Writings on sculpture and sculpture studies

“Cassils, PISSED (2017)” in Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects, ed. David Evans Frantz, Chris E. Vargas, and Christina Linden (Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2023), 254-55.

"Lynda Benglis: Forms of Entanglement," in Francesca Rebecchi, ed., Lynda Benglis and Properzia de’ Rossi, exh. cat., Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), 68–83.

“Scott Burton’s Public Sculptures” [excerpt from conclusion to Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art], Burlington Contemporary (3 May 2023)

“The Materiality and Mythology of Rodin’s Touch,” in Auguste Rodin: Displacements (Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, 2021), 42-62. Adapted excerpt of chapter two of Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture.

“Shim (The Number of Inches Between Them), 2020,” in Gordon Hall with Mira Dayal, Circling the Square: Words from End of Day, exh. cat. (New York: Hesse Flatow, 2021), n.p.

“Lynda Benglis, Untitled (Beyond Barnett Newman), 1966-67,” in Matthew S. Witkovsky, ed., Material Meanings: Selections from the Constance R. Caplan Collection, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2020), 38-41.

"Queer Figurations in the Sculpture of Elmgreen & Dragset," in Leigh Arnold, ed., Elmgreen & Dragset: Sculpture (Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center, 2019), 154-94. 

"Scott Burton, Two-Part Chair, 1986," in Jonathan Weinberg et al., eds., Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989, exh. cat. (Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art, 2019), 132-33 

"A Sight to Withhold: David J. Getsy on Cassils," Artforum (February 2018): 57-60. 

"Seeing Commitments: Jonah Groeneboer's Ethics of Discernment," in Temporary Art Review(8 March 2016). [online]

"Generativity: On Michelle Grabner's Recent Sculpture," in Michelle Grabner: Bronze (New York: James Cohan Gallery, 2016), 4-10.

“Towards a Practicable Sculpture,” afterword to an annotated reprint of Edmund Gosse, The Place of Sculpture in Daily Life, ed. Martina Droth (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2016), 81-86.

“Second Skins: The Unbound Genders of Nancy Grossman’s Sculpture” from Abstract Bodies.

Introduction to Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015)

“Abstraction and the Unforeclosed” [conclusion to Abstract Bodies, re: Cassils’s Becoming an Image, transgender capacity, and contemporary abstraction]

"Acts of Stillness: Statues, Performativity, and Passive Resistance," Criticism 56.1 (2014):1-20.

"William J. O'Brien: Making Faces," in William J. O'Brien: Ceramic Heads (Los Angeles: Wood Kusaka Studios, 2014), n.p.

"Sculpture since 1960," in Michael Kelly, ed., The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), vol.5, pp.529-34.

"Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation," Art Journal 72.4 (Winter 2013): 58-71.

"Queer Exercises: Amber Hawk Swanson's Performances of Self-Realization," GLQ 19.4 (Fall 2013): 465-85.

"Preposterous Parts: Nancy Grossman's Relief Assemblages, 1965-67," in Ian Berry, ed.,Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary, exh. cat. (Munich: Prestel Verlag/Delmonico and Saratoga Springs: Tang Museum at Skidmore College, 2012), 52-65.

"The Primacy of Sensibility: Scott Burton Writing on Art and Performance," in Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965-1975, ed. David Getsy (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2012), 1-32.

"John Chamberlain's Pliability: The New Monumental Aluminium Works," The Burlington Magazine 153.1304 (November 2011): 738-44.

"Playing in the Sand with Picasso: Relief Sculpture as Game in the Summer of 1930," in From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art, ed. David Getsy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 80-93.

Introduction to Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010)

“Rodin’s Performative Mark-making,” excerpt from Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 73-100.

"Immoderate Couplings: Transformations and Genders in John Chamberlain's Work," in It's All in the Fit: The Work of John Chamberlain, ed. David Tompkins (Marfa, Texas: The Chinati Foundation, 2009), 166-211. Revised in Abstract Bodies (2015).

“Rodin et Michel-Ange: réflexion sur l’érotisme des dessins de Rodin d’après les figures pour la chapelle des Médicis”, trans. Jeanne Bouniort, Revue de l’Art162 (December 2008): 59-69. Revised as chapter 1 of Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture.

“Tactility or Opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on the Art of Sculpture, 1956,” Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (December 2008): 73-86.  Reprinted in Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945-75 (Santa Monica, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum Online Publications, 2011).

"Give and Take: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Ezra Pound's Homosocial Modernism in 1914" Sculpture Journal 16.2 (Fall 2007): 39-51. 

"Fallen Women: The Gender of Horizontality and the Abandonment of the Pedestal by Giacometti and Epstein," in Display and Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern, ed. Alexandra Gerstein (London: Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum and Paul Holberton Publishing, 2007), 114-29.

"'Her invitation and her contempt': Bertram Mackennal and the Sculptural femme fatale in the 1890s," in Bertram Mackennal, exh. cat., ed. Deborah Edwards (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 96-103, 206-7. 

"The Problem of Realism in Hamo Thornycroft's 1885 Royal Academy Lecture" [including annotated edition of 1885 Thornycroft manuscript], The Walpole Society 69 (2007): 211-25.

"Privileging the Object of Sculpture: Actuality and Harry Bates's Pandora of 1890," Art History 28.1 (February 2005): 74-95.

Introduction to Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004)

"Punks and Professionals: The Identity of the Sculptor 1900-1925," in Sculpture in 20th-Century Britain: Identity, Infrastructures, Aesthetics, Display, Reception, ed. Penelope Curtis et al., vol. 1 of 2 (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2003), 9-20.

"Encountering the Male Nude at the Origins of Modern Sculpture. Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand, and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality," in The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, ed. Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2003), 296-313. 

"'Hard Realism': The Thanatic Corporeality of Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial," Visual Culture in Britain 3.1 (April 2002): 53-76. Revised in Getsy, Body Doubles, 2004 

"The Difficult Labour of Hamo Thornycroft’s Mower, 1884," Sculpture Journal 7 (April 2002): 44-57.