After completing my degree recently, I have been doing a lot of reading, but other than that, I have made a decision to devote this summer to my kids rather than intense study or making, especially since I am likely to become quite consumed and perhaps a little absent-minded in their eyes when I begin an MA in September. Watching me study over the last few years has been really good for them in many ways – they learn by example and a love of learning and ideas is no bad thing to pass on. But they do deserve some focused attention too. Yesterday, however, we managed to combine interests, just about, when we went to Tate Modern’s Mega Please Draw Freely by Ei Arakawa. I was pleasantly surprised when even my eldest somewhat cynical son not only joined us but also seemed satisfied and engrossed. What’s really fun about being able to draw all over the floor, and all over previous visitors’ efforts, is the complete lack of pressure the experience seemed to elicit.
I was also reminded of a passage in my latest favourite book, Marshall McLuhan’s (2010) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He describes how Western society is becoming ‘re-tribalized’, and that in pre-agrarian societies, “there is no true art because everybody is engaged in making art”. Later, at home, we were treated to a particularly avant-garde YouTube video made by another of my children which consisted of whispered nutritional information from various products he had found in the kitchen. Max Ersnt would have been proud! But then, spend any amount of time online – and it doesn’t take long to stumble across all sorts of truly surreal happenings. If the vast majority of us are indeed, as we turn our consciousnesses inside out via the internet, engaged in making art, what does that mean for “Art”? Something for me to think about as I head into that MA. There is, of course, also a great deal more to say about the trend for collaboration in art in general and a much-needed evaluation of individualism in our society, which Arakawa’s work asks us to consider. McLuhan is an excellent resource on that too. In fact, his writing ties in so much with my ongoing inquiry which aims to explore profound structural transformations brought about by digitisation, that I think I’m going to become a firm McLuhan groupie but I’ll save my effusive thoughts on him for another post.
The youngest of mine is the least enamoured by art, for now. Maths is his thing but he had fun too although I suspect the giant bubbles we passed on our way home were as much if not even more fun for him.
Here are a few pics from the day. It was definitely a good way to pass the time in this not quite post-Covid lockdown, rain-sodden summer we’re having.
Images (c)SJField2021
McLuhan, M. (2010) Understanding media: the extensions of man. (Repr) London: Routledge.