This
has been an enjoyable, but incredibly slow, week. It now feels like everything
is slowing down to a crawl, making me feel demotivated and tired sometimes, which
isn’t helpful. This time next week I’ll be in a comfortable space, relaxing and
spending a lot of my time sitting down, reading or watching, reverting back to
a past self who spent a lot of time indoors not doing a lot at all. It will be
a very weird and interesting experience.
Monday
consisted solely of ‘hanging’ the exhibition. In the morning we all convened in
our assigned spaces and discussed where each person should be placed, in
relation to the work that they’d produced. This went well, and by the end of
the day our groups’ part of the exhibition was pretty much done.
In
the afternoon there was a lecture on the Black Arts Movement. Although it was a
well put together lecture, with lots of thought provoking details about
cultural change and new ideologies that were created, I was so enthralled by
the process of putting up the exhibition that I found it incredibly hard to
concentrate afterwards. I did write down a variety of notes and learn some
things, but I feel that the hour was slightly wasted because of my distorted mind
at the time, thinking about deadlines and work to be shown, etc.
I
spent Tuesday finalising my installation, as well as sending off the necessary
documents concerning the unit and displaying all of my supporting work on a
desk in the studio. It was very weird that, for the first time, the majority of
my work was on a USB stick, rather than sculptural or book work. It definitely
marks a change in the work that I’ve been creating for the last few months, as opposed
to the artwork that I was making during my Foundation and over the summer
holidays.
Unfortunately
I was so caught up with deadlines and other aspects of the course that I didn’t
go to the Tuesday artist talk, which was incredibly frustrating. In reality I
should have really gone, but you can’t change what has already happened. I’m definitely
going to make sure that I go this week however.
Wednesday
was spent sitting in the exhibition spaces, invigilating and making sure that
my videos were playing, as my work was being marked during the day. It was
ultimately an incredibly dull 24 hours, where nothing was accomplished and
everything was lost. I think that after a term of being incredibly busy, this
week I simply stopped, which is unfortunate, but I feel that it had to happen
at some point.
Thursday
was a day full of crits, which was exciting. Although mine didn’t go too great,
as I didn’t feel that I communicated my ideas to the visiting artists as well
as I’d hoped, going to other peoples was both thought provoking and truly
awesome. Seeing peoples work being taken apart is fun and you do learn a lot
from the experiences, what not to do, etc. With some people, I did found myself
thinking, what have they been doing for the past two months, to make something
this bad/un-thought out? When someone is repeatedly saying ‘I don’t know’ over
and over again in response to questions about their work, I think that
something is definitely wrong. It was one of those days of pure enjoyment,
listening about art and critiquing the work that you dislike. One piece of work
that I especially disliked was a painting (obviously) which was ‘Untitled’. Who
puts the effort into printing out a label and then leaves the work untitled!?
This is something that consistently annoys me.
That
evening was the private view, which I feel went well. I saw people looking at and
– hopefully – enjoying my work. There were a number of performances during the
event, some good but some incredibly bait. One such piece involved writing ‘human’
in your native language on a large canvas with a piece of charcoal, which you
then proceeded to smudge with your hands, after which you touched the face of
the artist with your now charcoal infused hands. It was like going back in time
to before I was born, where that would have been considered ‘edgy’ and ‘new’.
After
the event I was linked by various friends to a number of images on different
social media websites of people lying down and looking at my work, which was
fun to see. This sparked the idea of saving all of the photographs and using
them in a future piece of work. This has obviously been done many times before,
but I think that it’s still worthwhile to save them, even if they’re simply
used to document people interacting with my work.
On
Friday morning I woke up incredibly early, and just lay in bed, listening to
the sounds of traffic and police sirens, and whatever other sounds that you
hear at four o’clock in the morning. The contrast between ‘home’ and here will
be incredibly noticeable next week, when it will be completely silent for the
majority of the day. It also made me think about how, as a seven or eight year
old child, travelling to London was always amazing. Sitting in the backseat of a
car and looking up at the lights of the city in awe. Just thinking about that
for many hours was an experience. I’m rarely doing nothing, always watching or
listening, writing or talking. The endless influx of information sometimes
becoming unbearable. I don’t know what to do with these thoughts, but I’m sure
they’ll come into my work in some shape of form, or already have in one way or
another.
Friday
was spent taking down my work, which was relatively easy to do. Yet again, a
wasted day where nothing was really achieved. I had tickets for the ‘Shadow
Without Object’ symposium at Chelsea during the day, but I felt that I would be
too tired and worn out to actually concentrate. This was proved when I went to
the Chelsea Space and couldn’t really take in any of the material from the
Women’s Art Library Magazine Archive, which is a shame. Maybe next week I will
re-visit the works on offer.
In
the evening I went to see The Book of Mormon, which was surprisingly dull. The sheer
number of racist jokes was incredible. Obviously it’s all very knowing and that’s
the point, but at some stage it’s too much, and the jokes became dull and
overused, and this is where the ‘it’s a musical’ part comes into play. Although
I hate musicals, I thought that this one might be the exception, but
unfortunately it wasn’t. The things that were being said would have worked as a
joke within a TV program, but not so much when they were repeated around 300 times
during the course of a ten minute song. By the end I was bored by the whole
thing, and my eyes had repeatedly attempted to close, which is a real shame.
I’m
a big fan of South Park (which is – I’m aware – a very obvious thing to
say/compare the musical too) as it’s so satirical, clever and up to the point.
So I think maybe the downfall is that I’ve seen this thing four years too late?
This also leads onto the thought that continually moves through my mind when I
go and see anything theatre based that has been running for a while, that the
cast must be so bored of it all. Of course the members of the cast are changed regularly
but it’s still something that I consider every time I see something like this.
I remember listening to an episode of The Moth where a member of the Blue Man Group
was talking about how he’d spent many years within the group, getting steadily more
and more tired of the performance. It’s kind of ruined any long running performance
theatre for me, which is a shame.
I
also watched a film, Danny Collins, a light hearted drama centred on an ageing rock
star who has a ‘mid-life crisis’ of sorts. It was fun, and Al Pacino played the
character well, but ultimately I will have forgotten all about the movie in a
few weeks’ time, as with many films of meagre quality.
On
Saturday I went to the Tate Modern and looked around the Alexander Calder show,
which was okay, but not great. A lot of the work was very samey, beautiful but
samey. I think everyone knows Calder’s work, and enjoys it in different ways.
For me, a lot of the ideas are very obvious and the outcomes are quite elegant
and aesthetically pleasing. Work that is suited for the Tate but not entirely
for me.
During
the day I did watch the new Netflix show featuring Bill Murray titled ‘A Very
Murray Christmas’. Ultimately it was a depressing 56 minutes of my life, full
of old songs and sad stories that made me miss the past and my childhood for
some reason.
As
well as this I started to make some new work, which was slightly surprising. I
created two work – in - progress films, still thinking about the monotony of
life and all of the ideas which accompany that.
One
film features clips from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – a video game
involving the American military and the shooting of many people, murdering on a
large scale. Obviously using this footage has so many connotations embedded
within it, so at this point I need to think about that, and how it relates. Obviously
it does relate to the concept behind it, otherwise I wouldn’t have spent time
and effort creating the movie, but I just need to spend some time thinking
about it. At the moment both of the videos are simply a group of short clips
meshed together, with no real narrative, but I hope to change that this week.
This is the work in progress piece:
The
other beginning piece that I made was created using avatars on a website, avatars
that are meant to be purchased so that you can add them to your own website, as
‘pop up people’ who inquire whether you need any assistance or not. This video
is incredibly far from being done, but it was fun to play around with certain
things as I get more used to the software. I was thinking a lot about the idea
of pop ups and advertising within the internet, and the rise of ‘click bait’ articles
from websites like BuzzFeed. This relates to the original ideas surrounding
life and boredom, as the ‘viewer’ clicks away from the ‘helpful’ avatars. The
background video shows a ‘Zook’, a computer generated creature, with one huge
leg and one tiny one, endlessly attempting to reach its objective that it will
never get to, a red dot on the floor. Throughout the clip it’s in the
background, and is slowly revealed as the pop ups are closed. This video needs
a lot of work, and the Zook may be turned into a video on its own, but I’m not
completely sure of that. I think some of the main parts are there, I just need
to spend a lot of time re-configuring them and adding/subtracting some key elements.
This is the video:
Today
I went to an exhibition at Somerset House titled ‘Big Bang Data’ which was
awesome. It consisted of a range of artists’ work being presented alongside scientific
ideas and documentaries featuring the internet and technology. So many great
artists had work being shown, including Philip Adrian, Julian Oliver, Thomson
& Craighead, Owen Mundy, Erica Scourti and many more. It contained an
amazing mixture of artists who work with the technology that surrounds our everyday
lives, and I’m now going to have to read up on and peruse their work, which will
be fun.
There’s
only a few things on this week, a group discussion tomorrow where we’ll talk
about the different essay questions and a feedback tutorial on Tuesday. I think
the rest of the week is free, so I intend to go to many galleries, as well as
making use of the studio space for the final week, before I go back to the
countryside. I intend to work on my new videos further, as well as finally
filming my video world, if I can get it to work.
Daily
Snapchat:
bob.bk
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