The most common, and still the hardest to answer is the ever ubiquitous 'so, what is it, exactly, that you do?' More often than not, this question is my own. The jacket of a bell hooks book I've been reading describes her as a 'cultural critic'. Yes! I think to myself; that's a good term. I'm certainly a cultural critic. But that's not the whole of my practice, not even close.
Some colleagues of mine have decided not to call themselves artists anymore. They've adopted terms like culture worker, philosopher poet, environmental interventionist, and activist.
And, yes! All those fit too. My film, time and its passing is surely the work of a philosopher poet. And what could you call my private protest: sprouting alfalfa project if not the work of an activist/ environmental interventionist? And the gifting project? Culture worker, clearly.
But then there are the small private pieces, like this broken ceramic bird, each shard threaded together, a metaphor of brokenness and repair, of the glaringness of the fissures in ourselves, the possibilities of re-piecing into a new whole.
So, you mash all these things together, and you slap on the label artist. But the image that title conjures doesn't quite fit, either. The art itself has never lived exclusively in the lines for me, the composition, the color. (Though you'll never convince me that craft doesn't matter.)
Art is in the action, the interaction.
Which is why I'm so excited about the Occupy movement. This is not a protest; it's a movement. And that movement is pure art. People are out on the streets embodying the metaphor of change, of action, of engagement, of democracy. They are not demanding democracy—which, I think, is what has so many people flummoxed—no, they are modeling it; they are creating and performing it. Our cultural frames are being challenged, falling away.
So, when I marched down the street with fellow citizens chanting: show me what democracy looks like: this is what democracy looks like, and singing quietly to myself we are a gentle angry people (and we are singing, singing for our lives), it felt more like making art than a lot of afternoons I've spent alone in the studio. Art is about creating something, and there I was amidst thousands of engaged, saddened, angry and hopeful people who were co-creating something together.
Yes, this is art too. This is everything art is meant to be.
