Yesterday I went to the Writing Center for help writing my thesis. I've had little direction on how to go about it or what the guidelines are. I've visited the University's online resources, which would be more helpful if they showed an example instead of a page of words describing pagination... ultimately I find again and again that words of help written by people, are alienated from those people, and that true help is a feeling. Suffice to say, Jennifer at the Writing Center was helpful and I have an appointment to see her again in two weeks.
Though I've been reading from a variety of sources over the last two years, my research has been scattered, non-linear, and the antithesis of efficient. Nonetheless, I can't be ashamed of the process because I've been absorbing information all this time. During my session at the Writing Center, Jennifer suggested I had a lot of research to do. This was a blow to me, because I thought I had been staying ahead with the assortment of self-imposed readings I had done. When I consider what a slow-cooker I am, I forget to look at the other end of that spectrum, the pressure to produce. The Raphael reading made me think in terms of pure planning vs. pure production. Like the anecdote concerning the wall decoration he had no time to plan out with preliminary drawings, I like to wade in the pool of possibility and the fearful waters of the concern that the product might not realize my concept. I have full control of the planning. I have virtually no control on the reception of the project. While I might be happy with the end result of my careful planning and execution, there's still the concern that I won't make the deadline because I was not ready to leave the planning process. But far more frightening is the fear that I will leave the planning process in fear of the deadline and make a monstrosity that I can never love.
Jennifer, whose livelihood comes from her tutelage in getting results in writing form, needed to light a hotter candle beneath me than I had lit for myself. Typically, I'm too busy counting the different candles burning, and from both ends, to think about how hot each one is, individually. There is a collective heat that never stops. I filled the time between the appointment and my next appointment with more time in the 3rd and 4th floor stacks.
"You need to find the gap in all previous research on this topic." She explained. My thesis topic is broad because art is criticized for being too personal and Art is that which appears to invoke the primal unity of all things. Firstly I spent a lot of time working on imagery that would evoke an experience which could only be communicated through the medium of art, and now I'm being asked to convert that language into written English. Even more problematic, the English should be logically formatted, an argument, a dogma which is so well-researched it must become truth (i.e. aspires to publication). Meanwhile, my art should be original. I must research my methods as I work. I must spend all my time practicing and gaining new insights into the practical methods by which I make it. I must contribute to the technology of making art.
Fill the gap, contribute to the technology, perfect my craft, perfect my writing, perfect the world. Produce, produce, produce.
And students are supposed to do this in two years with the scantest finances. What a system our idealism has created! Oddly enough, my thesis research focuses on modernity's idealistic pursuit of knowledge and production as a linear (logical) progression biting it's own tail as it reaches its limits and rediscovers that as the people it is made up of, it is only half ideally human. When we ignore our animal drives in the hopes of transcending them, we segment ourselves, only to see that we are really werewolves terrorizing each other at night, while during the day we continue producing.
For me, process entails a lot of time because it's my wish to balance these two halves of myself as a person so that I do not become segmented and look for escape from reality. Nietzsche said we "need art for protection and as medicine." And as a society, I feel we are under-medicated because we are conditioned to value the product. It pleases me to focus on and even imagine the artistic process of Raphael and Michaelangelo realistically without the Apolline veil. In this way we are creating new myths which in turn reconnect us with our primal core. I've been a painter in Raphael's shop. I've been a designer explaining my vision in it's cohesion to an artistic director's vision to a shop of builders and painters. But I understand the plight of the whole organization too. Produce. Produce Produce... load-in on Friday...
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