"Form as Geodesic"
Tuesday, September 22, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall, G22
Abstract
Over 15 years ago, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski asked a deceptively simple question we have not been able to answer: "how does marginal art change the perception of the art of the center?" I take up that question by proposing a different model for how an artist's practice moves through history. Rather than treating an artist's trajectory as a set of connections, affinities, or influences accumulated across a flat historical field, I argue that practice is better understood as a geodesic — the straightest possible path through a field curved by accumulated mass. Mass names the material and conceptual density an artist carries into the present, whether through a medium, a tradition, or an institution. Form registers where that mass has curved a practice with enough density that only this shape could emerge. I trace the model through three bodies of work usually read as anomalous within global art history, with a special emphasis on the sculptures of Buryat artist Serenjab Baldano from 1969 to 1975, made amidst Soviet suppression and exile.
Biography
Joan Kee is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, where she fosters new communities and forms of art historical inquiry across disciplines and geographies. She examines how artists deploy form within and against ethical, legal, and geopolitical frameworks. Current research includes work arisingi from a Getty-funded initiative on Central Asia, overseeing the publication Primary Documents: Korea for MoMA and an exhibition highlighting intersections between Asian and African art and culture, also at MoMA, opening in Summer 2027. Her books include The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity (2023); Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019); and Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013).
