Washington, D.C., February 3 - 06, 2016
Deadline: May 8, 2015

European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum
Geometric Abstraction, Op, and Kinetic Art in Transnational Perspective

Lily Woodruff, Michigan State University; and Daniel Quiles, School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. Email: woodru56@msu.edu and
dquiles@saic.edu

During the 1950s and 1960s Geometric Abstraction, Op art, and kinetic
art flourished as international styles that linked artists across the
globe. These practices were animated by socialist and phenomenological
discourses that appealed to visual perception and interactivity as ways
to democratize artistic culture. Eliminating elite cultural references,
these artists aimed to train or stimulate perception as a gateway
toward broader viewer participation. Recent scholarship has brought
attention to how these rationalized visual languages became prominent
outside of the North Atlantic due to the internationalization of a
network of artists and collectives. Has the appeal to the eye been
accompanied, however, by universalist assumptions that flatten local
particularities? We encourage papers that demonstrate how Geometric,
Op, and kinetic practices connect or break with the historical
avant-gardes, while situating their innovations within broader social
constellations such as urbanism, cybernetics, and labor.