Journal Article

Picturing efficiency: precisionism, scientific management, and the effacement of labor

Corwin, Sharon

2004

Overview

Revised text of a paper given at the `Art and labor' session at the College Art Association Annual Conference in New York (Feb. 2003), in which the author explores the effects of scientific management on representational practice, focusing on Precisionism and the work of the American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) in particular. She provides historical insights into the cult of efficiency that gripped the U.S.A. in the 1910s, using as examples the cyclegraph-based wire motion models which Frank and Lillian Gilbreth evolved in an effort to show workers the most efficient way of undertaking a particular task, and enquires into the aesthetics of these and other attempts to visualize efficiency where the act of labour is completely alienated from both the worker and the product, like Morton Livingston Schamberg's Mechanical Abstractions (1916; illus.), Louis Lozowick's Machine Ornaments (1922-27; illus.) and Cleveland (1923; illus.), and Sheeler's Self-Portrait (1923; illus.). She reflects on the tendency to make labour an invisible characteristic of Precisionist painting, whose surfaces bear no mark of the means of its production, commenting on the linearity of Sheeler's Rolling Power (1923; illus.), and on the self-effacing style of Georgia O'Keeffe's White Barn (1932; illus.) and of Sheeler's Upper Deck (1929; illus.).