Inner City Line

Keith Tyson

I got a History Painting. I haven't printed it yet.

Shell

When Bachelard talks about shells in The Poetics of Space, I wonder if the ideas he applies to the psychological resonance of snail shells could also be applied to nutshells.

Trace

Scuola di Atene

Today I went to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. In it is Raphael's cartoon for School of Athens. It was really great

Arti Performative

In a performance art class we were shown two pieces - one was a video of Samuel Beckett's Not I, and the other was a recent London performance of John Cage's 4'33". I had never seen Not I before and I enjoyed it. My understanding of the Italian language is poor and limited to picking out words I know and forming my own sentences around them, but I think the teacher was talking about 'speech art'. He kept saying 'si parla' is better than 'io parlo' etc. which means 'it is spoken' is better than 'I speak'. I still have no idea what this means. It was quite interesting to hear him talk about language (I think) when I was excluded from the conversation for that very reason.

I've just finished reading Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension which also talks of language. In light of this, I think this is what the teacher was saying: 'When you speak, you speak using a prescribed framework of that particular language. Likewise, when you experience a piece of art, you experience it through your cultural framework.' I suppose that, similarly, performance in this context could be described as a schematic language.

With this in mind, I remember watching Nicolas Philibert's Le Pays des Sourds, perhaps it's relevant to this sort of discussion.

I also re-watched Lars Von Trier's The Five Obstructions. Good stuff

The Hidden Dimension

Public Distance: Whole body has space around it, postural communication begins to assume importance

Statue of St. Bartholomew, Marco d'Agrate

A Void

An unusual void found in floor of gothic Duomo. Conforming to constraints was plainly not a worry for labouring folk long ago; this church building took 600 'Christmas Day's to construct.

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven

Via Massimiano

Via Ventura

Via Ventura is like a poor man's Vyner Street, but still pretty good. The other day we went to Klerkx gallery with an exhibition by Matt Calderwood, and Francesca Minini gallery had an exhibition by Simon Dybbroe Møller. Today we went to Prometeogallery, which has an exhibition by Ivan Moudov that I really enjoyed. The space was divided into two rooms, with two distinct sets of work.

This photo is of a piece called Fragments, which is a box displaying an array of artefacts stolen from various exhibitions. For instance, the vertical white stripe on the right-hand side of the box is a leather strap from one of Matthew Barney's pieces, and the odd shape at the front-right is stolen from a Sarah Lucas piece. What made the piece particularly interesting for me was that just two days ago we picked up our own little pilfered souvenirs from an exhibition by Alfredo Jaar:

It's ok, though - Alfredo Jaar gave a talk at Camberwell last year and he explained that people kept taking these slides from his exhibition and he liked it!

The other half of the exhibition was called Traffic Control and were videos of performance pieces in which the artist dressed as a Bulgarian policeman and controlled the flow of traffic - in two pieces he was stood in the middle of the road directing cars; in another video he drove around a roundabout slowly for one hour.

Lambrate

Pinacoteca

Drawings

Pinacoteca di Brera. These photos aren't top quality

The Pinacoteca is a big gallery which is above the Accademia. Originally part of the school - now separate but free for students - it contains a lot of work from the renaissance and a small but decent modern collection.

No Gelmini Day

There was a big rally in front of the castle today - apparently the Minister of Education is introducing budget cuts for state schools and the Accademia students aren't too happy about it! I forgot to take my camera so here are a couple of the past few days' photographs.

Accademia

This week has consisted mainly of arranging to see tutors and attempting to articulate that we are students of the school and not lost tourists. Here you are expected to organise your own time (the working week being Monday to Saturday) and to choose your subjects. I think this might be slightly different for full-time students, but there is still a great variety in the courses available. So far I have met a painting tutor, Prof. Salvatore, and a 'Grafica Multimediale' tutor, Prof. Muzzolini (...).

Today I should be meeting Prof. Chiodi, tutor of 'disgno' (drawing). At this stage much of the students' work I have seen has been fairly traditional, but having seen the catalogue of last year's exhibition I am still quite hopeful!

Milano

We've been in Milan for about a week, found an apartment and the Accademia and will start writing soon.