Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art

Duke University Press - 2022

Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art argues that abstraction is a tactic of queering in contemporary art that contributes to critical politics of gender, sexuality, and race, while refusing oppressive representational logics. Focusing on the formal and material innovations of current queer and feminist artists, this book attends to their drag on certain loaded modernist strategies—the hard edge, the grid, color, and the readymade—in order to draw out their social and political capacities and relevance for the present. Lancaster pursues comparative analysis between modernist and mid-century abstract artworks and their contemporary interlocutors, demonstrating how abstraction does queer work through visual and material processes of dragging that expose the violence of abstraction while at the same time exploding processes of categorization and signification. Rather than rescue the problematic potential of abstract forms and tactics that can do harm, Lancaster attends to the mixed feelings at play in contemporary politics of abstraction, engaging with abstraction affectively rather than iconographically. Arguing against the tendency to reduce abstract form to a bodily sign or biographical symbolism, this book makes a methodological intervention in the field of art history by combining a politically-driven formalist and materialist analysis with queer, feminist, and critical race theories in order to take these artists’ formal and material experimentation seriously as social and political praxis. Artists whose works are discussed include Linda Besemer, Nancy Brooks Brody, Harmony Hammond, Angela Hennessy, Every Ocean Hughes, Xylor Jane, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Ulrike Müller, Sheila Pepe, Lorna Simpson, Shinique Smith, and Carrie Yamaoka.