Oceanic Feeling

Faye Driscoll Beach Sessions hier soir. As it turns out, this may be a Faye Driscoll fanpage. I'm fine if it is.

I can't believe that on the "last day of summer" at my favorite beach spot, the only famous choreographer I follow staged something so special and art in the wild. This is what is exciting and brilliant to me that Real Art does, that the (capitalistic) art world wants to strip away in the name of sales. It is an elevator to the gods. It says Context Is Paramount! It Connects us to our greater reality rather than removing us from it (see: internet).

The ocean performed last night. The sand performed. The mass of audience performed. The blasted MTA performed (one star). The sunset performed (five stars!). The lives of hundreds who gathered were enriched for it. It gave meaning to a time and a place. Beach 106 was Enriched. 

That was art.

That was the kind of art that makes me (again, Faye!) wish I were a better artist, wish I were a more conceptual artist, had been studying and making art earlier, were a better, more tapped-in member of my community. 

And not necessarily for the performance itself. Though gods it was so beautiful, focus-inducing, patience-and-awareness incubating, strong, collaborative. Heroic? Even beyond the movement of the dancers' bodies, it was for me the concept of gathering that audience, those dancers, that sunset, the sand, the water. Breaking down the barriers of art and dance and sea and sand. Feeling the feelings of witnessing and presence.

Paint is inherently coating over, obscuring something that is there to obliterate what is under it with its own presence. It is masking. It can be, but often is not, indicative: where not to park, cross the road. // Dance is inherently leave-no-trace. Happening. It can be, but is often not, related to its environment. (Parkour?) It is also often difficult to document. Painting is all documentation. 

This week and next are the high season of art world openings in New York. Biggest gallery openings of the year. Armory Show over the weekend. This can't be what artists who have "made it" to blue chip galleries dreamed of their art doing, hanging inertly in contextless art malls. Even Spring/Break, where you can create an environment of your choosing in your assigned room is really only a terrarium. An artificial recreation of the life from whence it came. This is the height?? I think of Storm King and Dia:Beacon where the art is, yes important, but as important are the space & sanctity of the whole atmosphere. Holiness.

What do I do with today's feelings of desperation to make better, more connected art? Study performance and installation art? Read up on installation and conceptual artists then create "fresh" iterations of their ways of breaking down barriers between art and life? Make all of life a performance? Create public art and hide it into reality, hoping someone- They- will notice it? Devote my life to finding ways to say Look! The world is art! You're alive snap out of it! 

How can I make art better- Alive- not again but for the first time?