Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 22:45:03 +0000
Subject: ART DEMANDING COMMUNITY: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLOQUIUM


University of Westminster English Colloquia in association with the
School of Architecture presents:

ART DEMANDING COMMUNITY; IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE AND THE ENDS OF ART

FRIDAY 13TH FEBRUARY 10 AM

Speakers include:

ANDREW BENJAMIN  (Warwick,Philosophy)   The Surface in Architecture

ALEX DUTTMANN   (Middlesex, Philosophy) Art and the Public Sphere

DOINA PETRESCU  (Paris, Architecture)   'Art of Making' 'Marginality':
(excerps of a User's Guide)

JOHN BELL  (Westminster/Architectural Association)      Verbloden, a
postcritical moment

PIYEL HALDAR  (Birkbeck, Law)   Aesthetics and Law


To be followed by a plenary session, chaired by David Greene (Archigram
etc) featuring some of the above, with the additional presence of
representative from the architectural/art practices MUF and FAT, plus
others. 

ALL WELCOME             ADMISSION FREE

University of Westminster
Marylebone Road, opposite Baker Street Underground Station

Lecture Theatre Two (LT2)
Starts 10AM

For further information contact:

Jon Goodbun
David Cunningham
Andrew Stott
0171 911 5000 ext 4334

email: jon.g-AT-zoo.co.uk



An inter-disciplinary one-day colloquium at the University of
Westminster on the 13th of February 1998. The event is to be
co-sponsored by the departments of English Literature and
Architecture.It is hoped that the day's discussions will focus on a
consideration of the relationship between art and the notion of
community, particularly in the light of the recent theoretical
re-examinations of this latter concept. 

To what extent, and in what form, does art demand (a) community, or (a)
community art? Such a question has from Plato onwards been a, (perhaps
the), central concern of the philosophical attempt to rigorously define
art and to provide the basis for its judgement. The 'nature' and
situation of art, (including literature, architecture etc), within
modernity has no doubt complicated this. Firstly in the way in which
modern theory has come to question the possibility, and desirability, of
both a universal concept of art and of a traditional idea/l of
community. Secondly in the way that modern art has itself sought to
continually transgress and transform the limits of the 'artistic', but
also sought to question or challenge its 'place' within, or in relation
to, (the) community.

Special attention here will be paid to the nature of the connections
between art, history and politics suggested by an idea of community,
(whether descriptively or prescriptively), and to the question of
whether such an idea necessarily operates by a logic of (communal)
identity and, as such, certain processes of exclusion required in order
to maintain this identity. Thus a crucial issue would be the extent to
which art, and architecture is perhaps the most explicit instance in
this context, is called upon to maintain the construction of ideas and
forms of community tending towards the conservative. Indeed, one
particular form of the postmodern might well be a demand to restore what
is concieved of as a  more ‘traditional’ relation of art to community.

In relation to these issues three central questions will be raised: (i)
how art, thinks itself in relation to an 'exterior' community, (ii) how
aesthetics and 'theory' utilise a concept of community as the grounding
for the definition, judgement and delimitation of art,  and (iii) how
histories, both of art and mediated through art and theory (including
concepts of tradition, heritage etc), are used in the creation,
maintenance and repetition of ideas of community and communal
self-identity. In resisting conservative response to these questions, a
radicalisation is required of the terms within which community is
thought.

Without necessarily accepting any simple distinction between the two,
its is hoped that issues will be addressed at the colloquium in relation
to both theories of art and its practice, and to the conjunction between
them. It is on this basis that the organisation of this event is to be
carried out jointly between members of the university coming from
backgrounds both in literary theory and in architecture, providing a
forum for discourse between these two disciplines and others in the
university and beyond.




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