Over the last few decades artists have been engaging in various ways with both the ‘natural’ environment and ecological issues. This paper introduced some of the controversies and debates confronting artists, critics, historians and theorists engaged with these concerns. It explored some problems of definition, and the complex and differing ways in which art – in particular installation art - mediates these issues to a wider audience.

Discussion 1 This symposium explores the controversial status of Futurist movements in art history, and some of their ‘avant-garde’ practices. Speakers engage with various forms of Futurist art, performance and film, including the use of manifestos and demonstrations. Italian Futurism will be viewed in relation to other radical art practices across Europe. The Futurists’ disdain for traditional values and their pursuit of an ‘art of modern life’ will be explored in relation to prevailing concepts of modernity and ‘avant-garde’ utopias.

Gill Perry and Alex Danchev, Futurism: art and life and politics  The Futurist project was ambitious, not to say grandiose. It outran art to embrace life. It was also intensely political.

Matthew Gale and Gill Perry, ‘The raging broom of madness’: making an exhibition of Futurism  The presentation covers some of the ideas, issues and decisions that went into making Futurism at Tate Modern. It covers a range from conception to installation, including such concerns as how to present the manifestos and what happened to Balla's dog?

Gill Perry and Dominic Willsdon​, Introduction This symposium explores the controversial status of Futurist movements in art history, and some of their 'avant-garde' practices.

Mike Belshaw, Gill Perry and Chris Riding, Discussion 2  Matisse Picasso at Tate Modern brings together major masterpieces by the two giants of modern art. Between them Matisse and Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Now you can discover more about their fascinating and intricate relationship in this long-awaited exhibition which opens at Tate Modern and subsequently travels to Paris and New York.

Gender, Matisse and the Fauves, Gill Perry  Gill Perry explores the relationship between the work of Matisse and the Fauve avant-garde, and that of several women artists working and exhibiting on the fringes of the movement. She focuses on issues of spectatorship and ideas of avant-gardism, and goes on to consider the role of gender in both contemporary and modern perceptions of Fauve practice.

Sophie Howarth, Gill Perry and Claire Bishop, Discussion 2

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.