"Illegitimate heirs: Queer Artists’ Claims on the Modernist Canon"
Tuesday, April 8th, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
This talk tracks the effects of the performative claim of filiation by queer artists, examining how such claims on major (straight) modernist artists prompt debates about artistic authority, autonomy, lineage, and what is proper to art. In 1989, the artist Scott Burton (1939–1989) offered a rogue reading of Constantin Brâncuși in the hallowed space of the Museum of Modern Art, and from 2018 to 2020 Adam Milner (b. 1988) undertook a series of conceptual performances at the single-artist museum devoted to the Abstract Expressionist artist Clyfford Still. These museum interventions demonstrated care for the concerns of their modernist forebears while also posing questions about normative values, artistic autonomy, intergenerational influence, and the queer capacities to be found in modernism. These two episodes are marshalled to question whether a queer claim of filiation might be considered as a form of revisionism, one that both re-adopts and alters the canon. Queer claims of filiation (and their incitement of reactive charges of illegitimacy) bring to the surface the limits of propriety and challenge the exercise of authority in establishing art’s histories.
Biography
David J. Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (Chicago 2022), which received the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publication on the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. He previously authored Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015/2023); Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010); and Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Yale 2004). His edited books include the anthology of artists’ writings Queer (MIT 2016); Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance (Soberscove, 2012); and From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art (Penn State, 2011). He and his co-author Che Gossett received the College Art Association’s Award for Distinction for their 2021 article “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History.”
