Stuff and Nonsense

Lucazoid seems to have gone on a blogoliday.... and hasn't posted stuff about the squatspace valentines day filmfest or that knot galleyr have found premises up the rad to battle on wiht frequency lab - or even that they got booted out of their crumbly old premises.......

So sorry forlack of local informative content. I reccomend that you read bilateral or the Art life. Whenever I'm homesick I read the latter and I cna pretend that SINNY isa friendly sydney of happy beer drinking culturla congosceti, not the sweaty, sticky mozzie ridden cockroach crawling hell hole it is,

Right now, I'm writing from London. ANd loving it. I can wear a black skivvy, and jeans and even a jacket outside. I can even wear a long blouse and a skirt with tights. I can stroll around for hours in the middle of the day. And I don't sweat, scratch, sneeze or burn. I love European weather. Nive cold crisp, weak sunlight or none at all.

Most people think I'm insane. But I hate melanoma, and kaftans don't ahve pockets, so 6 months of the year in sydney, I hide indoors to fearful of sartorial disasters.........

I've started on this track coz today I went out to the V&A in search of KULCHA. I've spent most of this week doing extreme sports cram in the British library, and my wrist is getting a bit tired . The old tate and NGA renderme fearful coz of tendency for compulsive skethcing of great paintings, which is bad for wrist. I'd actually intended to chekc out the New Tate. But the district line was pretty much shut down for the day so I gave it a miss and headed north.

I've always dreamed of seeing that great big persian carpet in the V&A........ an art school lecturer raved about it.... But the islamic art section is closed for renovations. So I had a good hour gawking at the indian section, and then wandered into the fashion show. Joy oh joy. Lots of corsets and stays and lace and ruffles, and suits, and evening gowns, and good english tweed. The standout was the popology show of Jena CLaude Castelbajac crazed concoctions. Think of Teddy bear jackets, and hightop tops and postcard parkas.....He's almost as good as Leigh Bowery!

These evening we headed off to the Barbican to see a bit of theatre. The barbican is one of those idealistic 70's 'lets bring cultulre to the workers' kind of projects - sprawling acroos a housing estate, a theatre, cinma, glaleyr, and a few freeways. Think lots of dark 70's brickwork and le corbusier style..... oh no..... no,not that bad, but its got a definite la defense type ambiance. You know the architecture that's meant to remind you that the idea is greater than the people? I felt very very small. The theatre was good tho.

Home again, to watvh DVD's of my latest obsession SHAMELESS.

Oh god this is reading like an average banal blog and I'm sorry. It's 1am and I've gotta get up in 7 hours to go back to the library.

I'm researching postwar art education, in the UK. It's a damn shame that the open source art school blog/project seems to have died, but, hell, I canbarely keep up wht the blogs I got, and maybe I should start getting closed source about my Intellecutal Proerty on art pedagogy since that's what I'm rapidly becoming an expert on.(just jokes)

The reaosn why I'm researching postwar art education in the UK, is that many art teachers in Sydney come from the UK, and were educatioed during or after the changes in the 60's and 70's. Trying to understand the changes in Australian art education in the 70's and 90's needs some more critical and comparative context than listening to gossip (mind you I do this pretty well, its called reflexive ehtnography) or reading sycophantic posturing catalogue essays. London, as the head of the commonwealth, has a mightly resource of archives from you know, Austrlia, New Zealand, Canada - as well as within the UK. I found a great book, that's kind of like THE TOME THAt WILL BE - only its all aobut NEw Zealand. Think I could find a copy in Austrlia? you gotta be kidding.

Libraries are such strange and randowmthings. I spend my last week in Paris doing pretty muchwhat I've been doing in London - chekcing out national library and that of some of the schools - just to see what had been writtineabout postwar art education. Just to get a comparison wiht the critical culture - of how things used ot be, and how they changed.

The advantages of Blighty and Frogville is that more research gets done and more researhc gets published. The biggerart schools have their OWN PUBLISHING HOUSES. Sociology of Art is a distinct discipline, as is cultural history. I found some GREAT flow chart exploring 2 differnet models of art schools - the offical transgressive art student model (yep, someone's described COFA) and the oficial therapeutic art school model (err meadowbank? east sydney in the good old days?, some hippie's fantasy?). However, with photocopying costing 20p per page (and no double paging allowed), and my wrist and 2B pencil (no pens allowed) both about to give way, and my photographic memory capacity having been flushed down the loos of the Sandringham while there was still a Berlin Wall, I'm not hopeful of retaining much. And there ain't that many government reports or conference papers on e-bay or amazon. bugger.

I'll sort it somehow.

btw THe triumph of Painting at the Saatchi kind of died in the arse. They were booted out of the building in october.... so no saatchi. Shit! is that some kind of karma?


(http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/fashion/castelbajac/index.html)