Useful links:


University of Nottingham
Institute for Research
in Visual Culture


Tate Britain Conferences



The Herbert Read Library
at the University of Leeds



University of Victoria Library
Herbert Read Collection



The Herbert Read
Discussion Group



Basic Biography of Read



Herbert Read Books
Available

The Herbert Read Conference 2004

The Herbert Read Conference, Tate Britain, London, 25 and 26 June 2004
Jointly organised by the University of Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and Tate Britain


Speaker: Margaret Garlake, Editor, The Sculpture Journal
Title: Revisiting the 'Geometry of fear'.

I shall discuss the way that, in the half-century since Read devised this phrase in connection with the sculpture shown at the 1952 Venice Biennale, it has become a phrase taken to subsume virtually the whole sculptural production of early post-war Britain, which has consequently become identified with existential angst, guilt and the Holocaust. Contemporary critics identified the Biennale sculpture with iron, linearity and spikiness which, while only partially true, obviously ignored vast swathes of sculptural production.    The Venice exhibition was called 'New aspects of British sculpture'; newness was probably the selectors' priority. The work selected for the show was extremely diverse;Read acknowledged that the artists were not a group, though this has since been largely ignored. Though Read probably saw the work before he wrote his essay I shall argue that his text was principally about and contingent on a particularly perilous moment of the Cold War - a political moment. Today this context has been forgotten and the essay and the sculpture have been reread in the more recent context of memorialisation of the Holocaust and the retrieval of survivors' memories.














































This page hosted by

Visit Geocities'