For once, I feel like something in my school readings actually relates to
my life. In a lot of critical theory about art (in the broadest sense)
it discusses the shift in the mid-late 1900's from work that was
autonomous and historical - its meaning was self-contained, and the thing
(be it a painting, a text, etc.) made sense in a historical context. You
could trace the work's development through history to see how one would
arrive at such a visual presentation or set of ideas - to work that exists
in a collapsed present tense, as though it has black-holed itself off from
history. Suddenly history doesn't make any sense in reference to the
present, There is no traceable reality to what you are looking at, what
you are thinking. You can not formulate a concrete thought yet about what
it is you are thinking/feeling/experiencing because you no longer have
anything in your personal (or in the case of art, the academic
establishment's) history bank of memories to draw from.
Everything is new, and yet it isn't. There is a yearning to find something to relate everything to. I'm nostalgic for a time that isn't
just past, but maybe didn't even really exist, because as I'm going
through this huge internal re-working of my perspective I find that I'm
re-writing my past as well.
I'm struggling not to lose sight of my goals. Simultaneously forgetting and not at all able to forget that there is this other world called "my life". Which I'd like to be closed off from.
for a while.