This talk will make a case for why the artistic sea changes of the 1960s brought by pop, minimalism, and conceptual art should be seen to flatter the skills and values of professionals and managers, particularly their impulse to turn social problems into technical problems requiring technical solutions. Drawing upon theories and histories of the PMC (professional-managerial class) by Barbara Ehrenreich, Andrew Hoberek, and Thomas Klikauer, Elise Archias will take on the role of educated experts and white-collar workers in shaping global politics and culture between roughly 1970 and 2010, the “postmodern” or “neoliberal” era. Archias asks whether what art historians call “contemporary art” can provide insights into the massive redistribution of wealth upward to a ruling elite that defines this period.
Among the artists who rejected the new approaches of the sixties, American painter Joan Mitchell (b. 1925) and sculptor Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) each continued to deploy and adapt abstract expressionist modes of making throughout their respective careers. As their postmodern peers began to evacuate the idea of the expressive subject circa 1960, their projects—while distinctive—both continued to rely on interior space as a dynamic formal component. This talk will propose we consider their persistent modernism not as anachronistic or naive, but as a quietly stubborn critique of the managerial methods and worldview that enabled the neoliberal balance of power. To articulate a set of political stakes for what Mitchell and Edwards were doing, the talk joins insights from Wendy Brown on the neoliberal “undoing” of the democratic public sphere with Adolph Reed’s account of the way leftist political voices in the Civil Rights Movement were displaced by an “administrative elite” agenda. By continuing to make art concerned with qualitative relationships rather than technocratic solutions, Mitchell and Edwards offered a critical alternative to the compromise the PMC made to secure their place in the neoliberal hierarchy—a compromise that continues to dominate our culturally sanctioned notion of contemporary art.
Elise Archias is Associate Professor of Art History at University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research and teaching centre around art since 1945, including performance art and dance, asking questions about the relationship between abstract ideals, physical materials, and human needs in 20th- and 21st-century life and aesthetics. She is the author of The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (2016, winner of the Frank Jewett Mather award for art criticism), co-editor of the Arts special issue, “Dance and Abstraction” (2020) and editor of the special double issue for nonsite, “Contemporary Art and the PMC, Parts I and II” (2021, 2022).
Organised by Professor Jo Applin as part of The Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
