Fuck off

I thought I was doing quite well, but now I don't think I am at all. When my tutor was looking through my sketchbook yesterday and telling me about all the things it didn't have that 'they' want to see I suddenly felt completely out of my depth. Cut off at the knees. As if everything I've been doing and learning and making all this time is actually nothing.

In spite of everything my instincts and intuitions have been telling me, in the grand scheme of things that is the university rubric and 'the context' and 'the theory' what I am doing (and have been doing) is rubbish. Insignificant. It doesn't measure up.

Today I've read James Elkins The Object Stares Back and it's such a beautifully constructed argument about (among other things) how we see what we want to see and disregard the rest (Paul Simon mentions this in his song The Boxer, 1968) and all sorts of other complicated stuff that just blows me away when I try to get my head round it that I have no idea how I'm ever going to be able to deal with it.

Yesterday I read Berger On Drawing and I know that what I've been trying to do all this time is just feel my way towards something and wait and watch and see what happens (and in the meantime possibly create something that's worth looking at and is pleasing and makes people think) and now somebody is saying I have to look at what I'm doing and what it says and I'm not really ready to.

It's a work in progress. I'M a work in progress. It and I are not ready for scrutiny yet, especially scrutiny by someone whose objective is simply to measure us against some kind of wifflywaffly criteria that are hazy but sound good when they're written down until you try and work out what they actually mean.

What I really want to say now is 'Fuck OFF'. FUCK your rubric. FUCK your context. FUCK your theory.

So I have a choice (we always have a choice. I'm a child of the early years of Feminism so I know this. I have also been through years of counselling and psychotherapeutic drugs and the fact that I have a choice has always been both a consolation and a terror).

My choice now:

1 To continue
2 To give up