Books by David J. Getsy
Van Gogh's Bedrooms
by Gloria Groom, Louis van Tilborgh, David J. Getsy, Inge Fiedler
A fascinating look at the genesis and meaning of Van Gogh’s famed paintings of his bedroom
Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom, a painting of his room in Arles, is arguably the most famous depiction of a bedroom in the history of art. The artist made three versions of the work, now in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d’Orsay. This book is the first in-depth study of their making and their meaning to the artist.
In Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, an international team of art historians, scientists, and conservators investigates the psychological and emotional significance of the bedroom in Van Gogh’s oeuvre, surveying dwellings as a motif that appears throughout his work. Essays address the context in which the bedroom was first conceived, the uniqueness of the subject, and the similarities and differences among the three works both on and below the painted surface. The publication reproduces more than 50 paintings, drawings, and illustrated letters by the artist, along with other objects that evoke his peripatetic life and relentless quest for “home.”
Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago
Exhibition Schedule:
Art Institute of Chicago
(02/14/16–05/10/16)
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Queer (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)
Key artists' writings that have influenced and catalyzed contemporary queer artistic practice.
Historically, “queer” was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, “queer” was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities.
Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists' queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular “queer art.” Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists' writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.
Artists and writers include
Nayland Blake, Gregg Bordowitz, Leigh Bowery, AA Bronson, A. K. Burns, Giuseppe Campuzano, Tee Corinne, Barbara DeGenevieve, Dyke Action Machine!, Elmgreen & Dragset, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Simon Fujiwara, Malik Gaines, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gran Fury, Sunil Gupta, Hahn Thi Pham, Harmony Hammond, Sharon Hayes, Hudson, Roberto Jacoby, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Mahmoud Khaled, Zoe Leonard, Lesbian Avengers, Catherine Lord, Ma Liuming, LTTR, Allyson Mitchell, Zanele Muholi, Carlos Motta, Ocaña, Hélio Oiticica, Catherine Opie, Ridykeulous (Nicole Eisenman & A.L. Steiner), Marlon Riggs, Emily Roysdon, Prem Sahib, Assoto Saint, Tejal Shah, Amy Sillman, Jack Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Toxic Titties, Danh Vo, David Wojnarowicz, Wu Tsang, Yan Xing, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Akram Zaatari, Sergio Zevallos
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Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
An innovative analysis of 1960s abstract sculpture that draws on transgender studies and queer theory
Now back in print, Abstract Bodies was the first book to bridge the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies with the discipline of art history. Original and theoretically astute, it recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form.
This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender studies and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.
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