ISBN: PB: 9780300271898
April 2023
400 pp.
25,4x19,1 cm
103 colour illus., 53 black&white illus.
PB:
£35.00
QTY:
Abstract Bodies
Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
An innovative analysis of 1960s abstract sculpture that draws on transgender studies and queer theory.
Now back in print, Abstract Bodies was the first book to bridge the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies with the discipline of art history. Original and theoretically astute, it recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender's mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form.
This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender studies and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists – Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927-2011), and David Smith (1906-1965). "Abstract Bodies" makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender's multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.
Now back in print, Abstract Bodies was the first book to bridge the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies with the discipline of art history. Original and theoretically astute, it recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender's mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form.
This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender studies and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists – Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927-2011), and David Smith (1906-1965). "Abstract Bodies" makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender's multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.
About the author
David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Chair in Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of "Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905", also published by Yale University Press, and editor of "From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art and Sculpture" and the "Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880-1930".