Today turned out to also be an odd day just because of the strike that happened in London on Thursday. As I had mentioned last Thursday (or at least I hope I mentioned) on Thursdays we are split into two groups, one group meets in the morning and the other group meets in the afternoon. I am in the afternoon group, so I slept in.
When I arrived, on time, we had a lecture on female artists in France. I was quite unimpressed with the lecture style of our guest lecturer who repeatedly said that she didn't want to spend a lot of time on Louise Bourgeois, but ended up showing us the most work by her. Her lecture mostly spiraled downward when she began discussing the performance art tactics of Gina Pane (very masochistic if you ask me and frankly not worth discussing here, you can look her up on your own if you want to but MOM DON'T DO IT BECAUSE YOU WILL VOMIT).
Afterwards we were supposed to have a lecture by another visiting lecturer, but the woman was on strike, and so we went to see the new Murakami works at the Gagosian. I will mention to you now that at this point I have laringitis and can no longer speak, and what does our class do? Go to an exhibit by a contemporary Japanese artist who references traditional Japanese art like crazy, a topic that I can speak on quite well. Yet I cannot speak. My professor, funny as he is, decides to make a joke of my inability to speak by asking for my opinion on works of art and jokingly states that I will be singing Karaoke for everyone after class. So I stood in this gallery, full of references to traditional Japanese art, listening to my fellow students who have not just completed a class on Japanese painting and printmaking, guess at the motives of the artist. It was extremely frustrating, but I managed to write down some of my ideas on paper and share them with the class. Afterwards (since we were so far away from class) the afternoon group went to a cafe to discuss the exhibits we were to see for our homework (that I wrote about earlier, The Minimal Gesture and the Ai Weiwei pieces at the Lisson Gallery).
After enduring all of that I just went home, ate dinner, and went to sleep, as not being able to speak is extremely exhausting.
xoxo
