Reproductie van een tekening van ontwerpen voor een gasleiding before 1879

Curator: Here we have an intriguing print from before 1879, attributed to Joseph Maes, called "Reproductie van een tekening van ontwerpen voor een gasleiding"—which roughly translates to "Reproduction of a drawing of designs for a gas pipeline." My first thought is "bleak." The world imagined within the lines seems almost surgically precise but drained of all joy, no room for flourish or waste, so different from our time, maybe even a little…scary? Editor: Bleak, maybe. I see it as practical and optimistic, in its way. Look at all these meticulously rendered schematics—a world being built, a gas pipeline being conceived on the page. Each precisely engraved line a testament to material possibility. The sheer amount of industrial planning laid bare here makes you think about human ingenuity and where that kind of directed thought actually lands us. Curator: "Ingenuity" is a generous read. Maybe it’s the starkness of the lines, or the uniformity of the objects. Maybe it feels like a step away from organic expression and more into something strictly defined by calculation. Everything serves an explicit purpose. It leaves little room for surprise. Editor: Precisely. Consider the labor embedded in each of these precise marks, the process from sketch to engraving. This isn’t some fleeting impressionistic landscape; it’s technical skill deployed in service of infrastructure, of progress. We have drawings for different components: couplings, joints, maybe even a schematic for tunnel digging, the project, and even R. Leon Voorties’s name! It's almost a celebration of industrial possibility. Curator: A celebration, yes, but a sober one. And I wonder who got celebrated, or left out of the Livre d'Or—or Golden Book. Whose back broke laying those pipes? Which of these objects went on to explode, leak, or otherwise disappoint? The golden age wasn’t so golden for everyone, after all. Maybe that's why this project's cool clarity carries such a stark weight. Editor: Good point, I suppose. While this blueprint seems almost utopian in its ambitions, there's a dark underbelly there, for sure. A shadow of toil and unequal distribution. Maybe both aspects, utopian potential and inherent exploitation, reside within those lines—the precision and optimism balanced against a creeping unease about their consequences. Curator: Exactly. This artwork reminds us to not only think about the innovation and creation of systems, but who those systems truly serve, and to not lose ourselves in the promise of progress without understanding its implications.