Machine in the Studio

Looking at the artworld of the 1960s, Caroline Jones explores pervasive imagery of the American artist at work and the implications of those images for understandings of their art. Jones investigates artists' break with Abstract Expressionism after the 1950s, demonstrating that the traditional modernist view of the solitary, suffering individual artist did not seduce artists who came of age in the burgeoning American economy of the 1960s. Far from the countercultural stance associated with the decade, Jones argues that the artists examined here, including Stella, Warhol, and Smithson, identified their work with postwar industry and corporate culture - and revealed the anxieties of this identification through the slippages and darker implications of their art. The text draws on extensive interviews with artists and assistants as well as close readings of the artwork. The author concludes that the work of the 1960s was transformative precisely because it was "mainstream" - central to the visual and economic culture of its time.