There’s something I hate about the art world.
Was it the valid yet repetitive nature of this morning’s endless talks about “context” and “questioning assumptions”? Maybe I was just on my feet too long at this afternoon’s artist talk at the Craft Council. (One of our professors, Simone ten Hompel, is the proud and deserved recipient of the £30,000 Jerwood Applied Arts Prize for 2005.) Or maybe my unplaced irritation is simply a result of my late diner, which was delayed so that I could catch one more free film playing under the drizzle of London’s orange night sky in Trafalgar Square during the opening of the London Film Festival. I packed my gloves for this evening’s showing.
In the back of my mind is the fact that the computer lab here, which is dedicated to digital video editing, 3D animation and 2D image manipulation, is still not open – a mess with disorganization, and no office hours. The other lab was flooded last week and the problem is proving to be far more serious than initially thought. A central heating pipe burst overnight and immersed the carpet in hot water and filled all the computer rooms floor to ceiling in steam at 70c. As a result most of the infrastructure as well as the equipment has to be replaced in all the computer rooms on the first floor on that side of the building.
It’s been over a week and a half since I applied for a bank account here and I still haven’t heard from HSBC. It takes up to two weeks for my student travel card to be issued.
As for art, though, it seems like artists have lots to talk about but nothing to say. They are endlessly investigating and exploring but too often their artistic productions are hiding behind the thick fog of immune subjectivity and erudite hermeneutics. Consequently, their work suffers from the infinite weightlessness of indecisive meaning. Even when art has a point, it seems crippled by its own elitist nature.
These reasons don’t really sum to the total irritation that I feel tonight. Under the hum of the newly installed kitchen fan (humorously labelled “Greenwood AirVac”), Waleed suggest I am thinking too much: probably an unfortunate side effect of a full day of circle discussions and fruitlessly trying to summarise a professor’s verbose parole for the ESL students on the course most of whom have either bravely or stupidly enrolled in a course founded on contemporary and linguistically complex English discourses.
During these brainstorming sessions, however, I often catch myself thinking, “so what.” At times, most likely during these occasions of mental and verbal gymnastics, I feel like I’ve forgotten why art is important…maybe I never really knew…maybe it’s not important.
Then I remember that art makes you look with different eyes. It forces you to observe the world with an unusual and keen awareness. It forces you to question what you take for granted.
Meeting by accident as we left Calcutta House, Anne and I walked back to Claredale House together. Weaver’s Fields were darkly glowing under a low harvest moon. It was like the small worn grass fields had dropped from the sky and squished the noisy city aside. Only the top half of the red moon was visible: the rest was obscured by fog, cloud or pollution. Anne continued a few paces ahead until she realized that I had stopped to savour the definitively unique image. It was only for a moment – looking again for the moon, it had flippantly vanished.
There’s something I hate about the art world, but I’m not sure what.
Tags: London