Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender

Getsy, David J.

ISBN 10: 0300271891 / ISBN 13: 9780300271898

Published by Yale University Press, 2023

New. Seller Inventory # FROMMIKESHELF-0000513

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author: David J. Getsy is Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the ...
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 2023
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: New