My dissertation, Negative Freedom: The Late American Avant-Garde and its Labor Aesthetics, 1965-1993, examines the aesthetics of avant-garde artists engaged with American identity amid the culture wars and the shifting landscape of radical artmaking. Spanning the years 1965 to 1993, my study focuses on artists working in a public art milieu that emerged alongside the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and culminated in the 1993 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial.Using the interdisciplinary lens of visual studies, I historicize and theorize the late American avant-garde as a praxis guided by progressivist ideas of the American work ethic. Central to my argument is the concept of negative freedom—freedom from alienation and oppression. I argue that within this praxis, negative freedom is articulated through the aesthetic as a dialectic of labor: the processes of artmaking and reception as acts of labor that are mediated by form and oriented toward self-production.
Through case studies of Lillian Schwartz, Noah Purifoy, and Henry Wessel, I demonstrate how the utopian aims of the historical avant-garde were Americanized and extended by artists trained in its methods who likewise integrated scientific and technological knowledge into their artmaking. I argue that their artworks intervene into the material conditions of deindustrialization, perceptual experience, and social identity, while engaging with social justice movements including Civil Rights, Women’s and Disability Rights, and Labor and Consumer Rights.
My chapter on Lillian Schwartz’s hybrid-computer film Pixillation (1970) explores how she merges feminist critiques of labor with the female nude, extending her own visual impairment as an instrument for overcoming gendered estrangement. My chapter on Noah Purifoy’s “environmental art” shows how he re-forms an ecology of racialized underdevelopment and deskilling, making propositions of self-emancipation. My chapter on Henry Wessel’s snapshots of working-class suburbs demonstrates how he takes up automobility, offering a new vision of machine labor as a catalyst for freedom from industrial alienation.
Altogether, my dissertation identifies the late American avant-garde as a historical formation, addressing an ongoing gap in the study of Black, women, and working-class American artists, while reframing the history of postwar art and visual culture.
