UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE on Taste and Nation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE On Taste and Nation Dissertation Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degrees of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Visual Studies by Anna Therese Kryczka Dissertation Committee Chancellor’s Professor Cécile Whiting, Chair Professor Catherine Liu Associate Professor Victoria E. Johnson 2016 © 2016 Anna Therese Kryczka DEDICATION To my family and friends with gratitude ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CIRRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Historicism on the New Frontier: Making Taste in the Kennedy White House 23 CHAPTER 2 Oldenburg, Los Angeles, and A Certain America 65 CHAPTER 3 Art and Infrastructure: The Suburbs as Elsewhere 120 CHAPTER 4 Worthy Pleasure: TV, Video Art, and Cooking 168 CONCLUSION 229 BIBLIOGRAPHY 234 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to first thank my advisor Cécile Whiting whose prompt, thorough, and thoughtful guidance made the task of finishing the dissertation a joyful process. Her trust and support gave me the confidence to execute this project. My committee members Victoria Johnson and Catherine Liu were integral to the formation and articulation of this undertaking. Cécile, Vicky, and Catherine also importantly modeled three divergent and equally inspiring models of academic practice. I sincerely could not imagine a better committee. Beyond my committee, I wish to acknowledge Visual Studies faculty members Lucas Hilderbrand, Amy Powell, Bliss Lim, and Jamie Nisbet for their wise counsel and support. In anthropology I am grateful to have worked with and been encouraged by Keith Murphy, Bill Maurer, and Julia Elyachar. My dear friends and colleagues Robert J. Kett, Meredith Goldsmith, and Laura Holzman provided invaluable editorial and emotional support. I also wish to thank my students who always impressed, inspired, and challenged me. My parents, brother, sister-in-law, and nephews provided intellectual and spiritual inspiration. My mother, Martha Barry, and my father, Marion Kryczka showed me how to love your work and live your life with conviction. My friends in Chicago, like Donald Rogers, Melanie Emerson, Erin Moore, Jess Mandel, Liz Ward, Rebecca Schorsch, John Huber, and more kept me true to my roots. Friends across the country like Margot Werner, Jean Adamoski, Emily Bauman, Margaret Rogers, Michael Huber, Nicole and Peter Burghardt, Amy Daws, and Stu Pittman that made feel at home on all coasts. The adopted family I have cultivated in Los Angeles provided invaluable sustenance on an every day basis. April Wolfe, Lenae Day, Sarah Fang, Sasha Samochina, Georgia Hartman, Albert Chu, Alina Cutrono, Lauren Hamer, Bizzy Hemphill, Jeremy Bird, Joelle Barrios, Chris Hatfield, Kim Feig, Cliff Collins, Lee Laskin, Jenn Witte, Mally Jones, Emily Brooks, Kim Icreverzi, and numerous others made sure I had some fun these past 6 years. I want to thank the KLAM family and the Los Angeles Pharaohs for offering creative and athletic nourishment. The Chancellor’s Club; Humanities Collective; Water UCI, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts; Osei Duro; Sing Sing Studio; Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies; Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion; and the Graham Foundation all provided much needed financial support required to complete this degree. Finally, thanks to Beyoncé for releasing Lemonade right when I needed it. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Anna Therese Kryczka Education University of California, Irvine PhD in Visual Studies, June 2016. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Master of Arts in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory and Criticism, May 2009. Knox College, Galesburg, IL Bachelor of Arts, Art History with a Minor in Anthropology and Sociology, June 2007. Research Interests Mid-twentieth century American art, design, media and material culture, and architecture with an emphasis on issues of taste, technology, national identity display, labor, and domesticity. Publications (“A Certain America: Claes Oldenburg and Los Angeles” at the revise and resubmit stage at American Art ) “TV and Taste on the New Frontier: A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy” History and Technology: An International Journal (July 2014). Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft, Science, and Counterculture in Modern California Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2014. With Robert Kett. “Performing the Pedagogical Parergon: Our Literal Speed in Chicago” Journal of Visual Culture (August 2010): 233-237 v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION On Taste and Nation By Anna Therese Kryczka University of California, Irvine, 2016 Professor Cécile Whiting, Chair This dissertation explores the material, visual, and aesthetic dimensions of cultural consensus and distinction in emblematic domestic spaces, from the White House’s chambers of respectability to the pleasures and perils of the modern Los Angeles bedroom, to the candy- colored architectural shell of the average New Jersey tract home, and, finally to the pedagogical and progressive labors that shape the televisual Cold War kitchen. From television, design, and architecture to video, pop and conceptual art, these case studies deliver determinations of taste shaped by nostalgia couched in the language of “tradition” as well as ironic and polemical commentary on the outcomes and objects of the accessible aesthetics, lifestyles, and origins of the cultural “middlebrow.” This dissertation argues for the centrality of domestic taste in the forging of national belonging during the turbulent 1960s. Through an analysis of the sway of domestic taste in Cold War visual culture, its consumption, and reception across these case studies, this dissertation offers a new reading of the art of the sixties—often conceived of as delivering a liberal critique of society—as mired in anxieties around the nation’s ever widening discourses of inclusion and identity. These works and projects face the radical futurity of the American 1960s and the expansion of social programming that sought to eradicate poverty and include minorities into the postwar dream of middle class life and materialize anxieties about the quality of life in the age of television and nuclear war and white middle class identity manifest in the confluence of debates over taste, national identity, tradition, and history. vi INTRODUCTION In 1959 at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev famously sparred about the nature and quality of domestic life in what has been dubbed “The Kitchen Debate.” This expansive exhibition was sought to demonstrate that “the United States, the world’s largest capitalist country has, from the standpoint of distribution of wealth come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society.”1 The fiction of classlessness espoused by Nixon correlates to the development of a vision of national identity premised upon the middle class American experience, represented by the postwar, single family home. The United States Information Agency describes the endeavor in its intra- governmental publication Facts about the American Exhibition in Moscow: This is an effort to project a realistic and credible image of America to the Soviets through the exhibits, displays, films, publications, fine arts, performing arts. The exhibition reflects how America lives, works, learns, produces, consumes, and plays: what kind of people Americans are and what they stand for; America’s cultural values. In a sense this is a “corner of America” in the heart of Moscow. 2 Questions around how to produce, derive, and portray the American norm while also underscoring the ideals of freedom and diversity guided the design and components of the exhibition. The show, which displayed innumerable consumer products including Pepsi-Cola and Betty Crocker, lipstick, the latest ovens and electric ranges along side twenty-three pieces of sculpture and 49 paintings, all produced by American artists, was chosen by a Presidentially approved committee of four specialists. 3 The tremendous energy devoted to the selection of 1 Remarks at the opening of The American Exhibition in Moscow, published in the New York Times, July 25, 1959. 2 Facts About the American Exhibition in Moscow, United States Information Agency Papers, National Archives. 3 The selection process was hotly contested in Congress within the context of Senator McCarthy’s crusade against domestic communists. The political background of the participating artists was shown to be questionable within this newly conspiratorial political climate. Strong appeals from government funded arts organizations promoted the cause of free speech. President 1 works of art as well as the cakes, beverages, and chairs to be displayed along with the consistent arguments over what was, in fact, typical, worked to forge a vision of an enlightened, domestically-oriented average American middle class identity. At the same time, combining quotidian domestic objects with high art, the exhibition foreshadowed a developing conflict between the comfortable middle class pleasures of easy-bake cakes and ranch houses, the highbrow gravitas of the artistic avant-garde, and the historical authority of the elite American heirloom over matters of what constituted Americanness or the good life and how that might or might not relate to conceptions of good taste. For example, might the Skylark Charcoal Formica kitchen counter top be more representative of the nation’s postwar character than Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral of 1947? These two formally