Interchanges: Construction of the U.S. Interstate highway system and artistic practice, 1956-1984

A sprawling art installation of stuffed and knotted pantyhose droops from pylons beneath a freeway overpass. This amorphous and growth-like environmental installation by Senga Nengudi, considered in this dissertation alongside the work of her contemporaries, invites the question: What is the relationship between the highway system, its growth, and the art that responds to it? In response, this dissertation offers the first examination of how the decades-long Interstate construction project—the largest public works project in American history—transformed art in America. Examining a broad range of artworks from minimalism to performance art and drawing on ecological theory, new materialism, and queer theory, it charts the interchanges between this monumental construction project and developments in American art history to produce new knowledge about both. In applying the Interstate project as a lens through which to analyze art, it expands and shifts the aperture of art historical inquiry by affording attention to artworks by women, people of color, and immigrants without neglecting the work of artists of the established canon. Chapter one investigates Robert Smithson’s engagement with the construction materials and methods of highway construction in Spiral Jetty (1970). It shows how this iconic artwork casts the Interstate as equal parts construction and destruction, as an entropic material construct in a seemingly interminable state of change. Chapter two examines how Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon’s “Valley Curtain” (1970-72) and “Running Fence” (1972-76) create irrational infrastructures that incorporate the materials, landscapes, and logistical enterprises of highway construction to weave a more expansive and complicated narrative of the U. S. highway system. Their temporary installations uncover the Interstate’s foundation in colonialism, its instrumental role in Cold War military operations, and its complicity in the neocolonial displacement of peoples. Chapter three examines the enmeshment of art and California freeway construction in Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s supergraphics and Nengudi’s performative installations. Drawing on landscape designer Lawrence Halprin’s proposal for an alternative to modern art predicated on “environment as art experience,” it shows how their artworks offer a way to come to terms with and reconfigure the freeway environment. Chapter four analyzes Joseph Jarman’s “movements” beyond music in the context of Happenings and Black ecology in Chicago, exploring how his performance art responded to the mass displacement of people of color effectuated by Interstate construction. Shaped by a desire to heal the resulting trauma, Jarman's expansive approach fostered a new form of performance practice with remedial potential. Chapter five applies the Interstate lens to Donald Judd’s seemingly discrete projects in sculpture, design, and land stewardship to reveal how they are all underpinned by an “aesthetics of logistics” that provides the blueprint for making vast infrastructures, as well as their capacity for environmental devastation, graspable. Throughout, it adopts an art historical method predicated on the principle of interchange that is multi-directional, accretive, and inclusive. By drawing connections between major and minor actors and objects such as ephemera, mass-produced design, meager materials, and outlier cases, it presents a more expansive picture of postwar American art.