Friday, March 29Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Author: Abigail Ratcliff

The student strategy
Opinion

The student strategy

We all share anxiety. We all have good days and we all have bad days. With anxiety, one almost becomes hyper-aware, but that doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t feeling the same, it just means that those who are hyper-aware feel entrapped within their acute perception of reality. Even for those who believe they have a certain amount of empathy and consideration can never fully understand until they have felt it themselves. But this is the underlying point, everyone has felt it, but some people hold onto it, and it manifests into a confusion of adrenaline and numbness that doesn’t necessarily structurally coincide with everyday life. Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it isn’t. For those who don’t understand this feeling, it is sometimes difficult to gauge how it can affect someone to such an...
Culture & Literature, Visual Arts

Anselm Kiefer and the Pornography of Art

It doesn’t take much stimulus for me to assimilate a passion about art, whether I’m revelling or critiquing, given the material I will go on until I’ve either inspired someone or angered them. It was only the other week that I found myself in a heated (and drunken admittedly) discussion with an older friend over an exhibition which I had just attended. Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy is absolutely spectacular. I hadn’t previously expected to connect to the extent at which I did with his love of books and mythology, and how they play a pivotal role in many of Kiefers pieces. However, he expresses the ability to carry us down to earth by combining the celestial with the realities, of the Second World War for example, a subject portrayed through many of his early works and indeed percol...