Post

A Post About Posts

How nice to recive a parcel in the post! A jar of marmalade all the way from Kos via Windermere. Thank you, older daughter. A taste of sunshine for my breakfast toast.   Talking of post brings me back to my studies. Am having to deal with a lot of posts - not the Royal Mail kind but definitions of cultural phases. Post this, Post that - so many that, as Jeanette WInterson commented in her book Art Objects, we're in danger of fencing ourselves in! 

We have post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialsim, post-capitalism, post-industrialism etc. Apparently it helps to think of the term post meaning 'because of' rather than after. OK but I wonder why we need to have so many labels  - is it for reassurance, explanation to create some continuity by showing how one thing leads to another like a domino chain?  It certainly means we appear to keep moving on. Many artists by their very nature are individualists and don't ask to be classified or belong to a movement even if we are  influenced by others.   Where will it all lead? Let's hope not to a bout of the postgraduate blues.

​Post-humanism was the topic...this included artists using mechanical limbs to paint and turning a rabbit into a glow-in-the-dark bunny using jellyfish DNA. Challenging the many directions humans are going in - beyond human?

Only one more seminar to go - about the indefinable and never-ending topic of space including astrophysics. And breathe a sigh of relief. Take time off to ponder, walk, socalise and wait for promised ditties and gifts in the post!  Happy Festivities one and all.
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