UC San Diego

This dissertation looks at artists whose work was closely aligned with research and pedagogy in the American university from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Four institutional projects structure the work: a collaborative research proposal at Rutgers University, a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a series of exhibitions at Finch College, and an experimental school at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). My analysis begins with Gyorgy Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, a center for artistic research meant to bridge the visual arts with the tradition of science and research. The Center’s model of research shared key characteristics with the scientific tradition, such as discovering fundamental principles through experimentation (emphasizing the visible experience) and creative-problem solving. Next, I look at the “Project in Multiple Dimensions,” a research proposal written collaboratively by Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts and George Brecht for Rutgers University. I argue that these artists’ works offer a knowledge alternative not unlike Dewey’s aesthetic experience and intelligent action, or knowing through doing, and that this model worked against the dominant trends of the university. The subsequent chapters look at the Art in Process exhibitions at Finch College, and the collaborative Feminist Art Program (1971-73) at CalArts. Some instances of conceptual strategies that appeared in the exhibitions at Finch College (seriality and the use of information and language in the work of Mel Bochner, for instance) transformed the understanding of aesthetic experience—not abandoned it—by aligning it with the ability to disclose and construct consciousness or subjective experience. The final chapter looks at how this new decentralized notion of experience collided with a political notion of experience at CalArts. Key works by John Baldessari, Suzanne Lacy, and the Feminist Art Program represented the artist in society in competing ways, as either critically detached or socially engaged.

A practice component also contributes to fulfilling the requirements for the degree, included here as supplemental files.