I cannot believe how long I have been here. I also cannot believe that it is almost all over!!! I have been having an amazing time while I've been here in London, and I really am thankful to everyone of my family and friends who have made it possible for me to be here (also to my two future roommates who are searching for an apartment or house for us for next year without me, to them I am so grateful and I don't know if they know how much I appreciate them and how many baked goods I plan to make for them the second we are all living together).
Onward Ho!
Today was the day of oral presentations (Graded assignment 1/3). I did my presentation with Susie (as she was the only other member of the group) and this was on the piece that I blogged about on Saturday/Sunday if you missed that. We both thought our presentation went well. We were clear with our ideas and we made our own mini-powerpoint (to showcase the many different views of the work), and we also worked together well, splitting up the speaking, etc. So yay for us! Also our professor seemed to enjoy our presentation and had positive feedback!
After the first set of presentations, of which there were five (including ours) we had two lectures on photography, with lunch in the middle. The first lecture was by a woman who gave us a few lectures before, but I really did not like her lecturing style (which I also mentioned on Day 5). For the start of her lecture she had meant to show us two videos, but had many technical difficulties, and she gave the most horrible lecture introduction to photography ever. It was sort of frustrating and infuriating at the same time. Then we watched the videos which were basically works by artists with the actual artists talking about the works (you don't see the artists you just hear them). The two artists were Sophie Calle and Nan Goldin. I do like some of both of their works, but not all of either. I'll post one photo from each and talk briefly about each.
One project that Sophie Calle did (she is totally insane by the way) is she followed a man to Venice Italy, just to follow him around there and photograph him (without his knowing). This is a photograph from that series. I think that some of the photographs in the series stand out individually.
Nan Goldin is well known for her style of photography, basically documenting every second she possibly can of her life. In her early years she would photograph the drag queen community in Boston, and then not too much later she became involved in heavy drug culture (I believe in New York) in the 1980s. She has often been persecuted for making "drug culture" sexy, but I think she's said how she thinks it is actually "evil." I actually prefer her later work. I think it is so peaceful and beautiful, and I'm sad that more people don't realize that she really changed what she was working on.
From there, the lecturer talked about many photographers, but her speaking style is so monotone that it was really hard to like anything she was saying about anything. The other problem with her is she gives us slide lists with artists names, but no titles of works, and she makes many typos in the spelling of names. If she does have anything resembling a title it is really just a descriptive word used for their work, e.g. "cinematic" or "installation". Maybe I will revisit some of these artists at another date.
Our second lecture was by a photographer who is also a professor, and she has been coming to gallery visits with us a lot, so we are all very used to her "lecture-style." Her lecture was extremely interesting, and covered the topic of contemporary photographers. She definitely gave us some titles of books and essays that I want to read SOON, which is rare in any art history lecture for me. Let me know if you want the list :).
After discussions on theories of art and theories of art originally applied to painting that are now being applied to photography (believe you me this was all extremely helpful for the formation of my thesis), we looked at the works of several artsits (some of which I know, and others which I do not know). One of the photographers who she mentioned (whose work I really liked) was John Hilliard. Hilliard plays a lot with cropping and focus to change the nature of an image in one space. Here are a couple of examples:
For the first one he has taken one image and cropped it in four different ways. Each way tells a different story. I believe the piece is entitled "Cause of Death" and the four captions are 'Crushed', 'Drowned', 'Burned', 'Fell'. So you see? Cropping can change a lot of what an image says.
For this second triptych entitled "She Observed herself in the Glass," he has taken the same photograph three times with different focal points. Look carefully at all three pieces (I apologize for the poor image quality).
We talked briefly about artists who simply take photographs on the street, or even re-create things they saw on the street. One of these artists I enjoyed was Tom Wood. His series "All Zones Off Peak" was really interesting. What he did was he would take photographs from the bus every morning when he went to work. Unfortunately because of security people are no longer allowed to take photographs from public transit sources. There is a book of this series and if you like the work I suggest you buy it (it may or may not be on that list I mentioned earlier).
Of course we also talked about John Baldessari, and I wanted to share just one work by him from his Goya Series.
All in all, a great second lecture. After that there were more presentations, but instead of staying for those I went and did some research on the artist Lee Bontecou, who I am writing my final paper for the class on. I didn't necessarily want to write about an american artist, but I have always been fascinated by Bontecou, and I don't know if I will have a chance to write about her again (in my school years at least). On Saturday, if the weather is nice, I may go to Regent's Park and read some very long articles and essays on her that I have.
Then, Susie (from earlier in this post) and I went to Tea at the Sanderson Hotel. We had an amazing meal, and it was a lot of fun. There is an album on my facebook just for the afternoon tea portion (it's entitled Afternoon Tease, I was just going to do Afternoon Teas as I am going to tea next week at Claridge's Hotel, but I decided to be cheeky). The photos are here. The tea was sort of "Alice in Wonderland" themed, the captions have explanations of all of the foods (the only normal thing were the scones, basically).
And that was Thursday!
