Tuesday 23rd September - Essay Planning & Discussion

This session revolved mainly around fine-tuning the class's evaluative skills to ensure our final, marked essays would be as good as possible. We spent a lot of time discussing important themes to look at in an essay, such as a piece of work's attempt to attract or repel an audience, its relevance and relation to the time it was made, the materials involved and so forth. This gave me a great deal to write about, and for my critical writing assignment helped me flesh out and develop my argument much further than I otherwise would have. The essay can be found here.

After that, we spent some time looking at some example pieces of work to talk about - Annette chose an album cover (Bjork's Homogenic, designed by Alexander McQueen), two music videos (Bjork's All is Full of Love and Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy, both directed by Chris Cunningham) and a painting (Myra, by Marcus Harvey). 

All of the above examples were from 1997, in keeping with the critical writing assignment we had, and the comparative practice proved useful for the essay later on. It was interesting seeing different people's reactions to the aggressive, unnerving video for Come to Daddy, and comparing them to the almost unanimous revulsion at Myra or the inquisitiveness at Homogenic. The discourse served to highlight perfectly the different effects that different pieces can create in a viewer, and helped me think about constructive ways of comparing these effects in the context the pieces were created in.