10:30

Gill Perry and Marko Daniel: Welcome and Introduction

10:40

Paul Wood: The idea of ‘avant-garde’ in the early 20^th century
Paul Wood will introduce the development of the idea of an avant-garde. He will look at what it meant in the early twentieth century and also discuss some contemporary art historical views on the avant-garde.

11:10

Jason Gaiger: 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. In this paper I shall argue that although it is a mistake to assimilate the Readymades to traditional models of aesthetic appreciation, the physical properties of Duchamp’s chosen objects remain ‘integral’ to their meaning as works of art, which resides at least in part in the conflict or dissonance between their appearance and their artworld status.

11:40

TJ Demos: Dada and Exile
TJ Demos will discuss 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. During the early twentieth-century, a period of expanding capitalism and catastrophic world war, each of these artists produced experimental objects that mobilize unconventional materials and spaces, formal constructions and linguistic formulations in ways that negotiated the experience of geographical and political dislocation. Demos will examine the link between art and politics in relation to Dada's aesthetics of exile.

12:10

Jennifer Mundy: Three's a Crowd?
Jennifer Mundy, curator of Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, will reflect on the exhibition, its making and its aims.

12:40

Break for lunch or visit to the exhibition

14:00

Start of afternoon session

14:05

Dave Beech
Dave Beech will link Picabia's monster paintings to current artists such as Mark McGowan, Laura Oldfield Ford and Freee by drawing out a shared commitment to produce art that does without the privileges of cultural capital, taste, style and so on. Picabia's critique of art - his anti-art - was a full-on philistinism (his version of avant-garde deskilling was an attack on taste as much as craft) even if it was mainly pictorial. Today artists pursue the challenge to art without restricting themselves to the pictorial or questions of style. McGowan uses outrageous performances to create controversy; Laura Oldfield Ford uses the formats of subcultural activism to put the artist in the thick of things; while the collective Freee use the technologies of the mass media to establish small counter-public spheres.

14:30

Richard DeDomenici: Leave the Avant-Garde Behind
“Some of artist Richard DeDomenici's work is so new that it seems rubbish at first. Join him as he tries to convince you otherwise.”

14:55

Tea (Starr Auditorium Foyer)

15:25

Carey Young:Imagination Engineering
Using a variety of media including video, performance and photography, artist Carey Young uses found tools, language and training processes from the worlds of the multinational corporation and global law firm and diverts them into an artistic context from which she explores ideas of autonomy, duration, intimacy and dissent. In her talk she will discuss the corporate avant-garde's hunger for 'creativity' and 'revolutionary' language and how she responds to these challenges within her own artistic work. In recent projects she has been 'psychoanalysed' in terms of her ability to remember corporate slogans concerning 'creativity', received motivational training to help present herself as a convincing revolutionary, offered a spoken portrait of a call centre worker, and presented legal contracts which bind the viewer to the artist for indefinite periods of time.

15:50

Panel discussion and Q&A

16:50

Concluding remarks

17:00

End

Paul Wood
Paul Wood is Senior Lecturer at the Open University, where he is Chair of the course ‘Art of the Twentieth Century’. He is co-editor of the Art in Theory anthologies, a project to document the changing ideas which have informed the practice of modern art.

Jason Gaiger
Jason Gaiger is a lecturer in art history at the Open University. Recent publications include Art in Theory: 1648-1815 and Art in Theory: 1815-1900, co-edited with Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, and an English edition of Herder’s Sculpture for Chicago University Press. His book Aesthetics and Painting is forthcoming with Continuum this summer.

Jennifer Mundy
Jennifer Mundy is Head of Collection Research at Tate. She has curated a number of exhibitions in the field of early and mid twentieth-century art, including Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Tate Modern 2001). She has also published in this field, and is working on a book on Man Ray.

Gill Perry
Gill Perry is Head of Art History at the Open University. She has published books and articles on eighteenth and twentieth century art, including: Gender and Art, Yale University Press, 1999; Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women's Practice, ed., Special Issue of Art History, vol 26, no 3, June, 2003; Themes in Contemporary Art, co-ed., Yale University Press, 2004; and Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art c1768-c1820, Yale University Press, 2007.

T J Demos
T.J. Demos is an art critic and a lecturer in the Art History Department, University College London. A member of Art Journal’s editorial board, he writes widely on modern and contemporary art, and his essays have appeared in journals such as Artforum, GreyRoom, October, Tate etc., and Texte zur Kunst.
Demos is the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007) and is currently working on a book provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.

Dave Beech
Dave Beech is an artist in the collective Freee. He teaches at ChelseaCollege of Art and writes regularly for Art Monthly. Recent articles include ‘Shock versus Awe’, ‘The Politics of Beauty’, and ‘Autonomy Or Barbarism’. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Protest is Beautiful’ at 1,000,000mph gallery, London and ‘How to Make a Difference’ at IPS Gallery, Birmingham. Upcoming exhibitions include ‘How to be Hospitable’, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and ‘Nought to Sixty’, ICA, London. www.freee.org.uk

Richard DeDomenici
Richard DeDomenici describes himself as a Quipnunc, a Gadfly, and a Trimtab*
*For definitions to these terms visit dedomenici.co.uk

Carey Young
Carey Young is an artist based in London. Since graduating with a Masters in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London in 1997 she has exhibited widely, most notably in solo shows at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2005 and 2007), Index, Stockholm (2004), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2004) and John Hansard Gallery & tour (2001). Her work has appeared in group shows including A Short History of Performance Part II (Whitechapel Gallery, 2003), British Art Show 6 (BALTIC, Newcastle and tour, 2006), How to Improve the World, (Hayward Gallery, 2006), Moscow Biennale 2 (Moscow, 2007) and For Sale, (Cristina Guerra Gallery, Lisbon, 2007) curated by Jens Hoffman. Her works are held in the public collections of the Tate, Arts Council England and the Centre Pompidou. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. www.careyyoung.com