identification

Abstract

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Moira Roth's celebrated essay "The Aesthetic of Indifference, " published in Artforum in November, 1977. In the over twentyyears since Roth published it, the essay has continued to be cited in nearly every new work on Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and their circle. 1 Though much has changed in the intervening years in both the discipline of art history and our state ofknowledge of the figures she critiqued, her attempt to define and historicize what she understood to be a new Cold War aesthetic sensibility in American art has shown remarkable longevity and unmatched explanatory force. 2 "Marcel Duchamp in America: A Self Ready-Made:' published only seven months earlier in Arts (May 1977), constituted a kind ofhistorical and thematic predecessor to the "Aesthetic of Indifference:' for she understood the practice of artistic indifference discussed in the later essay as originating in Duchamp-who was then taken up as a model by the group around John Cage. Together, the two 1977 essays set out a new approach to the history of art, one sensitive not only to questions of political valence, but to what had long been considered mere ephemera in the still-formalist critical context of the time-notably artistic personae, sexuality, and the social historical roots of identity.