Representing“Le moteur humain:”Chronometry, Chronophotography,“The Art of Work”and the “Taylored” Body

Abstract

When Taylorism was introduced in France, it led to a massive strike in 1912–1913. The new ergonometric methodologies on “the human motor” developed by Jules Amar were crucial in this battle against Taylorism. Turning labor into art, tailoring rather than “Taylorizing” the working body, Amar combined the apparatus of science and art. In a remarkable series of still and chronophotographs, Amar then re-imaged the laboring body with modern scientific instruments and technologized machinery, with no parallel in Modernist art of that time. Yet, in acting as a form of projection, Amar's photography uncannily reveals how the laboring body was not necessarily emancipated from technologies of surveillance and domination. Rather than Amar's methodologies epitomizing the antithesis to Taylorism, his images latently signify that they constituted only a different form of control technology situated at the confrontation between bodies and machines. Sadistically disciplined, corporeal identity denied, the very art designed to reveal “the art of work,” paradoxically reveals how the worker became nothing more than a human motor.

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