Interbeing

The inclusion of my artwork titled Seven Years into an exhibition was a big shift in the story of life art.  I believe it created a bridge, a portal where life art as a lived practice found registration within the art world in a manner of fellowship.  I feel compelled to write about it because there is more to say than simply what was in the text I emailed to SPACES, the gallery where that text representing the piece was hung on a column to be viewed.  I think for one, it is worth saying that the piece invited people to read while in the gallery, reading not just title cards or didactics but a consumption of text that transported the viewer through time to a span of concerted living done in the name and essence of art. 

The piece Seven Years, refers to the time I worked at a public library from 2018 to 2025 as art.  It is an example of a new type of public art, one that is lived and transferred through direct service as deeds.  I truly feel that this work is important to our zeitgeist and can stand as a pivot point where the artworld gains the option of relationally shifting to accommodate an immersion in noninstitutionalized art unfolding which I sometimes refer to as world art.  I have expounded on the rise of life art in this way in a presentation that is posted online as a video.  That presentation and video is called Art as Life and Its Influences: A Proposition for Life Art.  The realization of the piece Seven Years arose after the completion of that presentation, a few years after actually, as I took the helm of being a librarian as art, as life art and practiced what I preached to become the art. 

This shift is so enormous and is important to understand.  The printed document with the text describing the work is sort of a physical symbolic representation of the work.  The actual work in addition to that text is of course all the lived deeds, thoughts, emotions, feelings, conduct, behavior, choices and intuitive leads that unfolded over those seven years.  Of course, life art was all that transpired before then both as my life and just life in general and it continues after that time into the unfolding future.  But to create a title and a document and refer to a certain amount of time and concerted effort, context, role, expression, allows for the interbeing of conventional art within the greater expanse and flow of life art as the true nature of reality. 

All that I do is life art.