Concrete Thinking for Sculpture

This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through four specific examples, viewed from the locality of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle in 2015. It will be argued that ‘concrete’ makes possible a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture. The first example looks to the use of concrete, as a material, in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore, from the 1920s-1930s. The second example is the only public concrete sculpture by Barbara Hepworth on record, entitled Turning Forms. This is a kinetic work which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete will be explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third example examines the interplay between abstraction and concretion in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva transmission tower on Emley Moor. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a sculptural monument in a landscape of other design ‘types’. The fourth example considers the recent display of Lygia Clark’s Bichos at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014-2015. Bicho Pássaro do Espaço (‘Creature Passing through Space’) (1960) reveals a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These examples call upon the semantics of the concrete as a thought process and will track a journey into a region marked by three interconnected points: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture

The 'do-it-yourself artwork' : spectator participation and the 'dematerialisation' of the art object, New York and Rio de Janeiro, 1958-1967

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Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities.

This article documents the author's attempts to produce a series of instructions for performance that would enable students to make work from their everyday experience of the city. The first part of the essay deals with the author's account of teaching Performance Studies at De Montfort University; the second part provides a list of performance instructions for immediate use. The intention behind the article is to struggle towards a subject-specific model for teaching Performance Studies that blends theory with practice

Objets en procès : après la dématérialisation de l'art = Objects In Progress : After the Dematerialisation of Art

"In the 1970s, talking about the « dematerialisation of art » meant taking stock of the transformations effected in art by « conceptual » approaches. This book lays out the problem of dematerialisation in a fresh way. What is going on with the materiality of works that are deployed in space, as installations, or play out over time, such as performance art ? The various essays brought together here are less attuned to the absence of objects than to the questioning of their character as works of art. Looming on the horizon of late-twentieth-century art, the notion of the object is worth exploring by rethinking its materiality in terms of how space and time put it to the test" -- p [4] of cover