We had a student text seminar yesterday where we had to bring books that have influenced us and read short texts from them, discuss why and how they were of influence.
I found this really difficult, not sure why as I read incessantly but not necessarily art related books. I had so many to choose from but wasn’t sure what was expected.
As it happens the other students didn’t use art books really either, it was more to do with their lives, mainly memories from childhood/young adulthood. Very interesting.
Mine were whittled down to three and then changed at the last minute.
I chose a poem from Trees be Company,An Anthology of Poems, A passsage from Womans World by Graham Rawle and a passage from an essay by Gregg M Horowitz in Arguing About Art;Contemporary Philosophical Debates.
The poem primarily because though I don’t really understand poetry, I read it to relax me if I feel down. This book has some beautiful poems in and I have always loved nature and though I have never been a lover of (or able to produce) landscape art, I have always loved trees. Now working at the Butterfly Park I feel like I’m working within a landscape painting and this little poetry book is apt.
A Womans World, is an amazing work of art, it’s not a bad read as a novel either but the way it is produced is fantastic. Rawle cut each and every word of the book out of 1960’s womens magazines and is visually fantastic. The patience of the man leaves me in awe. I think it was about this time I started using recycled materials and this book was a huge infulence on that.
http://www.grahamrawle.com/womansworld/index.html
The essay was the old argument about Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc but was primarily what gave me an interest in Public Art. I had read this not long before I applied for my job at Liverpool Biennial and was one of the reasons I applied. Some of the statements in the essay got me fired up enough to want to be a supporter of Public Art. Working in that field now I realise that not all public art is good public art, indeed there is some truly dreadful work out there in the Public Realm but I am still a big supporter of GOOD Public Art.
