Painting signs in the fifties: Material surface in the art and culture of the United States and Great Britain

Valued as an indexical sign, painterly abstract painting served to remedy alienating aspects of workday American life. As an iconic sign, painterly painting seemed to issue as an abundance with a homogeneity that needed to be individualized--as was the case with commodities intended for the marketplace. In other words, during the Fifties, members of the art world and intellectuals from other fields were "mak (ing) sense ... of (painterly painting) within the framework of possibilities offered by the society of which (producers and consumers were) members" (Clarke, "Pessimism versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture," l990). The "frame of possibilities" derived from postwar commodity capitalism. Semiotic categories (index, icon) clarify the status of painterly painting when it was evaluated in relation to capitalist practices, commodity form, and commodity features like label, brand, and trademark.;Thus, having established two preliminary observations, commentators were converting painting into elements of commodity culture. (1) Certain items of commodity culture, such as the package, page, and screen, shared the same structure. Like them, painterly painting could be perceived as a surface covered with signs. (2) Commodity culture--including these semiotized surfaces--developed in correspondence with postwar capitalism and served it practically and ideologically. The work of the Independent Group in England and Claes Oldenburg in America reinforced the commodity culture status of painterly painting as it was simultaneously being articulated by critics.;My argument is that art history and critical theory have as yet failed to acknowledge the relationship of painterly painting to commodity culture in the Fifties. This failure might be attributed to a tendency to maintain distinctions between high art and commodity culture. My dissertation detaches the existing analysis of commodity culture from its exclusive application to Pop Art and extends it to painterly painting. This reconfigures the historiography of painterly painting, previously restricted to considerations of Existentialism, modernist notions of subjectivity and expression, and analysis of the political environment of the Cold War years. Without denying the significance of these concerns, my dissertation adds new dimensions to the capacity of painterliness to signify.