October 23, 2003
if i'm writing about art, i'm not thinking about the bad things: Xu Bing lecture etc.
I'm kind of weird again tonight.
My drawing three class met at the library today. We critiqued for about an hour before heading across the street to a lecture by Xu Bing. He seemed pretty interesting. It was hard to understand his English sometimes, but most of his ideas came through just fine. He had some humor every once in a while, but I also felt like there was a joke or two that the crowd missed because we weren't sure what he said. I heard the word "cute" to describe him as a person a couple of times (whatever connotation it was used in). His work mainly dealt with printmaking and language and written characters. He has lived here in the US for the last ten years or so. One piece I particularly liked, The Living Word, used a transition of characters, from modern Chinese to pictographs, symbolizing the word "bird". These characters start off lying on the ground and begin to rise up into a flock of floating symbols. If anything, it was pretty. I'm just writing to keep my self from freaking out, so that's what you get. At the end, they let him take four or five questions. About two of them were worth asking. It took a while for some of the questions to be explained to him with his limited English. That made the dumb questions all the more excruciating. During the question, you could look around the room and watch all the people staring at the floor, grimacing, because they know that it's a stupid question and they still have to sit through several more sentences before it doesn't get across the first time and it has to be repeated. When the information finally would get there, every one would perk up and pay attention to the speaker again. That might have been the best part of the night. And tomorrow night, Horacio Pagani is speaking. Hopefully I'll remember to go to that too.
I finally get to have dinner with Susan and Steve and Joe and Krista on Friday. One of these days I'll start differentiating between the two Susan's I mention on this site. You'll just have to use context clues for the time being. I'll get a crit of some sort from them. I also need someone to advise me on grad school applications. There must be lots of things I don't know and I need to do it soon, so I can get reference letters taken care of. There wont be much, if any time after we get back in school before deadlines start popping up. I'm a little bit overwhelmed by it at the moment, among other things. The hula machine is getting started this weekend. I have to keep going. I'll explain that one some other day.
