Art is now, as it has always been, the means by which humans are made aware
of the whole of their being. However, it does not assume that an enduring
wholeness is the result, or that art is a magical solution for the conflicts in
our nature or in and among differing cultures and societies. That is the domain
of philosophy, the social sciences and politics. Nevertheless, to "make sense"
of things in a given moment or circumstance is to grasp their full complexity
intellectually, emotionally and perceptually. That effort does not promise that
our grasp will hold for long, or even much more than the instant in which we
awaken to the fact that such fleeting powers of concentration and transformation
are ours. Incidentally, "making nonsense" of the world, as grotesque, Dada or
absurdist art does, deploys those same powers through exaggerated disparity. By
inverting order and logic the artifact created paradoxically holds fragmented
consciousness in suspension so that its contradictions can be clearly
apprehended.
Epiphanies happen but do not last. As James Joyce showed, one of the
functions of art is to preserve the experience so that we may savor and study
its many aspects. The history of art is a fabric of epiphanies woven by many
hands at different speeds; the present tense of art is the outer edge of that
work in progress. At any point the edge may be ragged and uneven and the pattern
in formation disturbing or hard to discern, reflecting the difficulty of making
art in troubled times. We are living in just such times. Rather that trim the
edge or reweave the pattern to neaten it, this exhibition focuses on selected
aspects of current production that hint at what the emerging patterns might be
without presuming to map them entirely. No attempt has been made therefore to be
programmatically "representative," either in terms of styles, mediums,
generations, nations or cultures. Instead certain qualities and concerns widely
found in contemporary art have been used as magnetic poles for gathering work
from all seven continents, in all media, in various styles and of all
generations now active.
Between the poles to which some works have readily gravitated is a force
field where many other works hover. The poles themselves have been used like
tuning forks, such that the criterion for selection has been resonance or mood
as much as subject matter or aesthetic methodology. Among these vibrating points
of reference are the immediacy of sensation in relation to questioning the
nature and meaning of that sensation, intimate affect in relation to engagement
in public life, belonging and dislocation, the fragility of society and culture
in the face of conflict, the sustaining qualities of art in the face of death.
