1970s: Out of Sculpture

In the 1970s, the mobility of ideas, artists, and their work intensified. British sculpture was included in the most ambitious exhibitions held abroad, aiming to present the latest international developments in contemporary art. Transnational exchanges are discussed as pivotal in the reshaping of artists’ attitudes to their work and the process of making. Nonetheless, questions are also raised about inclusion and exclusion from the narrative of British art as displayed abroad, at a time when the rubric of sculpture as much as the sense of what was specifically British in the visual arts were verging towards dissolution. As part of this narrative, Lucy R. Lippard’s Art from the British Left (Artists Space, New York, 1979) is discussed as a seminal, if little known, exhibition.