Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ferrari, Francesca

Titel

Animated Geometries: Abstraction and the Body in the Post-First World War Work of Alexandra Exter, Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Joaquín Torres-García

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the decade that followed the First World War, the human body became a battleground for debates about what human beings could be and do in the age of mechanization. Modern artists played a crucial role in these debates, often adopting abstract forms to celebrate the body’s machine-like qualities or negotiate the alienation brought about by technology. Still others, however, used abstraction, and especially geometry, to foreground the body’s vulnerabilities and relational possibilities. This dissertation explores four such artists – Alexandra Exter, Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Joaquín Torres-García – whose works and writings are exemplary of a broader trend in modern European art that I call “animated geometries.” This phrase describes an aesthetic grounded in geometry that enlists motion (actual or represented) and sensory stimulation (optic, haptic, aural, and kinesthetic) to champion a perpetual state of transformation and interconnection in an expanded phenomenal field. Working independently from each other and across distinct geopolitical contexts, the four artists mobilized this aesthetic in vibrant paintings, works on paper, textiles, and multi-media sculptures – often inviting activation by human and other-than-human agents – that stage the body’s exposure and receptivity to external forces. I propose that they enlisted geometry to highlight the body’s ability to interact with its surroundings and, at the same time, to abstract it into an obscure assemblage of conflicting signs that resist legibility and visual control. The opaque, porous figures that emerge in their post-First World War oeuvres, I suggest, carried important ethical implications at a time when geometric forms and structures proliferated in normative visualizations of the body. Fostering instead radical modes of fluid corporeality, plural identity, and non-hierarchical relationality, their animated geometries contrived a utopia in which nothing is fixed but everything is connected.