Picturing Efficiency
Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4370230 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sharon Corwin (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 84 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 139-165 |
| Publication date | 2003-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Representations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0734-6018 • E-ISSN: 1533-855X |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1525/rep.2003.84.1.139 |
| OpenAlex | W4244852133 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
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
Aesthetics · Art · Economics · Linguistics · Microeconomics · Operations management · Political science · Rhetoric · Scientific management · Sociology · Art, Technology, and Culture · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography · Photography and Visual Culture
Alienation Effects
The Hands of Fortune
Towards neuroscientific management? Geometric chronophotography and the thin-slicing of the labouring body
Motionmindedness
Boredom, Art and Work
They Attend Strictly to Their Own Business”
Hands off the Machine
Efficiency and the Productive Body
Confounding Solidaritysingular, Universal and Particular Subjects in the Artworks of Tehching Hsieh and the Politics of the New Left
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2008 - 2025 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |