Seminar

Last week, we had a pretend crit as preparation for the real one next week.

The next day, I had to give a seminar for the theory class. I was up second, but the guy who was meant to go first was so disorganised that he had to reschedule.

For the seminar, you select three readings, formulate five questions about those readings, and then lead the discussion about them. I chose The Amorphist manifesto from 1913, The cacodylic eye from 1921, and a rather long but very readable article about the transition from Picabia's Amorphist paintings to his mechanomorphic ones.

It was a good thing the first guy was so useless. I was most of the way through the first two of the five questions when the tutor interrupted me to say that it'd been an hour already already. I was deeply shocked. It had seemed like about 20 minutes.

I rushed quickly through the rest of it, which was a shame, as we'd been having a good discussion, with almost everyone in the class getting stuck in. When we'd finished, the tutor, who'd been visibly twitching throughout the proceedings, asked me to respond to the criticisms of the avant-garde, particularly those of postmodernism.

I didn't laugh, tempting though it was.