- Venue
- Nottingham Trent University
- Location
I will admit that I began the Degrees Unedited blog in a bought of self promotion. The idea was to place my name on a website with some pedigree within the incomprehensibly gargantuan cyber world. This, I considered, was an unmissable opportunity to place myself, my work and a chronicle of my final year experience in a public place; to begin to advertise myself and share what I was making.
This incorporation of the experience with a more critical discussion of the work can lead to a difficulty in deciding the degree of honesty with which you approach each entry. The public/private debate can easily rear its head. My decision to not shade the personal side of my experience of the Ba was in many ways an accident; my work is often heavily intertwined with my personal life. I suppose in many ways I used the blog as a way of explaining to myself these issues, on occasion as a rant, sometimes as a confused speculation; the build up of the final years highs and lows are catalogued alongside the development of the thinking around the work I was creating.
Hindsight has provided me with a cautious approach, however. My first experience of blogging was naïve; a first year web design workshop required us to conceive and build a web site of our own. The result was an online ‘journal’, which I describe on the opening page as “a context for me to explore myself, my identity and my spirituality, to develop a deeper understanding of these concepts”. The project lasted a year and was accompanied by poorly taken documentation of other work. I’m not sure that I ever specifically decided that this was a piece of artwork, it seemed too transient at the time, however now I realise that this foray into webspace gave me a foothold in the incomprehensibly large online community and left, within a technological and rapidly changing environment, a space dedicated to a personal, internal argument.
The result of this journal still intrigues me. I think in some ways it was an attempt to shout ‘I’M HERE’, but also to relate what I was thinking or fighting with to those who I knew would read it; friends, but most importantly my parents read it. I knew that whatever I wrote would be read by them. The last post, which was subsequently removed, dealt with a situation concerning a close friend. To someone who knew little of me or my situation, this may have been interesting, however considering most of my readership were connected to both people this became a destructive piece of writing and, having caused some difficulty, was removed and replaced with an apology and notice that the journal was to end at that point.
As I read back through that journal, I am not sure that I can totally identify with the person who is writing. It is often said that hindsight is a wonderful thing, and in this instance it is, I wish I had known what I was doing. It taught me a valuable lesson about where to stop and how best to conduct writing, however I have maintained an unedited style, using a train of thought method to convey what is happening at any point. Using a blog to convey frustration can end up with the author being affected far more than those he is writing about. This last year has contained some high drama for me, and it has been instrumental in developing the path that my work took. As much as I consider this significant, it was not something that could be talked about in such a public context, and although I do have a tendency to go public with most things it was a deliberate decision to only refer to the happenings without describing them in any way. Felix Gonzales-Torres writes “We are always shifting back and forth between the personal and public. One day I want to make something from what I read in the paper and the next day I want to make work about a memory I have about eating a delicious meal with my boyfriend in Italy”. His work was a public interpretation of something very private done with much dignity, uncomplicated by unnecessary information and preserving what should remain private. This is a tough lesson to learn for someone who’s work is so intertwined with a personal relationship or set of events yet one which is important to learn especially within a blog with a potentially global readership.
The lack of identity I share with my former journal writing self is due not to a dramatic change in persona but to a gradual development of my ideas, knowledge and confidence. The best, most permanent change is often slow and deliberate, informed and developed by experience and situation (as Alfred North Whitehead would put it, each occasion of experience directly influences the next and is inherently influenced by the previous) and as such is unnoticeable at the time, only recognised when hindsight is applied at a future point. The journal allows me to look back and be amazed not just at my previous naivety, but at the progress I have since made. Similarly the Degrees Unedited blog has allowed me, at times, to read back over where I was and revisit ideas as well as realise the progress that has been made, both in myself and in my work. At one point I accused an artist of making difficult, inaccessible work (I may have even written that the man is an idiot, or words to that extent), yet a future blog extols his work and makes amends for the previous slight on his practice. This was because of a progression along the learning curve leading to an alteration of opinion, which within a chosen subject where the learning curve is so difficult to define provides some comfort that progress has been made.
The audience must be considered, both in this instance and with consideration as to what they will expect. The Degrees Unedited blog provides an audience of other students, most in their final year, all of whom will have similar experiences of excitement, success, self doubt and frustration along the way. In some ways it becomes a support group, the addition of the ability to comment of what each other has written allowing for a supportive environment as well as debate around each others work, and an opportunity to realise that you are not alone on the path you are following. These are people outside your cohort, your friendship group and your school and as a result can, at times, provide an unbiased and more insightful response to what you write.
As well as your fellow students, it is important to recognise that the blog is published on the Artists Talking site and thus is available to other artists who may comment form a perspective of hindsight or with experience and maturity in their practice. You are part of an online community. What started out with that bout of self promotion has developed to incorporate this idea of community, of being part of a wider context.
I discovered an ability to step away from my practice, out of the pressures of having to critically explain each move and thought and instead reflect on less ‘highbrow’ issues, to gripe about the course and its shortcomings, as well as realising the scale of the challenge and the opportunities I was presented with. At times the need to be critical paralyses me, the blog gave me a space to wrestle with this and to read how others were dealing with the same situation. Removing your work from its institutional context (the best way is to show somewhere, however this is a far more difficult opportunity to harness) gives you a new perspective; it is easy to become settled in the educational environment and make work which relates to the people you are around and the tutors who inform and assess the work, placing work on a blog or other such site brings a realisation that people with no knowledge of you (except for what you tell them) will be making an exegesis based solely on the images you have placed. This can be invaluable in developing your sense of how the work might be read, or in how to develop your methods of documentation in a safe environment, preparation for the wider world.
In short, the Degrees Unedited blog presented me with a challenge, a learning curve and a record of my final year of study that may still prove itself invaluable. The desire for self-promotion is still to bear fruit, although the publication of this writing and the mentions in print through the ‘Bits From the Blogs’ section might suggest it has begun, but so too has a realisation that to blog is not to advertise but is to be part of an online community.
