The Hand & the Machine (SECAC, Sarasota, 8-11 Oct 14)
Sarasota, FL, October 8 – 11, 2014
Deadline: Apr 20, 2014
Southeastern College Art Conference 2014
Session: The Hand and the Machine: Tensions in Interwar Design
The story is familiar: modernism’s post-World War I fascination with in architecture, industrial design,
the dissipated in the 1930s, replaced by a valorization of handicraft and a reemergence
of the human subject. Where the machine aesthetic dominated design in the early 1920s, artists grew
disenchanted with the signs of industry in the 1930s, focusing instead on the human subject, and crafting work
to show the « hand » of the maker. But is this tale of a « return to the hand »universally true? Are there certain mediums
or national traditions that trouble the story? This session solicits papers that examine the precarious dynamics of
made in the applied arts between the wars. We encourage a variety of perspectives within or
beyond the powerhouse industrial economies of the West, and we hope, through the breadth of papers, to reassess the standard
narrative of interwar design.
Session Co-Chairs: Toby Norris, Assumption College and Rachael
Barron-Duncan, Central Michigan University.
Contact: tnorris@assumption.edu
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.