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Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-Garde. Barbara Zabel. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississipi, 2004. Pp. xviii + 202. $45.00 (cloth).
Within the history of art, studies in early American modernism have been something of a growth industry in recent years, with a whole sequence of publications appearing on the artists of the Stieglitz circle, New York dada, and the tendencies of the 1920s, among the most prominent being Wanda Corn's The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (1999), Marcia Brennan's Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (2001), and Amelia Jones's Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004). These scholarly monographs have been matched by a series of major exhibitions such as the Whitney Museum's Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (1996) and the National Gallery of Art's Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (2000), both of which were accompanied by substantial book-length catalogues. Barbara Zabel's Assembling Art is another issue of this trend.
At one level these publications are welcome in that they surely put paid to that absurd cold war history in which American modernists were regarded simply as second- or third-rate camp followers of European developments until the world center of modernist activity shifted from Paris to New York after 1940. They mark a widening recognition that American modernism was played out on an international stage from the outset and had some formidable players. They are also more synthetic and ambitious in their interpretative claims than earlier studies, which were generally more of an empirical mapping of the phenomena concerned. Yet if there are progressive aspects to this new histoiy, there are also conservative or regressive ones, as Assembling Art illustrates.
Zabel's underlying thesis is that the "pervasiveness and power of machine technology" "informs" much of the art produced by "artists of the American avant-garde" (ix). The organisation of her book is similar to Corn's in that she seeks to make her argument through inter-related essays on a set of themes...