Non-Aligned Abstractions

OPEN, SEMINAR—SPRING 2022

Sarah Lawrence College

This seminar examines abstract painting and sculpture in countries that include Iran, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Nigeria, Iraq, India, and Venezuela and that are generally categorized as being part of the Cold War’s “Third World” or non-aligned geopolitical bloc. Within new and expanded histories of global modernism, the proliferation of abstraction around the world during the 1950s and 1960s has been pegged to artists’ aspiration to follow Western modernist precedents and has overlooked the national and political entanglements that led postcolonial artists to accept, adapt, or reject the possibilities of abstract form. This seminar focuses on these entanglements and asks why, for example, leftist and Communist artists in postcolonial contexts often opted for abstraction instead of Socialist Realism; how artists used abstraction to support or resist postcolonial “nation-building” projects; how artists drew on indigenous sources, including Islamic calligraphy and ancient and folk art, to develop new approaches to abstraction; and how abstraction ultimately became co-opted by nationalist and Cold War political forces and turned into yet another tradition that artists needed to surpass. The course emphasizes close looking at and reading of essays, manifestoes, and theories of abstraction written within and beyond the Western canon. Students will develop a grasp of key terms—including concretism, the grid, medium-specificity, minimalism, flatness, and facture—and will consider debates on abstraction and realism emerging from “Second World” geopolitical contexts—such as in Cuba, China, and Russia—along with “non-aligned” artistic practices within the West, including by Black, immigrant, and minority artists. Covid-depending, the class will include trips to New York galleries, including MoMA and the Whitney Museum.

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