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This thesis provides an account of the events of the first ten years of Printed Matter, Inc., a distribution center for artists’ books established in New York City in 1976. Included are descriptions of the individuals who formed Printed Matter’s first board, their objectives, books published by Printed Matter, and the windows installation program. This thesis also describes challenges the board members faced, including lack of organization, difficulty cultivating a broad public audience, and inadequate income. In addition, it recounts the gradual streamlining of business practices, and the realignment of goals and expectations for the genre as board members accepted the fact of a limited audience for artists’ books. The conclusion offers a brief summary and a look at Printed Matter, Inc.’s current operations.

George Lippard, a name scarcely recognized in today's American literature classrooms, was the author of the most popular American novel prior to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 - The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall. Despite producing such a popular and risqué novel, Lippard and his work have been curiously absent from the American literary and historical canon. In this paper I have chosen to focus on three aspects of the novel that I believe to be important for analysis - Biblical parallels, narrative structure, and female characters. Lippard uses the narrative structure and plot to incite curiosity in his readers and to appeal to audiences' instincts of sexual curiosity, pleasure in revenge, and the punishment of "evil." I will explain how Lippard uses two of the themes to reflect major issues of the time period and one as a metaphor for the plot of the novel. / Master of Arts

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-346).

My dissertation is a historicist examination of the circulatory relationship among popular fiction, theatre, and related non–fiction texts in mid–nineteenth–century America. Though previous critics have acknowledged interactions between mid–century theatre and print, none have fully fleshed out the performative contexts or social consequences of this interplay. In contrast, I contend that the narrative and visual exchanges between theatre and literature are crucial to deciphering how different social classes formed and distinguished themselves. My central claim is that cultural arbiters from the print world (including activist authors and advice–text writers) and from the public amusement realm (entrepreneurial theatre producers and melodrama playwrights) poached each other's work in order to capitalize on preexisting consumer communities. By cultivating socially homogenous audiences, these arbiters became vital contributors to the consolidation of self–conscious, class–based identities in nineteenth–century America. Chapter One examines George Lippard's urban–crime novel The Quaker City; or The Monks of Monk Hall (1844). In it, I argue that Lippard reproduces apocalyptic scenes of disaster familiar to readers from spectacle–centric theatrical melodramas in order to unify a diverse working class. Chapter Two contends that W.H. Smith's temperance melodrama The Drunkard (1844) co–opts the real–life speeches of working–class temperance lecturers and reframes them as a middle–class landlord's story of redemption; through featuring this popular show at their curiosity museum theatres, proprietors Moses Kimball and P.T. Barnum established the nation's first theatrical spaces solely for middle–class audiences. Chapter Three claims that the 1860s proliferation of home theatrical guidebooks—which detailed how to construct makeshift stages, simulate special effects, and adapt well–known stage dramas—offered the emergent middle classes a viable substitute for commercial theatergoing and a key outlet to reinforce their social status. My final chapter studies Louisa May Alcott's sensation novella Behind a Mask; or, A Woman's Power (1866), a work which engages the dissertation's collective themes of theatricality, social class, and private space. By depicting a professional actress utilizing her theatrical skills to infiltrate an aristocratic family, Alcott presents the private estate as the ideal venue to gain social status and reveals performance as a critical means for upward mobility.

This study constitutes the first critical history of dematerialization. Coined by critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their 1968 essay, “The Dematerialization of Art,” this term was initially used to describe an emergent “ultra-conceptual” art that would render art objects obsolete by emphasizing the thinking process over material form. Lippard and Chandler believed dematerialization would thwart the commodification of art. Despite Lippard admitting in 1973 that art had not dematerialized into unmediated information or experience, the term has since entered art historians’ lexicons as a standard means to characterize Conceptual Art. While art historians have debated the implications of dematerialization and its actuality, they have yet to examine closely Lippard and Chandler’s foundational essay, which has been anthologized in truncated form. If dematerialization was not intrinsic to Conceptual Art, what was it? By closely analyzing “The Dematerialization of Art” and Lippard and Chandler’s other overlooked collaborative essays, this dissertation will shed light on the genealogy of dematerialization by contending they were not describing a trend limited to what is now considered Conceptual Art. By investigating the socio-historical connections of dematerialization, this dissertation will advance a more far-reaching view of the ideology of dematerialization, a cultural misrecognition that the world should be propelled toward immateriality that is located at the intersection of particle physics, environmental sustainability, science-fiction, neoliberal politics, and other discourses. This analysis then focuses on three case studies that examine singular works of art over a twenty-year period: Eva Hesse’s Laocoön (1966), James Turrell’s Skyspace I (1974), and Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names (1979-85). In doing so, this dissertation will accomplish two objectives. First, it looks at how these works materially respond to the ideology of dematerialization and provide a means for charting how this cultural desire unfolds across space and time. Second, this dissertation contends that contrary to Lippard and Chandler’s prognostication, dematerialization—and immateriality—does not correlate to emancipation from capitalization. Rather, it will be shown that dematerialization, its rhetoric, and its strategies can actually be enlisted into the service of the commoditizing forces Lippard and Chandler hoped it would escape.

The main objective of this thesis is to formulate a practical aesthetic framework from Giorgio Agamben’s writings, and to use his concepts as an interpretative tool in relation to certain aspects of poetry in contemporary art. The specific category of printed poetry by artists is studied from a meta perspective, looking primarily at the gesture performed by writing poetry as an artist. A selective history of poetry in art looks at Marcel Broodthaers and the Bernadette Corporation, including the ways in which they can clarify the aesthetics of Agamben, followed by a shorter interpretations of three contemporary artist-poets – Karl Larsson, Karl Holmqvist and Hanne Lippard. These works can be defined as a hybrid third with Agamben, not art, but making the absence of art present. Works that are neither poetry nor art but with the availability and potential for both. An aesthetic terminology from Agamben is an aesthetics of privation and potential, of absence and inoperability, as well as an aesthetics of negation and resistance. A framework for looking at the tension between activity and passivity, and the resistance present there. The concept of potentiality also proves to be a fruitful opening for the interpretation of art leaning toward negation or withdrawal. / Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Uppsatsen undersöker en samling filosofiska begrepp kopplade till konst, hämtade från några av den italienska filosofen Giorgio Agambens böcker. Dessa kan läsas som en estetisk modell, och användas för att tolka konst som tangerar aspekter av inaktivitet och frånvaro, eller befinner sig mellan konst och andra uttrycksformer. Poesi skriven av konstnärer läses här ur ett metaperspektiv, med hjälp av Agambens filosofiska ramverk. Poesins kvalitet eller effekt är inte det huvudsakliga intresset, utan den gest som skrivandet av poesin förkroppsligar. En historisk kontext presenteras genom konstnären Marcel Broodthaers och konstnärsgruppen Bernadette Corporation. De filosofiska begreppen prövas sedan på tre samtida artist-poets, konstnärer som skriver poesi. Agamben ger verktyg för tolkning av konst som dra sig undan definition och representation. Uppsatsen påvisar hur poesi, när den produceras av konstnärer, kan tolkas som ett motstånd mot konstmarknaden.

The research done for this investigation deals with both the motivation of the artist, the personal history and the individual's artistic process. This process is examined through two bodies of art work dealing with the home as a metaphor. The shared themes of belonging, loss and longing are further reinforced by "visual cues" represented in the photographic works. For the Home Divided series, I approached the style of the photographs and the subject matter through indexical photographs of multi-unit homes and the visual representation of a distinct and bilateral division of the structure. The imagery presented in this series deals directly with the historical use of landscape in photography and the house or home as the subject. This series is motivated by my personal experience with a fractured family unit and experience with the fractured notion of the home. The second part of this study examines and records the artist's exploration of space and surroundings in the series, Chez Moi. The images document occupied structures at night with a visual focus being on a light source within the structure. There are shared elements that exist between both bodies of work that elicit feelings of searching and belonging. The separation from the viewer and the subject is further reinforced by the layer created that separates the photographer from the subject through the lens of the camera. The concept of the flâneur, introduced by Charles Baudelaire is an integral part of the artist's process, finding a sense of place and belonging in a foreign environment. The written portion of this investigation gathers materials and information that deals with the conception of the family unit and the house that is literally, and metaphorically, utilized in the notion of home. This focus on the structure as a metaphor for home has further reaching v implications than the structure itself. Findings show that a Western view of community and belonging is rooted in a place of stability in one's community. The basis for personal growth within that community has a direct impact on an individual's development in it. (Goldburgh, 67) The fractured nature of my experience and emotions tied with the notions of home, are expressed through both A Home Divided and the Chez Moi series photographic series. Within this investigation there are references to the artist's memories and experiences that are in contrast and discord with the traditional concept of acceptance and belonging.