Becoming “Le moteur humain”: “The Art of Work” and “The Taylored Body”

When Taylorism was first introduced in France, it led to a massive strike over the harsh winter of 1912-1913. The
new ergonometric methodologies developed in the laboratory, not shop floor, by the physiological scientist, Jules Amar, were
crucial in this battle against Taylorism. To turn labour into an
art, to tailor rather than ‘Taylorise’ the working body, Amar
extensively deployed the apparatus of science as well as those of art, particularly chronophotograpy. Through a remarkable
series of still and chronophotographs, Amar was able to genera
te a reimaging of the labouring body working in unison 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 also reveals how the working body may have not necessarily been emancipated from
technologies of surveillance and domination, but uncannily subj
ected to the scientist’s masochistic disciplines and sadistic
punishments. Rather than Amar’s methodologies epitomizing th
e antithesis to Taylorism, this paper will reveal how his
images latently signify that merely they constituted a diffe
rent form of control technology situated at the crux of
confrontation between bodies and machines. Corporeal identity
denied, sadistically disciplined, the very art designed to
reveal the art of work, paradoxically reveals how th
e worker became nothing more than a human motor.