Abstract Bodies

Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.

If mathematics is the purest form of knowledge, the perfect foundation of all the hard sciences, and a uniquely precise discipline, then how can the human brain, an imperfect and imprecise organ, process mathematical ideas? Is mathematics made up of eternal, universal truths? Or, as some have claimed, could mathematics simply be a human invention, a kind of tool or metaphor? These questions are among the greatest enigmas of science and epistemology, discussed at length by mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers. But, curiously enough, neuroscientists have been absent in the debate, even though it is precisely the field of neuroscience—which studies the brain’s mechanisms for thinking and reasoning—that ought to be at the very center of these discussions. How our Emotions and Bodies are Vital for Abstract Thought explores the unique mechanisms of cooperation between the body, emotions, and the cortex, based on fundamental physical principles. It is these mechanisms that help us to overcome the limitations of our physiology and allow our imperfect, human brains to make transcendent mathematical discoveries. This book is written for anyone who is interested in the nature of abstract thought, including mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists.

Gita leads us from spiritual infancy to maturity, impulsive irrationality to intelligent rationalism, and agitation to tranquility. ‘G-OO-D’ contains two ‘O’s between ‘G’, the God, and ‘D’, the Devil. First ‘O’ near ‘G’ denotes Obeisance to God; and second ‘O’, near Devil, denotes Obfuscation. Eliminate Obfuscation from life to see God in everything ‘Good’. Ego and prejudice are the earplugs that stop us from listening to inner voice of God. Enjoy the 3 D film of life by wearing spectacle of Anaasakti, the indifference. Orthodoxy is the peel of a banana whose pulp is Dharm. We shouldn’t set foot on the peel and slip into gutter but relish soul-nourishing pulp. Our senses must follow our commands like the ‘Genie’ of Aladdin’s lamp. The best batsman defends his wicket by driving every ball to boundary but the less skilled runs to score; and the least skilled is bowled out. Dharm appears as the ferocious tiger Richard Parker in the film ‘Life of Pi’. Initially Pi struggles to save himself from tiger; then it suddenly dawns on him that the tiger is an indispensible anchor of his life in the boat. His simple attitudinal change saves the beast and himself.