Event Description
Taking as its point of departure the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s notion of the “organic line,” a line of space that appears between a painting and its frame, a door and its lintel, or tiles on the floor, art historian and theorist Irene Small tracks the emergence of the concept in Clark’s work circa 1954. But it also comprehends the organic line as a generative conceptual tool, one that does expansive aesthetic, epistemological, and political work well beyond Clark’s immediate context. Mobilizing a rich repertoire of archival sources and moving across multiple chronologies, geographies, and disciplines, Irene Small’s work is an invitation to envision modernism not as a stable construct defined by centers and peripheries, inclusions and exclusions, but as a topological field of interactive, destabilizing tensions.
Speakers
Irene Small is Associate Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She specializes in contemporary art and criticism within a global context. Her areas of interest include experimental practices of the 1960s and ’70s, legacies of abstraction, temporalities of art, problems of methodology and interpretation, relationality, and the social implications of form. Small’s work engages a variety of geopolitical formations and transnational, translocal contexts, and has paid particular attention to art and theory in Latin America, notably Brazil.
Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, and Third World humanism.
Natalia Brizuela is the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Chair and Professor in the Departments of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil.
Co-sponsorship