duckwit

Kevin Barnes says that he fell in love with the first cute girl that he met who could appreciate Georges Batailles. 

I appreciate Georges Batailles, Kevin Barnes. He broke with Andre Breton’s reading of Surrealism as inherently meaningful, decodable, decidable.

But I haven’t read Story of the Eye. 

I seem to be descending down the rabbit hole of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. I didn’t even know what phenomenology was until about a week ago.

Isn’t it funny how you have these ideas, and then you realise that other, famous people have already had them and tried to explain them in big long opuses. Opi? It’s funny. 

Hmm. I seem to be stuck in this terrible limbo place between extreme boredom and extreme panic. It is a bizarre place. I think they call it denial. 

Meanwhile, NO idea how Krauss managed to produce such a huge volume of highly detailed, hugely original work from such a young age.

Krauss today. Catch up class from last week. Two in one week. Gah.

I should probably restrain myself from physically gripping my head in dismay during class. Then again, R has no qualms about puffing his cheeks up and then hitting his face and/or leaning back in his chair and scratching his fingernails on the wall while students are interpreting texts. At least my physical expressions of inner turmoil are silent.

R spends most of the time when he’s actually speaking with his eyes closed. This means the class can quite freely exchange looks without him noticing. Which is what we do.

Head literally hurts.

Am fine with Grids and can get to R’s “banal” reading of it quite easily. Have a bit of trouble getting to that extra step of ‘repetition is a necessary condition of originality’. The mind blows. Also find distinguishing between centripetal and centrifugal grids a bit mind bending. Though I understand the concept, I have difficulties with identifying them practically.

Luckily I can write one of my essays on ‘On Frontality’ which I totes get and also would quite enjoy talking about, especially relating it back to Monet. That’s thrilling.

In other news, today I was described as a “high functioning individual” which I am rather chuffed about. Obvs not by R. Was a nice counter-balance to R’s description of me as being vague/vulgar/banal although perhaps he does have a point. Is ironic to be vague about Krauss.

Exhaustled. 

Yesterday’s meeting with S went really well but I feel quite daunted. My idea is apparently really original and interesting, but it is based very much in concepts and theory. So I have to battle with theories of representation of reality, maybe even Lacan. And then my theory is going to be a new, very 21st century theory. Which is mega scary! I’m 23, I’m not meant to be theorizing!!!

I’m not sure what the protocol is on blogging about a research thesis. The idea is that it’s an original piece of work at the time it is submitted. And it’s hardly going to be original if I’ve self-published the ideas through blogging.

What’s the deal with ‘publishing’ re: blogging, anyway. Don’t know.

What I do know is that Rosalind Krauss published two articles in ArtForum in the 1960s that predated her doctoral thesis on David Smith, so I’d be more than happy to follow in those footsteps.

Might hold back a bit just in case though.