In the Political Body Blog, I intend to write an entry about each work or group of works of art in the exhibition The Political Body. In each post I will describe my reasons for including the subject in the exhibition, and while doing so, I will offer some observations and facts about the art and the artist. I will also try to say something from a more general critical perspective about the excellence of the work—why I am proud to show it at Trident Gallery in the first place. Ideas themselves, such as the ideas behind The Political Body, are well and good and important, but I feel one must always be careful, in the zeal of pursuing a topic in art, not to lose track of the prerequisite of the intrinsic excellence of the work of art, which motivates and justifies exploration of its topical relevance to a theme by placing it within the suggestive context of an exhibition and the discourse it inspires.
I am writing this blog toward the end of this exhibition because, as with all genuine political discourse in my view, I have developed the ideas I express in dialogue with others, through recent conversations, reading, and looking, beginning with the extraordinary performances with which we opened the exhibition and including conversations with gallery visitors and the artists, and reading inspired by these experiences. Political thought, like making art, is a continual process, the nature of which, I feel, is organically suited to a blog format: thoughts captured for the future, but dated on a continuum, thoughts soon superseded and receding into quaint naivete. Please join me in this vigorous activity of movement: the faster these thoughts become obsolete, the more we have meaningfully experienced and done together.
