The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (review)

How does art relate to the environment in which it is produced? And what should we know about that environment in order to understand the art that "comes out" of it? Contextually oriented throughout, Joshua Shannon's The Disappearance of Objects argues that key players in the post-abstract-expressionist art of the early 1960s were keenly aware that the character of New York City was changing around them. Even as they tenaciously held on to the clunky materiality of the older industrial city, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd found themselves responding to the newly streamlined flow of traffic, goods, and capital that heralded the arrival of postmodernity. Devoting a chapter to each artist, and large parts of those chapters to contemporary developments in such areas as transportation systems, urban renewal, consumer packaging, and containerized shipping, Shannon lucidly makes a case for viewing "junk art," as it has been called, as the material product of living directly in the path of a dematerializing juggernaut.

Glass towers, super-block residential high-rises, urban expressways, and the displacement of manufacturing by the financial sector represent for Shannon the leading edge of a widespread thrust toward an engineered abstract order that these artists, based in the semi-chaotic flux of Greenwich Village and the downtown loft district, opposed only partially. Shannon claims that "this art's obsession with urban detritus was both a willful resistance to New York's transformation and a grudging acknowledgment of the new urban texture of flow and sleek homogeneity" (5). While this push-and-pull of repulsion from and attraction to the city's newness is widely regarded as a hallmark of modernism, it works pretty well as an entrance point for Gothamized postmodernity, too. Shannon makes a strong case for the period around 1960 as a liminal moment, giving a more scholarly substance to the thesis announced in the title of Fred Kaplan's recent book 1959: The Year Everything Changed. Clearly and persuasively written, The Disappearance of Objects is handsomely produced and contains forty-eight color and 141 black-and-white illustrations, making it a pleasure to read and learn from.

Postmodernity moves in mysterious ways. In his influential epic poem Paterson (1946-1958) William Carlos Williams had proposed that poets go to the basic materials of life around them not only for their subject matter, but also their imaginative possibilities: "No ideas but in things." But in the wake of abstract expressionism, New York artists turned toward ordinary, everyday objects in an effort to do the opposite: to make an art that would explore the possibility of "pure" materiality; such art would take a stand against meaning, interpretation, transcendence; it would represent only itself. Early on, Shannon quotes Rauschenberg as saying, "I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is." Or as Judd put it, "I'd like a work that didn't allude to other things and was a specific thing in itself"(3). While admitting that "there can be no object without ideas attached" (7), Shannon points out that he takes the artists' literal, material emphasis seriously, as the cue for his careful historicizing of both the art and the objects used to make it.

This leads to some interesting contextualizing. In the opening chapter on Oldenburg's aggressively chaotic installation The Street (1960), we learn not only about Robert Moses's infamous plans to put a highway through the center of Washington Square, and the neighborhood-altering super-block construction by New York University and Washington Square Village; we also find that in 1958 the new concern for traffic flow regulated pedestrian behavior for the first time, resulting in 20,000 citations for jaywalking in that year alone. In the Jasper Johns chapter, which focuses on his iconic sculptures of flashlights, beer cans...