Abstraction Today 

David Getsy (Art History, University of Virginia)

Unnatural Relations: Stories of Queer Abstraction in American Art

Many artists know that abstract art has queer potential. By turning away from the representation of the recognizable world, artists can invest in forms and formal relations to conjure and present less restricted versions of how things might be and be together. Since its emergence in modernism, abstraction has proved a useful place for some artists to register their lack of fit with expectations of sex, gender, family, and society that are based on a narrow, binary account of how people relate to one another. This lecture will discuss the recurrence of “queer abstraction” in modern and contemporary art, asking how non-representational art relates to the politics of visibility that have been so central to LGBT political and social movements. It will trace some founding formulations of the capacities of abstraction to evoke non-normative sexualities, genders, and lives.