From Plato onwards philosophers have divided and
compartmentalized human consciousness more or less explicitly pitting one
faculty against another; mind versus body, reason versus unreason, thought
versus feeling, criticality versus intuition, the intellect versus the senses,
the conceptual versus the perceptual. At best such dichotomies have served to
sharpen our understanding of the different capacities at our disposal for
comprehending the world and making our place in it. At worst they have deprived
us of some of those abilities by setting up false hierarchies that cause us to
mistrust or disparage one for the sake of another, many for the sake a few.
Yet no matter how successfully philosophers and ideologues have persuaded
people that such categories are not just analytically useful but inherently or
historically true, the manifold challenges to understanding that reality poses
and the actual flux of existence exceed the power of systems, theories and
definitions to contain them. The imagination is the catch basin into which this
overflow spills and art cuts the channels that reconnect formerly isolated or
segregated parts of consciousness to each other while flooding and replenishing
the whole of it like a fertile river delta.
Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind is predicated on the conviction
that 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.
