At the State Library…

 

Up High

• Will Smith’s giant head (film advertising)
• Children’s Book Festival flag
• V&A Inspiration by Design advert on scaffolding
• Statues (is that media?)

On the Ground

• my backpack (Fjallraven Kanken)
• 50 Shades of Grey being read
• Biscuit packaging

Kanken cult all over town

Mid-Ground

• Two people sharing a phone to watch something
• Free Tibet rally — flags, posters
• Tram advertising
• Man studying with laptop and notebooks
• Carrefour bag

Back-Ground

• Tibetan chanting, national anthem
• Construction site (noises, signs)
• Omnipresent Melburnian coffee cups
• Shop signs, promotions e.g. travel adverts at Student Flights

Foreground

• Group writing on worksheets
• Clothing brands e.g. Cheap Monday, Acne

In Your Hand

• The worksheet
• Notebook
• Text from friend: “A bird just flew into my f***ing eye”
• Mum called, had a conversation about this great butcher outside of Daylesford

On the process of noticing…

Deliberate noticing is something I enjoy – I love people-watching, noticing patterns (like the popularity of Kanken backpacks, which I admit I’ve fallen victim to), looking at the way they interact with their surroundings. That said, sitting down in the middle of the grass with a notebook and jotting down what I see felt forced. It was interesting and a little unnerving to see how saturated the world is with media, especially advertising, and I get the feeling that even though I saw a lot there’s even more that I missed. All I can say is that there’s a lot going on at one given time.

It’s difficult to write about something that didn’t happen. Since today’s workshop was silent I thought I’d write about (arguably) the most famous silence of them all: experimental composer John Cage’s 4’33”. The composition is three movements of an orchestra shuffling uncomfortably in their seats and not doing much else.

 

4’33” is the most elegant blend of idiotic, pointless artistic snobbery and deeply personal, genuinely moving work. On the surface, Cage’s ego in attempting to harness and eventually copyright silence is almost intolerable. It’s like that joke about an artist deciding a blank A4 sheet is art and going on to sell it for millions, simply because the artistic world was too afraid to be seen to not ‘get’ it.

 

On the other hand, 4’33” is incredible. Peter Gutmann, freelance music columnist and broadcast regulation and transaction specialist at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, PLLC, says: “This is a deeply personal music which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4’33” the same way.” And Peter has a point. Silence is a deeply personal experience that we bring our individual thoughts, fears, hunger and discomfort to. 4’33” might be uncomfortable shoes to one person, mild tinnitus to another. If art is about interpretation then this might be one of its purest expressions.

 

None of this excuses the lengthy legal battle between Cage’s estate and Mike Batt, lead of a band named the Planets and composer for the Wombles (no relation to Gutmann’s firm). It’s an ugly story that detracts from the piece itself. Put in a vacuum — away from a musical community desperate not to miss out, away from later re-writes (I’m not kidding; silence was rewritten by Cage multiple times) — 4’33” is beautiful. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum; nothing does. I know now that whenever I listen to 4’33” all I’m going to hear is The Wombling Song. 

I’ve noticed the way I learn has changed over the last few years. I’ve always had a relatively weak attention span; there was this tree outside my Year 8 science lab that I knew better than anything I ever learnt in there. My focus has deteriorated now to the point where I can’t watch TV without being on my phone. It’s sort of pathetic. So it was interesting to read about it in academic terms, to give it its proper names: deep and hyper attention. It’s ironic that even as we were discussing our thoughts on the essay we couldn’t keep on track. I don’t know if I have particularly hyper-attentive tendencies; it’s more that I tend to get distracted. I can do a very specific nothing with great focus for hours on end. Still, I think it all relates.

 

It’s a valuable thing to learn about your own learning. I have a system to get through bulky readings; a little star in highlighter, evenly spaced throughout, to give me a little feeling of fabricated accomplishment. I never noticed the parallel between levels in video games. If I can understand my own brain, the ways its benefitting me and letting me down, and I can use that knowledge, I think uni (and life) could be a lot more productive. The difficult thing is knowing what to do with what we know.

First days are always exhausting and frankly when I tried to think of a “key takeaway idea” from yesterday’s workshop all I could come up with was pizza and kebabs.

Really all I know is that I have so much to learn this semester. That’s a start – at least I’ve figured out what I don’t know, and that’s apparently the hard part. It’s intimidating but equally reassuring. If nothing else, it’s nice to see that ideas are coming to me. I’m haunted by the thought of coming up blank. The trouble is going to be gaining the skills to realise them.

I haven’t thought too much about the mechanics of blogging before now. There are so many blogs I enjoy – women in Paris with tired eyes, long-suffering film enthusiasts, over-enthusiastic vintage hoarders – but I don’t really think about the people behind them. They might post pictures of themselves, at home, at work, but it’s always so oddly forced. I know there’s someone or something holding the camera up, deliberately framing the picture to be most flattering to its subject. They’re edited to be welcoming and bright, then put up with a few words on what a wonderful day the blogger had had. I’m always aware of how staged it all is and that distances me from the blogger as a person. They’re more of an actress or a set dresser than a human being.

Very still life (image by Elsa Billgren)

Setting up this blog has felt a little awkward and a little forced, which I think must be natural. Everyone wants their blog to look a certain way – you know, like this, but not the same, but with the same feeling to it, the same vibe. My feelings are on the small scale I know; still, the people behind the blogs I enjoy had to make those impossible decisions between fonts and colours and themes, oh my god; but more than that, they finished and left their computer to do something unphotogenic.

 

It’s a bit of a leap to connect “is this title a little bit too sassy and will I be resented for it” to a lovely Swedish woman who does hair and collects 1950s crockery. The mechanics and process are the same, though, so it’s interesting to get some insight to what goes on behind impractical vases of peonies and stacks of coffee table books.