Cataloguing critique: experimental forms of documentation in American art, 1970-1977

This dissertation focuses on catalogs and other publications that served as critiques of conventional art and museum practice by artists and curators of American art during the 1970s. This study attends to both experimental forms of curating and the publications that accompanied them, as well as to the catalog as an exhibition or curatorial process in itself. The objects of this study, often collaboratively produced, were lodged between the traditional categories of art, catalog, exhibition, and book. “Cataloguing Critique” explores the idea of “curating” a catalog, when artist curators work as authors, editors, and producers. By looking closely at particular curatorial and publication projects of the early to mid 1970s, this project endeavors to highlight the importance of the exhibition catalog as a site of expression, political critique, and collective action among American artists at the time. ❧ These case studies provide examples in which artists and curators radically experimented with the formal and conceptual possibilities of the printed catalog. In each of them, the catalog fulfills a function beyond that of documentation. The manipulation of images, text, and attention to format, layout, and binding play a part in the objects of this study as they do in other printed artistic media. This conception of the catalog as a space of exploration parallels the growth in artists’ books and self-published magazines in the twentieth century. If artists’ books and magazines live at the margins rather than the established center, then the catalogs examined in this project lie somewhere in between. The artists, curators, critics, and collectives featured in this project operated in dialogue with institutions at some level, seeking to augment or even undermine an exhibition by presenting supplementary, alternative, or oppositional ideas and images within the catalogs they produced. ❧ The subjects of this study show how, in the late 1960s and 1970s, curators, artists, and critics increasingly called into question the purpose of the museum as a passive and ideologically neutral space of display. The precedent of non-traditional, experimental catalogs explored early in the dissertation paved the way for activist and feminist approaches to formulating, documenting, and also critiquing exhibitions. Thus this project also contributes to existing scholarship on collective action among American artists during this period to mount political critiques through their actions or their art production. The objects of this study fall within that same context, and an expanded view of American art history should include them. ❧ Rather than emphasize the differences among experimental exhibition catalogs in post-war American art, this project seeks to foreground what this material has in common. The producers of these objects revised the audience’s expectations about how catalogs function. They redefined the role of the traditional catalog from that of documentation to one with the potential to express critical or contradictory viewpoints and to become a distinct art object in its own right—separate to, or in place of, the exhibition. The 1970s witnessed a real slippage among functions of positions in the art world, especially in the function of the curator. While challenging the aesthetic and institutional framing of art practice, the case studies in this dissertation demonstrate that this shift in curatorial practice changed the practical relationship between artist and curator—and, as a result, the relationship between curator and institutions.