Dear Jeanne,
[...] I would like to share some "Blue House feelings and sensations". It is almost like a vocabulary of terms, so I will go through my emerging collection in this manner, starting today with:
WELCOMING EMPTINESS
The Blue House is indeed empty. Coming into it "as an officer of the European Cultural Foundation" I could easily choose to judge this emptiness in a critical manner as a sign of "inactivity", lack of productivity, as a symptom of inefficiency. Yet this is not how I feel in here. It is rather the opposite. Emptiness makes my spirit move and i feel stimulated to think and imagine. My mind becomes silent and calm in this room on the top floor of the house. I can observe my own thoughts and there are no obvious obligations put upon me, apart from those that I choose to follow. My sense of responsibility is awoken. I feel that I want to do things. Yet, I still remember slight apprehension while I was traveling in the tram, coming here for the first time on the 7th of November. What am I to do here? Why on earth am I doing this? How am I going to justify this excursion in the eyes of other people, the ECF management, in the context of ALMOSTREAL? Then I arrived, I was welcomed inside "my room" sitting at "my desk" with a coffee — no questions asked, no agenda made, no tasks outlined or meetings scheduled — yet fully inside, fully received and gently left to my own devices. Left to be, here. Thats why I am talking not only about emptiness, but rather about "welcoming emptiness". A positive disposition of a negative condition (difference) rather than a negative disposition of the positive condition (identity).
I starting to realise, with my experience of working for a funding body, how difficult it is to explain this mode of functioning inside a culture based on economic productivity. Tending the earth, caring for what is planted into it, waiting patiently and for a long time for the plant to emerge while observing passing of seasons... all these gardening metaphors, in the context of the productivity based culture sound terribly romantic and even pathetic. They are also considered as an excuse for wasting time and resources and furthermore a kind of luxury "given to the artists" on the basis of the hard work of the others to whom artist should be grateful, accountable etc...
Interesting question is, why the artist of all the people is receiving this uneasy and often pejorative privilege of "wasting time and resources"? Why is the social space and time left unstructured (and consequently free to be restructured) only under the pretense of "being part of the artistic process"? Why the immaterial, unformed, unknown, non existent and yet to come is in popular imagination justified by the ironic half smile and joke-like conclusion: "oh, it must be ART". Why art and not city administration? Why art and not politics? Why art and not institutions of culture? Finally why does the artist need to be endlessly grateful, almost indebted to the society for any resources given, as if it is a child, unproductive, slightly unaccountable and definitely wasteful, dependent for his existence of the enlightened love of its parent.
It seems that the main reason for such an odd situation is that (as long as it stays safely symbolical in its nature) art is used as an index of social creativity — proof and a token of a collective willingness toward emancipation and change. And, where there is symbol, a proof, action is not required, you just hang a picture on the wall or you sit in your "young designer of the year" chair. You confuse decoration with transformation, symbolical with operational. So out of this attitude "common wisdom" is slowly forming: life would be unbearable if everybody would be "creative". Let those suposedly talented eccentrics dwell carelessly in this obscure (almost obscene) realm of yet-to-be-formed, because we ordinary people have more urgent things to do in life.
I detest implicit quasi-pragmatic cynicism of these remarks. They are invoking and re-enforcing privileges of the elite and are giving false comfort to those who are not belonging to it. Contemporary attitude make creative change into an artful fiction without consequences, to be consumed mostly as entertainment. Used as a part of the existing cultural framework, art is not much more than a floating signifier without a referent. Excuse for its alarming absence. Under these social conditions, creativity IS maybe doomed to stay privilege of the art (or if we take it a bit more broadly, privilege of "artfulness"). But at the end, what matters is not ART which represents it, but creativity which is represented. As far as I'm concerned art as a system of visible signs can as well disappear if the creativity as a social force is maintained and disseminated.
Interesting question is: how to maintain, demonstrate and disseminate individual, social and political creativity if we assume absence of the conventional "signs of art" as its symbolical container? I think that hospitable emptiness is probably an essential starting disposition of human spirit, social planning, political decision making, that needs to be cultivated, so that creativity can emerge. To a degree to which I can sense and enjoy it here, I am more than happy to observe (and support) Blue House as an art project. As long as this label is enough to keep it alive and on the move, lets call children's library organized on the ground floor (right now as I am writing this lines) by neighbours and volunteers rather than urban-planners, lets call it ART .
Maybe that is a destiny of the contemporary art as a sphere of action. To grant, in the productive society of today, prestigious protection of its venerable signifier (ART) to the modest and yet essential signified — welcoming emptiness that could become anything depending on circumstances and people inhabiting it.
It is quarter to 4 so i think i will stop here, for today [...] In the meantime, I look forward to read your reflections "from the other side of the divide".
Regards,
Igor