The Matter of Abstraction: Feminism and the Arts

Catalog description

How does feminist art help us think through the matter of abstraction? How does feminism’s emphasis on the social constructiveness of needs, desires, bodies, and subjectivities affect - and resist - the terms of not only formal abstraction but also economic and political abstraction? This course considers the influence of feminist theories and practices in the arts, especially their impact upon debates about abstraction versus representation, formalism versus realism. We begin with feminist art in the 1960’s, and proceed to the recent resurgence of abstraction in contemporary art alongside analyses of an ever more abstracted world of capital.