Light Cue 23

I had drinks with my friends Jeff and Pilar last night. It was a lot of fun. Jeff may well be the smartest person I know. I know a lot of smart people. I know a lot of really smart people. Really smart people.

It is always an interesting experience interfacing with his brain. When our thought patterns mesh it is a great meeting of the minds. A fabulous time. Then there are the times where he is so far beyond my level of conceptual thinking that I can only sit back and admire. Last night was one of those times.

Topics of conversation ranged from general catching up to art, music, porn, drinking, mutual friends, Bay Area weather, etc. etc. A typical night at the bar.

The issue of aesthetics is such a personal one. It is always interesting to talk to other artists about how they see the world. Hearing them speak about how they see and then looking at their work can be such an intense experience.

I remember hearing Richard Foreman talk about his first video project. How it was such a radical departure from his earlier work. A real aesthetic rupture. Then I saw the piece. To my reckoning it was a Richard Foreman piece with video. But to him this was such a radical shift that it necessitated a revaluation of aesthetics and meaning.

The disparity between what I heard and what I saw caused me to realize how intense his vision is. That the way he sees the world is so specific that what to me appears a small change is to him a tectonic shift of cosmic proportions.

This is the essential nature of art. It is the expression of a worldview. A specific way of seeing. A visual representation of a Being in the world.

Art is a physics of presence. It is the geometry of identity.

Concepts become thin and tangled here at the edges.

Theatre is in many ways a perfect art form for the 21st century. It is inherently collaborative and relies upon the contributions of many. Like web 2.0 the content and the form are distinct and interchangeable. A single script can be placed in any of an infinite number of visual, aural and spatial contexts. The script remains static, but its meaning shifts as its context shifts. Content and meaning are two independent variables along a matrix of experience.

So too a conversation shifts as the surrounding context transforms. As the bar fills, the sun sets, food and alcohol are consumed, the nature of the language alters. Same people, different context. Thus different content.