David Getsy: “Unnatural Relations: Stories of Queer Abstraction in American Art”

Tue
28 October 25

18.15 - 19.45 h

Location

Online (Zoom)

David Getsy: “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.

David J. Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. His book Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015/2023) argued for abstract art’s capacity to generate accounts of the mutability and multiplicity of gender, and his 2019 essay “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction” has been widely cited by contemporary artists working with queer abstraction. He received the Robert Motherwell Book Award for his recent book, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022). Other books include Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (2010) and the collection of artists’ writings, Queer (2016). He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.

Participation via Zoom link

Code: 366701

ID: 656 3202 5609

Part of the International Lecture Series

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

Further Program

November 04, 2025
Evan Hume (Photography, Iowa State University): “Abstraction and Redaction in Photographic Archives”

November 11, 2025
Henning Engelke (Art History, University of Arts Linz): “‘Zones of Activity’: Abstraction, Digital Culture, and Analog Experimental Film”

November 18, 2025
Till A. Heilmann (Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum): “Sharpness Abstracted”

November 25, 2025
Isabel Wünsche (Art History, Constructor University Bremen): “Beyond Western Avant-garde Approaches: Abstraction in a Global Cross-Cultural Dialogue”

December 2, 2025
Sabine Eckmann (Director and Chief Curator, Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis): “Abstraction, Sensation and the Digital”

December 9, 2025
Sven Lütticken (Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University): “Lethal Abstraction and Alter-Abstractions”

December 16, 2025
Kim Albrecht (Information Design, Folkwang University Essen): “Data Visualization as Abstract Realism”

January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): “Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science”

January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”

January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.