Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist.

The powerful construction of the individualistic, isolated creative space, magically symbolized by the now-embalmed Krasner/Pollock studio in Springs, Long Island, started to unravel as American social and political conditions changed at the end of the '50s. With a soaring economy thanks to the success of the Marshall Plan and the threat of atomic war on the wane, the figure of the brooding, existential artist-hero began to seem overplayed, even silly. It comes as no surprise, then, that this is the moment the art world produced another type of studio, one receptive to the city and the exciting world outside. Andy Warhol, ever the pragmatist, opened his "factory" in the early '60s smack in the middle of the concrete-and-steel corporate canyons of New York as a clear statement about the changing role he saw the artist was now called to play, In her well-researched and theoretically fascinating Machine in the Studio, Caroline A. Jones charts this important transition, one that was at once radical and gradual.

In the first chapter, Jones outlines the ideological bases on which Abstract Expressionism drew its strengths: triumphant individualism, male power, the articulation of a certain image of what America was in its pioneering cultural stage, all of which were intimately linked to the rise of American political power on the world stage. One highlight of Jones' approach is her discussion of the role of photographs and films of the artist in the studio in disseminating these ideas to a large public. Perhaps more important, though, she shows how the belief system rooted in the notion of a detached and intrinsically oppositional artist was, by the late '50s, in full retreat. In her treatment of three artists - Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson - who rejected the traditional Abstract Expressionist paradigm and responded to this moment of flux, redefinition, and cultural reorganization, she analyzes not only the transformation represented by the work they produced but also the new type of relation they developed within society and the symbolic place they managed to hold.

Jones uses theoretical tools ranging from neo-Marxism to feminism to reopen one of the most compelling moments of contemporary American culture. Jones thinks, with reason, that the evolution and transformation of the role and understanding of the space of the artistic studio can be a "particularly privileged kind of signifier in the contested discourse of authorship and the industrial aesthetic in the 1960s." She is right, of course, because the space of the studio defined the way culture was understood and promoted. The shift does not entail the disappearance of the American romance with the studio but only its transformation, a sliding from the aura of the anxious individual to that of the entrepreneur. In Jones' careful analysis of attempts by Stella, Warhol, and Smithson to get away from the myth of the Abstract Expressionist studio, she demonstrates that many of the auratic mechanisms put in place by Modern art were actually left intact, allowing, in the end, enough space for this myth of the studio to be recuperated by the market and mass culture. Nevertheless, it is this apprehension of the new "reality" - a vibrant, booming economy - that produces a new set of destabilizing positions under an irrepressible fetishism of technology.

Selecting only a few samples for analysis affords one the possibility of studying in depth a transformation in behavior, but at the risk of giving the false sense that the move from the cloistered studio represents simply a progression of artistic positions. Jones shows throughout that she is aware that the shift represented instead a clash between ideological positions, a battle between different understandings of the role of art in American society, but the structural organization of the book leaves the reader with the impression that this phenomenon is strictly local to New York rather than a development in late international capitalism. It would have been interesting to insist a bit more on the differences between the positions of New York artists and that of, say, Daniel Buren, who, as Jones briefly mentions, was articulating a critique of the studio in the mid '60s in Paris. His discourse, though, was made all the more trenchant by his highly conscious political position, a product of a Parisian tradition steeped in postwar debates within an active, diversified Left of a kind totally lacking in the US since the '50s. Similarly, one should keep in mind that Clement Greenberg, depressed by the failure of nerve he saw in a city now producing popular culture on a grand scale, attempted to save "high art" by discovering the "new" in the person of Morris Louis, hidden away in suburban Washington, DC. Sheltered from the influence of mass production and technology, suburbia became the new castle of high Modernism, a place where the last pioneers, Harold Rosenberg's "aesthetic legionnaires," could carry on like "survivalists."

Jones' analysis of Stella's activity is sensitive and enlightening as she ably discusses his painting technique in relation to his astute understanding of emergent ideological conditions. She charts his progressive withdrawal from the aesthetic of anxiety and heightened individualism to his discovery of the new importance of "matter of fact" painting. From the still anxious "black paintings" to the already confident "aluminum" ones, Jones pinpoints the social meaning of the move: an alignment with the "technological sublime" then fully in vogue. The passage to "presence" and "grace," as Stella's friend Michael Fried would powerfully describe it, was in almost no time transformed into an immediately recognizable sign of the painter's work, verging on a copyrighted "look."

Through Stella's ethic of workmanship these paintings became objects rather than expressions of emotions. Unlike Pollock's use of aluminum paint as a way of achieving a certain instability and ephemerality, Stella's aluminum paintings did not invite the viewer to lose him- or herself in reverie. Their strong presence involved, according to the painter, "socializing rather than individuating fields." This "socializing" is of a specific kind, as Jones points out: "This immediate impact ... is one of speed, urgency and recognizability strategies of those who would insert their product in a busy market place, their message in a noisy medium." The strength of Stella's pictures in the end was the way they imposed themselves on the viewer with all the force of a corporate logo, obtaining "the ultimate goals of consumer recognition and brand loyalty."

Andy Warhol pushed this trend of brand recognition even further by literally transforming the studio into a "factory" where objects and pictures were produced by others, by workers, with the artist retaining the privilege of signing and distributing the product. Warhol's interest in what he called "commonism" was a direct reflection of the new fast pace of consumerism. Jones shows how this upstart brand of artist exemplified by Warhol becomes a manager of images, where the detached look of the artist is contradicted by a ruthless, commanding style: a factory overlord in a Brando leather jacket. He is in charge, even overbearingly so, transforming his near-death experience at the hands of Valerie Solanas into another publicity stunt (and giving credence to his nickname "Drella," a portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella). The alienating studio of the previous generation bad been replaced by the alienating factory, hissing and puffing, against the glittering glamour of the front office.

The dilemma of the machine and the studio also confronted Smithson, who, according to Jones, took the notion of the studio even farther from the city than did the Abstract Expressionists, though not to a country idyll. Even still, he was unable to deliver on a radical critique; though Smithson carried the logic of the machine in the studio to its next stage of decentralization and dispersion, the method of production resonated with the flow of capital and manufacturing in the last decades of the twentieth century. Leaving the studio behind, Smithson dragged the machine into the wilds of Utah. There he wanted to study the beast, the system that, he recognized, functioned through him. In the end his band-to-hand combat with the machine produced an internalization far from the criticality certain spokesmen claimed to find in his work. Like Stella and Warhol, writes Jones, Smithson appears "in much criticism and monographic writing as reflexively oppositional or avant-garde - the strategy of defiant publicity being mistaken for the intention of political critique." Smithson's skepticism toward technology corresponded closely to US failure in Vietnam, but the machine could not be totally rejected by the artist, who depended on the patronage of Virginia Dwan, heiress of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) fortune. Instead, according to Jones, Smithson initially accepted enthusiastically and later accommodated nostalgically the technological discourse. Like many of his artist friends, he discovered the catch-22 of the studio, and once again aestheticization became part and parcel of the project. But Smithson's flight from the studio, while not a revolution, was a revolt that helped usher in a postmodern rethinking of the tradition. This reconsideration carried with it, of course, its own myths and orthodoxy without totally eliminating the appeal of the "technological sublime," as the return of the romance with technology in the '80s makes clear: "In the 1980s, the charms of cyberpunk, junk bonds, 'smart' bombs, patriotic missiles, and other cultural fantasies attest to the continuing appeal of, and to, the technological sublime."

In its complex discussion of visual production in relation to cultural history and ideologies, Machine in the Studio can help us to understand the mechanics of the dance between resistance and absorption. Jones manages to analyze artworks in their historical, political, and conceptual context, giving them a thickness of description rarely possible in standard art history. Her critical unpacking of issues of the production and construction of meaning succeeds in making crucial comparisons between artistic strategies and ideological models. This is one of the best books on the period I have read so far. To paraphrase Clement Greenberg, it gives contemporary art history a good name.

Serge Guilbaut is professor in the department of fine arts at the University of British Columbia.