Today, progress looks like this:
Tomorrow I have a lot of other stuff to do, but may be able to devote about half a day on writing. I’m getting there slowly.
Category: CORE course
COLLEGE—Essay progress
As of today, here is a colour-coded summary of the essays I have to hand in next week. Green is in progress, red is finished:
The Framing Art essay is worrying me …
Addendum: I originally posted this entry using green as the label for finished essays, and red for those which needed work done on them. To me these colours represented happiness (green–my favourite colour) and danger (red) and the related meanings when associated with the essay’s relative state of progress. Shi pointed out, however, that, for her, green represents an active colour, where work is going on, like green shoots of plants growing, and red is for completion. So I’ve changed the image to reflect this alternative view of the meaning of colours.
COLLEGE—Final Presentation
The Spring term has just ended and we now have a month to finish our essays, after which my day-to-day involvement in the Diploma will be over and all that remains will be to get the results.
Last week we gave our final group presentation to our colleagues and tutors. We were asked to “build a presentation around a topic” rather than an artwork or exhibition and we chose to concentrate on the subject of “performativity” with reference to speech-act theory and the work of J L Austin, as well as it’s applications in gender theory of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Rebecca Schneider. Along the way we brought in Foucault, Debord and Jorge Luis Borges as indicators of the transference (or failure thereof) of meaning through language.
Our piece took the form of three re-presentations of a series of statements recorded during the Core course and Lab sessions over the previous few weeks. These were initially decontextualised and re-contextualised into a short conversation between the members of our group, using the fragments to discuss (as best we could with the available material) the nature of performativity and illustrate it with some examples, and supply responses to the issues raised.
For the second part we replayed the original sound excerpts, reverting to the original source material, as it were, and following the same ‘script’ as used in the first part, thus partially recreating the original context for them while making clear their problematic nature in their new situations.
Finally, the audience was invited to take the floor and create a further version of the piece, sometimes reading their own lines or lines spoken by others.
The mark we get for this will count as 50% of the total mark for our Core course, and the Core course is one third of the overall mark for the Diploma.
I now have to complete a 4,000 word essay for the Core course, two 4,000 word essays for the Philosophy and… course and one 8,000 word essay for the Framing Art course. Lots of work to do.
UPDATE:
The marks are back already for the presentation. Our group got 85 out of 100! That amounts to an A+. Superb! Well done us.
CREATIVE JOURNAL—George Baker—The State of Institutional Critique
Some might say that in the transformed conditions of the present [Institutional Critique] has become an academic exercise, a genre, or worse, a style. Completely recuperated. This is undoubtedly true of certain cases. But such a judgment rests on an understanding of avant-gardism that is no longer operative, perhaps no longer desirable. And the contemporary situation doesn’t obviate all communicative, critical practices. There are significant ways in which work formerly known as Institutional Critique has been transformed and thus continued in the present. (Baker, 2001, p.220)
- BAKER, George (2001). Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism. In October vol.100 (Spring). pp.200–228.
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