Why Art? - WHEN HYPERBOLE BECOMES REALITY

Placing participants at the core of the art experience indicates that people can find solutions rather than be sucked up into the problem.

In my family everyone had a story to tell at the table. All the stories had to be told at the same time. The most dramatic ones were heard first, the ones that were loudest or most urgent. As a child there always seemed to be a crisis going on in the family. Eventually, you got to see that some things were and some were not, crises.

Here we are choking on smoke ridden air, again. I think about my own FRESH AIR sculpture, in 1990. People were breathing clean, fresh air from plants in sealed glass chambers on mobile wagons. Breathing through hospital grade respiration masks and tubes it seemed like a hyperbolic art work providing pure air in contrast to the pollution at the time. There was something serene and beautiful about the contact of people with plants and people with people.

In Victoria Vesna’s [ALIEN] STAR DUST (ASD) mobile app art we can zap pollution particles floating amidst micrometeorites, in the room around us.

These two interactive examples of contemporary art, FRESH AIR and [ALIEN] STAR DUST, integrate elements of environmental crises. In FRESH AIR we experience how our breath nourishes the plants that give us, in turn, life sustaining oxygen. In ASD, the simple zapping of pollution particles with a finger touch makes easy and satisfying the removing of pollution from our atmosphere with almost childlike glee, like in a video game.

The last time Austrian born, Margret Wibmer visited Delhi in 2023, she participated in SURFING THE APOCALYPSE KARAOKE (reported in Mountain Eagle by Robert Brune), soon to be recreated in September at Birdsong Farms, in Hamden.

At the time, as today, we were choking on smoke from forests burning to the north, in Canada.

Feeling the smoke in my chest, I become enraged that yet again, I cannot breath in comfort. My lungs are more sensitive because I had locked myself in a sealed glass house with 10,000 plants, breathing once per minute for 10 days, in 1989. Did I know making that “hyperbolic” art that the hyperbole would become today’s reality?

I’ve written too many times in this column that “artist/visionaries often include an element of crisis in their art to be gently digested by the audience through a shock (sublime trauma), by the grace of seeing the art in the cloistered, safe space of the art gallery.”

In SALON D’AMOUR, at the Birdsong Farm Gallery, artist Margret Wibmer subtly introduces the sublime trauma through a few key things; 1. soundscape produces a nurturing atmosphere; 2. the preparation of the participants by “guides” comfortably assist participants into their roles; 3. Margret’s sculpted, alternately horrific and playful masks; 4. A book of love letters to be read aloud in coupled groups; and, 5. the experience of “swimming in the river” of human, interlaced, layered voices in the “salon” during the immersive performance.

For persons wearing the masks, silently hearing the reading from their partners, their personalities are subdued within the anonymity of the mask. As they are “hidden” and perhaps challenged hearing their own inner voices simultaneously with the melodic confluence of the community around them, they perhaps realize the complexity of stories that form our identities. And that perhaps the one inside us embracing all this is the real “me” co-existing in the love-symphony of the collective community voice.

So, in Margret’s work its the “pause” from hyperbole that becomes the intense “non hyperbolic” reality, the substance connecting us all.

The labor of making this art is intended to activate artists and non-artists in a creative practice of life. The art empowers community to intervene with the hyperbolic realities facing us today, problems which, perhaps, we all participated in creating.

SALON D’AMOUR Birdsong Farms Gallery, Aug. 8th & 9th, 7:30-9:30PM.

Please reserve tickets: john@studioicai.org

Or just come by and swim with us.

For the Birdsong Program by ICAI, visit www.studioicai.org