1995

If you have got this far dear reader, you will know that I think that art does not belong in art galleries, art ‘centres’ or art ‘spaces’. The reason I think this is because everybody is creative and I think that artists can persuade that universal creativity to examine and disclose the many worlds we inhabit – art cannot be centred anywhere. Neither can art be ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’, because through it we must examine the nature of time and time-based languages (that we need to survive on this planet of many things.) Time and language.

Time and space are what we understand them to be – in the form of the objects we sense around us. The problem is that we use time-based languages to dominate the things around us instead of being with them in a state of understanding. In linear time we can say something like ‘the cat sits on the mat’ or ‘that bicycle is red’ – and these worlds exist for us. They are so ordinary that they are over almost before they began, and we have moved on to the next breath. And although we know that there is an infinite complexity of things that lie under the surface of our linear time-based worlds, we assume that their contextual complexity is nothing to do with the here and now of what we are doing. All that stuff exists somewhere else or at some other time or is simply not important.

But then there is the quasi-phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which casts into disarray our linear time-base and our command of the things we sense and the objects we speak about.  We are ultimately forced to conclude that the space and time which we think we inhabit are actually just that – thoughts – and that our actual state is a singularity. What this means is that it is no longer true to say something like ‘that bicycle is red’, without thinking ‘I am that red bicycle and it is me, and we understand each other as this single moment. This is why I say that artists must work with people everywhere, to help us disclose the actual nature of the worlds we live in and the languages we use to describe them.

But we still seem to be very far away from that situation. And although artists nowadays work more and more in the environment with people, the Art World still seems to dominate and commodify  creativity. But in 1995 I made this proposal to the director of the Tramway Arts Space: that inside that cavernous space, a structural copy of the Centre for Contemporary Arts be built. It should be built as shown above, from natural wood to which gold leaf is applied. Then white voile would be stretched, almost like a painting has canvas stretched. But there would be nothing on the walls of that ‘gallery within a gallery’, that ‘world within a world’.

He just laughed. And I continued my search for a more symbolic way of speaking.