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Ripped from the Pages of Life: The Mass Public, the Avant-garde, and Magazine Aesthetics in Postwar American Art.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Ripped from the Pages of Life: The Mass Public, the Avant-garde, and Magazine Aesthetics in Postwar American Art./
Author:	Merport, Carmen.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2018,
Description:	328 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 80-03, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International80-03A.
Subject:	American studies. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=10840519
ISBN:	9780438370814

Ripped from the Pages of Life: The Mass Public, the Avant-garde, and Magazine Aesthetics in Postwar American Art.
Merport, Carmen.

Ripped from the Pages of Life: The Mass Public, the Avant-garde, and Magazine Aesthetics in Postwar American Art. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018 - 328 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 80-03, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2018.

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

In the 1936 prospectus for Life magazine, Henry Luce imagined that his new publication would be "the biggest picture show on earth." This dissertation argues that Luce would do more than create an enormously popular form of entertainment-Life would transform the American mass public sphere and the terms of radical cultural production in the twentieth century. For Luce's was not merely a commercial ambition seeking to lock into white, middle-class appetites; he contended that his magazine would allow the American public to truly "see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed." In order to realize these lofty aims, Luce and his editorial team deliberately drew on the insights of the historical avant-garde and the prestige of the social reform documentary photography developed during the Great Depression. The magazine they produced would quickly popularize a formal language of words and pictures; this allowed the publication to offer thrilling spectacles of American violence, death, and disaster that doubled as vehicles for moral 'instruction' and general (dis)interestedness. Furthermore, Life enjoined its readers to put this language into practice-to see as it saw and to moralize as it did. Through the enthusiastic solicitation and publication of reader submissions, Life promoted the dream of a truly democratic mass culture. This afforded its audience the satisfactions of narcissistic self-regard even as it sutured an abstract collectivity-the 'mass public'-to the concrete realities of everyday life. By the middle of the twentieth century, the success of Luce's vision was undeniable. Reaching millions of readers every week, Life magazine had transformed the protocols of the mass public sphere. "Ripped from the Pages of Life" argues that it is only in light of Life's paradigm-shifting achievements that one can understand precisely why politically-engaged artists would turn to its glossy pages time and time again in their efforts to respond not only to the events of the postwar period but also to a white-supremacist patriarchal mass public sphere increasingly able to assimilate avant-garde and modernist challenges to the culture industry. This dissertation draws together some of these artistic engagements with the aesthetics of the mass-picture magazine. I argue that rather than retooling modernist tactics of disturbance, works by Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Asco, and General Idea look to the potentially transformative scene of mass cultural consumption in ways that current discussions of Pop art and postmodern aesthetics have not yet fully explored. This diverse group of creators was united by a shared interest in the visual culture that developed around Life; their practices were shaped by an understanding of how their respective minoritarian identities connected them to the images of minoritized victims that circulated in mainstream magazines as lucrative diversions, or social 'problems' held in suspension for privileged witnessing. Reinvesting the language of graphic form that Life appropriated from the avant-garde with new utopian energies, their engagements represent attempts to re-route the visual culture developed by Luce's magazine toward different visions of mass society. This dissertation dwells with objects that manifest the desire to create a new ordinary, one that would allow viewers and readers to sit with otherwise disturbing questions of structural oppression and social transformation in the muted, indeterminate atmospheres of the familiar and the everyday. In order to throw into relief the full sociopolitical implications of these avant-garde artists' experiments-works that reach across high and low cultural strata and draw 'art' and 'life' together-I take an interdisciplinary approach, blending methodologies from the fields of literature, art history, media studies, and visual culture. At the intersection of these fields I carefully detail the manner in which these artists used language, color, texture, and photographic form to bring the ordinary affects associated with mass cultural collectivity into dialogue with a range of other intensities associated with distinct social positions and modes of cultural production. "Ripped From the Pages of Life" demonstrates that by contemplating the practices of late twentieth-century artists through the lens of the magazine aesthetics that Life helped to produce, we can broaden our narratives about what radical art might look, sound, and feel like.

ISBN: 9780438370814Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122720
American studies.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Avant-garde

Ripped from the Pages of Life: The Mass Public, the Avant-garde, and Magazine Aesthetics in Postwar American Art.
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245 1 0 $a Ripped from the Pages of Life: The Mass Public, the Avant-garde, and Magazine Aesthetics in Postwar American Art.
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500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 80-03, Section: A.
500 $a Publisher info.: Dissertation/Thesis.
500 $a Advisor: Nelson, Deborah;Berlant, Lauren.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2018.
506 $a This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
506 $a This item must not be added to any third party search indexes.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a In the 1936 prospectus for Life magazine, Henry Luce imagined that his new publication would be "the biggest picture show on earth." This dissertation argues that Luce would do more than create an enormously popular form of entertainment-Life would transform the American mass public sphere and the terms of radical cultural production in the twentieth century. For Luce's was not merely a commercial ambition seeking to lock into white, middle-class appetites; he contended that his magazine would allow the American public to truly "see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed." In order to realize these lofty aims, Luce and his editorial team deliberately drew on the insights of the historical avant-garde and the prestige of the social reform documentary photography developed during the Great Depression. The magazine they produced would quickly popularize a formal language of words and pictures; this allowed the publication to offer thrilling spectacles of American violence, death, and disaster that doubled as vehicles for moral 'instruction' and general (dis)interestedness. Furthermore, Life enjoined its readers to put this language into practice-to see as it saw and to moralize as it did. Through the enthusiastic solicitation and publication of reader submissions, Life promoted the dream of a truly democratic mass culture. This afforded its audience the satisfactions of narcissistic self-regard even as it sutured an abstract collectivity-the 'mass public'-to the concrete realities of everyday life. By the middle of the twentieth century, the success of Luce's vision was undeniable. Reaching millions of readers every week, Life magazine had transformed the protocols of the mass public sphere. "Ripped from the Pages of Life" argues that it is only in light of Life's paradigm-shifting achievements that one can understand precisely why politically-engaged artists would turn to its glossy pages time and time again in their efforts to respond not only to the events of the postwar period but also to a white-supremacist patriarchal mass public sphere increasingly able to assimilate avant-garde and modernist challenges to the culture industry. This dissertation draws together some of these artistic engagements with the aesthetics of the mass-picture magazine. I argue that rather than retooling modernist tactics of disturbance, works by Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Asco, and General Idea look to the potentially transformative scene of mass cultural consumption in ways that current discussions of Pop art and postmodern aesthetics have not yet fully explored. This diverse group of creators was united by a shared interest in the visual culture that developed around Life; their practices were shaped by an understanding of how their respective minoritarian identities connected them to the images of minoritized victims that circulated in mainstream magazines as lucrative diversions, or social 'problems' held in suspension for privileged witnessing. Reinvesting the language of graphic form that Life appropriated from the avant-garde with new utopian energies, their engagements represent attempts to re-route the visual culture developed by Luce's magazine toward different visions of mass society. This dissertation dwells with objects that manifest the desire to create a new ordinary, one that would allow viewers and readers to sit with otherwise disturbing questions of structural oppression and social transformation in the muted, indeterminate atmospheres of the familiar and the everyday. In order to throw into relief the full sociopolitical implications of these avant-garde artists' experiments-works that reach across high and low cultural strata and draw 'art' and 'life' together-I take an interdisciplinary approach, blending methodologies from the fields of literature, art history, media studies, and visual culture. At the intersection of these fields I carefully detail the manner in which these artists used language, color, texture, and photographic form to bring the ordinary affects associated with mass cultural collectivity into dialogue with a range of other intensities associated with distinct social positions and modes of cultural production. "Ripped From the Pages of Life" demonstrates that by contemplating the practices of late twentieth-century artists through the lens of the magazine aesthetics that Life helped to produce, we can broaden our narratives about what radical art might look, sound, and feel like.
590 $a School code: 0330.
650 4 $a American studies. $3 2122720
650 4 $a Art history. $3 2122701
650 4 $a British and Irish literature. $3 3433225
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653 $a Magazine
653 $a Mass culture
653 $a Ordinary
653 $a Photography
653 $a Visual culture
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710 2 $a The University of Chicago. $b English Language and Literature. $3 1675661
773 0 $t Dissertations Abstracts International $g 80-03A.
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