Studio 8: Pleasure, Excess and Dirt

Studio brief

Why do certain objects, practices and people appear to have a right place? What happens when they are discovered outside it? This studio will explore ideas of category, definition, identification and belonging through examination of a series of objects and behaviours that appear to be in the wrong place. We will investigate the pleasurable, surreal and disturbing effects of subverting categorisation and the methods various writers and artists have used to do so.

You'll investigate the pleasurable, surreal and disturbing effects of subverting categorisation and the methods various writers and artists have used to do so. We'll also focus on the place of the home and things that have apparently strayed from it, such as sleep, sex, washing, women.

The studio sessions will address the following questions: What can the experiences of agoraphobes teach us about routine, ritual and classification? What makes certain objects dirty and others clean? What makes a building ugly? What does it mean to feel you are in the wrong place, the wrong skin, the wrong sex?

You'll encounter tights, beds, handbags, toothpaste and tomato puree, take part in collaborative reading and writing and be supported in the development of original written dissertations.

Weeks 1-7: gallery visit and reading list

  1. Gallery visit to Louise Bourgeois’ Artists Rooms, Tate Modern.
  2. Claire Louise Bennett, Pond. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days.
  3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.
  4. Vincent, ‘Confessions of an agoraphobic victim’. Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces.
  5. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Holly Pester, Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip.
  6. Roland Barthes, ‘Paris Not Flooded’. Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, AA Files.
  7. Elin Diamond, ‘Rethinking Identification’, The Kenyon Review. Franz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’.

Image. West Side Story (dir. Jerome Robbins, 1961).

Clip from West Side Story (dir. Jerome Robbins, 1961).

Details

Tutor Edwina Attlee

Dissertation Studios

 
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