The Blog as Art

I am rather excited by this idea that I will be able to post and save ideas that come to mind in relation to the general illumination and revelation that has been taking root in my conception of art over the past year or two.  Much of it has come from, well a number of experiences but also conversations that I have had with my aunt, Molly Wiley.  Her discerning objective reasoning has played a very special part in how a conception of art as something which is lived, that art is life itself, lived and that everyone is an artist, has come about through our talks.

I am also excited by the idea that art is no longer a plastic medium of any kind and I am elated that I can post and save in a chronological order all that which comes to me when it comes to me to hopefully will give me a sense of where I am at in the development of ideas but also I hope to have stand as some kind of map or reference point for future scholars and just people at large.  I have this insatiable lust, a good spirited lust for being, becoming and so forth a person in a stream of persons, lives that teases forth something very profound and identifiable as revelatory in not only the world of art but also life itself.  I think that perhaps my aunt and I have come about illuminating a very important transition which I hope to continue to pursue as much as it interests me.  The transition is one of an art which is hung on a wall or podium into that which is conversed. 

In my view, conversation is a wonderful example of where art is now in the year 2017.  There is no artist/viewer dichotomy, no author/reader dichotomy.  In a conversation content is developed in tandem.  A mutual generation is undertaken.  This is in fact what art has been struggling to get to in the gallery and museum.  As I have stated in other excerpts in this blog, the museum and the gallery in this way fall away and leave in their wake people standing amongst each other, with supra-content to share among themselves, such as arcane knowledge and so on.  

I am excited by this.  I have been wondering why it seems to be happening that I am going in a direction of no galleries and museums when FRONT will be happening in my home town region.  The art world will be convening in Cleveland Ohio just a few miles north of here and I am writing about how museums and galleries are over.  I wrote to Michael Gill of CAN Journal about possibly getting my essay titled The Exhibition is Dead published in CAN but he seemed to say that it flew in the face of the gallery network that we live in and does not speak to that reality.  And that is true.  My work has been speaking to a new future.  A future where dialogue conquers the death of lifeless mediums.  I am taking to the living spirit now.  

I had intended to show a work in the Box Gallery in Akron Ohio during FRONT and was turned down in that attempt.  The work was to be one of conversation, conversation between myself and anyone who happened to walk up to me in that space during the exhibition period.  Once that piece was rejected it all seemed to go that much more away from galleries and museums per se and into the world at large.  Conversations can happen anywhere.  Conversation was key to what I was developing as an art form.  I still think that the artist talk should be retired and that artists should speak their art not speak about their art.  Sometimes this happens with artist talks but sometimes not.  This begins to smell a bit like philosophy but not really.  Art is changing.  As long as it pleases me, I am interested to see where it can go as a spoken and lived phenomenon rather than an exhibited one.  

In fact, if this train of thought plays out completely or at least rather fully it would be such that everyone is an artist and that life itself is craft, from what we wear to what we do, say and eat.  All of those things would be artful movements in life.  And by the definition that has developed from the historical narrative in western art through to the contemporary of 2017, art is life itself.  There would be no more exhibitions.  Participation would be infinite.  Perhaps we would come up with new expressions of culture given this change of events.  Theatre would radically change.