Privacy and abstraction: American painting, late modernism, and the phenomenal self.

摘要

It has been a common theme in histories of sixties and seventies art to contend that, with the advent of Minimalism in the early sixties, artists turned away from representations of artists' inner and private worlds and began to engage moving, perceiving bodies. Alex Potts, in an oft-quoted turn of phrase, termed this move away from represented and toward actual bodies, sixties art's "phenomenological turn." In "Privacy and Abstraction: American Painting, Late Modernism, and the Phenomenal Self," I demonstrate that, in fact, the postwar interest in the phenomenal self is inseparable from and dependent upon a postwar theorization of the self as private. Through an analysis of three instances of postwar conceptions of privacy---constitutional, bodily, and epistemological---in conjunction with three postwar pictorial techniques--- expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and serial painting---I historicize the concept of privacy as it entered as a key term in defining modernist identities. Through this historicization, "Privacy and Abstraction" explains how a mid-twentieth-century concept of privacy and a distinctly phenomenological approach to the self coincide, not only historically, but also conceptually---a relation that is only legible, I demonstrate, in the context of the cold war discourse of privacy, which conceptualized privacy as an attribute of the phenomenal, publicly situated self. By rereading such canonical artists as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella in light of the shared cultural space that the subject of privacy illuminates, this dissertation rethinks the divisions that have long defined this period.