NADA Special Edition featuring Sara VanDerBeek, Will Rogan, Mickey Smith, Talia Chetrit, and text by Hannah Brehm
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At first I thought: how will I write about art if I can't see it?

Then, it occurred to me that I never looked in the first place.

Aside from the time at Museo dell'Opera del Duomo when the guard 
scolded me three times for hovering behind an unfinished Nicodemus 
sculpture by Michelangelo, I had probably never touched art either.

Ditto for smelling, unless you count hours exposed to dark room 
chemicals -- which I won't. Wait, once I met Rirkrit Tiravanija. 
Close enough?

But hearing, yes. An experience I can account for. Louise Lawler's 
Bird Sounds.

Looking meant selling, but experience meant it was everyone's 
to share, not to own.

What happened to the time when artists lived in their present?

What about art that speaks to our present condition in a way 
that nothing else -- not music, poetry, politics, or prose -- 
could approximate? Did we lose that sense of purpose in a 
dialectic revolving on an untraceable thread?

And what of the art that wanted to open eyes and minds and 
hearts? It couldn't be lost forever in the cacophonous swirl 
of posts and pastiche, macabre and money, institutions and 
I-centric thinking.

We wouldn't let it.

Collectivity should have been everything we had always 
wanted, but some of us lost it before we began. Others wore 
it as the threadbare, but still onerous, burden of singularity 
cloaked in universality, even as they tried desperately to 
shrug it from their confident shoulders.

Now, when the world is too dire for nostalgia and too acute 
for complacency, where should we look for the ideal of 
collectivity?

This time, we must get it right.

Surely manifestoes, declarations, statements of intent are 
appropriate and necessary.

Now, about this business of looking -- where to begin and end? 
Nowhere and never can't be the answers. Or perhaps they 
are, but the question is wrong.

An arduous assignment: hold the sinewy fibers of history, 
vision, and thought. More wearisome: cast off these strands 
in a bout of negligence or refusal.

We are not in the business of looking: and while we're at it, 
can we stop calling business? Start instead with a conversation 
between you and me about what you see and what can be done.

Copyright © Abe's Penny, LLC, 2009