Sophie Howarth, Gill Perry and Claire Bishop, Discussion 2

Robert Morris, Mike Nelson and Martin Fried, Installation Art and the Post-Medium Condition  Claire Bishop argues that installation art is exemplary of 'post-medium specific art', in other words, art whose medium is so expanded that it no longer has much to do with traditional art historical genres such as sculpture and painting.

Gill Perry, Sculpture and Performance in Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series  Studies of Mendieta's work have frequently interpreted her earth/body art as both instilled with primitivist fantasies of a feminine primordial power, and an obsessive response to trauma and loss.

Sophie Howarth, To the Things Themselves! Phenomenology and Minimal Art  This talk explores ideas of the readymade in American and European art since the 1960s. Beginning with a discussion of the historical origins of 'readymade' sculpture in the 1910s, Sophie Howarth goes on to explore the renewal of interest in such practice in the late 1950s, and its appeal to generations of artists since. Among those whose work will be discussed are Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Piero Manzoni, Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons.

Sophie Howarth, Paul Wood, Matthew Gale, Dominic Willsdon, Discussion 1

Dominic Willsdon, To the Things Themselves! Phenomenology and Minimal Art  Phenomenology is a school of thought founded by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others developed and expanded phenomenology to address art, literature, society and politics.

Matthew Gale, Carving out a Reputation  Brancusi has a reputation as a skillful peasant camping in the milieu of Montparnasse modernism. Purity and innocence are habitually used to describe both the artist and his work. However, it is clear that this can be traced back to the complex myth that Brancusi constructed for himself. Matthew Gale, curator of Tate Modern's exhibition Brancusi: The Essence of Things, considers some of the questions of validity that accumulated around Brancusi's work, as it generated controversies around the world, and how the sculptor came to embody ideas of authenticity.

Paul Wood, Expanding Concepts of Sculpture  For most of the twentieth century, sculpture seemed to be the poor relation of modernist art compared to painting. After the crisis of modernism in the late 1960s this changed, as painting lost its position at the centre of contemporary art to be replaced by a multiplicity of three-dimensional practices. Paul Wood starts the day with a brief overview of some aspects of the modernist theory of sculpture leading up to the challenge to it in the sixties.

Sophie Howarth, Introduction  This study day explores the various art practices that have been described as sculpture during the modern period, with particular reference to their avant-garde and aesthetic status. The talks consider the way in which the category of sculpture has been reworked or challenged through concepts such as the 'readymade' as well as through performance and installation art and site-specific commissions.