Framing Los Angeles: Artists' Environments and Institutional Space, 1962--1994

This dissertation re-evaluates the relationship between contemporary art practices and art institutions. In most current scholarly and critical accounts, the exhibiting institution is understood as a tangle of mostly conservative ideological functions concealed beneath a facade of "white cube" neutrality, and the artists of note are those who can be assimilated to the critical goals of the historical avant-gardes. This approach tends to be reductive with respect to artists who fall within its purview, and negligent with respect to those who do not. My research on contemporary Los Angeles artists reveals their relationship with institutions to be dialectical.;If art museums have become less didactic, more inclusive, and more popular than ever before, what role has contemporary art played in all of this? Los Angeles, where art institutions are relatively young and mutable, has proved to be particularly fertile ground for complex and multifaceted artistic interventions. Moreover, the presence of the film and television industries has provided local artists with behind-the-scenes access to the methods and means of producing spectacular environments that compel a more expansive view of the institution as a site of aesthetic and affective encounter. By considering the encounter between the artwork and the institution as a negotiation, we can see each one more clearly, avoiding two common traps: the naturalization of the institution and the subordination of the artwork to the institutional frame.;The first chapter of the dissertation summarizes the stakes of this re-consideration, situating it in relation to the discourses of institutional critique and site specificity. The four chapters that follow are case studies, organized chronologically, which discuss selected works by Edward Kienholz, Allen Ruppersberg, Michael C. McMillen, and Paul McCarthy. Particular attention is paid to formal qualities, affective impact, and conditions of production. Together, these studies constitute a proposition: that we may understand recent changes within art institutions---the accommodation of improvised works, the expansion of art audiences, a heightened threshold for spectacle, and the proliferation of electronic media---as responses to, and negotiations with, contemporary installation practices.