#  Book Presentation | The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism  

 



    ![cover of book](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-03/Small%20Front%20Cover.jpg?itok=hQj2-1hZ) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **March 24, 2025** 

 05:30PM - 07:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South, Room S216**  



 

 



 

Professors **Thomas Cummins** and **Jose Falconi** will engage in a dialogue with Irene Small on the occasion of the release of her latest book, The Organic Line:Toward a Topology of Modernism (Zone Books, 2024)

In this book, **Irene Small** elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.” For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge. A spatial cavity that binds discrepant entities together, the organic line transforms planes into flexible topologies, borders into membranes, and interstices into points of connection. As a paradigm, the organic line has profound historiographic implications as well, inviting us to set aside traditional notions of influence and origin in favor of what Small terms weak links and plagiotropic relations. These fragile, oblique, and transversal ties have their own efficacy, and Small’s innovative readings of canonical modernist works such as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, John Cage’s 4’33”, and Le Corbusier’s machine-à-habiter, as well as contemporary works by such artists as Adam Pendleton, Ricardo Basbaum, and Mika Rottenberg, reveal the organic line’s remarkable potential as an analytic instrument

Mobilizing a rich repertoire of archival sources and moving across multiple chronologies, geographies, and disciplines, this book invites us to envision modernism not as a stable construct defined by centers and peripheries, inclusions and exclusions, but as a topological field of interactive, destabilizing tensions. More than a history of a little-known artistic device, *The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism* is a user’s guide and manifesto for reimagining modern and contemporary art for the present.

Speaker **Irene V. Small**, Associate Professor of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University

Moderated by **Thomas Cummins**, Director of Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University and **José Luis Falconi**, Assistant Professor of Art History and Human Rights, University of Connecticut.

**About the Speaker**

**Irene V. Small** is Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where she teaches contemporary art and criticism within a global context. Her areas of interest include experimental practices of the 1950s, ‘60s and ’70s, legacies of abstraction, temporalities of art, problems of methodology and interpretation, relationality and the social implications of form. She is the author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016), the first English-language monograph on the acclaimed Brazilian artist, and has published on topics ranging from Neoconcretism and radical pedagogy to social sculpture, restitution debates, free speech and the afterlives of slavery. At Princeton, she is a member of the Executive Committee Program in Media and Modernity, as well as an associated faculty of the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is also a member of the advisory boards of the journals October and Texte zur Kunst. Her second book, The Organic Line: Towards a Topology of Modernism, was published by Zone Books in October 2024.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Art, Film, & Culture ](/programs-initiatives/art-film-culture)
- [ Brazil Studies ](/programs-initiatives/brazil-studies)
 
 

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