On the occasion of the publication of The Organic Line, Irene Small is interviewed by Drew Pugliese for November Magazine. Their conversation begins with a nod to Small’s early interest in literary studies, touches on her formative experience working with the curator Okwui Enwezor in New York City, and circulates around the myriad questions and topics Small grapples with in her recent book. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full interview in November Magazine. Click here to read the conversation featured on the Princeton University Department of Art & Archaeology website. An excerpt appears below:

“DREW PUGLIESE: I’m interested in your writing process. Readers will know that The Organic Line puts seemingly distinct histories and works in conversation (e.g., in Chapter One, works by Kazimir Malevich, Lygia Clark, and Adam Pendleton are all considered). The word you use to describe The Organic Line is “paramonographic.” I might call your writing associative. How did those connections form?

IRENE SMALL: Well, I noted before that the archive brought me to art history, and I continue to think that archival research is vital, particularly within the context of “globalizing” art history. Of course, purely theoretical analyses have enormous value as well. But, if you work in a marginalized context of any kind, outside Europe and the United States, for instance, you often risk applying external theoretical paradigms upon material rather than elaborating paradigms that arise from the material itself. Dipesh Chakrabarty talks about this in “Provincializing Europe.” What does it mean for certain theories or methodologies to be deemed “universal” and others to remain merely “contextual”?

In my first book, which began as my dissertation, for example, there was a desire from certain readers for me to recover Oiticica as a “gay” artist. In my archival research, however, it became very clear that that specific marker of identity wasn’t historically operative in the Brazilian context in the same ways it carried meaning in contemporary US academic discourse. In fact, Oiticica’s transgressive sexuality operated across a much wider and more interesting spectrum than the binary opposition of gay and straight could possibly signify. If I had applied a pre-given matrix of “race, class, gender” to his work, I would have missed so much, in addition to reinscribing assumptions about what a term like gender even means. The unexpected elements that I found through my archival research into Oiticica’s scientific training—about butterfly genitalia and behavioral mating that implicate his use of the term genero (gender or genre), for instance—provided new insight into the extraordinary and very specific ways he disrupted codifications of sexuality.

The material I found regarding Oiticica’s scientific training was never considered part of his artistic archive, however. But, it was through that material that I began to understand the conceptual import of taxonomy in his aesthetic practice. Thinking about the taxes on imported paints was another instance in which exiting the art historical archive was necessary in order to understand the motivation behind certain aesthetic decisions, in that case, the politics of raw matter in Oiticica’s chromatic sculptures.

When I’m researching historical material that lies beyond what we would consider conventional artistic or art historical archives, I don’t necessarily know which elements will become key within my subsequent writing. But by researching widely and deeply, by pulling on different archival strands, I often come to certain problematics that are differently visible, or differently enacted, by works of art and what I might call more symptomatic historical traces, such as tax codes or magazine advertisements. These kinds of traces allow us to visualize history in a certain way. For me, though, looking closely at works of art is always front and center.”