How ironic that previous posts have been about the internal discussion I have about art/art discourse and the relative merits (or not), and my feedback from last semester centred on just that. Ironic but devastating, at least for a week or so.
It boils down to this: if you have a skill, does that skill have to consistently be applied to everything you do? I was asked why my writing skills aren't applied to my work, why, in fact, the concepts I was writing about were not driving the work. The simple answer is that I think about more than one concept, and I have different ways of expressing different concepts. When I explained that I purely wanted to produce objects that people were drawn to, enjoyed, and investigated through look or touch, the response was that these would just be…nice. Lovely and nice and not enough.
It seems with ceramics (as I can only talk about this from my own experience) that aestheticism is not enough; in order to validate it as 'art', not the dreaded 'craft', it needs conceptual grounding rather than pure, aesthetic responses. While I agree that some of the most interesting ceramics produced looks at huge, generic concepts addressed by many media forms, some of the most interesting ceramics produced also looks at what it is that makes ceramics so individual in the art or craft worlds. Rejoicing in an understanding of the medium you are working with is no less a success than rejoicing in the realisation of a concept.
Anyway, to that end I've thought fuck them and I'm going to do what I want. Third year is the time of the student (a bit like The Year of the Ox) and I want to make what I want. If they want me to explain, I will, but the primary objective of my work is now to produce those objects that engage people through aesthetic and tactile qualities. We'll see :)
Our fund-raising is trickling along. Our degree show is being moved from out of our department, which is odd. Everyone is stressed but having fun. It's my birthday tomorrow, so piss up ahoy and sack off sketchbook for a day or two.
Snare, over and out
