21. Beyond Binaries: Navigating Ambivalence in Abstraction

This session considers the stakes of ambivalence for global art practices from the 1960s to the present. Art-historical narratives of the 1960s and 1970s are often structured through binaries including abstraction and representation, the political and apolitical, tradition and innovation, the material and conceptual. Simultaneously, artists occupied more ambivalent positions, harnessing new materials and processes while persisting with older forms, techniques, and attachments. Such practices did not always conform to the radical experiments most readily associated with the period, yet they filtered the major movements, social upheavals, and geopolitical realignments within and beyond the Euro-American context.

Accordingly, this session interrogates a more complex and contradictory terrain for abstraction, both during the 1960s and 1970s and across their shifting afterlives. Scholars including Helen Molesworth, Christa Noel Robbins, and Saul Nelson have offered new models for understanding doubt and ambivalence as generative paradigms for abstraction. Building on these discussions, we frame ambivalence as a troubled state that disrupts neat categories such as medium specificity and anti-form, formalism and feminism. Our session aims to bring together scholars concerned with the politics – racial, gendered, national – of revisiting binaries, and the way ambivalence exists as a personal and/or political tool for artists and their slippery modes of practice. How and why has ambivalence been mobilised by artists and critics since the 1960s? In what ways can we rethink abstraction through a productive logic of doubt?

We welcome papers across all geographic contexts that address how artists navigate ambivalence through medium, form, categorisation or politics.

Themes: Abstraction, Modern and Contemporary Art, Ambivalence

Additional format comment: The session will consist of four 20-minute research papers each followed by five minutes of questions

Lead Convenor: Cora Chalaby, University College London, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Matthew Cheale, The Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.