Biblioteque
I’m in the British Library today, working on my dissertation. This is causing me much grief at the moment, but I’ve got until March to have this done so I think all will be well.
I went to the loo about ten minutes ago and saw Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, I knew it was him because he had his head resting on top of his short little body and legs and arms. It was him because it was no-one else but him.
Tomorrow the Youth Board have Dot Dot Dash Dot which I am super-duper excited about.
If you’re in East London tomorrow night, please come along.
On Monday I met Sara in Sainsbury’s. She has been in Turkey since graduating from my course last year. It was a lovely coincidence since she’d just got off the plane that afternoon. Tonight a few of us are going out for a proper get together.
Now I’ll get back to the dis….
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I made quite a few recordings when I went home some weeks ago. Here’s a little piece I put together using some of these.
When I went home last weekend I found two ancient rolls of film, I brought them back and had them processed. There were a few things on them from foundation and some things in the first year which was a bit of a shock. Here’s a pic of my brother Francis.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I had a go at writing a very short ‘play’, partly inspired by adverts for cleaning products. This is called ‘Is The Washing Up Done?’.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I was looking for a recording of a piece of performance work by Martha Rosler called ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. I found this in a series of VHS tapes in the library at Uni called ‘What Does She Want?’ produced in the late 80’s by Lyn Blumenthal. The recording here is of the preview sequence of the tape entitled ‘Fact is Stranger Than Fiction’. I really liked the collaged music along with the snippets of speech taken from archive footage depicting gender-attitude stereotypes.
My favourite bit is the part: “And then I said to my old boyfriend, Kerry Moffat, who I detest now, ‘I have run away’, and he said, ‘Oh God!’”.
Anish
Yesterday I went to the Anish Kapoor Exhibition at the Royal Academy with Richard and John.
Whilst we were going round it struck me that much of what we had to say about the work constantly referred back to the commonplace and everyday. Richard, when describing the show to a friend later that day described it as being full of (I’m paraphrasing here) “vaginas, piles of shit, breasts, ejaculate”. I suppose it was.
It feels as though my time at art school has (to a limited degree - through my lack of thoroughness) allowed me to learn a vocabulary about art that I find incredibly stimulating and exciting. Yet why, whenever I go to exhibitions with other art students does the discussion of work so frequently descend into a discourse through crude, quotidian terms?
Well, firstly that’s what the work looked like. It looked like the things it looked like.
I’ve thought about this so often. Is it to do with intellectual lazyness? is it the expression of a pluralistic reading of artworks? Is it because I enjoy crude humour? Is it (especially with Kapoor’s work) the realisation that in psychoanalitic terms these objects are an expression of subconscious desire? Its probably a combination of all these things.
I think a major factor is perhaps that I’ve spent so long doing the art thing that it almost seems (not to say that it isn’t exciting) commonplace now and I don’t feel any pressure to talk about this in the knotty, over-intellectual way that some people so often do.
But…yes go to the Anish Kapoor exhibition, its very good.
Found via
nicholasowenjones.
Posted
Sunday, October 25th, at
11:21 AM (∞).
Available in higher resolution.
A few weeks ago I went to a house party in Finsbury Park. The theme of the night was ‘dead animals’. I dressed as a piece of coral.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
A recording of a friend’s cat eating. I’m planning on using this in a piece I’m making at the moment.
