3rd October 2024
Week 1 – Writing and Structure
Tutor: Christabel Harley c.harley@csm.arts.ac.uk
Elements of the session:
a) Writing exercises: breaking and remaking
b) The introduction – your focus, aims and objectives
c) Voice
d) The words of others in your writing
Writing for 5 minutes about your thoughts and feelings right now without stopping.
I’ve been thinking a lot about pain lately. Mental and physical. I’ve just had a double mastectomy and I can feel every pull and movement in my chest. I don’t want to become reliant on opioids so I’m trying to ween off them as it’s been 2 ½ weeks now, I only had 1 cocodamol yesterday morning and then ibuprofen after that, I was pleased with myself. Then in the night I tried to roll over without realising it and it’s the most pain I’ve felt since waking up after the operation. I thought I would see blood when I lifted my shirt. I had to take two cocodamol to have the mental strength to come onto this session. So I woke up in physical pain. As the time since my surgery has gone the physical pain has lessoned, but my mental pain has grown worse. I feel isolated from my friends, nobody really checked in on me. And as the start date of my course drew closer the more anxious I felt about today.
a) Writing about artworks/case study ‘objects/practices’
Think about one of the artworks/practices/cultural forms/case studies that you describe and analyse in your research paper
Choose one that you think you could write about differently, or one that you are not entirely happy with, or think could be stronger, it could simply be one that you are prepared to experiment with.
Please re-write your description of it by responding to the following questions.
What is the process by which the thing is made? Is it part of a wider genre/type? When was it made? Why by? Who for? Why was it made?
What is there, visually/sonically/materially? How was it composed? What meanings might be generated from these aspects of it?
How was/is it circulated? How has that changed over time? Who is responsible for the circulation of it?
How was/is it displayed/viewable/experienced?
Cassils is a trans masculine artist. Pissed is both a sculpture and not, liquid in form. The tank is the plinth a method that helps display the artwork but the artwork is the urine itself free from a container. The discussion around the artwork is that at the time laws we’re trying to prevent people from using the bathroom that coincided with their gender identity, containing the urine inside the body until reaching a safe toilet that they were allowed to use. The goal was to free the pee. Now the urine is trapped again but outside of the body and on display to make the people that interjected feel uncomfortable. The only way to display it and have people confront the actions of their words was to trap it again. Which meant Cassils had to purposely not urinated in toilets, just as the then government wanted, to be able to save all his urine in bottles for display.
What social issues or discussions surround it that affect its meanings? How?
What other big issues or public events or important art, are connected to it and how? Why does this matter?
Does it connect to any small, ‘everyday’ issues, matters or experiences? Say how, say why this matters.
What is your interpretation? Does your interpretation spring from your perspective? If so, how? Are there any other perspectives?
The social issue in discussion is transgender rights. Making this not just a cube of urine, but a disallowed cube of urine.
It connects to the everyday issue of the bare minimum human rights to use the toilet. Although not included in Maslow’s hierarchy if needs, it is a vital human bodily function. This artwork confronts the fact that this necessity was being withheld for a minority group. It matters because it is dangerous to not urinate when necessary, but the change in government made it dangerous to urinate when necessary in a bathroom. If you used the bathroom of the gender you identify with, despite the laws, and you did not ‘pass’ enough, then you could be attacked. If you used the bathroom the government wanted you to use, that of the gender of which you were labelled at birth, and you ‘passed’ too much to be considered that gender anymore, then you could be attacked. If you used either bathroom but looked like you wanted to be using the other bathroom because you looked like you were attempting to pass as the opposite gender, you could be attacked. A basic human right was taken away.
My interpretation is that people should be able to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with if they feel comfortable and safe to do so, which comes from personal experience. The other perspective is that this can lead to people being attacked, and that there should not be adults of one gender in the same toilets as children of the opposite.
b) The introduction – your focus, aims and objectives
Think about your introduction. It is in the introduction that you can set out your question and contextualise it within a critical framework.
You can clearly identify your aims and objectives by telling the reader about the thing that you think deserves deeper investigation, and saying which questions you will ask with reference to which sources (artworks and texts).
Re-write your introduction in response to these questions.
What? How? Why?
c) Using AI as an assistant, asking it to summarise your text in five points, or describe it in the voice of a philosopher, to help create a dialogue around your writing.
Jonathan does NOT use Turn it in as he does not agree with it.
d) the words of others in your writing: paraphrase, summary, quotation
If the quote is 3 lines or longer, you have to take it out of the text and indent it in its own paragraph, tab it in, new line, no quotation marks.
We use present tense when writing about an artwork or text, they state rather than stated, present tense only
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Zotero – reference library creator to use
Using illustrations in the body of text, remember to (year of illustration) (see fig.1) reference in text like so, and reference properly underneath the illustration.
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