Small Gestures in Specific Places: Communication and Topography

As a writer I am primarily concerned with the way art participates in a field of understanding and communicates with the world. I don't confine my discussion to calculating either the aesthetic value or political objectives of art but, rather, I seek to grasp the sense of place that is created as art stimulates sensations and engages relations with other people. In contemporary art practice the place for art has been dispersed and de centred. An integral part of the practice of many contemporary artists is the specific act of placing. It is these trajectories and topographies of art in everyday life that drives my thinking. However, these topographies are surrounded by pitfalls. Engagements with the everyday and the writing of art can be compared to Elias Canetti's analogy of the interpretation of a dream to a birdcage with the door slightly ajar. You awaken from a dream but what happened? The bird has gone. While writing the story of art cannot trace the function of the feather in flight, it must suggest another trajectory. Writing does not aim to return to the imperious originality of the artwork, but to replicate the experience of the origin in the working through of ideas.