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Re-examining Precicionism : The Paradox behand its Rhetorics and Scholarship

Chaeki Freya Synn 1

1계명대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

From the early 1920s to the contemporary era, Precisionism has generally been regarded as a significant art movement in modern art history. The name of this movement appeared in major survey textbooks on Modern Art, explaining it as a unique, American version of modernist painting. Scholarship on Precisionism accumulated during the past 80 years. However, a closer look at Precisionism reveals that Precisionism does not suffice the conditions to be called an art movement By surveying documents and literature on Precisionism, this paper intends to reveal the politics embedded in the discursive formation of Precisionism and intends to seek more justifiable ways to discuss its significance. The paper is consisted of three parts. Chapter One deals with the emergence of Precisionism. Records show that Sheeler, O'Keeffe and Driggs all denied of being called a Precisionist even though they were considered to be the most important artists of the movement In addition, there were no organized group with any artistic goal behind the Precisionist movement. Precisionism was simply a tendency some American critics believed to have existed in the American art world during the 1920s. In other words, Precisionism was based on the assumption that certain qualities befitting the Precisionist aesthetics-whatever that might have been-existed. Chapter Two considers various scholars' effort to discuss Precisionism in relation to formalism. Milton Brown is particularly important for this reason because he was the first to establish theoretical grounds for such interpretation. Paradoxes and contradictions in other formalist studies are further explored in this chapter. Chapter Three examines contextual studies on Precisionism. Considering Precisionist painting within the rhetorics of scientific management, many of the contextual studies read Precisionism as a visual effect of Fordism or Taylorism. Such studies, however, by avoiding to discuss organic/agrarian imagery of O'Keeffe or Sheeler, forces a reductionist interpretation of the movement. Few studies done recently will focus on these organic/agrarian imagery acknowledging the ambivalence and complexities in the Precisionist movement, but the basic question remains: What exactly is Precisionism and how can it be defined? As such, the present scholarship on Precisionism reveals that Precisionism was a set of rhetorical construction fabricated by American critics and scholars for the past 80 years. Obsessed by the notion of creating an art culture that was distinctively American, the discourse of Precisionism evolved in to a gigantic scale and solidified its status in art history. However, this movement was more of a ghostly discourse which only happened in theory.

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