Taught my Critical Fine Art Practice students today all day in Fabrica sat around the large round discussion table in the gallery. It was part of my plan to explore new environments for teaching in. It went very well. The students fed back at the end of the day that they had enjoyed the round table and being in a 'proper gallery' and that it was good to be working and thinking about photography near Hirschhorn's banner, which was indeed a constant reference for our discussions.
I found myself saying at one point that the more I have thought about the banner the less I know about it. That it seems as if my thinking has broken down, is broken, like the bodies. And that if one of the bodies were to get up and reconstitute itself what radical potential there would be for new thought.
The students introduced very interesting perspectives on their own practices via texts they had chosen for presentation to the group. We looked at Mary Midgley's examination of human nature in 'Beast And Man', David Green's short essay 'Moving to Manual Override', an extract about gypsies and their persecution and extermination by the Nazis taken from 'The Gypsies' by Jean-Paul Clébert and Fredric Jameson's reading (in 'The Deconstruction of Expression') of Heidegger's reading of Van Gogh's painting of the peasant shoes.
