Another Reality
By Jon Keppel
The day may be sooner than we think when art will become an activity that is undertaken over a thing that is produced. The idea that art is something that you do, something that you undertake rather than something that you produce is important in these regards. This is so not only because art-as-a-process rethinks and reimagines how we have thought about art and how many of us still think about it today but also because it places art as a doing rather than a done. The notion of a cultural exercise which has been taken up and embraced by the Front narrative is a rather stark example of how this trend is developing.
Exercise is a doing and harkens back to a very core notion to our being, namely metabolism. There is a flux that transpires throughout our entire corporeal existence. This happens on the individual scale and also the collective whole of humanity. There is a certain chaordic coalescence that takes place between excitation and regulation when the body and body- being are put into play so to speak. The same is true for the craft of culture as it manifests in our individual lives and our societies.
Once upon a time we drew, wrote and marked upon a wall in a cave in Lascaux which are some of the earliest known plastic elements of art known to all humanity. But what was being said in that cave, spoken or unspoken between the peoples making the marks? There was a flow taking place in that cave, a flow of life. One that arguably still very much flows today and one that will in some form or another continue to dance into the millennia to come. How can we tap into that timeless energetic fount? Maybe it is what we do in the here and now rather than traces that we leave that flop like fish that have fallen up and out of the river of life and onto the banks.
In this spirit then, the most exciting aspect of the Front experience is that it is not really an exhibition at all but rather a dream that has blossomed from the heart of the city of Cleveland, one that illuminates lives before walls and hearts before heads. There is a magic in the air and it is coming from us not the things that we make. It is time to dream again and exercise that ephemeral quality of truth that flows throughout all art of all times and all places. Cleveland becomes an address of sorts to tap into this flow of exchanges and transformations but an address much more in the sense of a hyperlink than anything else, a hyperlink of the heart.
Some will not be able to travel through space and time to our great city but it is the feeling of an idea that lives in their heart, and it lives because it existed before the idea of Front manifested and took hold. That is because Front reminds us of something which transcends time and place and any specific cultural facet. Front reminds us of a culture of humanity itself and couriers us to a future where exchange happens, transpires at the very highest levels of creativity and personhood. Art is literally then the conversation that touches on feelings and ideas along the way of a journey.
It may be that a museum is a name for a congregation of people in a field similar to how the first universities were simply gatherings of folks under a tree to collectively exchange information, knowledge and the like. It could come full circle again to where art is the information and knowledge that is exchanged directly among peoples in language, in conversation rather than through mediums, plastic mediums fixed to a cold bleak wall. The heart is warm and so is this idea of art as conversation rather than the plastic and prismatic quality of material reality or object hood. It is time we turn inward to the nature of person hood with our craft. We are the work. We are the art. We are the spontaneous effect of ever becoming.