| Between the advent of popular illustrated magazines in the mid-1850s and the "closing" of the frontier at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the United States transitioned from a nation of primarily agricultural and artisanal laborers to one of wage workers whose everyday lives were increasingly shaped by technology. This dissertation, which studies representations of American technology, laborers, and factories, explores the strategies artists used to acclimate Americans from a range of social classes, races, and education levels to an environment of industrial production, wage capitalism, and international communications. Examining both paintings and magazine illustrations, this study demonstrates how image-viewers actively conceptualized their lives in terms of vast, underlying systems of technology. It also examines a key tension between images making production processes overly clear to viewers and those using visual metaphors to describe the "magic" of modern life.;This dissertation consists of five chapters, situated in a roughly chronological progression. Chapter One lays out the theory of technological systems as it relates to visual media, and introduces the methods artists developed to represent key systems such as the telegraph, railroad, and international trade. The second chapter addresses the "alchemical sublime" in representations of Civil War-era metalworking. The artist John Ferguson Weir used representations of metallurgy as metaphors for a process of purification that included economic, national, and personal meanings.;Chapter Three argues that labor and industry served as important metaphors in the visual representation of reconciliation following the Civil War, as the South worked to bring its technological infrastructure into harmony with the well-developed North. Chapter Four enters the factory itself, and explores the emergence of a new mode of viewing, the "managerial eye." In representations of proto-assembly line work beginning in the 1860s, the managerial eye allows the viewer a privileged position that takes in, at a glance, all the steps in a commodity's production. Chapter Five, which studies the relationship between work and citizenship, examines how artists conceptualized factories, schools, prisons, and other sites of group training or incarceration as places for the molding of potential citizens, who were theorized as potential laborers. |
