What dreams will you dream?
I personally stopped dreaming a while ago. And by dreaming I obviously don’t mean the psychic activity occurring during sleep (hopefully not of the mind). No. What I mean here is that imagining process of hope or of fruitless and inconsistent desire in which we often take refuge to escape the pressing frustrations of daily life, forgetting that this aid has too been totally colonised by the radicalisation of that line of thought we define as “capitalist”.
The dream of pursuing an ephemeral reality which often reveals itself to be disappointing at the exact moment it comes true. The unsolvability of the desire ending in itself has been quickly replaced by a desire for immediate satisfaction, for pure feeling instead of perceiving. Let’s not forget that perceiving and feeling are two completely different moods. Perceiving requires a support by consciousness, whereas the logic of sensation is ephemeral and immediate.
It’s difficult to be able to dream and deeply know ourselves within a society of feeling and of the already-felt, especially when the mind is crowded with billions of untranscribable thoughts.
It’s time to start dreaming again, though, but in order to do so, we need a new awareness, starting from more cognizance in our sector, as well as from our individual daily routines.
Art is in fact an activity completely enveloped in a smoke curtain, a social frame of appearances that insists in showing off the intellectual emancipation of an environment in which everything “is fine”, “works”, “is interesting”.
Acknowledging the contradictions and the hysterias embodied in the art system means unveiling the problems concealed by the blinding garishness of its events and rituals: conformism, opaque informativity, voluntary self-exploitation, etc.
Art has often managed to combine the dream world and the real world, which are so hard to connect in the context of our daily lives. It perceives, it doesn’t limit itself to feeling. In addition to that, in its perceiving, it has the ability to communicate and convey. That’s why it’s important to reconnect with ourselves in an attempt to recover a dream function leading to feeling, and from feeling to communicating.
When words are not enough, art responds with a silence pregnant of meaning.
What needs to be highlighted is that this loss doesn’t only reflect at a personal level, but also on what is exhibited, be it in a shop or in a museum. If we confine ourselves to feeling, we remain superficial, and superficiality drives to imitating what we have already seen or heard. The lack of internalisation which characterises this historical period generates already-existing, often boring and repetitive scenarios.
Now unable to have dreams, we dream other people’s dreams. We take what’s theirs to make it our own and showcase it, miserably failing in the attempt to try to make it innovative.
We are witnessing an incessant churning out of slogans, works, trite exhibition projects. We are looking to the past to cover for our inability to understand and represent the present.
Art has hijacked itself.
The reality is that we are all victims though. Victims and accomplices of a system that we find repulsive to investigate and analyse.
The solution is not easy to find nor easy to accept. The best way could be to internalise the problem, take a moment and close our eyes. Imagining, travelling through those unexplored meanders of our mind that seem to be more dangerous than reality.
Forced to be closed to the outside, it’s time to open up to our inner selves.
But going back to the initial question: what dreams will I dream then?
I will fight to start dreaming again.
