TATE MODERN
Tate Modern invited The Chemical Brothers to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track.
It was Jacob Epstein's Torso in Metal from 'The Rock Drill' that grabbed their attention. It's a menacing sculpture made out of bronze. The Chemical Brothers said that they wanted to 'capture the latent feeling of force that the figure has.' The result was their track, The Rock Drill, which opened the groundbreaking Tate Tracks series.
The Chemical Brothers are an electronic music duo comprising Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, who met at Manchester University.
To date, the band has sold over 9 million albums around the world. The duo's songs Block Rockin' Beats and Galvanize were both awarded GRAMMYs.
The duo have collaborated with artists as diverse as Bernard Sumner from New Order and the rapper Q-Tip.
The band are renowned for the strength of their live performances and have headlined major festivals from Glastonbury to Fuji Rock in Japan. Video collaborators have included Michel Gondry, Dom & Nic and Spike Jonze.
Torso in Metal from 'The Rock Drill' was originally created by sculptor Jacob Epstein in 1913-14. Initially, he placed a plaster version of the sculpture you see here on top of a pneumatic drill used for drilling into rock. Epstein said he was motivated to create the sculpture because of a love of machinery. At the time, several artists were producing art about what they considered to be symbols of the modern age, like speed, technology and machinery. At one stage, Epstein even considered adding a motor to make the drill move.
After the destruction of World War I, Epstein changed the figure dramatically. He stated, 'I lost my interest in machinery.' He discarded the drill, cut the figure down to half its original size and changed its arms. He then cast this new form in bronze. These changes made the figure seem much less powerful and menacing. Instead of celebrating modern life, this more vulnerable version appears more like a victim of the violence of modern life.
You can view this work in the Tate Collection.
Jacob Epstein was born in New York in 1880, of Polish-Jewish parentage. From New York he moved to London and became a British citizen in 1907. He spent some time in Paris in 1912-13, where he met and became influenced by many well-known French artists, but returned to England in 1916 and remained there for the rest of his life.
Epstein made his name as a sculptor of monuments and portraits but he was also an occasional painter and illustrator. His work explores concepts which were central to modernist sculpture, including 'truth to material' and the direct carving technique in which the sculpture's final form evolves through the process of carving. Like other modernist artists, Epstein was also influenced by so-called primitive art. He was consistently the most controvertial artist working in the UK for much of the period up to 1940.
You can learn more about Jacob Epstein in the Tate Collection.
