Art as a (Dis)Assembling Machine. Fordism, Taylorism and Avant-garde Art in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, avant-garde movements, as well as some cultural critics, addressed either explicitly or implicitly the way taylorism and fordism were affecting the labor conditions and the social life at large. Since the first years of the century more and more artists put into question taylorism, which allegedly reduced the human being to a machine. After WWI and the spread of fordism, avant-garde works showed a sort of "dissembled" structure (images with no apparent unity, collages, texts where the words don’t form a unique line, and so on). While the most notorious aspect of fordism was the assembly line, where all the parts merge in a single chain to produce an object, avant-garde artists presented chaotic or non-unified objects that in the end, as in the useless machines by Marcel Duchamp, attempted to disrupt the long-standing equation between individual, man-made objects and "works of art".