[x-post: H-Ideas]

Spheres of Action - Art and Politics

10am-6pm, Saturday 10. December 2005

Tate Britain
Millbank
London SW1P 4RG

This conference brings together three of Germany's leading thinkers on
philosophy, art and the media to debate the changing relationship between
art and politics.

Peter Sloterdijk: 'On a Few Relations between Surrealism and Terror'
Peter Sloterdijk, is Professor of Philosophy and Rector of the School of
Fine Arts, Karlsruhe. His numerous books include Critique of Cynical Reason
(1983), Rules for the People Park (1999) ­ subject of a notorious
controversy with Habermas ­ and the recent trilogy, Spheres (1999­2004).

Peter Weibel: 'The Political Revolution of the Neo-Avant-Garde' Abstract:
Traditionally the Neo-Avantgarde after 1945 is discredited as a purely
formalist movement, blinding out the political content of the Avantgarde of
the 1920s. But assuming that the Avantgarde movements from 1950 to 1970
share the same epistemic field as the cultural theories of their time, from
semiotics to psychoanalysis, we can apply these theories to these art
movements and discover in a new approach that the Neo-Avant-Garde was a
political art, not on the level of representation but on the level of the
dispositiv: transforming our traditional concept of the image, destroying it
and deserting it, extending into space and time, defining it as an arena of
action, and therefore expanding our conception of art and art-activities. In
daily life, on the streets, beyond the studios and museums. The political
revolution of the Neo-Avant-Garde operated on the level of the display, the
dispositiv, the tool, negating our traditional media of memory and
representation because after Stalinism, Fascism, and Hitlerism it became
difficult to believe in the means of traditional culture. The proposed new
methods, a radical critique, will produce new and surprising results and
interpretations of this period.
Peter Weibel, artist and media theorist, is Director of the Center for Art
and Media, Karlsruhe and author of Fast Forward: Media Art (2004) and The
Open Work, 1964­1979 (2005).

Boris Groys: 'The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights'
Abstract: Art and politics are connected at least in one fundamental
respect: both are realms in which a struggle for recognition is being waged.
The artists of the classical avant-garde have struggled to achieve
recognition for all possible signs, forms, things or events as having the
equal "aesthetic rights", e.g. as having the same right to be represented in
the public collections, put on display on the art exhibitions etc. But after
many decades of struggle the art of today still operates in a gap between
formal equality and factual inequality. Art practice is still a material
practice operating in the context of the contemporary mass media market. To
understand the actual functioning of art under the regime of equal aesthetic
rights means to reflect on the material, technical and economical side of
the contemporary art system.
Boris Groys, art historian and theorist, is Professor at the School of Fine
Arts, Karlsruhe. His books include Stalin's Total Work of Art (1988) Ilya
Kabavov (1998) and Über das Neue! (1999).

This conference is a collaboration between the Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy (CRMEP), Middlesex University and Tate Britain. The
event will be chaired by Eric Alliez, Senior Research Fellow, and Peter
Osborne, Director, CRMEP.

Tickets £25 waged/ £15 unwaged
Tickets are available from Tate Britain
Staff and Students of the CRMEP should contact r.brassiermdx.ac.uk for
tickets