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To understand what lies outside the Art Zoo one may want to just simply ignore it. The zoo keepers will respond in kind, by ignoring the person who engages in an independent course. Having nothing to lose and possessing plenty art fodder to thrive upon, they will wait patiently until the independence itself of the free is ripe for exploitation as an added value for the selling of its products. Thus, they simply will proceed to expand the perimeter of the zoo’s gates to include the stuff it initially excluded, locking it up in the zoo. |
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| That’s what we have done so far. Now, instead, we might want to invent a way of conceiving of art that is immune to the game we have played to death. Let’s understand first of all what visual art is now. It is the making of tangible and seeable things which are put somewhere so that a few or many people who wish to do so might share in their presence. This indeed is not much that’s left for art to do if compared to its grand tasks of the past, but it also is the seed of an eternally incomplete, enriching universe of much wider endless exchanges. |
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We want to unleash a million streams of thoughts and doings that are impossible to define. Each particle of each stream can be described and defined, but the stream itself cannot. The artist of the present does not follow a theme, a motif, does not make a sociological nor esthetic statement. S/he renounces all explicit communication, acknowledging the fact that anything s/he will do will anyhow inevitably refer to some encoding or other of the time and place it happens within. There is no time to waste to explain how. S/he doesn’t want to be new, original or consistent. S/he floats, desperately and gleefully attempting forever to be true to the point of whatever practice s/he finds her- or himself attracted to perform. |
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| This kind of ritual presence of the author in the work of art finds a counterpart in the ritual of the viewer pausing to look or touch. It is crucial that no form, technique or conception be excluded from the options available to the artist. For instance, painting on canvas is neither better nor worse than working images with the computer. The canvas technique was invented in the Renaissance in Venice, for reasons that are no longer relevant now. But nothing can replace the kind of decision making and viewing that happens through the application of color by hand on a flat surface, especially now that is has no agreed-upon purpose anymore. |
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| It takes guts to accept the permanent discontinuity of art: referential systems that shift, loving attention to detail, total lack of consensus about value. But the artist of courage is rewarded by unsaturated curiosity and ever-regenerated discovery. For instance, if during the practice of the making of an artwork an artist stumbles upon an image or a technique the kind of which s/he suspects having already been touched upon by others, this author will not let her- or himself be intimidated but shall persist in exploring the matter that is fresh discovery to her/him. |
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| The modern artist is lonesome but not lonely, will not seek breakthroughs, will avoid programming anything, will not explain the art. S/he structures a wide array of source materials which get mixed aimlessly but precisely to echo the power of life and mystery of death, regardless of whether others recognize the same, even if faced with ridicule. Some people call this eclecticism, but it is not so. The Eclectic philosophers of old sought to squeeze the best from contrasting post-Aristotelian trends and put it all together in one new coherent whole– ek-lego meant ‘to choose’. The modern artist does not try to choose the best of anything. S/he just plainly exists, day by day, attentive, respectful, humble. The very concept of there being a ‘best’, and by implication there being accepted criteria to detect it and select it, is part of the rigid tenets we are letting go of. |
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| The modern artist is a volcano of unstoppable power. |
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