Abstract city
During the early 1960s, New York City endured a rapid physical and economic transformation. Small shops were exchanged for office towers. Crooked streets made way for massive highway construction. It was in this upheaval that artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg gathered the relics of their outmoded city and raised them up to the level of art. Old ale cans. Tires. Retired license plates. In The Disappearance of Objects, art historian Joshua Shannon examines the work of four artists living in New York City, arguing that these halting alternatives to the cool steel and glass of the rising capitalist city were the artists’ tools for making sense of an increasingly abstract world.
Though abstraction is still very much at work in today’s New York, the city appears to be turning back to its less congested roots. Just last month, city officials shut down parts of Times Square to traffic, signaling an apparent change in tack. Today’s artists may indeed reflect these changes as well, but no matter what direction we’re heading, a book like The Disappearance of Objects will always serve to illuminate where we’ve been.
















