I know my writing on the project ended up being a bit stiff and stilted. I think the main reason this happened is that the topic, while something I was very interested in and passionate about, ended up being very difficult to research. I'm not sure if not many people have written on the act of looking and being in dialogue with the artist or if I was just looking in the wrong places, but I definitely struggled to have my thoughts make "intellectual sense"--if that makes sense.
Other things:
I'm really happy we made it to the V&A. I loved getting to spend time with the sculptures there, and I think it helped me a lot with my final Nature and Culture project. Especially important to me was Samson Slaying a Philistine (1562) by Giovanni Bologna. The way it invites--no, begs--the viewer to walk around it and take it in from all angles is amazing.
Another sculpture that was completely different but also fascinated me was Vessel (1988) by Takiguchi Kozuo. Part of this is due to the title, which is so general so as to allow this abstract figure to be almost any kind of container, and yet so specific with the choice of word 'vessel' over some blander word like 'container'.
Illustrating the importance of a title in abstract art, this next work has perhaps a more interesting shape--more human, suggesting the curves of a body?--than the previous one, but its name Sculpture draws you in far less. It doesn't pin as much importance to the figure as the word 'vessel' does for the previous one.
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| Sculpture (1958-9), by Yagi Kazuo |
Unfortunately the museum had both of these two works behind class with a wall behind them, so their interesting shapes couldn't be explored 3-dimensionally in the way that sculptures need.
Also just to touch on Keats, watching Bright Star and visiting his house made his obsession with death make a lot more sense. Seeing him in the movie constantly taking care of his brother with tuberculosis and then seeing his medical instruments from his early career as a doctor brought home just how close his contact with death was, even way before he began to face it for himself.
I think reading some of To the Lighthouse made the visual/textual connection clearer to me. There's the obvious stuff where Woolf is writing about painting, but also just the way she writes in general is incredibly visual and painterly in the detail. The density of the descriptions does make it hard to read quickly though.
I read Great Gatsby before coming to London, which was another novel that has immensely creative descriptions. I wasn't at that time thinking about visuals in terms of texts as much as now, so I'll be curious whenever I go back and read that if there's a similar quality in it.
