Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender

David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2015, 256 pp., 50 colour + 50 b/w illustrations, hardcover, £35.55. ISBN 978-0-30019-675-7David Getsy's Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender presents a rigorous art-historical account and a theoretically bold reinterpretation of North American abstract sculpture from the 1960s. This richly illustrated volume comprises four main chapters, each one focusing on selected case studies by canonical artists, including David Smith, John Chamberlain, Nancy Grossman and Dan Flavin. The book's conclusion brings into the discussion post-i98os sculpture by two contemporary artists, Heather Cassils and Scott Burton, successfully carrying the author's theoretical and political concerns on the category of the 'transgender' into their contemporary context. Getsy's reading is set against the grain of the majority of the critical literature on abstract sculpture that typically pits abstraction against figuration as two opposing and mutually exclusive formal categories. Instead, the author undertakes an ambitious interdisciplinary analysis that recasts celebrated examples of abstract sculpture in bodily terms, not by seeking out any formal resemblance with the human figure, or even by evoking the body as metaphor, but by mobilizing the category of transgender, 'an umbrella term used to refer to all individuals who live outside of normative sex/gender relations', as a potent interpretative framework (p. xv). More specifically, Abstract Bodies explores how 'the emerging public recognition of the presence of transformable genders and bodies in the 1960s correlate[s] with the sculpture's contentious relationship to figuration and the body in that decade' (p. xii). While this correlation may seem tenuous at best, especially with his choice of canonical male artists, Getsy is not oblivious of this fact; instead, he expressly states that he resolves to 'infect the canon' by 'finding ways to re-read [these artists] to find capacitating sites in their work ... making sure no one can ever look at a John Chamberlain again without thinking about questions of gender that were not his politics, but are maybe ours'.1Throughout the book, Getsy posits abstract sculpture as an 'open and contested category', employing a set of recurring operative terms such as openness, variability, possibility and polyvalence. As he writes in the introduction:The cultivation of possibility is an ethical and political, not just a theoretical, aim. The artists I discuss offered abstract bodies and, with them, open accounts of personhood's variability and possibility. Their sculptures do this by moving away from the human form and the rendering of the body. Rather, they figure it in the abstract. That is, these works evoke the concept of the body without mimesis, producing a gap between that calling forth of the human and the presentation of the artworks that resolutely refuse to provide an anchoring image of the body. In that gap, there grew new versions of genders, new bodily morphologies, and a new attention to the shifting and successive potentials of these categories. Activated by the conventions of sculpture's attachment to the human body, these abstractions posited unforeclosed sites for identifying and cultivating polyvalence. (p. 41)In other words, Getsy identifies a semantic openness or ambiguity in these sculptures that he purposefully reads through the interpretative lens of shifting gender identities. Even though Getsy casts his book in terms of interdisciplinary research - in 'the expanded field of gender', as the book's subtitle indicates - his main methods remain decidedly art historical, encompassing close visual and formal analysis of the artworks, sustained archival research, and an exhaustive discursive analysis of textual material such as artists' statements, interviews, titles of artworks, as well as a rigorous reinterpretation of secondary critical literature. …