Office Door

My Office Door.  It's a blurry hallway--the iPad jiggled--but that may be fitting, given the time of evening and the shadows. I like the way the dark pulls in and almost makes the bottom of the door disappear. Often these shots are too bright, too clear--which misses the actual experience. Here the can light has been pointed down onto the plywood wall--and the wood itself never seems to look wrong. In fact, being surrounded by those plywood walls is a key part of Wurster, and, to my mind, one of Esherick's great choices in designing the place (I'm thinking the plywood was his choice.) Also, someone told me once that he imagined all the partition walls as moveable--so that studio set-ups could be flexible and responsive. Some of the big sliding doors in classrooms on the fourth floor were an echo of this.

But the world became less flexible--or maybe it never was, really--and spaces became proprietary. Property, after a fashion.

The postings here are my course flyers--the VS280 Grad Seminar: Beginnings, and the VS185X Songs & Places classes (American Roots, México and such--we did Russia and Argentina as well--and an International Edition, in Spring 2012.) I always liked that the write-ups were there on display for perusal by passers-by--got some interesting students that way. And of course by word-of-mouth-- "My friend so-and-so told me about the class...!" There's also an old ED11A Ancestral Realm flyer--from 2009, last time I did the course), and on the far right, a sheaf of copies with an elaborate list of relevant courses elsewhere on campus--ones that would be of interest to Visual Studies people. It was a long list--I've always seen the field (the endeavor, better) as inclusive. So why not  East Asian Languages and Cultures 103: Writing, Visuality, and the Powers of Images, or French 175A:  Literature and the Visual Arts--or Film185: The Language of Cinema. Not to mention Alexi Yurchak's Anthropology 152: Art and Culture, or Paul Rabinow, Anthropology of the Contemporary...(all courses offered at the time.)

The wall is a bit bare now--the mooncake box is no longer there above my name plate, nor some of the quirky notes from students, often dashed off in ballpoint on lined paper torn out of a binder notebook and tucked under my door. Swoosh, they'd be there on the floor when I'd open it, about to walk in...


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