Novelty and Art I

Have you ever noticed somebody leaving his own tutorial at academy in absolute disgust and anger - and I'm talking of a tutor really bold and powerfully eloquent, invested with humour, irony and sarcasm?! I did and it was a very disclosing moment, when his many powers failed him. Why, oh why did it happen?

We - a friend and me - had prepared a presentation about Rachel Whiteread, which prominently featured  her Closet 1988, on which Rachel Whiteread herself commented that it was the cast of the inner space of a closet she used to play in as a child, where she would play that she was entering the magical realm of Narnia. To produce this cast she had to demolish this very closet.

What ensued was not a discussion , as one might expect, on the work of art and its implications, something my friend and me were most eager to do and even travelled far - because of the sculptures entitled Plug I had made an outing to a morgue to get a photo of an autopsy table or we had imagined doing the whole presentation at a local morgue - but instead people started imagining procedures of how one may produce a cast of something without destroying the positive. And this was exactly the point the tutor left uttering that if we were interested in technics we should be studying at a technical college instead ;).

Me was also very annoyed at the people who had simply blown our presentation and I still was on the next day, when I met another tutor sitting in the cafeteria and desperately trying to make up a subject for next semester's seminar :). Thus drawing from the experiences of the day before and the fact that he was also a  publisher I suggested that he should propose a seminar about the technical aspects of making a book. And so he did. And never before have I witnessed any of his seminars so full, though of course - and I knew him for this aforehand :) - he never did an outing to a printing press or indeed any at all ;)!