How have you been an artist today?
May 26 2006
by Michael Smit
gallery 2 inaugural show
How have you been an artist today? This is the name of an ongoing interventionist art project and investigation started by artist Michael Smit. In it, in an exchange with Smit or someone else, people are invited to consider and respond to this question, in a documented conversation.
The question leads back of course to what words like “art” and “artist” mean or can mean, and whether everybody indeed can be considered an artist, even on a daily basis. Smit always sympathized with Joseph Beuys’s statement from the nineteen seventies that “everyone is an artist” (“Jeder ist ein K√ºnstler”) but felt it had its shortcomings as just a statement. Although it still is a shocking, provocative, and exquisite Joseph Beuys work in itself, Smit feels it misses a more active way-in for the audience (to make its meaning more powerful and true). Thus it still is too conforming to the understanding of art as a unique and brilliant form by a creative genius, to be admired on a pedestal by the non-artistic audience.
Through his own art practice Smit came to understand, in 2002, and partly as his response to his experience of living in the United States for some years, that we need to embrace what art essentially is: the creation somehow of something meaningful, in the creative meeting between our selves and our surrounding realities. The challenge to make our existence in our situation meaningful is familiar to everyone and does not need to be delegated to specialists. This leads to a wider understanding of art where art is not limited to the making of traditional art objects nor by the profession or specific talents someone has or has not. In this sense art is the birthing of meaning in creative engagements between oneself and the world.
In Smit’s understanding art not only brings the ability of everyone to be artful and the possibility of joy and meaning, it also suggests a responsibility with it. Thinking of the state of our environment art could be seen as a requirement for survival of our species even.
The How have you been an artist today? attempts to investigate whether this understanding of art is viable in people’s lives, as it invites others to consider our art in a dialogue and exchange. Having taken place in the physical world of the San Francisco Bay Area thus project now for the first time has a Second Life component. Documentation of recent such interactions within Second Life will be on view at the Ars Virtua show, and on billboards at several places in Second Life, from May 26 till mid/end of July. Ongoing interviews conducted within and outside the gallery will be added as the exhibition proceeds.
