Irene V. Small

DP

You wrote your undergraduate thesis on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. What drew you to Morrison’s work at the time?

IS

My obsession with Toni Morrison has its origins in a slightly earlier moment. As a senior in high school, I read Beloved seven times. [Laughs.] I was totally enraptured with Morrison. I mean, I had always loved literature, and specifically modernist poetry. I adored e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, Countee Cullen...But, Beloved was different: it was so clearly an engagement with those modernist legacies, but it also worked from specific historical incidents and opened up passages of radical experimentation with language. It made me rethink everything.

DP

What was your course of study at Brown?

IS

After I got to Brown, I chose to study English and Women’s Studies. I was particularly struck by the coincidence of post-structuralism and postcolonial studies (which also surfaced as what we might call multiculturalism or identity politics today) in the mid ’90s. I wanted to think about post-structuralism and the politics of feminism and race against one another.

I was lucky because Brown had a Modern Culture and Media program with an art semiotics track, and there were amazing classes around these clusters of thinking. As an undergraduate, I was trying to wrestle with these issues, armed with a public school education that wasn’t particularly sophisticated in any way. How could postmodernism, as a so-called flattening or dissolution of meaning, be reconciled with a work like Beloved, which exhibits something like an excess of meaning, in which the sedimentations of history all but dissolve the syntax and structure of language?

As a feminist and biracial woman, I was also very invested in thinking about the politics of identity. How could I comprehend the “death of the author” alongside decolonial movements that were about literally bringing other subjects into being? How do you think Roland Barthes and Frantz Fanon at the same time? I was interested in pressing on that specific problematic. Postmodernism had also arrived as an incredibly sexy way to disrupt all kinds of power structures and patterns of reading associated with concepts like originality. It had plenty of blind spots of its own. But I have an almost visceral memory of my semiotics professor unpacking Fredric Jameson’s reading of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes and the image of those shoes on the screen. I was hooked. If not yet on art, certainly on theory and the politics of interpretation.

I should also mention that I went to Brown because I had practiced photography in high school, and I thought I might study photography at RISD. That ultimately didn’t come to pass, and my previous photography work also didn’t translate into an interest in academic art history. I took one class on American art history taught by a professor who had swallowed Greenbergian modernism whole. It had no purchase for me. I was especially confused by how kids with private collections were spouting off Marxist theory as if there was no contradiction. Luckily, there were lots of other places on campus to think about aesthetics and ultimately, I returned to Beloved for my senior thesis, now triangulated with Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston and the work of the Vietnamese theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha.

It was all kind of happenstance, though. I didn’t really have any faculty mentorship when I was at Brown. I didn’t even realize that kind of relationship was possible. Still, I had an amazing experience and there were plenty of exciting moments. I was lucky to cross paths in classes and other spaces with an extraordinary number of fellow students who continued in art afterward: Seth Price, Kerry Tribe, and Lisa Oppenheim were in my class on art and public space. I took a poetry class with Chitra Ganesh, and I remember being blown away by her work. We published photographs by Taryn Simon in a feminist art-literary zine called The Spread I co-edited with my friend Xander Marro. I was also hugely influenced by Christopher Myers, who did the Whitney ISP after graduating from Brown. At the time, he was making these fascinating objects that reimagined the pleasure, pain, and agency of fraught historical phenomena like the circus freak show. In retrospect, I can make out that there was something like a crystallization of intellectual or aesthetic currents, but that was not something I could necessarily discern at the time.

DP

I’m curious as to what the Women’s Studies program was like at Brown. In The Organic Line, you write that feminism was somewhat of a phobic object for Lygia Clark: “Clark was certainly not a feminist in any contemporaneous sense of the word. Her identification with the scorpion as a figure of solitude reflects a constitutive detachment, if not antipathy, to collective affiliation or action...The self that Clark pursued in her later therapeutic practice was ‘processual, flexible, and impersonal.’” In turn, you appeal to a “conceptually queered” version of feminism—one indebted to the likes Eve Sedgewick, Paul B. Preciado, and Elizabeth Freeman and therefore inimical to the stable subjectivity assumed by identitarian politics—as a vein that may have been generative for Clark. What kind of feminism did you encounter? Was queerness as such on the table?

IS

I don’t remember there being a specific articulation around what we now would call Queer studies outside of the feminist inquiry. Officially, there was “Women’s Studies,” a label which, from the present, sounds massively limited. That said, I saw feminist studies as incredibly dynamic, almost the opposite of what most people associate with that field now: doctrinaire, white liberal feminism. Women’s Studies at Brown taught me the richness of articulation and critique, how to hold theorists as disparate as bell hooks and Luce Irigaray together, for instance, and to think about where they aligned and where they didn’t.

The program still informs how I understand feminism’s relevance in the present, that is: not as a limit, but an expansiveness that moves in many different, and often conflicting, directions at once. Feminism certainly doesn’t carry the same mantle of experimentation now as it did back then. I think Queer studies and Black studies are far more dynamic fields now. But, at the time, feminism gave me the tools to articulate power and positionality while resisting any formulaic application of identity politics.

Clark is an interesting case study because she would absolutely resist any circumscription of her practice within the category of “woman,” yet she drew from her experiences as a woman in highly conceptual and corporeal ways. The moment you just mentioned, where I cite Clark’s description of herself as a scorpion, involves a complete self-othering at the moment of giving birth. That feels really resonant insofar as she is thinking with a series of metaphors and critical capacities related to highly specific experiences such as childbirth and, in the same breath, moving against the fixity, and even the category, of the human. I think Clark’s articulation disrupts the affirmation of the human; she prompts us to question what a human is at all.

DP

Since we’re talking about The Organic Line, I should mention that I loved it. It was truly inspiring to read. Congratulations. [Laughs.]

IS

I think you might be the first person who’s read it all the way through (and didn’t have to!). [Laughs.]

DP

It wasn’t easy. [Laughs.] But, before we go further, I want to hear about what you were up to after graduating Brown and before enrolling at Yale. I know you spent some time living and working in New York. What did you get up to?

IS

That part is important. Until about four days before graduation, I actually had no idea where to go or what to do other than that I wanted to be in New York City. But, a fourth space in a loft that friends of mine had rented in Williamsburg opened up. Two of us had jobs and two of us were unemployed. The two of us without jobs would sit around, circling classified ads, faxing resumes, and tooling around with the drywall since the loft didn’t have any rooms. Eventually, I landed a job working for a nonprofit that advocated for diversity and environmental practices in the design and arts professions. I also did some writing and editing for a very small publication put out by the Asian American Arts Alliance on the side. It was a great gig for a couple of years, but I was hungry for a different kind of environment—a different approach to conceptual and aesthetic issues.

Around this time, I happened to go and see a talk by Okwui Enwezor about the archive, I think at Artist’s Space, in 1999. I don’t remember precisely the research he was presenting, but I remember that he articulated problems concerning the archive that I hadn’t been able to crystallize while writing my senior thesis. I thought, “This was what I had been looking for.”

This is also why I embrace being irresponsible in New York! I love to go dancing. In those years, I went out dancing all the time, usually in these small clubs on the Lower East Side. I happened to mention to a friend I knew from that scene that I had attended this incredible lecture. It turned out he knew Okwui from his bohemian days, and he was like, “Oh, he lives on your street in Brooklyn.” I wrote a letter to Okwui, outlining all the reasons that I wanted to work for him, knocked on his door, and gave it to him with a bunch of my writing samples and a resume.

He called me the next week and said something to the effect of, “I really liked your letter. I don’t have money to hire you right now, but you could come and help me out one or two days a week.” So that’s what I did, waitressing on the side to support myself. It wasn’t long before we were able to write me into grants. It quickly became a full-time job. It’s through Okwui that I came to understand contemporary art. But the politics and aesthetics of that world were very distant from art history as a discipline, and that distinction is also important.

DP

What did he have you doing?

IS

This was 1999, so Okwui had just been appointed to Documenta 11. In the beginning, I was mostly doing research for The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, which was his pivotal show on African modernism. I was primarily researching modern architecture in Africa, about which there was relatively little existing scholarship. At the time, people would just sort of throw up their hands and say, “Well, there’s nothing there. The archives are not there.” Part of Okwui’s brilliance was his insistence that the archives were there and that sometimes you need to change your idea about what an archive is to find the content you’re looking for.

When I was doing research in Lagos for The Short Century and for the Century City exhibition at the Tate, there was nothing like the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to draw from. I was visiting newspaper darkrooms, or looking at albums of family photographs in private homes. Where there were archives in the conventional sense, they were often preserved quite precariously. Sometimes, one had to conjure an archive into being by differently conceptualizing a set of historical materials so that they gained new kinds of traction.

Okwui was very certain about the intellectual worth of pursuing these questions around the instability of institutions, historical knowledge, and the way meaning can be legitimated, recovered, but also erased. The experience of thinking critically about the archive is what propelled me to study art history. But, because the curatorial world of contemporary art is so different from the academic world of art history, it was a mismatch for quite a while.

DP

Say more about that.

IS

There was a juncture where Okwui wanted me to move to Kassel to continue to work on Documenta, but I increasingly felt like I didn’t want to be in the belly of the beast of the contemporary art world. The intellectual stakes were always there for me, and they were likewise always front-and-center in terms of the urgency of Okwui’s projects. But I didn’t have investments in a lot of other things entailed in the contemporary art world and the Documenta bubble. It’s a world of extreme pressure and stress. And some of the reasons people might want to be there nonetheless—glamour and prestige, for instance—weren’t appealing to me. I wanted to spend more time reading, so I ultimately decided to apply to graduate school.

It really was tough in the beginning because I had no “proper” art historical experience. I only had one undergraduate class under my belt, maybe two. I didn’t know who Dürer was when I got to grad school, and I remember just about everyone—faculty and fellow graduate students alike—being horrified. [Laughs.] Luckily I had some partners in crime who were key interlocutors throughout my studies, even though they ultimately went different ways in terms of academia. Art history moves at a much slower pace than the world of contemporary art, so that was a difficult transition for me as well.

When I started graduate school in 2001, there was still an inherited division between formalism and social art history. Moreover, the things that I was interested in—artistic practice outside of Western Europe and the United States, diasporic artists, artists of color—all seemed to fall into a category maligned by adherents of formalist art history. The derision was often mutual. Thankfully, I don’t think that division is operative any longer. But, it did mean that I took a long detour to arrive at a kind of formalism I could subscribe to.

I should mention that Okwui was really, really rigorous about thinking about the specificity of works of art. I would never call him a formalist per se. He certainly didn’t wield either formalism (or anti-formalism) as a bludgeon. If you’ve read The Organic Line or Folding the Frame, my first book, I hope it’s clear that I would proudly call myself a formalist, but one who arrives at form from the side of the social.

DP

Right. While reading The Organic Line, I was so impressed by your ability to walk the reader through apparently impregnable compositions with such lucidity. I’m thinking of that passage in Chapter 1 when you narrativize Clark’s Descoberta da linha orgânica (Discovery of the Organic Line) [1954]. What sparked your interest in writing about form?

IS

As I mentioned, I once thought that I would be a photographer. But, I’m firmly a believer that some people need to be artists and some people simply don’t. That doesn’t mean all artists are good artists. But there’s an urgency that makes them make art. I don’t need to be an artist; that’s something I realized pretty soon. By contrast, I loved the practice of interpretation and analysis. Deconstruction was still big when I entered college, and the slides and reversals of meaning–or non-meaning–were incredibly persuasive for me.

At that point, I was mostly interested in literature and theory. Now, I find the work of interpretation in art history even more compelling. Art history is probably a more conservative discipline than literary studies, but there’s a determining difference: art history’s objects of analysis aren’t words. In that sense, you’re using words to try and think about something that is always in excess of your means of communication. Of course, any work of poetry contains an aesthetic excess, too. But I enjoy the difference between art and language. I love seeing a work of art transform again and again through analysis and shifts in perspective. I think it’s truly exhilarating.

DP

You mentioned that Okwui changed your understanding of the “contemporary.” Throughout The Organic Line, you use that term in very specific senses. What does that word mean to you?

IS

That’s an interesting question. I worked for a number of exhibitions for Okwui, but the two biggest ones were The Short Century and Documenta 11, in 2002. Documenta 11, of course, had a much bigger profile. That’s where Okwui made his curatorial intervention of geographically-dispersed platforms. But, for me, the most significant project was always The Short Century. At that time, around 2000, there was real excitement about globalization, or globality, and contemporary art. The discourse was robust and people were open and enthusiastic about work from all over the world. But as soon as you stepped away from the contemporary, you would run into the old hierarchies about what counts as innovation, what’s significant and worthy of study, and so on.

For instance, there was a boom of contemporary African artists in the market, but far fewer people were thinking about the connection to African modernism. There were crucial exceptions: Chika Okeke-Agulu, who collaborated with Okwui on The Short Century while he was working on his Ph.D. and Salah Hassan, for example, who was by that time already teaching at Cornell. As I understand it, Okwui, Chika, and Salah founded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Artl in part for that reason: to provide the discursive and scholarly foundation to what, in some quarters, was circulating without any historical or critical tethering.

DP

How did that work inform your scholarship?

IS

Thinking in a more comprehensive and critical way about modernism is actually what led me to work on the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica for my own dissertation. I had read some writings by Oiticica about the problem of avant-garde art in a so-called “underdeveloped” context, and I found this really stimulating as a way of tracing a pre-history to concerns around globality, translation, and site-specificity that animated the contemporary art world. It was when I actually encountered the work in person, however, that I simply fell in love with it. In short, I became a “specialist” in Brazilian art by default, pursuing a broader theoretical question around difference in modernism.

Although my position at Princeton is in contemporary art, I think that modernism is at the core of my thinking. I’m trying to understand how modernism constellates the contemporary and vice versa. There are certain strands of contemporary art history that are primarily interested in market forces and curatorial turns. I’m not particularly compelled by that approach, just as I’m not particularly compelled by the discourse of multiple modernisms. I’m more interested in modernism itself as an overarching problematic with implications for the contemporary. How were practices that seemed to lie beyond modernism’s purview actually constitutive of it as a phenomenon? How can a contemporary perspective illuminate that to which modernism–or a certain version of modernism–has been blind?

To give a more concrete example, since 2015, we’ve known about an inscription on Malevich’s Black Square that refers to a 19th-century racist joke circulated by Alphonse Allais as a caption to a black monochrome. Before 2015, Malevich scholars weren’t necessarily thinking about race, and those who knew about Allais’s monochrome thought the comparison pseudomorphic and specious at best. Moreover, someone like Lygia Clark, who appears to cite Malevich’s Black Square in her own work Discovery of the Organic Line, didn’t know about the inscription either. But, because I know about it, I felt compelled to think through its implications. After all, even if Malevich himself did not write the inscription, it shows that b(B)lackness was being thought in these dual registers, even at his time. So the modernist history of the monochrome, in this case, is entirely reframed by the contemporary. But what this contemporary perspective illuminates had been there all the while.

That’s why I don’t see this point of view as presentist. I see it as an honest acknowledgment of how certain epistemological frameworks bring other historical phenomena into legibility. I think that’s another thing I’ve learned from feminism. What is the positionality from which you speak and from which you see? Although The Organic Line or Folding the Frame are not feminist books per se, I think a certain kind of feminist analytic informs how I think and, therefore, how they are written.

DP

I’m interested in your writing process. Readers will know that The Organic Line puts seemingly distinct histories and works in conversation (e.g., in Chapter One, works by Kazimir Malevich, Lygia Clark, and Adam Pendleton are all considered). The word you use to describe The Organic Line is “paramonographic.” I might call your writing associative. How did those connections form?

IS

Well, I noted before that the archive brought me to art history, and I continue to think that archival research is vital, particularly within the context of “globalizing” art history. Of course, purely theoretical analyses have enormous value as well. But, if you work in a marginalized context of any kind, outside Europe and the United States, for instance, you often risk applying external theoretical paradigms upon material rather than elaborating paradigms that arise from the material itself. Dipesh Chakrabarty talks about this in “Provincializing Europe.” What does it mean for certain theories or methodologies to be deemed “universal” and others to remain merely “contextual”?

In my first book, which began as my dissertation, for example, there was a desire from certain readers for me to recover Oiticica as a “gay” artist. In my archival research, however, it became very clear that that specific marker of identity wasn’t historically operative in the Brazilian context in the same ways it carried meaning in contemporary US academic discourse. In fact, Oiticica’s transgressive sexuality operated across a much wider and more interesting spectrum than the binary opposition of gay and straight could possibly signify. If I had applied a pre-given matrix of “race, class, gender” to his work, I would have missed so much, in addition to reinscribing assumptions about what a term like gender even means. The unexpected elements that I found through my archival research into Oiticica’s scientific training—about butterfly genitalia and behavioral mating that implicate his use of the term genero (gender or genre), for instance—provided new insight into the extraordinary and very specific ways he disrupted codifications of sexuality.

The material I found regarding Oiticica’s scientific training was never considered part of his artistic archive, however. But, it was through that material that I began to understand the conceptual import of taxonomy in his aesthetic practice. Thinking about the taxes on imported paints was another instance in which exiting the art historical archive was necessary in order to understand the motivation behind certain aesthetic decisions, in that case, the politics of raw matter in Oiticica’s chromatic sculptures.

When I’m researching historical material that lies beyond what we would consider conventional artistic or art historical archives, I don’t necessarily know which elements will become key within my subsequent writing. But by researching widely and deeply, by pulling on different archival strands, I often come to certain problematics that are differently visible, or differently enacted, by works of art and what I might call more symptomatic historical traces, such as tax codes or magazine advertisements. These kinds of traces allow us to visualize history in a certain way. For me, though, looking closely at works of art is always front and center.

With The Organic Line, I felt that I needed to understand the essential qualities of the organic line–and particularly how it appeared to Clark–before I could even begin thinking beyond the works and formal devices in question. Then, the research was almost driven by necessity. She had this painting you mentioned, Discovery of the Organic Line, which hadn’t been published or exhibited much because it doesn’t show the organic line as clearly as her Breaking the Frame series does. I didn’t really understand the painting myself. But I spent a long time–several hours–inspecting it up close, trying to figure out how it worked as a painting about painting, and a painting about painting and space. I actually started researching that work before the discovery of the inscription on Malevich’s Black Square in 2015. I didn’t really know what to think about either of them for a while.

Slowly, I started to feel as if I had to put these seemingly disparate elements into dialogue. I just started to push on both historical and theoretical elements, starting with some basic questions, like, what were the cultures of Blackness in Russia in Malevich’s time? What would it mean for Clark to make a citational painting that could also theorize its own materiality? Once I started looking, a million things bubbled to the surface: how certain members of the Russian avant-garde were thinking about African art, racializing distinctions in the terminology of the “primitive,” political alliances (and misalignments) between Soviets with African and African diasporic activists, popular cultures of sport that stretched from the United States all the way to Moscow, and so on.

It was the same case with the sections on John Cage in Chapter Two. I immediately realized that the organic line complicated my previous understanding of Cage’s 4’33.” I had also been thinking about Julius Eastman’s work in terms of lateral, rather than vertical relations of influence, as well as the question of what he called “organic music.” As I continued to research, I realized that there was this whole connection to Cage’s 4’33” No. 2: 0’0,” which Eastman realized in 1975 (much to Cage’s dismay), and what I had come to call “the noise of notation,” which emerges from within the “sonic” organic lines of 4’33”.

Of course, there are also paths that were not taken, red herrings, and dead ends. Research is always full of failures of one kind or another. My hope is that the book traces the paths that were successful. But failures, when approached from a different perspective, are often beginnings of their own. In fact, thinking seriously about phenomena like missed connections and weak links–which might be conceived as failures through a traditional art historical frame–was, of course, fundamental to the book.

DP

You have since alluded to this, but when did your research on the organic line begin?

IS

It started with an essay I wrote about medium specificity—or what I ended up calling medium aspecificity—published in 2012 in an anthology, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson. In tackling the problem of medium, the organic line helped me find a different way to write about demarcation. I was essentially using the organic line as a heuristic, in other words: something to help me think, to explain another problem better.

The organic line proved so generative that I started to wonder, “Well, what else can I do with it?” As I was finishing up the first book and doing other projects, I started to pursue the possibility of something around the organic line. It was probably around 2015 that I started thinking about it more seriously. I was, of course, familiar with the organic line because it features centrally in narratives of Brazilian Neoconcretism, which was the movement from which Hélio Oiticica emerged. I knew it was an exciting concept, but I hadn’t looked very intensely at Clark’s works that feature the organic line themselves.

Spending those hours with Discovery of the Organic Line and trying to decipher the various configurations of holes and arrow marks on the painting’s verso, for example,  indicated that it had been hung in all sorts of ways. That really changed how I thought about the problem of orientation and, in turn, Clark’s citation of Malevich’s Black Square. There are also all these small details one only recognizes up close–how a color turns the corner of a painting, for instance–which demonstrate exactly how the organic line is topological. The organic line is not simply a bridge between two flat planes; it’s an operation that flushes all material elements into a new kind of dimensionality or corporeality.

DP

For me, that conceit came into focus as I was reading the third chapter. I understand, at least experientially, how doors and walls function. That knowledge bridged a gap in my expertise that allowed me to grasp your argument with particular clarity. Your ability to metaphorize topology to resolve or complicate several problems and assumptions underwriting modernist art history was striking. What inspired you to think critically about topology?

IS

Topology comes directly from the historical material at hand. Brazilian artists of this period were thinking about topology—and the Möbius strip in particular—due to their reception of Max Bill’s sculpture Tripartite Unity, among other things. But more narrowly, the organic line is topological insofar as the gap between the canvas and frame is continuous with the spatial volume that extends in the room around us. It’s not something that exists simply between the painting and the frame. This is so powerful because as soon as you enter the room, you’re in that spatial envelope, too.

Topology was also helpful for me in thinking about modernism as a field. There has been so much emphasis on critiquing the canon, enlarging it, decentering it, horizontalizing art history, dispensing with the canon altogether, etc. The problem I see with many of these models is that they correlate to a flat space, and their methods of addressing the historiographic asymmetry accorded to the so-called center doesn’t necessarily account for the historical power that, say, the pre-war European avant-garde actually had for artists who were working elsewhere. If you’ve done any serious work on artists like Oiticica or Clark, you’ll know that eliminating the “center” doesn’t really make historical sense. They were obsessed with Mondrian! I’m really resistant to an art history that would simply forget or mute those references. At the same time, I’m resistant to keeping those references stable. Mondrian looks different after Clark. For me, topology allows me to think of the field of modernism itself as dynamic and malleable—not only as it unfolded in the 20th century but as it continues to be formed by us in the present.

When I got out of grad school and began applying for jobs, I had to justify my work in various ways. I was always opposed to the idea that my work was merely supplementary to the canon—that there’s Modernism proper and then Latin American modernism, where the latter is just some diluted version of the former. Moreover, there’s a divide in expectations about skill sets. I know about Duchamp, but do you have to know about Oiticica? At the same time, I refuse the idea that we’ll democratize or globalize art history through pure addition. No department is going to expand infinitely to all parts of the world. I mean, the idea of coverage itself has a kind of colonial logic.

DP

Was that historiographic operation in effect when you were a student?

IS

Upon entering the job market, I found that because I worked on a Brazilian artist, there was an expectation from some that I was a Latin Americanist in terms of my field. But I didn’t have the background of a traditional Latin American art historian, which would have meant training from ancient America through the colonial era to the present. I think that kind of training and trajectory is amazing. But they weren’t my points of reference, nor were they those of the Brazilian artists whom I researched, who, of course, spoke Portuguese, not Spanish, and didn’t trace an art historical lineage to ancient pre-contact civilizations like the Maya. There’s a kind of exceptionality to Brazil, real or imagined. When the artists I was working on invoked indigeneity, it was in relation to the operation of antropofagia, the eating of the other, which already presupposed an aggressive and creative incorporation of European influence. So in some ways, my project was to argue for the necessity of someone like Oiticica to both the historiographic fields of Latin American and Modernist art history and that such avant-garde work troubled the distinctions between those very designations. I’ve been really lucky that both of the jobs I’ve held were expansively conceived, so I’ve been able to move around and across these borders, even though I’m aware that they still structure the discipline in various ways.

DP

You write in The Organic Line that contemporary criticism needs to look to artistic practice to “activate” itself. What kind of relationship do you have with working artists? How do you hope to see practice and criticism working together? 

IS

I think that artists are selfish with regard to art history in the best possible way. They’ll look to anything interesting and put it to use in their practice. They’re motivated by desire and experimentation, not the legitimation of historiography. They’re extremely open-minded, much more so than art historians, I’d say, and I find that refreshing.

When I talk with artists about my research, I never feel I have to justify my topic, or why thinking across disparate practices would be generative. Mika Rottenberg’s work is a case in point. Her videos and installations foreground the wall in a way that is both totally magnetic and totally wacky; her work was so helpful for me in thinking about the disruptive character of the organic line when it enters architectural space and starts to interact with actual bodies, and moreover, begins to act like a body itself. If I had remained purely within a stylistic mode of art historical analysis that attended to mid-century modernism, for example, there would be no way of linking Clark’s maquettes to Mika’s work, as I do in my third chapter. But Mika’s work is fabulous for thinking about architectural and corporeal interfaces and how desires or affects are activated across spatial networks. I think they enact an architectural errancy that Clark’s maquettes couldn’t have articulated with the discourse she had available to her in the mid-1950s, but which her maquettes strangely prefigure at a structural level. Contemporary art, in that sense, helps me think.

In the same vein, I love the genre of the crit, which approaches the work of art at a moment when it hasn’t settled into an accepted meaning. Sometimes art history treats the work of art as if it’s a code to be cracked. For me, that’s the least interesting thing to do. I’m far more compelled by the moments when the work of art is unstable.

DP

For Clark—and this is something we’ve already begun to touch on—metaphors of birthing were central. Throughout The Organic Line—which is, in part, dedicated to your daughter—you appeal to notions of reparative criticism, which, to me, seems premised on the particular kind of formalism Sedgwick describes in “Queer and Now.” Can we talk about identification?

IS

That’s a really interesting question. Mary Kelly was one of my early heroes, and I always considered her Post Partum Document the epitome of combining the intellectual and experiential, political commitments of feminist post-structuralism. This was a work, of course, that she began when her child was an infant.

I started at Princeton when my daughter was two months old, but there was no feminist clarity, no synergy between my maternal and intellectual worlds. I was just a mess. And I was very disappointed that I wasn’t able to join those investments in thinking critically about theory and the radical project of sustaining the life of another.

With my second book, I felt like I had the mental space to think creatively about the postpartum period. But it was also necessary to think about, because it features so centrally in Lygia Clark’s biography; she frequently recounted that she began making art after suffering postpartum psychosis after the birth of her third child. I mean, I had nothing close to that kind of breach, but bringing another life into being shakes you to the core. It’s radical. I remember being shocked that the extremity of that experience has become so banalized and normative (to say nothing of commercialized) in our culture. It’s not “normal,” it’s epic. Clark always said that new phases of her work always followed from crisis. I don’t want to romanticize crisis, but I found it enormously generative that she could recognize those thresholds and live within them.

Your question also brings to mind one of my favorite passages in the book. It’s Clark describing the process of birth: not in a biographical way, and neither from the perspective of the mother nor the infant, but as a kind of impossible, corporealized duration. It lasts so long! Her writerly voice is incredible. She also uses a wonderfully specific and unusual vocabulary: duodenum, gills, bellows, oily valves…The process of translating the passage for me was also one of duration, grasping, and emergence. I just started to feel like, well, this is it—this is what real liminality is: we don’t even know what, or when, is “human”; it’s not about meaning or arrival, it’s about process and plasticity.

I’m not identifying with her as a woman, so much as recognizing what she was able to recognize, which is the true insanity of separation and transformation at a corporeal level. That differentiation is pure liminality–of being human, of everything–but it’s a thick liminality. The organic line also lives in that space–it is that space.

So often we use the metaphor of the work of art as something birthed by the artist, as if a new thing that has come into the world. That is a kind of before-and-after schema. What I see in Clark, by contrast, is all about passage: the unknowability of liminality.

DP

This past weekend, I saw Anora, the new Sean Baker movie. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a sex worker from Brighton Beach, New York. I think Anora—as well as Tangerine and The Florida Project, the two other Baker films I’ve seen—is lucid in so far as it, to borrow your words, dilates a seam. I didn’t expect this, but pressed me to think about your book, to appeal to the organic line as an analytic with which to think about the minoritized sexual subjectivity it documents. I mention this instance because it got me to wonder: How do you want The Organic Line to function?

IS

I would love the book to be of use in the sense of having portability to other artistic practices, ways of thinking, or historical research. So I’m really moved that the organic line triggered something for you in terms of the films. I see the organic line as a device, so although I’m elaborating it apropos of Lygia Clark’s work, we can also see it operating across a whole range of practices and problems. That’s why the coda ends with something like an invitation, not to make a mark or distinction, but instead to find a distinction and dilate it so that we can begin to understand its relationality.

There’s so much in art history that’s about capture in a proprietary sense, marking territory as our own or signaling that a given artist has done so with regard to their practice. But if we foreground observation and description rather than marking and claiming, I think we arrive at a potentially more generative place. Maybe that’s another way of getting around the so-called crisis in criticism. Instead of debating whether criticism is dead, how about we think about the capacities of description? If, as the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela argue, cognition is a constructive process and descriptions bring worlds into being, how can we mobilize it to change how we understand even our own agency? It’s the constructive element here that I find galvanizing. It’s not just about tearing things down; it’s also about building, about comprehending things differently so we can reimagine them.

DP

That’s a fascinating observation that’s pertinent. It feels like an article advancing the thesis that contemporary art criticism is published almost daily. “We’re at this juncture and we can’t move forward because criticism is dead.” Sure…

IS

Well, as is pretty obvious from this conversation, I never signed on to the fiction of the “disinterested critic.” Many of the things I’m interested in were never in the room to be judged in the first place. It’s the same for some of the stuff you work on too. By contrast, I think description can be a truly affirmative act. I don’t mean that in terms of a politics of representation. No, to describe and redescribe the capacities of an object or utterance (or the absence of one) is to bring a whole set of possibilities into view. I feel like that kind of work comes before criticism. But the stakes are sometimes higher, because it’s about articulation as a form of comprehension, of producing a legibility that wasn’t possible before. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for criticism. We always need it. But sometimes, the machinations of power are so obvious or overdetermined that our time is better spent looking askew.