11.23.2005

23/11/2005

Tutorial with a visiting artist/tutor – Is my work formal? I had a good filing in the end and a few artists to research. Felt that the work survived another test but also realized that I want to do individual work. And work that has a unique existence and not just an assemblage.

Saw the Cremaster DVD. Explosion of questions. The Installation and the sculpture denying the individual and how that becomes even more intense when we think about collaborative work. The clichés. The masonry symbolism. The pretentious and the authentic biographical association.

Discussion with Jim Noble: semantics and Wittgenstein when he started to build a run away bridge out of my trap: Do you really think a book is not a work of art? His question was: why would it be? Is it just semantics like any other philosophical question? I don’t think so. It’s not a snob subversion of things that makes me feel that a book should be seen as a work of art. It’s not because I think of art as being superior but because I can’t outline a barrier between the two forms of expression. If the same person can use both and define himself and writer and artist why would the concepts be extrinsic of each other? What about criticizing a painting because it’s just an illustration like he did. Aren’t all paintings that aren’t strictly abstract always illustrations? For him it’s a question of subjective judgement. He felt my work was strictly an illustration of the history of science when in fact I was representing the friends with whom I lived incredible intellectual adventures. For me it becomes obvious that it isn’t an illustration when one realizes it is completely impossible to put a text together that would match it.

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