Artist-proposed museums: Polemical projects by Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, 1965--1978

During the 1960s and 70s, a number of young, New York-based artists engaged the physical and metaphorical structure of the art museum in a rough embrace. This thesis focuses on the work of three artists—Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark—each of whom staked a unique claim within the genre of the artist-proposed museum. Distinguished from the practice of artists who imagined (and sometimes realized) museums that were idealized spaces for the display of their own work, this dissertation examines projects that take the modern art museum itself as a point of departure, assimilating and transforming its conventions in order to create new work. It is not a movement or an ism that is being described here; rather, the conceptual and material structure of the museum is being identified as a catalyst for new work that developed in the context of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art in New York during the 1960s and 70s. This thesis examines the ways in which artist-proposed museums paradoxically depended upon the institutions they endeavored to critique, and considers the present status of works that have, with the passage of time, returned home to the very museums they set out to deconstruct.