Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore19991600001
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
NjNbRU
Identifier (type = doi)
doi:10.7282/T35B017N
Genre (authority = ExL-Esploro)
ETD doctoral
Abstract
I examine the social and historical context for the creation of object-portraits in American art in the decade following the First World War. Object-portraits are portraits in which the artist has replaced an image of the subject’s face or body with an object or a collection of objects. This phenomenon occurs specifically in the postwar moment when several actual and intellectual assault on selfhood – from the mechanization of the Great War, the effects of the Machine Age, developments in the field of psychology that challenged traditional notions of the self, and the burgeoning consumer culture and national advertising industry – caused artists to reassess the very nature of portraiture. What they were faced with was nothing less than the question of what it meant to be human in the modern age. Their answer to this problem, in the form of the object-portraits, redefined the boundaries between subject and object, human and thing.
There are three main avenues of interdisciplinary inquiry this study has taken in order to determine how the social history of the self is written upon the object-portrait. First, I examine how contemporary shifts in the growing field of psychology impacted the understanding of identity in such a way as to de-center the self away from both the body and from the concept of a unified stable core. Object-portraits responded to this de-tabilizing of identity by searching for other means of visualizing the subject. Second, I analyze the history of technology and specifically of the body-machine metaphor to consider the various ways the object-portraits evince both a fascination with, and anxiety about, the machine in its myriad forms. And finally, I examine the contemporary advertising industry and consumer culture ideology, fueled by the application of psychology to commerce, and its manipulation of the subject/object relationship. I argue that the object-portraits, particularly the ones that appropriate an advertising aesthetic, participated in and commented on this marketed discourse. Therefore, the object-portraits examined here appear at the intersection of several histories. They anchor a variety of threads, from psychology to technology to advertising, and elucidate the construction of the self in the interwar period.
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.