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.

Sophie Howarth, Phyllida Barlow, Paul Wood and Mark Godfrey, Discussion 1  From Russian Suprematism through Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and beyond, abstraction has been variously interpreted as nihilistic, political, sublime, decorative and ironic. While much writing about abstract art has been opaque, the talks here aim to clearly open up a variety of theoretical models for discussion.

Mark Godfrey, Barnett Newman’s Abstraction  Speaker: Mark Godfrey, Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Art. Mark Godfrey considers some ways in which Barnett Newman's art has been interpreted. First, there are those who read it as if it were a code to be deciphered (Thomas Hess). Then there are those who 'see' it, and locate the meaning of the work in the seeing experience (Fried, Judd, Bois, Serra, Sylvester).