This week at college

Is this your idea of "being at college"? It was a good moment, at South London Gallery cafe after a seminar by two former book arts students who graduated in 2006.

Discussing their collaborative practice with the aid of PowerPoint slides that were part personal narrative and part academic discourse, Monica Rivas Velasquez and Barbara Greisman nevertheless had some interesting things to say about reflections (the visual kind) and losing oneself, about being lost and being present. Two aptly cryptic sayings from my notebook: "Keeping to the subject is the best way we have of keeping off the subject" and "the allegorist can never have enough of things" -the latter is from Walter Benjamin, who spent much of his time, allegedly, recombining fragments of paper (on which he had written) into new meanings.

On the way back from lunch I noticed a small(ish) round stone in the road, a few inches from the curb, and couldn't resist picking it up. This has repercussions for the development of my "text project" - more of which (at great length and tedious detail) later no doubt (the crit is on Tuesday...)

Back at the Wilson Road basment studio, we all assembled to provide a mid-term review for Wiebke, whose work had moved from seascapes with horizons to something less calm and more gestural, but in the same large format -

Wednesday started with a shortish session of screen printing - I'm still on the "big coloured pages, which will be a book of some sort eventually, but I can't decide yet what size or how many pages" project, and hoping it's nearly at an end.

The reading group (only four of us this time, the part-timers, as the full-timers are writing their essay, due next week) met to talk about this chapter in Joanna Drucker's "The Century of Artists' Books" -
We would have liked to see some books post-1993 (the book was published in 1994 and republished, with an "author's preface to the new edition", unchanged in 2004 - about which there was some speculation), and had some questions of who these books were directed at - preaching to the converted? Do such books become historical artefacts; where can they be found (they're hardly mainstream) and what sort of effect does this invisibility give them - indeed, how would you use an artist's book to have a social effect? would you have to be subversive, to pamphleteer -- and how would you compete with other media? who would be interested, anyway? how would you catch their interest, perhaps by relating to their lives a bit...

The practitioner lecturer was Judy Price, a London based artist who works with video,sound, photography and installation. Her practice is sited within the borderlines and interchanges between video and photography. Price was recently artist in residence at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, working with archival film material from the British Mandate period in Palestine. "Divided loyalties" - eg of officials - seemed to have a large and problematic role in her projects, which lately have concerned narratives and myths in contemporary landscapes, especially Palestine.

Although Thursday was strike day for lecturers, I couldn't keep away from screenprinting. I really want to move on to the next phase - plus there was some fabric for the "text project" to print. On the way, someone had stuck up these salient posters, with their careful typography and telling messages -

University Of The Arts London

Is One Of Britain's

Unhappiest

Universities (National Student Survey, 2010)

Nigel Carrington

UAL Head Honcho

Earns

£234,600

A Year

That's

£100,000 More Than The Prime Minister

CCW [Camberwell Chelsea Wimbledon, 3 of the UAL colleges]

Spends

70%

Of Its

Annual Budget

On

Admin

Not Including

Staff

Facilities

Or

Materials

Under the New

"Efficiency Measure"

Up To

7,000 Hours

Of

Teaching Time

Could Be

CUT

As quickly as possible, they were removed....

Not so good for students needing An Education to prepare them for jobs, life, etc.

Meanwhile, in my own post-job life, I got on with screenprinting ... avoiding battles ... still in my comfort zone -
Fabric with words printed in puffer-paste (more of this later, there'll be no avoiding it) ... and once those were done, back to the "journey lines" on paper. The grey-yellow-white combination has long been one of my favourites - note to self: Use it more -
The final print for the day (dark bit on the left) - backing sheets and papers all layered up, and some of the masking (to protect the red area) already removed -
One task for the weekend is to go through the sheets already printed to see if some can be regarded as "finished". On many of them, small areas are left unprinted - originally my intention was to leave these "open" but I seem to be losing sight of that, and the project is evolving in a different way, into lots of small areas of different colours, along with "accidental" overlaps. Also, it was meant to be random, and I find myself being very careful with what goes where. Are there rules, or aren't there rules??