The art of producing opportunities

The beginning of the third millennium is a period of social solidarity between the artist and the community, but also a period of emergencies affecting world life.
Art does not serve the purpose of solving problems but of raising questions and emotional awareness about the many difficulties our planet is faced with. Hence, the ecological nature of artistic evasion, the ethical need to mark out one’s moral resistance, a constructive will to survive despite social and political straying and what appears only to be irreversible chaos.
In a mass society like ours, art is called upon to develop communication strategies rather than contemplative tactics generating individual passivity.
Interactivity is a notion concerning the telematic growth of a civilisation that is squeezed between globalisation and tribalisation. Communication gives art the possibility of becoming a virtuous middleman, thus producing collective opportunities for social dialogue and exchange.
Art becomes an alarm system attempting to stir up again the atrophied muscles of collective awareness, evidence of complexity against the consumption-based apology of passive lifestyle. Art, be it European, American, Eastern or Western, is developing the multicultural and multimedia trend of producing opportunities that are capable of triggering new processes to learn about the worlds around us.
The search for suitable forms of speech is apparently keeping art and life apart, creating a split between the beauty of created shapes, an obstacle of a found existence, a squint of an identity.
I believe the artist is a biological error when compared to the work of art, the ansietas of daily practices against the verticality of enduring shapes. Perhaps a healthy division between art and life. Yet, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have three exceptions: Pollock, Fontana and Bourgeois.
A continuity between doing and living, a style that is in line with being and appearing.
The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois developed speech and behaviour as evidence of an elaborate study on the identity between daytime and night time, eroticism and memory, male and female.
A model of creative life inclined to interactive communication and exchanges. Desire for dialogue investigated through new visual shapes, sculptures and installations capable of producing new forms of existence, the coexistence of diversities.
Example of lifestyle: the Sunday appointment at her home in New York open to artists and intellectuals, the surprise of conversations in a city which is pragmatic by definition. And here, everyone is mobilised by the sway of a paradoxically Socratic personality that bestowed upon art the power of truth and upon speech the responsible flow of collective thought. Louise’s home is turned into a resonance chamber for voices flying back and forth, her sofas and chairs are pieces of furniture for a rest from the feverish activity giving way to a social reason for lost civilisations, a cosy enclave, a pause in speech, still capable of linking art to life. Different rooms, different conversations. Turning the great French century of petite conversation into a souvenir.
It all happens within the circularity of a female condition which does not adjust to preserving the present but seeks ways to express totality, the overcome waged war of differences between male and female: “Destruction du pere et reestruction du pere” (1998).
Examples of art: exhibitions designed for the 1993 Venice Biennale and for the current exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Proper conversation pieces among installations, the word of memory and the musical staff. Created for communication and dialogue.