I’ve never feared failure, in the sense of having a dread anticipation of either its possibility or its inevitability. ‘Failure’, for me, has always had a retrospective ring to it. I acknowledge its presence in my past, even though, at the time, I wasn’t always aware of it.
Wednesday, May 5. 7.30 am: The landscape bore the weather’s depression, as it had done yesterday.
8.00 am: To work. There were pre-submissions to review and correspondence to exchange before a clutch of consultations during the late morning and early afternoon. In the background, I continued uploading conference recordings to the ‘Spoken Word’ website. I suspect that some have gone missing, at least from my studio PC. I’d need to dig further into my archive on a previous computer. Not that anything of significance will have been lost, if they can’t be retrieved. The scripts to the presentations remain intact. But, to my mind, when something — either a video or a photograph or a sound recording or a letter — disappears, then, so do those moments that it embodied, in some sense. Like a memory which has been irretrievably forgotten. (‘What or whom have I forgotten? I can’t know unless it or they are, first, re-remembered’.)
12.00 pm: An MA consultation, followed by a PhD consultation, followed by lunch. 1.30 pm: A search of my old and dying iMac didn’t yield any of the presumed missing files. Since 2007, I’d recorded the lectures that I’d given in the context of undergraduate and postgraduate modules — some, several times over. That’s a lot of material. Unlike conference papers, the much of the lectures’ content isn’t original. Some form of extraction of the best and most indicative will be undertaken, before I move on. Like theatrical performances, lectures are ‘in the moment’. At their best, there’s an electricity between the speaker and the audience that can’t be captured on a sound recording.
3.15 pm: A meeting with the VC and a sector of the university’s professoriate about the current context of research post-Brexit and post-pandemic. My first ‘breakout room’ experience:
5.00 pm: A conclusion, for now, to game in which I’ll have little if any participation (I strongly suspect) in the not too distant future. 6.30 pm: Practise session. 7.30 pm: I reviewed a PhD Fine Art text submission before returning to the ‘Spoken Word’ website. My intent is to upload the lecture content of several now defunct art history modules, the content of which is most closely allied to my research interests. This needs to be done sooner rather and later. Psychologically, it’s one expression of a desire to place things behind me and move on. (Rather, like putting your affairs in order before you die.)
8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: There were pre-submission drafts of various kinds to consider during the first part of the morning. The day would be a mish-mash of impromptu Art/Sound consultations with students, further course-work considerations, and timetabled tutorials. In the background, I finalised the upload of lectures from my Chapels in Wales 1696-1918 module (which ended in 2015) to the ‘Spoken Word’ website:
Thereafter, the British Landscape: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (which ended in 2016) began its migration. Its integrated discussion of art, science, ecology, and spirituality remains as relevant today as it was five years ago — more so, perhaps, in my opinion. A number of students who were painting landscape took this module. It served as an exemplar of how art practice and art history could fruitfully integrate. This conviction has been one of the abiding touchstones of the School’s philosophy of teaching. This was, as I recall, the first module that was entirely of my own conception. Up until then, I’d been charged by my Head of Department, Professor Alistair Crawford, to refill the curricula of modules handed on to me by my predecessor in art history. The ‘Spoken Word’ module recordings are merely representative; they don’t include either seminar material or lectures given by other staff members and guest speakers who’d contributed to the teaching.
On with foreground consultations. ‘I’ll advise, but I won’t decide — that’s your responsibility.’
During the afternoon, I fielded discussions and inquiries. I suspect that this will be the pattern for the next month. In the background Abstraction: practice, theory and history, 1913 to the present (which ended in 2019) was gradually uploaded to the website. Even by the standard of 20-credit modules, this one was a biggy in terms of breadth, depth, and the number of classes that it comprised.
6.30 pm: Practise session. 7.30 pm: I attended to the students’ PowerPoint submissions for review and other queries, and lent a hand with resolving some of their technical difficulties as the tasks plopped into Teams.