This dissertation reconstructs the tradition of “democratic modernism” in the United States from its origins in the fertile avant-garde circles of the early 1910s through the maturation of American modernism as a cultural institution in the 1920s, the subsequent challenge to its authority by the radical social movements of the 1930s, and culminating in the ideological battles and profound geopolitical shift during and after World War II. It focuses on the overlapping intellectual careers of four literary figures – William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Burke, Archibald MacLeish, and Charles Olson – against the background of a wider cohort that included Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, F. O. Matthiessen, Melvin Tolson, Ruth Benedict, Edward Dahlberg, Dwight Macdonald, and Allen Ginsberg. The dissertation argues that debates over form and experience, strongly influenced by the writings of Ezra Pound and John Dewey, defined these central figures’ efforts to conceptualize a democratic subject grounded in aesthetic experience. For the democratic modernists, the poetic subject became a metaphor for a fully realized democratic subject, and “poetry” came to symbolize not just verse but also a heightened aesthetic orientation towards society that could serve as the basis for cultural reform and, for a time, revolutionary transformation. In reconstructing democratic modernism as a tradition, this dissertation aims to rethink the origins of the postwar counterculture as the political and philosophical heir of radical democracy in the interwar period. As the counterculture emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, leading figures such as Olson and Ginsberg helped shift the political ideals of the 1930s left towards aesthetic practice, preserving a cultural space for radical democracy between official anti-Communism and the aesthetic autonomy professed by intellectual elites. It concludes that the “true contrary” that Olson urged his fellow poets and artists in the late 1940s to seek through aesthetic practice had been there before him and continues to be a relevant stance within American society. This tradition proposes that through an active and critical inquiry into the conditions of one’s experience and the values that make them up, any person through receptivity, imagination, and poetic speech, broadly construed, can mediate the seeming oppositions in society, creating new forms of understanding, ritual, and symbolic experience.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

As we all know, there are multiple stories of art. But even in the West, each country has its own story, especially when it comes to the visual arts in the second part of the twentieth century. The stories told by the French, the German, the Italian, and the American textbooks and museums differ greatly. Yet, the American story is usually regarded as the standard account: the common Western story against which we mentally contrast the Non-Western stories. Without aiming at writing the true story of contemporary Western art, this dissertation tries to uncover alternative stories, interpret the differences, and explain how one particular view came to prevail as the story. Concretely, it examines four contentious issues on which the standard account is particularly challenged by other stories, namely the fracture of the Second World War, the shift of the artworld’s center from Paris to New York, the domination of American art in the 1970s, and finally the European comeback of the 1980s. Analyzing the different national interpretations of these events and confronting them with empirical data (place, date, participant, etc.), the dissertation uncloaks enduring myths and reductive explanations. It highlights above all the role of dealers, collectors, curators, critics, and government officials in the way art is produced, received, and remembered. It also demonstrates how the shifting historical, economic, and institutional contexts continuously reshaped the story, the canon, and the viewers, so that what art historians have traditionally seen as stylistic shifts and artistic leadership appears rather as the result of forces that extend beyond the artistic creation. Stories with less international recognition should not be dismissed in favor of an official story that would erode all differences and present us with a single -- and thus deficient -- perspective. Only through the consideration and analysis of multiple cultural and national perspectives can we understand the complexity of the artworld’s dynamics. Ultimately, I propose a comprehensive yet critical art historical approach rooted in cultural history that would offer a solution to writing art history in an age of globalization that purports to eschew previous assumptions of nationalism and creative genius. / text

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When the artist Mel Bochner described the reductive geometric forms on view in the "Primary Structures" exhibition in 1966, a show that announced the arrival of minimalism on the New York art scene, he claimed: "there is nothing behind these surfaces, no inside, no secret, no hidden motive."1 Yet after a careful examination of minimal art, and the ways in which it challenged a modernist trajectory set into place in the postwar period, I am arguing Bochner couldn't have been more wrong. With minimalism as its primary focus, my thesis considers how the political turmoil of the late 1960s- manifest in widespread social upheaval, the polemics of a contested war, and questions regarding the nature of the modern subject- disrupted the perceived self-referentiality of abstract art, particularly that adhering to a tradition of Greenbergian modernism. That is, when complicated by contemporaneous social relations and artistic debates, the formal language of minimalism, with its simple forms, precise lines, and industrial manufacture, becomes full of potential meaning, leaving the minimal box less hollow than Bochner would have us believe. To get at some of the complexities of the minimal project, both mainstream artists, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, and those more marginally related to the movement, like Barnett Newman, Jo Baer, and Eva Hesse, are considered. Setting the work of these artists into tension with one another and with the critical writings of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, the unique strategies used to mediate between individual artistic interests and larger social tensions are brought into focus. One primary area in which this was accomplished was in relation to the issue of viewership. Whether rethinking Morris' notion of "experience," Newman's conceptualization of "participation," or Baer's prioritization of "perception," these distinct modes of engagement signal what was at the time a shifting understanding of how politics is formulated in relation to the body of the viewer and how the art object is implicated in this process. Considering how this broke with previous formalist models, what these chapters show in different ways and from varying perspectives is that the authority of modernism was fracturing in the late 1960s, and that minimal art was central to this process.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, November, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Georgia, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-223).

Univ., Diss.--Frankfurt am Main, 2002.