CAMH Lecture: David Getsy: Abstract Bodies

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) presents a CAMH Lecture: David Getsy: Abstract Bodies.

Author, theorist, and historian David Getsy has interrogated art’s histories of the human form and its alternatives for well over a decade.

A leading authority on the history of modern sculpture, Getsy’s writings span the nineteenth-century origins of modern art to emerging artists working today.

For his presentation at CAMH, he will discuss his publication Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. Getsy will sign copies of his book (available in CAMH’s Museum Shop) after the presentation.

This program is in collaboration with Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (CSWGS) and the Department of Art History at Rice University. 

About Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, October 2015) is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. 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 and queer theory, 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).

About David Getsy
David Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His work in art history engages with transgender studies, queer studies, and performance studies to examine the ways in which artists have drawn on gender and sexuality as resources for artistic and public practices.

In addition to Abstract Bodies, his books include Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Yale University Press, 2004), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2010), From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play and Twentieth-Century Art (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), and Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 (Soberscove Press, 2012).

He is a member and past chair of the editorial board of The Art Bulletin and he co-edited a special issue ofTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2014. Just released by MIT Press in February 2016 will be his anthologyQueer, a collection of contemporary artists’ writings on sexuality, politics, aesthetics, and social relations.  He has also recently published essays on artists such as Heather Cassils, Kehinde Wiley, Catherine Opie, and Vincent Van Gogh. http://www.saic.edu/~dgetsy