Synthetic media and modern painting: A case study in the sociology of innovation

This study questions conventional assumptions about what constitutes artmaking, and who is involved with it, by focussing on relationships which have previously been largely invisible in both sociological and art-historical studies: contacts between artists, paintmakers, an conservators, chemists and various other experts on art-technical matters. The aim is to stimulate further reflection on participants in the "service areas of art" and through this to better understand their reciprocally constitutive relationships with the artistic phenomena they help produce and preserve.; The development of a group of new art materials in 20th-century North America--synthetic painting media--provides a point of access for observing these relationships. The study uses qualitative methods drawing on work by French structuralists, Quebec-based critical theorists and symbolic interactionists in an historical-comparative approach. Research is centered on a life story interviews supplemented by fieldwork and extensive archival research.; Accounts by paintmakers and artists reveal a collective process which cuts across disciplinary boundaries. Artists and small entrepreneurial paintmakers used new chemical products to create materials which satisfied aesthetic, political and economic preoccupations. Participants from the chemical industry, university research centers, museums, and government agencies as well as magazine writers and handbook authors played significant roles in the development, spread and eventual regulation of these new materials in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.; The findings are organized in an analytical narrative progression of themes and case histories beginning with a consideration of Mexican muralists who interpreted art-technical issues in terms of socialist ideals. The study traces the emergence of technical issues as a means for arts administrators to control artistic production in state-funded New Deal public art projects. This provided an impetus for research on new materials and efforts to set standards for art materials which continue to this day. Post-war enthusiasms for science and art led to the establishment of research centers on artists' paints and served efforts at professionalization in art conservation and paintmaking. Technical advice columns in mass art magazines and artists' handbooks chart changes in ideas about normative practices in both high and popular culture. Case histories of paintmakers, conservators and researchers are presented. The place of pioneers within the reference population of artists' colour manufacturers provides a basis for cross-cultural comparison. Finally in-depth oral history interviews with artists recognized as members of the avant-garde in the 1960s indicate ways technical knowledge was embedded in high culture discourse.; Thus this study presents new social dimensions of artmaking and a new perspective on the relations between art, technology and society in a particular socio-historical context. Oral testimony underlines the rich interplay of cultural practices in the appropriation of technical knowledge for the creation of individual and group identities. The findings provide insights into links between artistic practices, theories of art, other ideologies, economic preoccupations and more general social processes by studying the ensemble of art-technical work that helped the new paints and the art made with them achieve recognition as cultural innovations.