David Peat

The End of Representation 111that happen to people. One dreams of an old school friend and on thefollowing day receives a letter after 20 years of silence. But synchronicitiescan occur at the collective level of society itself.Our rational, waking, reasoning life is only a small part of our totalexperience. Likewise, individual, personal experience is only a smallpart of what is available to us. At the collective level we all dip intowhat has been called the zeitgeist of the times. We have access to adimly felt edge of where consciousness is moving. Some are more ableto plug into it than others. As Stravinsky once said, “[T]he artist isn’tahead of his time, the public are behind theirs.” 4Postmodern ValuesIn a world in which absolute certainty has been left behind, art itselfbecame many different things. For a time it viewed the canvas as anobject in its own right. A painting no longer referred to somethinglying outside itself, but rather, for a Jackson Pollock, for example, thecanvas itself became the arena of action. The canvas did not stand forsomething beyond itself; the canvas had become the thing in itself.Art was also performance, it was social action, it was a breaking ofboundaries between the picture, the frame, and the wall, between thegallery and the world outside, between the artist’s products and theartist’s life, between what it meant to be an artist and what it meant tobe a citizen.Art broke into a multiplicity of activities and products. More andmore it encouraged each one of us to be makers of art ourselves. As thesculptor Anish Kapoor asks, “[D]oes the work of art lie in the stone, inthe mind of the artist, in the eye of the viewer or in the space between?”It is in the participatory act of seeing that art is born. As the Germanartist Joseph Beuys put it, “We are all artists.” In this sense we are allhelping to create the world.4I’m a little reluctant to make such critical distinctions between public and artist,but it is certainly true that some people come into life with highly tuned sensibilitiesand act as beacons for the rest of us.