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The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City. Joshua Shannon. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 232. $60.00 (cloth).
How does art relate to the environment in which it is produced? And what should we know about that environment in order to understand the art that "comes out" of it? Contextually oriented throughout, Joshua Shannon's The Disappearance of Objects argues that key players in the post-abstract-expressionist art of the early 1960s were keenly aware that the character of New York City was changing around them. Even as they tenaciously held on to the clunky materiality of the older industrial city, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd found themselves responding to the newly streamlined flow of traffic, goods, and capital that heralded the arrival of postmodernity. Devoting a chapter to each artist, and large parts of those chapters to contemporary developments in such areas as transportation systems, urban renewal, consumer packaging, and containerized shipping, Shannon lucidly makes a case for viewing "junk art," as it has been called, as the material product of living directly in the path of a dematerializing juggernaut.
Glass towers, super-block residential high-rises, urban expressways, and the displacement of manufacturing by the financial sector represent for Shannon the leading edge of a widespread thrust toward an engineered abstract order that these artists, based in the semi-chaotic flux of Greenwich Village and the downtown loft district, opposed only partially. Shannon claims that "this art's obsession with urban detritus was both a willful resistance to New York's transformation and a grudging acknowledgment of the new urban texture of flow and sleek homogeneity" (5). While this push-and-pull of repulsion from and attraction to the city's newness is widely regarded as...