Common Ground

In a fortuitous visit last week California artist Suzanne Lacy stopped by as she was passing through the Hudson Valley, prompting our drive to the nearby home of Linda Montano, and before long, we found ourselves seated on her lawn talking about the current state of world affairs, wondering how artists might respond. There are those private moments when we find in art enriching, unburdened thought and new freedoms of perception and behavior. At other times, a special responsibility is thrust upon artists to give feeling and form to the complex transformations of an era. While making art that moves the spirit forward, at the same time an artist has one foot in the past. T.S. Eliot viewed a historical sense as the perception of "the pastness in the past," but also the manifestation of this pastness in the present. For Agamben the idea of the contemporary embodies the state of being in one's own time and yet distant from it.

Looking through page proofs of the current issue on my desk, I see how the groundedness of artists in the long continuum of time that is the history of art roams through these pages. There is a sense here of honoring this achievement by calling attention to the legacies of certain models of value and purpose. The dancer and writer Emily Coates offers an intensely reflective essay on another dancer, Sara Rudner, highlighting her insistence on "the thrum of everyday time," instead of focusing on constant public presentation. In what might be a central theme of contemporary artmaking, Coates wonders, "Is the point not to care about the public part of performance? Or is the point to care about how one chooses to live? In a similar vein, dancer Kay Nishikawa creates a charming portrait of her former kindergarten teacher, Saburo Murakami, who happened to be one of the founders of the Gutai movement in post-war Japan. He told the young, would-be artist playing with paints not to worry about making a mess. "Just do it. You'll feel great," he said. This lesson in freedom of imagination has served as a guiding principle her whole life.

Prominent in this issue are the contributions of dancers, who move through the world in bodies that have a special sensitivity to space and time. For Adam Weinert, one of the artists featured in the Food and Performance section, Ted Shawn—who purchased the Massachusetts property known as Jacob's Pillow and assembled his all-male dance company there—provided an inspirational model. Besides reconstructing his early dances, he moved toward embracing Shawn's vision of planting and harvesting crops as an essential aspect of making dance. Jacob's Pillow is now a working farm as well as the premiere summer dance festival Shawn had created. The food theme is traced in the four decades-long eco-feminism and performance project known as SPROUTIME, the creation of artist Leslie Labowitz, detailed here in her conversation with Jacki Apple, who died in June. Involved first in feminist anti-violence art (often in collaboration with Suzanne Lacy), and performances and installations, she turned to the garden as a place of healing before starting a business that began in her Venice, California backyard. It would eventually evolve into a source of sprouts that manufactured and distributed organic foods throughout Southern California, integrating her interests in food and hunger and social justice.

Another way to understand ecology is through the work of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, whose recent installation Particular Matter(s), as Sarah Lucie relates, invited audiences to listen to the vibrations among five different communicating species of spiders, and to think about how different species experience the environment. Transmission of meanings and experiences is taken up by Kenneth King (incidentally, also a dancer/writer), who brings his historical understanding of science and technology and a poetic imagination, to this subject ranging from the ancient world of cave paintings and the pyramid of Giza, to technological invention and industrialization, and to the arts of painting, cinema, photography, and on to biogenetics, computers, AI, and, of course, viruses. King reflects on what the computer...