Manipulations: Hands at Work in European Modernism

To what extent does the production of art require the work of hands? And, reciprocally, to what extent does an artwork enable a tactile understanding of the world? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning of hands goes beyond the simple gestures they perform: they become an agent, holding at bay technological progress and its implications for artistic creation. On the one side, the hand can itself be conceived of as a machine; often times it figures as a blueprint for technological tools and instruments. On the other side, hands appear to be outdone by the continuous rise of mechanization, challenging the need for the bodily skills and abilities. The ambiguity of the hand as simultaneously a primitive and proto-technological instrument frames the theoretical intervention of this book which investigates the hand in European modernism not as a motif but as medium. It looks at German and French case studies that address literature, sculpture, photography, film, and industrial design. As it turns out the medium hand allows to retrace the cultural history of the early twentieth century as an expression of the intricacies and ambiguities that the age of mechanization exhibited in the work of art.