nonsite

Busy week. I gave a presentation for my Mapping and Marking public art proposal: Kingsway Luminaires to the selection committee on Friday at 9:45. I enjoyed the process- it felt good. I should know by next Wednesday. Preparing for that presentation distracted me from my MA_DA research.

Andy had suggested that I look at Marc Augé’s ideas about non-places which he wrote about in his book: Non-Places: introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. Interesting ideas, and I can see how Augé’s ideas relate to some of the images I was posting in my nonsite project at the end of last year. Over the holidays I’ve pretty much completely revised the site- it sill needs a lot of editing, but I have now moved over pretty much everything that might be useful from this site to reflect upon in nonsite.

My ideas are becomeing clearer. I’m still thinking about Benedict Anderson’s ideas around the construction of imagined communities- and the contemporary artworld in particular, as an imagined comunity. What is it that makes the artworld an imagined community and how is one’s identity as an artist formed in relation to it? I have come to realize that for me this was something that I had a very tangible sense of as a young art student studying in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the mid 1970s. Those were seminal years- back in the day (as they say). Over the next few months I am going to try to remember and reconstruct the circumstances that made NSCAD the amazing place that it was in 1975 and 1976 and collapse that time and those memories with the past two years that I have been working on this MA course at Camberwell.