The end of art 130

Thursday, March 11, 2004 » school thought

As of about 3:15 PM today I have been done with all non-finals work for class. So ends two weeks full of papering, photographing, and Chinese-ing. Now I just have to worry about two finals and print a few images for my photo portfolio, but that doesn't seem like a big deal. I mean, none of them are even taking place on the same day this time around.

Today also marks the end of the atrocious art studio 130, listed as "visual arts as culture" in the course catalog although it was hijacked by the professor and turned into "artist as author." The best thing about it, though, is that we really didn't spend a lot of class time studying artists' written work. Mostly we just watched movies, a lot of which were either dada or in a foreign language (often without subtitles), and let me tell you, there's very little point in watching a dadaist film for more than 10 minutes. If you think about it, there's really no place for it in any class that involves analysis and comparison, or, for that matter, coherent sentences.

If everyone in the class wasn't already sick of it after the first paper, I'm pretty sure they changed their minds by the time the second rolled around, as the professor opted out of appearing in class the week before the assignment was due. So, instead of any clarification of the ambiguous instructions on the class Website, we watched a French film, which wasn't on the class calendar and was never even discussed in the following lectures. Then, at the beginning of the next class, we spent an hour arguing over the paper and blah, blah. Amazing.

For our final lecture today we watched an hour-long home video of the professor and some friends walking around Germany. I am serious. Needless to say, I enjoyed filling out the class evaluation, which I had been looking forward since the first week.

Hopefully next quarter will not be quite as much of a disaster.