Faculty Author Q&A: Irene V. Small on ‘The Organic Line’

Irene V. Small is a professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology. Her latest book, “The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism” was published in October 2024 by Princeton University Press.

How did you get the idea for this project?

The organic line is a line of space that appears between material entities (such as a painting and its frame or a door and its lintel). The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark observed this feature in 1954 and began to use it as a structuring element of her painterly and sculptural work. I had already spent several years researching the Brazilian avant-garde and legacies of abstraction, so I was familiar with Clark’s organic line. But in 2012, I was writing an essay about an entirely different topic, and suddenly this concept of an interval of space became an incredibly useful heuristic for me to describe other phenomena. I began to think, what else can we do with this idea? How can it help us think about artistic practices and fields of knowledge more broadly?

How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?

I began my research spending a lot of time with Clark’s organic line paintings, looking carefully at their materiality, idiosyncratic elements about orientation and hanging, qualities of paint, etc. At the same time, I was trying to understand the fundamental qualities of the organic line. For example, a line of space that we recognize as already existing in our environment is philosophically distinct from a line of space that we create by puncturing a canvas with a knife. One is made while the other is not made. The visual effect might be the same, but philosophically and theoretically, they couldn’t be more different. I was also delving into archives, trying to understand the conditions of possibility that led Clark to recognize this line of space when she did. Since lines of space exist (and have always existed) around us all the time, what matters about how and why Clark came to observe, and also name, the organic line in 1954? As I spent time with these questions, I became convinced that this simple line of space had the potential to defamiliarize the art historical field of modernism more broadly: the way we narrate fundamental ideas about discovery, innovation, and influence, but also formal descriptors such as surface, mark, limit, edge. For this reason, my book ended up moving across a much wider chronology than I had initially anticipated, looking back to inaugural moments of the avant-garde in the early 20th century, as well as forward to very recent contemporary art.

What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?

One of the most important things that the organic line teaches us is to attend to voids, absences, and weak links rather than strong ties. A line of space, after all, is a gap between things. So when we appeal to the organic line as a model for comprehending artistic practice or networks, we have to undo habits of thinking that encourage us to look only for the smoking gun of causality. We might instead pay attention to missed connections and lateral relations. Rather than hewing to a “father-begets-son” lineage of art history, the organic line invites us to imagine other ways of describing fields of practice, other modes of relationality. How might this open up new ways of thinking about the deeply entangled yet highly asymmetrical configurations of global art and global art history?

Why should people read this book?

The organic line gives us a new theoretical vocabulary for describing interstitial space. In this sense, it’s a portable concept. I hope that people will read this book who have a vested interest in modernism and its purchase for the present. But I also hope it acts as a user’s guide for thinking and making more broadly. Once you begin to read this book, you will start to recognize organic lines everywhere around you. It’s cognitive and epistemological, but also aesthetic and political. It’s certainly changed how I see the world.