Who: Vanessa Place is a leading conceptual writer, editor, theorist and publisher, and a practicing lawyer. Mark Sanders is the author of the brilliant “Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid”

What: Vanessa will talk a little about conceptual writing and allegory, on which she has written a definitive, expansive and incredible text. ¹ Music has much to learn here. Mark will talk a little about his research and writing on artists and intellectuals who take a stand against political policies and ideologies, and the predicament of complicity for artists across the ideological and social spectrum.

Why: Vanessa’s writing tries to cultivate a thinkership, not a readership. She writes as a platform to leap off into thought. The most challenging of Vanessa’s writing makes us pay attention, or listen to, already existing, unaltered texts. Without seeming to do anything, she opens up questions of how language is used to describe, dispute or establish the facts of real moments of violence and of how art engages with such violence. Where other artists use artistic ideas to examine art, Vanessa’s most challenging work roots artistic ideas in matters where the consequences are suffering, life and death. We think music could learn a lot from the way it makes us listen. Mark’s writing unpicks the complex relationships between language, power, art and the law and the social, political, moral and philosophical implications for artists, writers and thinkers. Between them, we hope to start some kind of conversation about responsibility, and consequence in art.

Vanessa Place was interviewed in The Scotsman in advance of the event.