In this talk, Lex Lancaster will discuss their book, Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art (forthcoming from Duke University Press in Fall 2022), highlighting how contemporary queer tactics of abstraction drag on difficult visual forms and histories of modernism.
Lancaster will discuss how particular formalist investments—in the grid, the gesture, or chromatic play—can expose the potential difficulties and violence of abstraction for those who are marked by difference, while at the same time transforming those tactics to make them work for queer, feminist, non-binary, and anti-racist art practices.
Bringing Louise Fishman’s work into this larger field, Lancaster will consider how her work foregrounded these queer formalist strategies long before the language for “queer abstraction” emerged, and how we can continue to take her abstractions seriously as social and political tactics now.
