This talk tracks the effects of the performative claim of filiation by queer artists, examining how such claims on major (straight) modernist artists prompt debates about artistic authority, autonomy, lineage, and what is proper to art. In 1989, the artist Scott Burton (1939–1989) offered a rogue reading of Constantin Brâncuși in the hallowed space of the Museum of Modern Art, and from 2018 to 2020 Adam Milner (b. 1988) undertook a series of conceptual performances at the single-artist museum devoted to the Abstract Expressionist artist Clyfford Still. These museum interventions demonstrated care for the concerns of their modernist forebears while also posing questions about normative values, artistic autonomy, intergenerational influence, and the queer capacities to be found in modernism. These two episodes are marshalled to question whether a queer claim of filiation might be considered as a form of revisionism, one that both re-adopts and alters the canon. Queer claims of filiation (and their incitement of reactive charges of illegitimacy) bring to the surface the limits of propriety and challenge the exercise of authority in establishing art’s histories.

David J. Getsy in the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. His recent book Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022) received the Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. His earlier books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015); Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (2010); and the anthology of artists’ writings Queer (2016). He recently received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his new book project Street Addresses: Performing the Queer Life of the Street in 1970s New York.

This lecture is part of the 2026 Study Day program New Approaches to Performance Art, organized by Christoph Chwatal, David Misteli, Katrin Pirner, and Sophia Rohwetter (University of Vienna) in cooperation with the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, mumok, and the Kontakt Collection.

Information & Registration

Thursday, January 29, 2026, 6 pm
Event location: mumok cinema

Admission to the event is free; all that is required is an online registration for a ticket.

The lecture will be held in English.