Rhetorically, New York City has long wielded artistic agency in postwar art. For instance, the metropolis apparently stole the idea of modern art away from Paris (according to Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]) and subsequently named its own school of painters (The New York School). Despite this centrality, however, few scholars have rigorously investigated the complex interactions between artists and the city itself. In The Disappearance of Objects, Joshua Shannon tackles precisely this issue as it transpired in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s. With his meticulous, street-by-street research into the historical fabric of New York and close attention to the particular and peculiar language of related art objects, Shannon attempts to do for New York in the 1960s what T. J. Clark did for the Paris of Edouard Manet and the Impressionists in The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Like Clark, Shannon is drawn to art whose pictorial awkwardness and ambiguity suggests larger social contradictions. As such, the “clumsy groundedness” (6) of art objects by the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg can capture something of the ungainly adolescence of New York in the early 1960s, a city caught between the particularity of light industry and the hyperspace of a late capitalist metropolis fashioned from steel, glass, and geometry.

Shannon approaches the relationship between art making and the urban politics of New York through four loosely chronological case studies: Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd. His decision to concentrate on sculpture, or works that contain sculptural elements, emphasizes the book’s materialist thrust—be it in the physical matter of art objects or the ways in which the city’s lived fabric shapes urban experience. This approach gives this volume an admirable and compelling focus. A more robust consideration of painting, however, might have raised the stakes of Shannon’s argument—especially when one considers that his chosen artists consciously thwarted concerns of medium specificity. I can readily envision how a discussion of painters like Grace Hartigan and Frank Stella might have formulated a broader argument about the city and art making.

Shannon’s lively interpretation of Oldenburg’s early work sets the stage; he discusses the sculptural installation The Street (staged twice in 1960) relative to the artist’s Washington Square Park neighborhood. Such geographic specificity is crucial for the author, as this public square was literally contested ground in the battles for the heart of Manhattan circa 1960. Not only was a road planned to cut though the park in 1958 (this scheme was eventually defeated), but ten active construction sites were also clustered around the square at this time. Such projects aimed to transform the particularity of the area into an increasingly homogenized, International Style city block. For Shannon, Oldenburg’s self-consciously dirty and disorganized cardboard forms allegorize the messy and violent matter of the old city—their pictorial chaos and illegibility symbolically impeding the efficient transfer of information, goods, or people. Shannon goes on to suggest that Oldenburg’s “elaborate but failed representations” (39) of the city demonstrate the impossibility of coalescing urban chaos into something legible. In Oldenburg’s New York, entropy always wins.

In the second chapter, Shannon turns his attention to the sculptural literalism of Johns, a welcome approach considering the privileging of this artist’s paintings in most studies. Using, among other evidence, the popular period social criticism of Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers (1960) and statistics detailing the disappearance of locally owned hardware stores, the author productively discusses Johns’s Flashlight I (1958) as a holdout in a New York newly obsessed with consumer obsolescence and corporate administration. The work’s sculpt-metal covering emphasizes an old-fashioned, all-metallic stodginess in marked contrast to the new plastic models that appeared around the same time. For Shannon, this sculpture, as well as Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) from 1960, are ambivalent things, marking a culture of consumer objects in transition. The weight and handmade qualities of Johns’s sculptures resist the increasingly spectacular and seductive methods of advertising that encouraged the culture of waste; however, the works are themselves useless and pure excess. Is it possible to make an object that escapes the abstracting, waste-generating tendencies of late capitalism? The answer for Shannon is no; the best an artist can do is acknowledge the contradiction of her or his position.

Despite its merits, this chapter falls somewhat outside the book’s overall concerns. The discussion of broad American shifts in capitalism and marketing, while important to Johns, deviates from the central contribution of the book: the specificity of New York as a locus for art making around 1960. In the next chapter, however, the sharp urban focus returns with the book’s physical and thematic centerpiece: a brilliant “historically and geographically specific” (107) consideration of Rauschenberg’s early 1960s Combines.

Although the artist’s first Combines date from around 1955, Shannon rightfully views those from 1961–65 as distinct within his oeuvre: their urban detritus speaks powerfully about the shifting character of New York. The author, like Thomas Crow in the recent exhibition catalogue Robert Rauschenberg: Combines (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2005), establishes a middle ground in the intellectual battles over Rauschenberg. Shannon situates these particular Combines between Rosalind Krauss’s embrace of the artist’s willful indeterminacy and Jonathan D. Katz’s more iconographic and biographical approach. While these urban Combines carry allusions to very specific urban issues (the increasing number of one-way streets in New York, for example), they also frustrate the viewer’s sense of coherence and narrative. As simultaneously concrete and abstract (in the sense of deferring meaning), these sculptures can embody New York’s contradictions as it became increasingly organized around the needs of late capitalism.

Shannon’s interpretation of Wall Street (1961) is worth singling out. Rauschenberg completed the Combine in the wake of a move to a new studio on Front Street, just blocks away from New York’s financial center identified in the title. Armed with maps detailing period construction and demolition, Shannon brings to life the radical flux of the neighborhood. In 1960, for instance, the artist would have witnessed the opening of the massive glass and steel modernist monolith of the Chase Manhattan building, a mere three blocks from his studio; such a structure was emblematic of the new architecture of money increasingly colonizing downtown. Rauschenberg’s inclusion of a decorative architectural cornice in Wall Street—likely pulled off of a recently demolished building in his neighborhood—is not, then, just happenstance but a very particular kind of urban memento mori. These urban Combines literally mark the disappearance of certain things in Rauschenberg’s immediate environs, as well as suggest something more fundamental: the potential loss of New York’s idiosyncratic ambiguity as its fabric was reorganized under the synthesizing schemes of capital.

Judd’s sixties work comprises the final case study in The Disappearance of Objects. By focusing on the artist’s New York materialism, Shannon gives readers a new Judd—one with more in common with Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, and Johns than with the phenomenological concerns of Robert Morris and Dan Flavin. Shannon also reads an urban uncertainty into Judd’s early work, which incorporated materials like iron pipes and printing pallets (Untitled [DSS 29] from 1962 is a good example). These works exude a friction and materiality, even as Judd subjects these urban fragments to a systematic regularity. Again, for Shannon, the awkwardness of the early sculptures addresses a New York in transition. By 1965, Judd has others fabricate his work, and the results—made from steel and Plexiglas—are more refined.

Shannon reminds readers that Judd’s emerging “modular metal box” vocabulary was not only an artistic language at the time, but also the language of shipping containers (that forced the working docks out of Manhattan), as well as of corporate architecture and design. By referring to this ascendant corporate style and stripping it of its functionality, Judd’s sculptures call specific attention to these new built forms, rendering their emerging urban ubiquity explicit. Judd’s metal boxes are a fitting place for Shannon to end the book: they not only bemoan the loss of materiality and friction in New York art and urban culture, but also figure this potential dystopia as a late capitalist dream of abstract and weightless efficiency.

The Disappearance of Objects is a fitting companion to Caroline Jones’s notable The Machine in the Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which charts shifts in studio practices against economic transformations of the 1950s and 1960s (most of it set in New York and its environs). Shannon’s volume should also be considered alongside gentrification debates in New York—best outlined in Rosalyn Deutsche’s powerful Evictions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). As such, The Disappearance of Objects has contemporary resonance, as it can provide a genealogy for the aesthetic fetishization of particularity and “authenticity.” The desire for well-worn brick and exposed plumbing fuels the marketplace for loft-like spaces that continue to perpetuate devastating gentrification in New York and other global cities.

The Disappearance of Objects is an important, forceful book—especially in its commitment to a materialist history of canonical postwar artists. For too long, the dominant scholarship around these artistic figures, especially Johns and Rauschenberg, has tended to consider the semiotic and philosophical questions raised by the work, sometimes to the detriment of historical specificity. The brilliant turn in this volume is Shannon’s intertwining of the social and the artistic—how at this time, “the formalist dialectics of modernism were in fact a means of thinking about a changing world” (186). Specificity, abstraction, and objecthood were buzzwords in the 1960s, and Shannon’s archival research and interpretive frameworks dramatize how these words could describe both art objects and New York’s particular urban experience.