A Strong Tutorial

I had a good tutorial with Linden at uni today.  I think I went well over time, but we covered extensive ground.  I have not finished thinking yet.

We discussed my draft proposal.  I had described the culture in which I had worked, and Linden recommended I read Raymond Williams and Foucault.  Williams was from a mining village in Wales and ended up at Cambridge post WW2, but discovered what his peer group meant by culture was completely different to what he meant by culture.  He became interested in keywords, contemporary cognitive science and considered Residual, Dominant and Emergent culture.

We discussed Saucerre and how later thinkers concluded his work was flawed.  Saucerre talked about the signifier and the signified and the relationship between them.  However later thinkers feel the sign is arbitrary - it arises from accident rather than rule.  His theory deals with sound, not meaning in language, and treats the sign as static, not moving with change or time.  Because we are sensory beings, our bodies ground our value systems in our senses and his theory of semiotics does not take this into account.

The aim of my artwork proposal was clear: I am to take the theme of valuing under-valued people further than my BA, by considering women outside my family, celebrating skills and talents, both minor and major, to recognise and give value to their achievements. The body of work will utilise some historically significant format that women have used to express themselves, either personally or publicly (samplers, banners, garters).  I need to "set rules for practice" - I am not sure what this entails (but I seem to have hit quite a lot of the requirements for the proposal, without being aware of what I was doing!).  I was recommended to read Rosalind Krauss.  I think she wrote about the Post Medium Condition.  Art is no longer a technique which requires dedication to a sole medium - it is an argument about criticality in relation to other art.  Concept is what is most important and in order to convey the concept, the artist uses the most appropriate technique and medium.  This is what I feel I do, so this suits me!

I was also recommended to read:

Lambrous Malafouris ch 5 How things shape the mind;
Stuart Hall Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices;
Kathy Myers, Understains;
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema on the gendering of the gaze.

One of the things that I really like about Linden, is that she is very good at recommending reading.  I am prepared to do the "hard reading" but find it a bit disheartening when what you choose/find is not in the right area, having taken books home, and plodded through them. So having someone who can target your energies is most helpful.

We also discussed imagery as the site (sight) of struggle.   I like Gustav Courbet and his Stonepickers picture - portraying the lowest in society when the trend was about the great and the good.  I see analogies with my work here.

We discussed postmodernism and how it deals with hierarchies in gender, ethnicity and orientation but does not deal with class.  I have concerns about how PM can be cruel and my concerns about how this is portrayed on television, when it appears acceptable to set people up for a fall and then humiliate them in public.  I find this distasteful and it affects my feeling about the whole genre.  I think there is too much grief in the world and I don't find it acceptable to mock the afflicted.

I was advised to do some content analysis.  Maybe about the representation of women in the popular imagination.  Set some rule like portray of women in quiz shows in one evening on tv, or putting "women" into google images and seeing what patterns and trends you can see in the first 25 images that come up.

4 books from the library for starters. Not a lot then!