COLLEGE—First term essays

I’ve been a bit quiet recently, apart from some exhibition notices, because I’ve had two essays to hand in, as well as a joint presentation to present.

The essays are the first pieces of writing I’ve had to do for the various courses which make up the diploma I’m on. They aren’t assessed, but they are marked, and they are designed to judge and give us feedback on our writing without destroying our grades. For this reason they’re called ‘diagnostic essays’.

This doesn’t stop them being very stressful to do, though. I’d rather not create a bad impression at this stage through a poor piece of writing. Although you could always say that it makes the final, assessed essay that much better looking if you are mediocre at this stage.

All but one of these essays have now been done and returned so I have a pretty good idea of how I’m doing and pointers to what to improve.

CORE Course essay (2,000 words)

For the Core course I wrote a piece on the Daniel Buren show at Modern Art Oxford, starting from the premise that I was disappointed with the show and how I felt that his work was now outdated with respect to current art practices in the arena of Institutional Critique. Picking up on a specific ‘conversation’ between Buren and the artist Olafur Eliasson, and looking back at some pieces by Buren that I considered to be successful, I tried to review my disappointment and come to some conclusions for the continued relevance of Buren’s work.

My tutor (Astrid Schmetterling) was generally positive about the piece, although she pointed out that I had omitted to mention the current ‘relational’ art practices as possibly superseding Buren’s work. The major complaint against my writing was that my discussion of Buren’s critique was not thorough enough, I never really explained what it was that the pieces I described were designed to do and hence how that related.

Download essay (PDF 3.4MB)

Score: 64/100*

Framing Art essay (1,000 words)

For this (very) short essay I chose from a selection of provided questions. These were really for the longer essay that we will do at the end of the course (8,000 words) but served as a convenient starting point for this shorter one. The piece I wrote dealt with the question:

Considering the importance of the fragment in John Soane’s Museum, can one say that his house is more about the use-value of art (its function as a collectible commodity) than its aesthetic value?

and swiftly discussed fragments as a concept, various examples of them, and how Soane, his contemporaries and a present day audience perceive and make use of them.

Overall the essay was well received by the tutor, John-Paul Martinon, with its clarity being particularly praised. However criticisms included the fact that no proper argument was proposed, mainly due to the fact that I had not concentrated on one or two sources, with which I could then participate in an argument, rather than present my own personal views along with a collection of opposing views with no form of engagement with them.

This is a new concept for me and it is taking me a while to understand the significance of it and it’s practical ramifications.

The other criticism was the speed with which I dealt with the topics, which led to generalisations raising more questions than they answered. It was suggested that concentrating on a couple of objects as exemplars would have served me better.

Download the essay (PDF 36KB)

Score: 66/100*

Conclusion

I was expecting much worse and bored my colleagues endlessly about how badly I was going to do, to the extent that I promised to buy them all coffee if I got less than 65 for the Framing Art essay.

So on the whole not bad, but not good either, and certainly not good enough if I wish to apply for funding for an MA next year – for that I would need a first. Much work to do over the next term.

The next essay deadline is for the remaining course, ‘Philosophy and…’, and which is due on the 17 of January and which I will be writing over the Christmas holiday. After that it’s time to start writing the extended, assessed essays due at the end of the Spring term.

  • * A score of 70 or more is a first.

SEMINAR—Framing Art—Institutional Critique

Today I made a short presentation to the Framing Art course that I’m on, based around two texts linked to the practice of Institutional Critique, one by Daniel Buren1 and one by Adrian Piper2. The question to which this is the response was:

During the seminar, students will give a short presentation of their chosen artists’ writings. This analysis must not give an overview of all the arguments contained in the two texts, it must instead be based on a single comparable argument extracted from each text and presented within a contextual framework.

The presentations must concentrate on how your chosen artist has addressed the museum.

I’ve posted the notes from which I did the talk, as well as a recording.3.

I didn’t realise I said ‘erm’ quite so much. How embarrassing. I’ve asked about presentation coaching so hopefully I will be able to improve on this.

  1. Buren, D. (1971). Function of the Museum. In McShine, K. ed., The Museum as Muse, Artists Reflect. New York: MOMA, 1999.
  2. Piper, A. (1980). Some Thoughts on the Political Character of This Situation. In McShine, K. ed., The Museum as Muse, Artists Reflect. New York: MOMA, 1999.
  3. Every few minutes you’ll hear the hard drive of the iPod spin up and down again. Although noisy, it’s still possible to hear what I’m saying.

WRITING—The Idea in Art

Picking up on another subject from the previous post, touched on in this quote:

. . . the [late nineteenth-century] avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society.1

What’s interesting to me, upon re-reading that passage, is the denigration of ideas as ‘infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society’, which is precisely (it seems to me) where certain strands of conceptual art took art in the late ’60’s – looking particularly at Adrian Piper.

On the course we are looking at Greenberg along with Clive Bell’s The Aesthetic Hypothesis (1914) and Roger Fry’s An Essay in Aesthetics (1909) as the developers of formalism in art theory in the early twentieth-century. So I reviewed the texts we are reading by them for other instances of the subordination of ideas, but it seems that for Bell and Fry it goes without saying and so there are only oblique references to it.

Clive Bell:

. . . for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object, into the state of mind of him who made it.

For to appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the works of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.

To appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space.

But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always.2

Roger Fry:

It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it . . . and towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity.

We must therefore give up the attempt to judge the work of art by its reaction on life, and consider it as an expression of emotions regarded as ends in themselves.3

Being prior to the development of conceptual art, Fry and Bell’s judgments are historically tied to an understanding of art as object based, so their concept of ‘idea’ seems to be one of subject-matter. Conceptual art on the other hand conceived of the idea as something that isn’t necessarily represented, so the return of the idea, post-Greenberg, was not a return to a previous practice, but a new way of doing art.

  1. Greenberg, C.(1940). Towards a Newer Laocoon. In Frascina F., eds. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. London: Routledge, 1985.
  2. Bell, C.(1914). The Aesthetic Hypothesis. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.
  3. Fry, R.(1909). An Essay in Aesthetics. In Frascina F. and Harrison C., eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982.