“I want to go home.”
Almost everyone understands. Those unfortunates who don’t, have never experienced home, and even social scientists and engineers recognize the lack of a sense of home as a terrible social problem. We want a home that is safe, a place where we are loved, where things make sense, and, if things don’t make sense, we want someone nice to patiently explain it (whatever “it” may be) to us, so we understand. Home is a place where there is enough to eat generally, good water, a place that protects us from harm, a place to dream good dreams and think good thoughts. Home is a place where everything has time, space and support to grow healthy and complete. Home is filled with understanding of past and present and hope for the future.
This profound definition of Home (not profound in my framing of it, which is clumsy, but profound in its definitive presence in defined humanity) explains why Communism fails and Capitalism fails. A State is not a home. Homes should not be bought and sold. Home explains why psychology fails. Mechanics do not replace Home. The word “home” is a too-small notion of Home – I apologize for my English. Religion also fails to replace Home. Heaven, a place we go that’s not here Now, where we go after we die, if we’re good and do the right things, is not good enough. Family belongs in a home. A home belongs in a community. A community belongs to the People. The People belong in the World. The World belongs in the Universe. The Universe and everything in it makes sense.
A person should have a home. What home looks like any child with a pencil knows. However, the number and kinds of homes that grow organically of the human experience in the home progression is rich and marvelous. A tipi. A cave. A castle. On the plains. In a mountain. By the sea. The architect is not an artist. He is a home maker, which is to say, a very important person. The designer is not an artist. She arranges the interior space for effect. Also very important.
A person should have a home. We spend a life engaged in verifying this for each other, not as an exercise or science project, but as an affirming of the scale and order of this progression. The geometry of it is mutable, but complementary. Maybe we view it as circles within circles, all moving and unfolding. Maybe we picture it as strands of DNA.
Art is the expression of HOME for humans, and mines the progression for content. One artist focuses on experience. Another is drawn to context. Some approach the Universal, others the specific, and the best touch both. A viewer is offered options, speaking of art, regarding depth of interaction, and can only bring to the table what he or she has to bring. A discussion of an artist’s responsibilities to offer the viewer hospitality must reflect the values of Home. The movements (some mentioned above), premised on home-replacement or whatever, reject this obligation, as they must, and therefore they fail to meet the viewer understanding, the inherent one – Hence the crisis in Art.
Art must come home.
A soldier on a battlefield dying
Wants to go home
& calls for his mother.
Acknowledgements:
Thank you to all warriors who afforded me the opportunity to make this show, especially those who died on battlefields far from home, not in the arms of their mothers. Thanks to the artists who participated in the collective DddD, 01, Journeyman Project and Art for Humans projects that will inform this exhibit, especially those who contributed work to “Home01” (Nashville, ruby green Contemporary Art Foundation, 2001). Special gratitude to my parents and our West Virginia home and all those who have shared their homes with me over the years. The inside of every home is a unique dream. I apologize to those whose dreams I didn’t or couldn’t respect, whose hospitality I somehow offended.
