University of Cambridge
'I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It': Silence in American Art 1947–2008
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis addresses silence as a political and aesthetic strategy in American art from 1947 to 2008. It seeks to develop a historical account of three different artists and their investments in silence, with particularized, historically grounded definitions of silence developed in each chapter. It asserts that silence is in fact an appropriate framework through which to consider each of these three artists’ practices in these time periods—a framework which has been wholly neglected for each of the three artists in question and indeed throughout later twentieth-century American art history at large—and seeks to draw out the formal, significatory, and political consequences of each artist’s engagement with silence as a strategy. This thesis provides a needed counterweight to the dominant narrative of politically engaged contemporary American art as ‘speaking up’, ‘finding one’s voice’, or ‘making oneself heard’; in doing so, this thesis establishes a new lineage of American political engagement in contemporary art through silence. The thesis includes three case studies that pair an artist and a theorist representing a distinct attitude towards silence, shaped in the cultural and political conditions of a distinct generational moment. Nonetheless, all share the context of working in New York, often simultaneously, and other salient characteristics tracked in the thesis, such as turning to the American flag as part of their engagement with silence. The first chapter addresses Jasper Johns alongside John Cage and the 1950s cultural atmosphere shaped by the Cold War and McCarthyism, with extended discussion of political affect and periperformatives. The second addresses Howardena Pindell alongside M. NourbeSe Philip and the 1970s cultural atmosphere shaped by second-wave feminism, with attention to Black feminist frameworks throughout. The final chapter addresses Zoe Leonard alongside ACT UP and ‘SILENCE = DEATH’ and the 1990s cultural atmosphere shaped by the AIDS crisis, with attention to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s reformulation of Audre Lorde’s ‘master’s tools’ as a matter of ownership. Each chapter treats the relevant artist as mobilizing a distinct modality of silence as a political strategy: for Johns, silence offers a means of scrambling routine iconography and sites of affective attachment; for Pindell, silence offers a generative site of multiplicity and serves a reparative function; and for Leonard, silence offers a means of protest and memorialization. Each also takes a different framing towards silence: for Johns, the appropriate framing is ‘silence to whom?’; for Pindell, ‘silence about what?’; and for Leonard, ‘whose silence?’ In all cases, the relationship between silence, noise, and speech is central, and the thesis repeatedly returns to central concerns such as silent protest, silence as a formal problem, and the limitations of silence as a political strategy. Throughout, the thesis tracks intersections with affect theory, attending to the ways in which each artist encourages viewers to reflect on existing affective attachments to symbols like the American flag and, in the latter two cases, seeks to challenge or shift the content of those affective binds. As a result, the thesis accounts for not only silence’s operations as a political strategy in each case study but also its outcomes.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Danis, Jamie
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Tobin, Amy
Subjects
dc:subject × 8Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.126520
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/397366