Christa Noel Robbins the first art-historical study to include both The book begins with just such a clo- a transgender history and theory, this book sure. Focused on a brief, televised exchange Transgressing Gender in is an important contribution to the field and between the poet Frank O’Hara and the 1960s Abstract a call to expand not just our archival knowl- modernist sculptor David Smith in 1964, edge of modernist and contemporary art, but Getsy’s first chapter unfolds the significance David J. Getsy. Abstract Bodies: Sixties also our theoretical categories. of Smith’s emphatic statement to O’Hara that Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Through a series of case studies, which he doesn’t “make boy ” (quoted Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, on 43). Getsy points out that scholars’ access 2015. 392 pp., 50 col. ills, 50 b/w. $65 to this statement and the interview it comes from was, for decades, egregiously misrep- David Getsy’s new book Abstract Bodies: Sixties resented. In Art in America in 1966, Cleve Gray Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender starts out “liberally rewrote” the exchange, and it has the way a lot of books about 1960s sculpture been to that revision that most references to begin: with a cursory account of the revo- the interview have referred (82). In response lutionary turn sculpture underwent in that to Smith’s statement that his sculptures “are decade away from modernist containment all girls”—itself a response to O’Hara’s ask- and toward something more relational, situ- ing whether Smith regards his sculptures ational, and bodied. But unlike the majority as “people around your house”—Gray has of histories that track this turn, Getsy’s book O’Hara afrming Smith’s unsolicited gender- just as quickly takes a turn of its own: “The ing of the sculptures: “Yeh, they’re all female 1960s in America,” Getsy writes, “also saw a sculptures.” O’Hara’s actual response, how- fundamental shift in the ways that persons ever, as Getsy shows, was less agreeable. When were understood” (xi). With this added Smith quips that the sculptures “are all girls,” historical lens, Getsy provides an account of O’Hara actually objects to the categoriza- how the debates over anthropomorphism in tion: “They’re all girls? Very angular girls.” To sculpture and statuary at mid-century track which Smith rejoins: “They’re all girls, Frank. in relation to parallel shifts in our under- . . . I don’t make boy sculptures” (82–83). standings, descriptions, and performances include David Smith, John Chamberlain, In characterizing Smith’s sculptures of personhood around the same time. While Nancy Grossman, and Dan Flavin, Getsy as “people,” O’Hara was carrying forward the last decade and a half has seen the pub- pursues a seemingly simple question: “How a description of Smith’s work that he first lication of several books concerned with . . . does the emerging public recognition of published in a 1961 essay for Art News wherein personhood and the art of the 1960s—such the presence of transformable genders and he likened Smith’s totemlike sculptures to as Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s Being Watched: Yvonne bodies in the 1960s correlate with sculpture’s “people who are awaiting admittance to a Rainer and the 1960s (MIT Press, 2011) and Julia contentious relationship to figuration and the formal reception and, while they wait, are Bryan-Wilson’s Art Workers: Radical Practice in body in that decade” (xii). The difcult task thinking about their roles when they join the the Vietnam War Era (University of California the book performs is encapsulated in the term rest of the guests already in the meadow.”1 Press, 2011)—Getsy’s book goes against what “correlate.” Getsy does not seek out queer or Despite this likening, as Getsy points out, I would call the archival impulse of recent transgender artists or even works of art that O’Hara never links his personification of the art-historical studies and puts pressure feature queer or transgender representations. sculptures to a gender. It is for this reason not just on the historical framing of 1960s Rather, he sees in the radical abstraction of the that Getsy finds it surprising that Smith him- sculpture, but also on the concept of person- 1960s a potential: the ability of certain abstract self genders the work in response to O’Hara’s hood. Instead of historicizing personhood sculptures to function as figures in space question during the televised interview. according to sociological or political frames before or beyond the assignation of type. For Instead of simply ofering up this exchange as of reference, Getsy theorizes it, allowing Getsy the status of abstract sculptures, which an example of Smith’s normative attachments the radically abstract sculpture of the 1960s he argues signal bodies, despite their having and possibly homophobic response to the itself to raise questions as to how persons get left figuration in the form of statuary behind, openly gay O’Hara, however, Getsy returns us figured, identified, and addressed as such. is like the status of bodies before they have to the original scene of the exchange, which The interpretative framework within which been slotted into biological, social, or politi- took place after the sculptor and poet had Getsy interrogates personhood is provided cal designations. While he is taken by and been engaged in a protracted conversation by transgender studies, an area of political, speaks eloquently about the opening up and about sculpture, form, and figuration, and ethical, and aesthetic theory with which art aesthetic plenitude of this state of abstrac- demonstrates a far more complex relation history has had little or nothing to do before tion—a space of possibility that, he argues in among gender assignation, sculptural abstrac- now. The core question grounding Getsy’s his conclusion, abstraction is uniquely suited tion, and sexual politics around this time. inquiry in this regard is how and why gen- to figure in the world—Getsy’s focus is less Getsy’s recounting of the extended ders get assigned to sculptures in the first on that plenitude than on the many ways by dialogue between O’Hara and Smith pre- place and despite their radical move away which it has been foreclosed within both art ceding the televised interview returns us to from any identifiable form of figuration. As history and queer studies. the intellectual intimacy between these two

65 artjournal men, within which both had expressed an and radically abstract sculptures to female- are themselves attempts to return to the acceptance of the other’s sexuality and, more identified bodies to a series of case studies “norms” of recognition. This is most clear than that, a deep respect for their respective that demonstrate similar closures: the art-his- in the tenacious nature of our periodization artistic practices. As proof of their mutual torical tendency to read John Chamberlain’s of the decade’s culture as a category unto admiration, Getsy points to Smith’s positive sculptures as examples of either an Abstract itself. It is most common in talking about reception of O’Hara’s 1961 essay in which Expressionist or muscle-car version of mascu- either 1960s sculpture or queer studies, for the poet first personified the sculptures. That linity; the identification of Nancy Grossman’s example, to remain focused on neo-avant- essay ends with O’Hara’s declaring a strong, heads—hand-sculpted, disembodied heads garde movements like Pop, , and personal identification with the work: “The to which Grossman has carefully tailored Conceptual art. Getsy’s text is refreshing best of the current sculptures didn’t make leather-bound skins—as male and associated in its refusal to parse his study according me feel I wanted to have one, they made me with an emerging underground sadomas- to such art-historical designates. The book feel I wanted to be one.”2 Smith was flat- ochism community in ; Dan moves from the high-modernist sculptures tered by the essay, and it was following an Flavin’s naming his fluorescent tubes after a of Smith, through Chamberlain, Grossman, expression of his gratitude for O’Hara’s variety of personalities whose sexuality Flavin and Flavin in a manner that allows readers sympathetic reading that the two initi- was himself attempting to navigate. In each to view modernist sculpture as occupying ated a relationship that developed for three case Getsy locates an abstraction that he takes the same historical and conceptual space as years before they sat down for the public to be typical of personhood prior to assigna- minimalist and conceptual practice. interview. Within this context, the televised tion: for example, the couplings at the center Getsy is further unburdened by art exchange appears somewhat lighter, infused of Chamberlain’s sculptures, which evoke history’s normative periodizations in with an ease that allowed a jocular banter to bodies through “the temporal process of his his reprioritizing the critical texts of the unfold. Getsy acknowledges, however, that fitting together parts” (130 ), and Flavin’s period. Instead of setting Michael Fried’s Smith’s evocation of gender still managed to discrete, modular, and interchangeable units. “Art and Objecthood” (1967) at its helm, counter O’Hara’s regard for his sculptures as And in each case, that unassigned, but still- Getsy designates Lucy Lippard’s “Eccentric exemplary beings that transcend dimorphic figurative formation is corralled through a Abstraction” (1966) to be the key text gender assignations, demonstrating a need, variety of methods. In Chamberlain’s case, his characterizing abstract sculpture in the late on Smith’s part, “to rein in the variability nonreferential sculptures are read as an ico- 1960s. Doing so helps somewhat to unseat and multiplicity that Smith’s abstract bod- nography of mid-century masculinity, and in hard-core Minimalism (à la Robert Morris, ies supported” (75). In this detailed account Flavin’s, through the sculptor’s own process Tony Smith, and Donald Judd) as the so- of Smith and O’Hara’s relationship, Getsy of attribution and personal dedication, the called crux of the decade and shows instead manages to demonstrate both the semantic interchangeability of his tubes “through nam- Postminimalism—a messier and more plenitude of 1960s sculpture, achieved in its ing, become unique” and indexed to specific diverse field of practice—to be “the more signaling bodies without succumbing to gen- persons (257). According to Getsy, the restric- fundamental move away from traditional der categories, and the social and discursive tion of the “unforeclosed potential” (130 ) of sculpture” during the course of that decade restrictions that prohibited a full acknowl- 1960s abstraction occurs at the hands not just (16). This bodes well for future studies and edgement of that plenitude. The result is of artists and art historians, but also in the demonstrates the benefit of freeing ourselves a complication of the discourse of gender name of feminist and queer studies, which from art history’s most entrenched periodiz- and sexuality as it met up with the radical Getsy argues have aggressively excluded trans- ing views of twentieth-century art (which abstraction of the decade, demonstrating gender possibilities from their practical and come in the standard sizes of “,” in the process a historical confrontation theoretical purview. “Minimalism,” “Conceptualism,” and so on) between a practice and politics increasingly In bringing to light a grossly neglected in order not just to think diferently about able to accommodate a conception of gender approach to the topic and action of gender- 1960s and post-1960s art, but also to learn and sexuality as non-dimorphic and a dis- ing in art production and interpretation, something about how that art was itself pro- course either unwilling or unable to keep up Getsy’s book demonstrates that we are still voking diferent forms of thinking. It is just with such accommodations. processing the profound event that was such a diference that Getsy discerns in the Opening the book with this anecdotal 1960s abstraction, still reconciling ourselves sculptures he studies. exchange is indicative of Getsy’s approach to its categorical refusals, semiotic disrup- to his problem throughout. He is not sim- tions, and relational revisions. It is the Christa Noel Robbins is an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in the ply interested in finding representations “semantic openness” (80) itself of the art McIntire Department of Art at the University of gender and sexuality in sculpture, or in of this moment that provoked, as Judith of Virginia. She is currently completing a book investigating the relation of artists’ identifi- Butler put it, “a crisis in the norms that manuscript, “Unmaking the Self in Late-Modernist cations with the works they made. Instead, govern recognition”—whether recognition American Painting,” which is a historical study of authorship in postwar abstract painting. Getsy ofers a close reading of the recep- of gender, race, sexual orientation, or even tion of individual works and the multiple art-historical periods and styles (quoted The epigraph is from Judith Butler, Undoing Gender manners by which gender gets evoked and on 94). We continue to live in the wake of (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 3-4, invoked despite a radical move beyond such that crisis, still organizing our analyses and quoted in the book under review, 278. assignments. The book moves on from histories of 1960s abstraction according to 1. Frank O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” Art News 60 (December 1961): 33. Smith’s harnessing of his emphatically figural historical categories and methodologies that 2. Ibid., 70.

66 WINTER 2016