Obstacle Course.

[sechan19]

For some reason, my mind has absolutely refused to let me concentrate in the past week. And despite piles of free time, I haven't gotten done nearly what I ought to have done. It's extremely frustrating. I realize that I have to get the old brain back into shape for the kind of exercise it's going to be undergoing for the next several years, but right now it seems intent on thumbing its nose at me - and I cannot muster the discipline to make it behave.

It's no good at all, and I'm very disgruntled.

Tomorrow I'll be leading the discussion in the Chinese art course, and I'm nervous about that naturally. But I have managed to make myself fairly well prepared for it. On the Methodology front I find myself becoming a Griselda Pollock convert while at the same time I'm ridiculously annoyed with T.J. Clark. Not what I expected at all. And Japanese continues as it always does, with the portfolio project beginning to require more of my time than I imagined at first - the downfall of choosing an extremely archaic text.

Of course, I need to make better use of my time. That's always the answer, and I know it. But somehow I persist in not taking my very own good advice.

And I have an irrational craving for cherry pie.

Comments

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

The name T.J. Clark sounds familiar... is this a different person from Tim Clark, curator of Japanese art at the British Museum?

[reteva.livejournal.com]

He's a professor of art history at the University of Berkeley; so no relation, I guess. He's mainly a social historian/theoretician (although the particular article I read by him did not have that cast as far as I could tell, which was interesting) so you might have encountered him in the course of doing your master's thesis. Didn't you say that your SOAS mentor was a big theory buff?

[foxxydancr.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of the reverse of you; I rather like Clark, but Pollock makes me cranky. While I agree with her on a lot of things, I think there are a LOT of problems with her approach, and just things I dislike about her paradigm.

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Angus is big into historical theory, but thankfully only within the field of Japanese history and not more generic historical/philosophical/social theory. .. I actually rather like that my primary exposure to historiography has come from historians of Japan and not general sources - it gives me a more unusual experience, and therefore the ability to bring a different approach...

[reteva.livejournal.com]

I just can't get over Clark's emotionality in this piece. He doesn't strike me as being a social historian at all here - just another aesthetically-bound formalist. Quite the reverse of what I expected from him, really.

[foxxydancr.livejournal.com]

I wish J had us reading the chapter about Olympia; I think it's a much better example of his style and methods. I like Clark because he still believes that there is something special about art; I don't think Pollock does, really.

[reteva.livejournal.com]

Interesting thought. I don't know if I'd go that far with Pollock, myself. It seems to me to be less a question of whether or not there's something special about art and more a question of how much that "something special," which is different for everyone, should be a part of one's theory about art. Clark obviously sets a lot of store by it - too much, I think - and Pollock almost none - also possibly a flaw.

We need to find a happy medium. ;)

[foxxydancr.livejournal.com]

happy medium? bah humbug. ;)
i'll be so happy when tomorrow's class is over with.