Blog 28: Restrained by Referencing

I’m supposed to be doing my dissertation right now. It’s all but there on the word count and I thought it’d be done by now but then there’s referencing to thank for a few more lost hours of my life. Format is the issue and the fact that even when I have the book in my hand the publishers seem to have put effort into making the edition and city of publication too much of a task to find. Referencing just feels like bullshit to me just now. It should be done but for that crap. I want to write a disclaimer at the beginning that states that unless expressly state no idea mentioned in mine. I want to reference my birth certificate where I write my name at the top. I might just do that anyway. Referencing seems to me like product of prevalent mistrust within academia. I’m not a physics student anyway. Why am I supposed to write an essay based on impartial and certain principles. I’m an art student, I work with perceptions that are not so simply categorised as right or wrong.

The obligation to create yet more commentary on art has always frustrated me during my pursuit of art as a career. How many people have reviews that aren’t of their work framed on the wall? Has a commentary ever been hailed as beautiful? I want to spend my finite time creating things that while not devoid of reference or inspiration are essentially new.

Horrific boredom in life can drive creation. A lecturer from another school of art told me that his most creative time period was while he sought to avoid writing his own dissertation. I have been writing more recently but it seems a sad reflection on the task that I would rather do anything else but. I have not been on such a writing spree since the dull days while I worked in the mine, manning the crossing point. I have other things to do. I want to be writing, drawing, taking photos or painting, pretty much anything besides trying to arrange the format of my damn references for an essay which I had been enjoying.

I want to enjoy my essay which is why I wrote it as two stories. I’m not passive, I want to create. If I can’t get away with a story as my dissertation then the ashes of my academically dull written essay will be posted to the marking box with a singular reference to whoever it was that burnt her work before marking in protest to that system of shit. Art is not right or wrong nor should it be.