9.00 am. Off to School on a winning autumn morning. Quite the best time of the year:
On arrival, we discovered that there was no one in building who had keys to open the galleries for the External Examiner. 9.15 am. I updated registers and Blackboard and prepared for a telephone conversation with a BBC researcher, who was putting together a radio series on the topic of the invisible. 10.00 am. The conversation. I suspect they’ll return to me at a later date for a fully-fledged interview on the topic of spirit photography and spirit audiography. The purpose of these initial calls is to test whether the ‘expert’ knows their stuff, and can articulate such without too many pauses, splutters, and ungrammatical inelegances. (Editors love interviewees who can speak in complete sentences.) 11.00 am. A final feedback discussion with one of our retiring MA Fine Art students.
Another retiree (who had, incidentally, already been marked) kindly baked me a gluten-free chocolate slab cake. Yum! Too good to keep to oneself:
11.45 am. On with a raft of references that have to be completed in the next few days. 1.00 am. I attended the examination board, with lunch, to discuss the show and its participants, and finalise the marks. With David Ferry, this is always an instructive, positive, and enabling (dreadful cliché) conversation, with fair and unanimous outcomes. 2.20 pm. Business done; everyone satisfied; justice and equity prevailed.
2.45 pm. The assessment feedback having been posted, I got down to my final reference. The MA exhibition was getting down too:
In the background to all things, I was twiddling knobs to produce a range of Bebe and Louis Barron-type moans and groans. (Quite unnerving with the right amount of reverb.) Ben, one of our MA Fine Art retirees, is helping me find a software solution to create a real-time visualisation of these noises for an Open-Day presentation. 4.00 pm. I knuckled down to my teaching diary for the next week. There’s much to fit in and around a day and a half away from university mid week.
7.30 pm. Bloomsbury Publishers (who published the Harry Potter books) contacted me about a potential book on the bible and visual culture. I responded with a cautionary tone:
You need to be careful about is any overlap with the forthcoming The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Arts, to which I contributed. The book covers other art forms besides the strictly visual (music, drama, film etc.). Of course, there’s room for another publication in the field, but it will have to define its territory in relation to the Oxford book. One thing needful is a reference book that deals with methodologies of studying the visual art in relation to the bible. A good model is The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion (https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415559201). This includes a chapter on the bible and visual culture (which I wrote); but the book’s reach is far far broader in all directions. Indeed, the problem I had was in condensing methodological approaches the bible and visual art and culture. The topic required a much larger canvas.
One of the salient limitations of both publications is their failure to properly deal with contemporary art and new media. (I touched upon this in my own The Bible as Visual Culture (http://www.sheffieldphoenix.com/showbook.asp?bkid=258).) Moreover, today, the visual arts are not hermetically sealed; they seep into, for example, music and, most notably, sound art to form hybrids and interdisciplinary practices. So, a book on the bible and the visual arts only may already sound a little dated to the ears of art historians, fine artists, and art researchers.
The other limitation of existing books on, or close to, the subject is that they are addressed to biblical and religious studies scholars primarily, rather than to scholars and practitioners in the visual arts. So, to my mind, there is still an audience who is under served in respect to this subject.
8.30 pm. I sat and began to write a description of my response to Sandra’s paintings, yesterday evening. What’s happening on the surface of her works: