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.

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.

Phyllida Barlow, New Generation Sculpture in Britain  Speaker: Phyllida Barlow, artist and Head of Undergraduate Sculpture, Slade School of ArtInvestigating abstraction as a force in British sculpture, Phyllida Barlow focuses on the 1965 New Generation Sculpture Exhibition, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Jennifer Mundy, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Three's a Crowd?  Jennifer Mundy, curator of Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, reflects on the exhibition, its making and its aims. Further Reading Jennifer Mundy ed., Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Tate Publishing, London 2008.

TJ  Demos, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Dada and Exile  TJ Demos discusses the form and function of "exile" in relation to the work of Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia, a term that both defines the experiential circumstances of Dadaist artists and inflects Dada's aesthetico-political commitment.

Jason Gaiger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Incidental and Integral Beauty: Duchamp, Danto and the Intractable Avant-Garde  It is widely accepted that the radical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century abjured beauty, thereby effecting a decisive break with the art of the past. Duchamp is accorded a leading role in this process insofar as he rejected the satisfactions of ‘retinal pleasure’ in favour of an art of ideas.