Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2003
Department
Colby College. Art Dept.
Abstract
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the pursuit of efficiency came to dominate instances of industrial and artistic production: the engineering consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth attempted to visualize a language of minimal waste, while Precisionist art achieved its own aesthetic of efficiency. This essay examines the Precisionist project alongside the discourses of the rationalized factory and suggests a relationship between the formal economy of Precisionism and the rhetoric of scientific management. For Precisionist art and the Gilbreths' time-motion studies, the representation of efficiency ultimately entailed the elision of artist and worker as producers of labor.
Recommended Citation
Corwin, Sharon L., "Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor" (2003). Faculty Scholarship. 63.
https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/faculty_scholarship/63
Comments
Originally published: Representations 84.1 (2003), pp. 139-165.