Focusing on the United States with lines cast to Europe, South America, and elsewhere, this course examines artistic production between 1945 and 1980. Artists in this period attempted to respond to the "caesura of civilization" brought about by the Holocaust and World War II, to contend with the consolidation of postwar consumer capitalism and mass culture, and to situate their work in relation to the far-reaching social upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. Practices linked to the early 20th-century avant-garde (such as abstraction, the readymade, Dada, and surrealism) echoed in these years as attention gradually shifted away from the canvas and studio and toward expanded contexts of reception and public experience. The boundaries of the art object transformed in turn as artists developed new forms and new models of spectatorship to confront a world that had placed enormous pressure on traditional concepts of humanist subjectivity. Topics include New York School painting, Pop art, minimalism, process art, conceptual art, institutional critique, and site-specificity. |