Blog 2 – Themes
Returning to our studies after the Spring Break, I was reminded of the thematic research that we had started with Better Lives towards the end of the last term. These investigations into the historical and cultural identities of one of the world’s continents both completely diverted and simultaneously, perfectly explained the need for our earlier ‘Better Lives Lectures’.
Given our first task of tactfully researching a chosen continent’s culture, I realised that the overarching theme for the unit that looked to expose all of our hypocrisies was designed quite legitimately as an institution’s briefing to its employees before a potentially compromising job. I assume this was set-up to role play the positions we are now in as creatives in a post-modern society, to prepare us for an even further globalised future of intersectionality and proposed environmental sustainability.
Essentially, since being given something to apply some progressive ideas to, I have found it extremely straightforward to address every step of our process in understanding a cultural stimulus and developing it into an outcome. Now, my Better Lives Unit doesn’t feel like the same crash-course in our industry’s already quite evident immorality, It has just provided a broad backbone from which to build any sort of skeleton around an argument we wish to make in an upcoming project. In fact, my response to these sorts of conversations, when led by an institution and consumed by a large group of people is that all sorts of details and intricacies are inevitably going to be missed or disproportionately focused on; leaving a cohort of people questioning each of their subject positions with relation to each other.
This project has so far allowed each member of the class to find their own chosen subject matter, entry point and context based around the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ that is proposed to be adapted for an alternative nationality of the same character roster. This allows genuine interest in a specific area to form from a wide selection of choices, introducing a personal element to the process. After this point, we hone our selection based on our cultural study of our subject matter, hoping to gain visual and contextual elements that satisfy our artistic impressions but remain tactful in our approach and apply the best of our abilities to ensuring we do this responsibly.
Overall, I believe the ability to have genuine discussion about identities and judgements over the appearance of certain individuals is not actually something to be afraid of at all, in fact there is nothing more important than understanding subject positions, instead of making assumptions about their lives. Essentially, when being dictated to in a large cohort of people that at an art school are likely to be far more left-leaning than others, the notion of a balanced opinion seems like it is going to become lost, eliminating the possibilities that discussion can allow. Therefore, as soon as the groups became smaller and more intimate, these possibilities opened up, and once applied to some interesting subject matters, simply strengthened our brief and gave us more to genuinely think about.