Who determines – and how do we decide – the existence of things, what they mean and why they matter? How do we establish the meaning of the relationship we have with things and with one another? We know that an entire array of powerful influences try to capture our attention and guide our perception to favour a system of relationships based on interest, distrust, consumption and the exploitation of everything and everyone; a system in which we are more or less trapped.
However, artistic creation – a laboratory for gestures, forms and meanings, where everything and everyone is at play – is an opportunity to subvert their plan. The inherent ambiguity of art, its unsettling unproductiveness, and the fact that whoever experiences it can be as much an artist as the person who created it, enable art to facilitate a democratic response to the initial questions, provided of course that we mitigate the anxiety we feel when art meets meanings or explanations prescribed by all nature of experts. An encounter with art requires not wisdom but rather sensitivity and a willingness to expose oneself to something unknown and strange; it requires not prejudices and critical suspicion but rather generosity and participation. When we are willing to experience art through our memories, our desire and our imagination, it doesn’t matter so much what we say through art or about art but rather what it tells us about ourselves and about the world.
If the perception and experience of art is a type of creation, can our attention also come together as a type of artwork, such that it can be shared? It is not easy, and it requires a lot of work, but there is nothing more urgent today than the need to develop a shared experience which is both liberated and liberating. Through careful listening, close conversation and profound attention that does not lead to individualistic isolation and confinement, it is possible to imagine other possibilities for things, for the world and for who we are, as well as the means for achieving them.
Who determines – and how do we decide – the existence of things, what they mean and why they matter? How do we establish the meaning of the relationship we have with things and with one another?