Moving Parts.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
I got asked to write a catalogue essay for the Michaelis 4th years, and then later I got unasked. I love my life.
Nevertheless, I did spend three days looking at all the final exams, which I thought were of exceptionally high quality. Having been freed of writing a formal essay, I want to speak here of my favourite moment of the whole exhibition. (I'm writing about this now, because I get my yearly day off on the day of their official graduation show.) Anyway, I was wandering around, and I came across a room filled with stuff, no name no title. It was a crazy space stuffed full of prints, paintings, broken things, a dried lizard, snake skins, a flowing plant, like this guy had studied four years at art school and then been kidnapped and isolated in a jungle cabin to do his exam. The sadness of all these abandoned objects was moving. As I was walking out I caught sight of a turning record. I walked up to it and followed the wires to a old radio and only when I knelt real close did I hear the faint sound of crackly piano music, the record scratched and warped into a loop. While I was down there I saw in a little red box, a preserved moth. It was very nice.
I'm not too sure why this stuck in my head. But I think after three days of seeing things well made, well communicated, things that moved and cranked and were big ideas, this little moment made me happy, that sometimes the things less well expressed can be better.
ps. On further investigation the piece was by Nicholas Wittenberg
Nevertheless, I did spend three days looking at all the final exams, which I thought were of exceptionally high quality. Having been freed of writing a formal essay, I want to speak here of my favourite moment of the whole exhibition. (I'm writing about this now, because I get my yearly day off on the day of their official graduation show.) Anyway, I was wandering around, and I came across a room filled with stuff, no name no title. It was a crazy space stuffed full of prints, paintings, broken things, a dried lizard, snake skins, a flowing plant, like this guy had studied four years at art school and then been kidnapped and isolated in a jungle cabin to do his exam. The sadness of all these abandoned objects was moving. As I was walking out I caught sight of a turning record. I walked up to it and followed the wires to a old radio and only when I knelt real close did I hear the faint sound of crackly piano music, the record scratched and warped into a loop. While I was down there I saw in a little red box, a preserved moth. It was very nice.
I'm not too sure why this stuck in my head. But I think after three days of seeing things well made, well communicated, things that moved and cranked and were big ideas, this little moment made me happy, that sometimes the things less well expressed can be better.
ps. On further investigation the piece was by Nicholas Wittenberg
Labels: 4th Years, Michaelis, Nicholas Wittenberg
posted by Robert Sloon at 11:21 AM
8 Comments:
This session was quite an educative one, but also became one of the most pitiable when Ed Young, one of the speakers went on the podium with a T-shirt emblazoned “I am Robert Sloon”. Young’s entrance was complemented by ‘Apologise’, a hit song by American rock band OneRepublic that blared across the auditorium much to the astonishment of the delegates.
The 3:36 minute song consumed a precious part of the speakers 20 minute designated presentation time, no wonder he ended up busting his time.
As if the delegates were not bewildered enough by Young’s entrance, the speaker totally lost the audience in his seemingly well researched rhetoric on how Jennifer Oppenheimer, Chairman of the De Beers Fund which participates in the governance of a range of civil society organisations in South Africa, primarily in the fields of education, conservation, and cultural heritage and Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, whose disputed 1979 election sparked the bloody Angolan civil war are funding the arts with what he deemed dirty money.
Young, may have had a point but he was clearly using the wrong forum, no wonder the audience had no questions for him at the end of his presentation, somehow justifying the third line in the lyrics of his theme song “I'm hearin what you say but I just can't make a sound”.
This speaker clearly wasted the precious time of the delegates some of them including this writer who travelled thousands of kilometres crossing countless lakes and rivers only to be subjected to such muddle.
If anything, Young or Sloon should realize that this is the 21st century, one does not have to be the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips to figure out that four wrongs squared, minus two wrongs to the fourth power, divided by two do make a right, even this writers two-year-old son can tell you that.
Besides, there was an international audience at the seminar and not everyone knows whom Young or his so-called alter ego Sloon is. Nonetheless Young should find the right medium for his contention, or better still he should put it in a book.
http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=33960
dear anon 12.29 PM,
The piece you post is an extract from The Post, a Zambian newspaper written by Andrew Mulenga. For the record and clearly for Mr. Mulenga’s edification, the loon who spoke that day was not Ed Young but his best friend Ronald Suresh Roberts, South African President Mbeki’s official hagiographer whose mind, Robert's that is, is muddled, true, and like that poor soul Kierkegaard he also suffers from hypergraphia. It is rumoured the entire charade was planned in advance with some organizers full knowledge. I too have no idea who Young or Sloon are. I know a bit about Roberts as he is constantly in the news being ridiculed by clever people. I suppose the art world is his last haven.
You know, he printed some lovely prints from that record throught the press with ink on fabriano and everything......
Dear mpo,
I cannot agree with your sentiments more...
I'm happy these two folk from 12.29 have meet each other, that is lovely. They should also meet Pippa Skotnes and Malcolm Payne, who are lovely too, as well as extremely intelligent both intellectually and emotionally. So lucky for the school to have nice humourous perceptive people like these to remind them what art is. And what it is not. The latter being, funny. Especially not in a serious conference, where everybody is not asleep or needing any stimulation. And where almost all of the speakers failed to stick into the allotted time, which seemed to worry the overseas visitors so much that they never laughed once, and had a terrible time.
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bitterbek
right on lizzard
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