More About the RCA

ARIES -It's been a long haul since last summer when you felt like a race horse chomping at the bit. Now you can throw off that annoying jockey and gallop as fast as you like. And you'll love feeling the wind in your mane.


I mentioned that I have been attending lectures at the RCA and I can't emphasize how interesting and stimulating they have been. I am really being changed by the experience, as you can see here.
On Monday mornings the Printmaking Dept. brings in a visiting artist. So far they have all been former RCA students. I have attended three talks and they have all been very interesting and all very different from each other. One I may have mentioned is Dick Jewell, who has worked with found photographs from photo booths, magazines, etc. and also does film/video and his own photography.
The second person was Marilene Oliver who just graduated a couple of years ago and currently has an exhibition in London that I haven't made it to yet. Her work is very beautiful and intriguing. A project she presented was one in which she had her family: mother, father, sister and herself, put through an MRI scanner and had images taken every 2 cm. These were then screen printed onto plexi and stacked together in such a way that they created a cubic life size transparent representation of each of them. She has worked with seed beeds hanging on threads to create images, and acupuncture needles poked into foam to create images. Very thoughtful, tasteful and delicate work. I liked her work a lot.
This week we had a presentation by Adam Dant, who started publishing, writing and distributing his own artist's newspaper under the name Donald Parsnip 15 years ago when he graduated from RCA. He has done a variety of projects in a variety of ways under this invented identity like writing for the Independent newspaper as a ficticious art critic. One project that I particularly liked was a language creation project in Paris. He advertised for students to create new words for things that didn't have words. This is actually a kind of game that Bob and I have done with our friends Dan & Freela for years. But he took it to another level. They invented the words, wrote up a dictionary and then proceeded to try to get them into the local vocabulary. They had their best success in small villages. One word they made up was for "the croissant that was bigger than all the others at the bakery" One of the students went into a local bakery and asked for the (?) (sorry I've forgotten the word!) When the baker didn't know what it was, the student explained and got the croissant. The next day they sent in a different student to the same bakery asking for the same thing. This time the baker knew exactly what the person wanted and gave them the biggest croissant. Eventually over time, the baker could be heard to ask someone who wanted a croissant if they wanted the (?) and explaining to them what it was, thus introducing the word into the local vocabulary. Pretty clever!
So, the Printmaking Dept has one set of presentations, but there are many more.

There are four different Critical and Historical lectures throughout the week. They come under the titles of "In The Realm of the Senses", "Aesthetic Theory and the Contemporary Moment", "All Tomorrow's Futures" and ""On the Road To Nowhere: Modernity & Monotony". Mon Weds Thurs & Fri I can attend a one hour lecture on a different topic each day. All with very clever titles to lure you in, such as, "Earlids & Brainlids: on thoughts and sounds", "The Colour of Time (god is a lobster)","The Future of Fun" and "Boredom in Photography". I have tried to attend as many as I can. The students enroll for one and just attend once a week, but I'm such a keener I go about 3 times a week.
The wonderful thing about the RCA is that there is such a large population in London PLUS they can bring visiting artists and lecturers in from other Universities not only from London, but all of England, AND Europe, for the day and it's no big deal. In Calgary, we have limited resources locally and to bring anyone in from outside means long travel distances and accommodation and just a huge amount of expense. But these guys get people from all the other Universities and Colleges in London and Oxford and Reading and Bristol and on and on and on. There have been historians, philosophers, artists and Sony game developers. Only one lecture was so dense and philisophical that I only understood about 1/3 of what he said and one was a little simplistic, but then it was about video game developments, so not too surprising. I have enjoyed them all and am just soaking it all up.