Had a lot of good conversations over the last few days. Yesterday we were preparing for group presentations in response to three seminars we’ve had. Afterwards I spent some time chatting with the members of the group about art, education, writing, feminism, separating yourself from your emotions, how to write about your work when you are your work and validity.
I presented my analogy of the artist-writer and the lawyer. Our male colleague agreed with that analogy and said that when talking about your art you should not question what you are doing or say anything that could plant a seed of doubt in the hearers of your case. He also suggested that it is futile to seek validity from peers, tutors, galleries but to seek it in the words and works of the artists who inspire us.
Today I bumped into a part-time 2nd year student in the library. We talked about presenting ourselves and how there is an expectation to do that in a certain way. Her natural approach is unconfident, apologetic, doubtful and that on one occasion was praised for this honest approach.
So what do you do? I started reading ‘The Transformative power of Performance’ by Erika Fischer-Lichte on the bus home. It starts with Marnia Abramovic’s Lips for Thomas and how we experience this type of art. I’ve only gotten a few pages in but it’s ringing true in my head and may well halp me with my writing goal I set myself at the beginning of the week.
Tomorrow I have a meeting to help me plan my time. Hopefully this will get things in order and allow me to achieve all these tasks. I’ve been ill now for about a month so it’s hard to keep going but I got to just keep chipping away at it.
