Black market: Materiality, abstraction and the built environment in the New York avant-garde, 1958--1962 (Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg)

This dissertation historicizes the New York avant-garde around 1960. Comprising chapters on tightly bounded groups of works by Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, it seeks to understand the social significance of the famed resistances to representation in this art. In particular, the dissertation argues that these artists' urban- and commodity-oriented works were inextricably bound to two historical conditions: (1) the architectural re-imagining of New York City under urban renewal, and (2) America's critical reception of the changes in advertising and consumer goods at the end of the 1950s. It then understands the emphatic materialism of these art practices as a complicated critique of the apparently increasing abstraction of the broader built environment as a whole. As such, the dissertation proposes both a new understanding of the art of this period and also a socially specific framework for understanding the terms materiality and abstraction, which were heavily fraught both in Abstract Expressionism and in the early years of postmodernism. The conclusion offers a means for thinking about the dissertation as a first case study in a newly concrete history of signification in the later twentieth century.