Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art

"Dragging Away argues that abstraction is a tactic of queering in contemporary art that contributes to critical politics of gender, sexuality, and race, while refusing oppressive representational logics. Focusing on the formal and material innovations ofcurrent queer and feminist artists, Lex Morgan Lancaster attends to their drag on certain loaded modernist strategies-the hard edge, the grid, color, and the readymade-in order to draw out their social and political capacities and relevance for the present. The book offers comparative analysis between modernist and mid-century abstract artworks and their contemporary interlocutors, demonstrating how abstraction does queer work through visual and material processes of dragging that expose the violence of abstraction while at the same time exploding processes of categorization and signification. Dragging Away makes a methodological intervention in the field of art history by combining a politically-driven formalist and materialist analysis with queer, feminist, and critical race theories in order to take these artists' formal and material experimentations seriously as social and political praxis"--
Lex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends.