Reticence and Resistance in New British Sculpture

Lecture on British sculpture in the 1980s, for a conference organised by Jon Wood of the Henry Moore Institute, conceived in relation to the exhibition 'Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1896'. This drew substantially on my long essay 'Beings and Somethings: New British Sculpture in the 1980s', commissioned and accepted by Rasheed Araeen for a book called The Whole Story: the Arts in Postwar Britain, which has not yet been published. The lecture covered three strands of this research: horizontalism, sculpture and embodiment, and political resistance, with a particular focus on works by Brian Catlng, Susan Hiller, Tony Cragg, Alison Wilding, Shirazeh Houshiary and Bill Woodrow. My attempt in this lecture (and in the unpublished work on which it is based) is to suggest the political agency of work that is often metaphorical and reticent, and also to make plain some of the negotiations of feminist thinking involved, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged.