Progress is a wonderful thing...

Last week, engaging in a group crit with everyone else on my course I discovered that I've made much more progress than I had realised. Something I had done for fun to make myself laugh was to tipex over words from a book to create an erotic story. This was done purely out of amusement yet everyone seemed to like it. It makes me realise that sometimes the things you dislike or dismiss end up being the best ideas.

Still, I now have the necessary fuel I need, I suppose I'd lost my confidence since I've been out of art for a while. I'd forgotten that art doesn't have to mean painting or drawing and I was reminded of my conceptual piece on 'Dreams' when I was back at school. I used my dream diary and painted excerpts and imagery from my dreams onto persplex and hung them, layering them and at different heights. At the time I felt like it wasn't really art and never really liked it but perservered because my tutors encouraged me to continue. I felt like it wasn't art yet it was. Strange that through retrospect I now realise that it was my best piece of art work yet, I mean I was commenting upon the nature of dreams and reality, the transparency or opaqueness of our subconscious but I didn't know enough about psychology at the time. If I had then maybe I would have enjoyed it more. I mean, I enjoyed creating the erotic story by editing and deleting the words in a book because it made me laugh and because it links in with Nietzschean philosophy; the destruction needed to create something new and also the absurdity of language; how everything is a metaphor for something else. I always feel frustrated that every thing I seem to do or say or read becomes Nietzschean but then it makes perfect sense. I would explain further but the whole point of Nietzsche's writing is that it can not be summarised into neat little bullet points, you have to read him to truly understand him and if I tried to explain his ideas, they somehow become changed, their meaning is lost and to an extent even just reading his work it is lost, language is far more complex than we may realise and creates more problems than it solves...reminds me of Depeche Mode! Check out the lyrics of Enjoy the Silence http://www.metrolyrics.com/enjoy-the-silence-lyrics-depeche-mode.html
especially "Words are meaningless and forgettable"...I suppose this fits in with my book art project now, more than ever. Which reminds me, I'm going to have to buy some more corrector fluid (it's Tip-ex but not as we know it!- yeah so, I'm beginning to waffle and should stop now)

I guess I should end this entry by pointing out that all this looking back and reminiscing has made me see that the reflexive research we've been encouraged to do throughout the Core Unit and group crit is a lot more beneficial than I had at first realised!

Progress is wonderful but retrospect is also a wonderful thing...
(As is Nietzsche's writing!)