Monday
Today is the first Fourth of July that I've had to write the date on a piece of paper. An odd feeling, but one that I could potentially get used to. The fourth has never been my favorite holiday, the only thing that wore me out was not being able to have the day off like everyone else I know!
In class we had two lectures, the first by our professor, Pierre (who is wonderful), on Scandal and Censorship in the art world. We started with the Fountain, of course, and then moved into the idea of one work of art in a themed exhibition causing some trouble.
After the lecture by Pierre, we had a lecture by a guest artist/lecturer. The information he was to lecture on was really interesting (Abstract art), but he basically just verbatim read his lecture (which was like a written essay). There is a huge difference between reading an essay and speaking about a topic that you have a lot of information on. It was really hard to pay attention to a lecture that was basically someone reading an extremely academic analysis of abstract art. Too much.
Then we went back to the Tate Modern to look at their photography exhibits. In their "permanent collection" section, they have works by six different artists that are called "New Documentary Forms." We discussed the idea of new documentary forms, but I was really unimpressed with the idea as something that should be shown in this kind of art space. I did, however, like one of the artists, from Ukraine, Boris Mikhailov.
This photo is from his series "Dusk" which are gelatin silver prints that have been dyed (they are not cyanotypes).
After spending what I thought was too much time in this part of the museum, we went to see the Taryn Simon exhibition called "A Living Man Declared Dead." The works were extremely powerful and very difficult to take in (especially after an already long day), and I wish we had started with this incredible project as opposed to the "documentary" bullshit from the 5th floor.
