I'm still here

Today, in the land of Dissertation, I have:

restructured

decided on new structure

copied and pasted into the new structure

copied and pasted into a newer structure

eaten 6 falafels

found clarity on my research topic

drank 2 bottles of fanta

pretended to be an international student

accidentally pulled out 3 eyelashes

In the Studio | he told me i was...

head over heels

My concentration span is terrible. I can never sit still or stay focused on one thing for very long.

Dissertation writing is traumatic - where to sit, where to read? I like writing on trains, but that's an expensive seat.

With 4,000 words committed to paper, I'm back in the studio, which is a terrible place to write - far too many distractions. I spoke to Louise today about making new work. I worry that in tutorials I get very quiet. I get ideas very quickly but never want to vocalise them, the ideas are too young and undeveloped. Louise has this calm reflection when talking about work, she asks the right questions and draws out potential problems and then possible solutions.

Today was a 6am start after 3 hours sleep. It's funny that a lack of sleep can bring an odd sense of clarity. I always leave things till last minute, but it works for me. Most of the time. I'm getting better at it...

“By placing an object of productive labour (the urinal) in front of an art audience, Duchamp produced a kind of mimetic short-circuit. The actual object of perception now stood in for the object of representation.”

"In a process well-articulated by Peter Osborne, contemporary (or 'post-conceptual') art both rejects matter as radically insufficient, insisting on a conceptual dimension that transcends the object's physical articulation, and, at the same time, requires a spatio-temporal presentation, albeit an anti-aesthetic one."

Friday afternoon on the studio roof.

Sean (the painter) just asked me what the point of my dissertation was...

"um... to defend objects... sculptural objects... the arrogance of objects...." uh oh.

So instead, I decided to wind him up and tell him that it was a declaration of the end of painting and a celebration of the objectness of sculpture, then hit him with some lovely 'death of painting' quotes from chapter one.

I realise that my dissertation introduction is pretty lame and needs a lot of thought before committing some vague ideas into words, which might just be what I've been doing. And I realise that Stuart is right, but I knew that anyway.