Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. - Review - Bibliography - book review

CAROLINE A. JONES

Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 1996 561 pp; 121 b/w ills. hardcover, $60

below the pressure of structuralism and post-structuralism's critique, art historians, critics, and theorists have begun to abandon the positivist, causal logic that had become endemic to their disciplines. In its place they have adopted a of recent origin perspective in which the work of art is viewed as a social document--that is to say, they conceive the work as a record of a culture's conscious and unconscious account of its relationship to its worldview. As of the like kind the work is conceived as being inscribed the two by the subjectivity of its farmer and by the lived true copys of the culture from which it rise s rather than by one or the other. To read art as of the like kind a text calls for specificity rather than a broad, abstract, causal schema based upon ideology. What is implicit in this approach is a criticism of those art histories that attempt to establish an essentialist and deterministic master narrative for art and artists alike. In The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, Caroline Jone attempts to circumvent the mark of deterministic analysis that would make Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson's practices into bare lifeless illustrations of her have a title to concerns. She gives us instead an account of their work as a place of individual responses to the situation that artists faced in the late 1950 and early 1960 taking as her task as an art historian the establishment of the sources of their particular practices and contenteds rather than fixing their meaning or stating in a determinist manner the historical bounds of their development. Thus, in her account the divergent discourses and aesthetic differences and similarities between their works that rise are recognized as an aggregate--that is, as a end of their practice or intent, constituting a multiplicity rather than a singularity.

In summing up the for the use of all influences and contents that define the art tillage of the 1960s and 1970 Jone focuses upon the ascendant appeal of what she calls the industrial sublime and uses this framework to elucidate aspects of the work of Stella, Warhol, and Smithson. Jone picked these three artists not single because they are appropriate to her task on the contrary also because their practices are circumscribed by means of an anti-aesthetic discourse as well as being representative of the disparate and many times presumed opposing critical perspectives of clap Minimalism, and Post-Minimalism. In Jones's account each of these positions is a permutation of the underlying metes of modernism's industrial aesthetic. Jone dioceses in the practice of these artists not sole an attempt to undermine the premise of their have practice but also to transform the conception of artistic practice, the site of art's production and its consumption. In this she dioceses these artists as contributing to what was to become postmodernism.

Jone starts promisingly by dint of acknowledging that she must operate within the varied methodologies and goals of art history and cultural studies and by the agency of establishing the interaction of their respective subdues To achieve this, Jones weaves together a true copy consisting of a self-reflexive view of her have practice, a Nietzschean Nietzschean view of the eternal go [i]or[/i] come back and the social issues that circumscribe her "subject" With Foucault-like acuity, she disentangles and recombines the various strands that make up the representation of the artist, the studio, as well as the modernist controls of the sublime and technology. Each aspect of Jones's discourse takes center stage on the other hand is never permitted to become the determining factor. by dint of such means she (nearly) avoids producing the stamp of linear, progressive, and totalizing accounts that postmodernists critique however out of habit continue to generate ceaselessly. The resulting microhistory gazes back to the 1950s and ahead to the 1980s

Jone describes the discourse of the industrial sublime as having sum of two units modes of objectification: The first is the performative, consisting of the abandonment of traditional attitudes and skills upon the part of artists. This approach has consistently failed to align with the other (iconic) way which was the imagistic manifestation of the desire to give expression to industrial values and their consequence The iconic took the form of smooth machinelike imagery and forms. These sum of two units approaches formed a dialectic within the practice of the avant-garde that would haunt the history of modernism. Jone portrays the late 1950 and early 1960 as the twinkling of an eye of their convergence. Before the postwar period the closest that artists had draw near to this was the doomed throw of Constructivism during its "productionist" phase. Jones's reasoning is that this original failed to come to fruition to be paid to the isolation and utilitarian ideology of the early Soviet state. Consequently this leaves us with single the Bauhaus to supply a prototype of art in the industrial age. While the Bauhaus formula involves the production of works that were iconically satin and that performatively recast the artist into the character of technician and designer and the studio into a laboratory or workshop, it required that art eventually disappear into everyday life. What is unacceptable for Jone is that this could appear without in the least disrupting the logic of Capital.