It is November 1st today and the clocks went back at the weekend. These things signal something: that it really is Autumn by now and we are heading for Winter. Time finally to give up on longing for summer until next year.
I missed my Spanish class last week because I went to a conference in Portsmouth about social pedagogy and art. I gather from looking at the online resources for Spanish Foundation (Thursday class) that the class learnt numbers up to 20 and to introduce members of their families. So at the weekend I tried to catch up by learning 1-20 though have no idea how to pronounce 16 and 17 ‘dieciséis’ and ‘diecisiete’ and watched and ‘repeated after them’ the BBC film about family relationships: ‘Este es mi marido’. At the conference I asked a question of the panel which was roundly misunderstood by one person who threw it back at me. I keep feeling as if people misunderstand what I am saying at the moment. Individual positions getting tighter as the cracks open up in the social and economic fabric?
I am rather haunted by the fact that there is nothing visual accompanying this blog as yet. But I’m also rather intrigued by this impasse. I do have an image which might suit: one I used for the exhibition ‘North and South’ where my rendition of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ sung in Arabic was played. The image shows the arabic text laid over an image of the bandstand on the seafront in Hove and the characters look rather like the starlings that circle around there.
So I was intrigued to read ‘On Translation’ by Mark Prince in last month’s ‘Art Monthly’ because he writes at one point about Nathan Coley’s ‘Bandstand’: “The concept of a bandstand objectifies public space. Open to everyone in principle, the limits of its accessibility are synonymous with the actual limits of what is understood as public space, which are inevitably local.”
How interesting and how clever. I am interested in how many of the choices we make as artists which at the time seem intuitive arise in fact from a considered thinking process.
A buddhist tells me about the idea of ‘beginner’s mind’. Wikipedia tells me it is “an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject”.
Yesterday, an interesting conversation with Matthew Cornford about academia. Can I make that place work for me as a place for dreaming in even whilst it tugs at me to become an expert? Surely my decision to take on a new language at the very institution where I am employed is tied into that attempt: to be, to remain, a beginner and to claim wonder for myself.
Key vocabulary: tents, ongoing collapse of Capitalism, fear, hope, focus, dissolution, the local and the global, uno, dos, tres, . . .
