The Direction of Intention

59.

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“By making art a specially precious part of life, we have demoted it from being all of life.” Margaret Mead

My great aunt Dorothy and great uncle Del lived on a hillside above the mining town of Central City, Colorado in the time before it was converted into a casino pretending to be a town. On the hill above their house was an old abandoned mining operation and beyond that was a graveyard. Many of my ancestors are buried in that graveyard and as kid I spent many hours making rubbings of headstones wondering about the lives of the people buried there.

There is not much information on a headstone: a birth-date and a death-date; maybe a phrase like, “loving mother,” or “Civil war veteran.” A life reduced to the barest minimum.

Because the stones offered no details I would make up stories. I would imagine what a day in their lives must have been like before television and electricity, before central heat and motorcars. I imagine that their lives were like mine: filled with love and yearning and pain and striving and disappointment and revelation and drudgery and elation and regret… all of the colors of life.

Sometimes while looking at paintings in museums or talking to school administrators about art, I think about those headstones; a life elevated/reduced to one precious phrase when the truth of the life was in the experience of living it. Art is the same way: when made precious or thought as a luxury it is reduced to the barest of minimums. It becomes untouchable. The truth of art is in the doing, in the messy, chaotic, contradictory, full-spectrum experience of expressing a life.

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