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- 15 Mapping

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A subtext of this book is time. Politics insists on timeliness. A truly political art has its focus on life around it, on people, on history, on the future. Spirituality denies time as we know it, but also has an inner eye on daily life; it is not the woozy superfluous leisure activity that both institutionalized religions and the New Age would have us believe. The artists in this book remind us that a head in the clouds need not preclude feet firmly on the earth. The unfamiliar images and symbols buried in cultures not our own, or coming mysteriously to us in dreams and flashbacks, offer fresh ways of seeing the world, and art. They support Emile Durkheim's contention that society itself is a creative power and the origin of religion, that only the intensity of collective life can awaken individuals to new achievements; on the other hand...only the individual can affect the collective dream.

At the vortex of these two forces -- the political and the spiritual -- lies a renewed sense of function, even a mission, for art. Stylistically the artists in this book share little. But they have in common an intensity and a generosity associated with belief, with hope, and even with healing. Whether they are naming, landing, mixing, turning around or dreaming, they are challenging the current definitions of art and the foundations of an ethnocentric culture.

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