Off my rocker at the art school bop

[venta]

Last year, I suddenly discovered that my offices (on a university campus) were near the art department.

This year we have seen no such high-jinks, but there has been a stripy sign up proclaiming that we could visit this year's degree show if we wanted. Last Thursday, hjalfi herded some of us across the grass to go and look at art.

The art department (the sprawling, single-storey white buildings in the photo linked above) looks like something leftover from WWII. However, inside it is all whitewashed and crammed full of Fine Art students' statements to the world.

I composed my features into my best looking-at-art expression and sallied forth. I tried. I really did. I peered at video installations. I listened to soundscapes. I paused before... things and struggled to understand... well, anything, really.

The art is presented as-is, with no statements on why someone thought joining lots of bits of plumbing supplies together to make domed structures said anything in particular about (or to) society. The multicoloured disk covered with (invalid) sums was a mystery. Ditto the small room almost entirely empty, barring a balsa wood box structure, some plaster shapes and some oddly translucent blocks which the label told us were soap. And the video installations... good grief they were everywhere, and I couldn't understand what a single one of them was about.

Disappointingly, the artwork explained on video here by a suitably photogenic student wasn't running when we went by, and existed just as a sad tangle of wires and speakers.

On the plus side, there was a mechanical horse. At least, there was a mechanical... thing with a saddle suspended above it. I'm not sure why it was called Sisyphus Unchained, though.

It's quite easy to sneer at student art. But I really didn't want to. I wanted to discover something new and exciting. I wanted to be sucked in by video installations and staggered by a new viewpoint. Instead, almost everything left me strangely unmoved. I'm surprised that the show doesn't include blurb produced by the students to introduce their art; I wonder how many of them would like it to, and how many think the works stand by themselves. (And indeed how many of them do stand alone, when they're not being gazed at by three increasingly disillusioned computer programmers.)

One wall was decorated with strips, fragments and whole rolls of insulating tape in various colours. I've no idea what it was about, but the result was strangely attractive. Other than that, like a proper Philistine I returned to look at only two works, both of which were traditional painting.

You don't get this with watercolours, though:

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Sisyphus Unchained

?? Sisyphus never did get chained, that was the whole point of him. He tricked Hades into chaining himself instead. Maybe they were thinking of Tantalus.

(I'm now wondering if CRASH-MESSAGE.txt is actually the artwork itself, in an ironic comment on the nature of video art. If not, it should be.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I didn't even wonder about the chains - I just wasn't clear why Sisyphus would be linked with a horse! (Ditto Tantalus, actually....)

I also wondered that about CRASH_MESSAGE.txt! One of my colleagues had seen it earlier in the week, though, and said it had been a rather nice animation - a model of the room it was in, projected onto one wall, with various items bouncing improbably around. There were also screens displaying details of the wireframe model, the source code and - as it turned out - the core dump :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Tantalus because of the saddle being suspended above it. But as you say, no obvious equine connection. I expect it's a metaphor. Who knows the mind of an art student?