Abstract This article argues that the sculptures and installations of Young Joon Kwak and Kiyan Williams offer trans and crip tactics of abstraction that materialize impure and expansive conceptions of embodiment through decomposing figurations. In the works of Kwak and Williams, bodies are partially present but refuse to cohere or compose into representative bodies (bodies that must either maintain normative composition or be subject to ongoing surveillance and violence). Deploying an embodied trans approach to formalism along with affective, relational understandings of trans and crip as material processes and forms of engagement with the world rather than merely appearances, the article opens the generative space of tension between abstraction and figuration as a site for navigating corporeal unmanageability. Kwak and Williams deploy material processes that interrupt perceptions of a form-as-body while foregrounding the often violent material histories and forces that shape bodies, including the potential violences of abstraction. At the same time, their work underscores the fugitive capacities of their materials, which circumvent control and subvert stable binary notions of what is natural or artificial, internal or external, past or present. In short, they show us how to work with, and from within, unmanageable material states.
Lex Morgan Lancaster (Fri,) studied this question.