Paul Wood, Julian Stallabrass and Dominic Willsdon, Plenary 2  This study day explores concepts of avant-gardism, and the ways in which these have been deployed to historicise and interpret twentieth century art.

Paul Wood, Conceptual Art and the Neo-Avant-Garde  Speaker: Paul Wood, Senior Lecturer in History of Art at The Open University.The political conditions of the 1930s followed by the Second World War either destroyed or significantly undermined the historical avant-gardes. Yet by the mid-1950s apparently comparable tendencies were re-emerging on an international scale. The relationship of this so-called ‘neo’-avant-garde to radical politics has been the subject of considerable art-historical debate. So too has its relationship to the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s.