My research and teaching center on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century European art and avant-garde culture, principally the Netherlands, France and Germany, as well as broader questions of modernism. Different forms of abstraction, both in their pioneering, early twentieth-century manifestations, such as Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo and De Stijl, and in contemporary art and theory, are particular interests. I am fascinated by how vanguard artists imagined they could migrate among or merge different artistic disciplines, making abstraction a cross-disciplinary phenomenon encompassing the visual arts, architecture, music, literature, philosophy, and utopian theories. How and why do artists transgress the disciplinary boundaries of their medium, engage new aesthetic considerations, or find inspiration in scientific discoveries and historical and socio-political events? Where should we look today for artists who push their work into new territory? Some critics have described “bioart” as the next logical step in contemporary art exploring new approaches and nontraditional materials (after video, performance, and the digital revolution), and I am especially interested in those artists who blur boundaries between art, science and ethics by working with genetic materials, creating new, transgenic life forms. These interests are also reflected in exhibitions I have curated and co-curated, “The Desire of the Museum” (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), a show of Vantongerloo’s De Stijl-period sculptures, paintings, architectural drawings and models, furniture, and design (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2002), and “International Abstraction: Making Painting Real” (Seattle Art Museum, 2003-04).

Expertise: Modern and Contemporary Art

Specialization:

Modern European Art
Historical avant-gardes and abstraction
Critical Theory and interdisciplinarity

Recent Courses:

Lecture: De Stijl; The Bauhaus; Pioneers of Abstract Painting; Post-Impressionism: Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin; Art and Science in the Modern Age; Pioneers of Modern and Abstract Sculpture
Seminars: Piet Mondrian; Abstraction: Modernism in Literature, Music and the Visual Arts; Deconstruction and the Arts; Theories of the Avant-Garde; Technologies of Vision: Seurat, Cézanne, Mondrian

Selected Publications:

 The Universe in the Living Room: Georges Vantongerloo in the Space of De Stijl — Het heelal in de huiskamer: Georges Vantongerloo en de Nieuwe Beelding van De Stijl (Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 2002)

 
“Piet Mondrian,” Encyclopedia of Europe 1914—2004, eds. J. Winter and J. Merriman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006)

“From Magneple to Video Watercolors: The Heart Beat in Balth’s Oeuvre”; the lead essay in Heart Beat: Carel Balth (Amsterdam: Albee Books, 2006)

“Piet Mondrian’s Turn from Cubism to Neoplasticism” and “Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck in De Stijl,” in Van Gogh to Mondrian: Modern Art from the Kröller-Müller Museum, exh. cat. Seattle Art Museum and High Museum of Art, Atlanta:  2004

“Art and Genomics: Phenotype and Genotype in Genetic Art,” co-authored with Joe Davis (MIT Department of Biology), Dana Boyd (Harvard Medical School) and Hunter O’Reilly (University of Wisconsin, Biosciences Department), in Nature Encyclopedia of the Human Genome, ed. D. Cooper (Hampshire: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2003)

“The SmArt Gene (or, Are We Not Alone in Our Esthetic Universe?),” in Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, CD-Rom exhibition catalog (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 2002)

“The Ridiculous, Sublime Art Of Slavoj Zizek,” introduction, Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000)

“Terrorism and History Painting: Gerhard Richter’s Blurry Images of Baader-Meinhof Murders,” The Journal of Art, Vol. 2, Nr. 4 (January 1990)