Mechanical Hands: Skill and Surplus in Industrial Art Education

This article examines the problem of mechanical repetition in the pedagogical methods of late nineteenth-century art educators Charles Godfrey Leland and J. Liberty Tadd. It seeks to reconstruct the historical and political connections between the experimental work of Leland and Tadd's school and the British arts and crafts movement, particularly as it is represented by socialists William Morris and Walter Crane. It draws from this reconstructed history a novel approach to the problem of aesthetic potentiality in a Marxist context.