Winter is definately so last season. The daffodils are out, the ratio of sun:cloud, while wobbling occasionally like a cheap drunk, is nonetheless redressing itself and there is generally an increasing sense of optimism to be found in the air. It's quite lovely actually and while not quite open-toed shoe weather it's tantalisingly close. I can feel it.
There has been much and nothing happening of late. I fear I'm turning into one of those people I normally loathe - those smiley, hand-holding, kissing on public transport types whose death by choking on their own kissy kissy smugness I regularly invoke. I suppose when the karmic stakes are measured up there are worse ways to go....
The last 10 days have been distracting and hectic and not a little tiring. I am trying to get through a hideously protracted essay, one that got well and truly left by the wayside in the dealings with all things housemate. As usual I'm juggling stress and apathy and my irrepressible need to be brilliant and it's proving fucking torturous. Especially as the deadline was two days ago... I think it will be fine once I get started though and I've surprised myself by discovering that in fact I have an urgent curiosity to understand the implications of what I'm researching.
Under the somewhat pretentious rubric of 'the art network', I have been encouraged [read explicitly pushed] to write about the Sydney Biennale, looking at how it is understood curatorially, geo-politically and artistically in terms of post-colonial theory, globalisation and the Asia-Pacifc region. I hadn't realised before now just how big a victim I had become of the cultural cringe. Perhaps my not-so-latent convict blood has realised that I'm not in Kansas anymore skippy and finding that balance between being Australian and being on the other side of the world is actually more complicated than it might first seem.
Whatever the case, it's been a revelation to discover a desire within myself to understand the place of Australia within the global world and the complexity of questions about responsibility, reception and engagement when it comes to transactions of culture.
One thing is for sure - this assignment is a long way from the last, an auction catalogue entry about Andy Warhol's famous Triple Elvis painting. Perhaps I was being provocative but I rather enjoyed comparing Elvis to a Renaissance religious icon...
God I can't wait to have this essay out of the way. So many more fun things to think about - possible weekends in Cornwall, a party at a tiki bar on Portobello Rd tonight, the arrival of European summer time....
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