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.

Sophie Howarth, Sarah Wilson, Niru Ratnam, Andrew Brighton, Discussion 1

Andrew Brighton, Matisse, Picasso and Marketing the Modern  The rise of the reputations and prices of Matisse and Picasso were made possible by the development of new ways of marketing art. In his talk, Andrew Brighton asks to what extent the character of their work formed by the political economy of their reputations.

Sophie Howarth, Introduction

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.

Suman Gupta, Sonia Boyce, Paul Wood, Dominic Willsdon, Discussion 1  This video recording from the Contemporary Art and Globalisation Study Day features a panel discussion between speakers.

Sonia Boyce and Dominic Willsdon, Glocal: somewhere between the local and the global  Many contemporary artists reject the idea of their work as ‘political’, as if such a label prohibits it from also being poetic. Sonia Boyce rejects this distinction and discusses how circumstances have conspired to ensure her politicisation. She reflects on why she increasingly falls back on the old feminist adage ‘the personal is political’ to consider the question of the local in relation to the global, and how these two states intertwine.