WHAT NEXT?

After “attending” the Santa Fe Flash Flood view-from-space art project last week, I experienced a flurry of ideas as to how to ride the coattails of the event in a beneficial way. I wondered: Are we now at a view-from-space era in art?, where thousands of people hold up pigmented materials to make images to be viewed from 100 miles up? This could be a wonderful confluence of classical, modern and conceptual art. Imagine a huge see-from-space Fragonard so subtly hued as to even include the finest “terminators” (a technical term in realist painting describing the light’s termination point where a form bends away from it). I can envisage global messages, such as that from 350.org—advocating the urgent adoption by nations of greenhouse-gas levels no greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere. No reason, too, why the 350.org message couldn’t be attached to the Fragonard. That could be even more powerful than to separate them.

So what should I do? Do I want to organize thousands of people to do view-from-space art? No. I think somebody should do it, but not me. It seems that I should do more to excel at the tasks that are currently under my control and that I now deal with inconclusively at best.

I would also like to do banners to be viewed, not only from space, but on the sides of abandoned buildings, in parks, or wherever there is still a public space not yet completely gobbled up by corporate interests. I’m contemplating making a giant sign to advertize the Pojoaque River Art Tour.

It could simply read: POJOAQUERIVERARTTOUR.COM Support Local Art and Crafts

It wouldn’t be visible from space but instead from the highway. The Pojoaque artist community is very much in harmony with the laid-back, tranquility of the area’s rural landscape. So, by supporting the art tour, I’m supporting the land. I’m supporting a tiny local module of Earth’s sustainable landscape. This is not the way to save the planet, but it presents a model that, if followed by people wherever they live on Earth, could help save the planet. There are many millions (I suspect) who are doing the same as I. The collective unconscious is probably at work in this as well.

So I guess that for now I see doing art in my own corner, while writing about how what I do might be relevant to the planet as a whole.