A Selfless Art

I’m not an artist. I can do art, as anyone can who wants to. I’m quite good at thinking about art, in a limited way, focused on content more than form. I have no mastery of form, and only an abstract interest in it. 

I am a community artist and that, at least to me, means something completely different.

It’s not my role to conceive artworks and get people involved in making them for me. My task is only to imagine an idea, a spark that might ignite a process, and whose brief light attracts curiosity and interest, drawing people in as they have always gathered around a fire. 

After that, my work changes. I become one member of a group, each of whom, in their own way, has the right and the capacity to influence what then happens. I want to welcome every idea, every suggestion, every question, not judge it. My task, which is also a shared task, is to discover how it can fit, just as, in a dry-stone wall, every stone, however irregular, has its place. 

Sometimes its place is in a different wall, but that’s another story.