Art and Difference

 

It's a funny morning I'm slightly Jet lagged after coming back from Canada .  I think this picture is funny as I was at the time really trying to make some sort of art statement but now it just looks a bit sad- especially where I haven't quite managed to get a piece of paper big enough for a backdrop - but it was in the middle of a workshop.  

I liked your writing about the leadership meeting, it struck me that it is not easy to be a leader and I bought a book about Lacan as I'd been reading a bit about the idea of "The Master" but although I read it at the airport I can't say it made much sense to me - the main thing seems to be to not give up on your desire but beyond that I am not sure what was been said - it all felt very circular.

I've just done a blog post on "Artists legacy studio " project blog and it struck me that I may be one of those artists who has a "Practice" and then does other work outside of Practice to earn a living.  This is what most people do I think and what I thought I did for ages until I realised that to earn a living doing one thing did not leave a space to do the other thing so I just called it one thing and said I had an holistic practice - whatever that may mean.

Now I've started thinking about "Difference" hence art and Difference this is a clever clever reference to Derrida's "writing and difference" a book I was excited to buy but unable to read as I'm just not really clever enough to do much more than puns on names when it comes to Derrida. 

My current thinking on the work at the University is that art offers an unclear "Space of Difference" we do not know what this is but it is different to what we are used to - we want to work differently to normal so lets enter this space of difference and see what happens.

I don't think we do this within our work at the poly-technic so perhaps this is the difference. We may end up doing this type of thing in certain situations but essentially we aim to build engaged spaces where we can imagine new things and new ways.  part of this may be the suggestion of difference in terms of approach and thinking but it is not the reason for the work.

So not to give up on my desire for a better way of doing things I wonder if having a dualistic practice is actually OK - to have the work as Kate and Steve and to have the work at the University as Steve and to flit between the two and not worry that much about how and where they connect and borrow from each other and also to accept they are different but one is no better than the other.