Appropriating....then articulating

The flurry of getting art work fixed up for shows has passed and now I have nothing but the stress of coming up/creating/making new art works for my grad seminar class. And then there's this class. I say it takes up a lot of my time, but really I'm just having some difficulty managing that time - you could say this pirate has been spending too much time listening to sweet sweet call of the sirens, rather than charting the course for his ship. And so I turn to what I do best to sort of catch up.

I'm reading my fellow classmates' and professor's blogs and start to see a pattern emerging of defining or articulating the parts of this CATTt process that is our assignment/project for the first part of the semester. I knew I had to do that...I just didn't know how, and to what extent. So here goes a few baby steps, or small paddles, in a direction (it may not be the right one).

We have two main texts for the first part of the semester: What is Philosphy? by Delueze and Guattari & Advertising the American Dream by Roland Marchand. The two occupy the Theory and Contrast slots of our CATTt respectively. We are to see where and how the two meet up or match in terms of creating a concept. D & G give us instructions on how to create a concept in WIP?, and state that the creation of concepts has been usurped by Consumerism (advertisers create "concepts," just for different purposes: selling commodities). Marchand shows us how Advertising shaped society's way of thinking or perspective of the world (into a product-based/consumer mindset) in 1920-1940s America. These two foundation texts will help us create a methodology for the creation of concepts that will be effective (modeled on the efficacy of advertising - Marchand) for the purposes of philosophy (D & G) and not the commodity.

That's quite a bit there, and before this post starts to get long and convoluted, I'll stop. I may have jumped ahead a bit and will probably further articulate the various parts of the CATTt, what a concept is made out of, and what advertising has to do with all of it in future posts.