1999 - The New Millenium
What is it that we celebrate as the Earth makes yet another of its ceaseless revolutions around the sun? Is it the passing of the planet past an arbitrary point in space? Of course not. Since the first moment Homo Sapiens Sapiens discovered the orderly progression of the seasons and their correlation to the angle of the sun we have created markers to determine our “progression” through the cosmos.
What makes this progression meaningful though is its correlation to the “seasons” within each human soul/psyche. The rhythm of the day, week, month, year, decade, century and millennium all have their correlates within the human breast, and each human life is an actor in and upon the development and direction of each of these great cosmic cycles.
It is clear that the movement into a “new” millennium is a big deal to the human psyche. Note all the energy and effort being put forth to accommodate it. And it is obviously just as clear that a big part of this “celebration” is not simply to state “we’ve made it another 1000 years” but to look forward at a moment in time that now represents a new chapter in our evolution. We all look forward as individuals, communities, cultures and as a species to project on to this new unwritten chapter in our history all of the dreams and desires of whom and what we wish to be. So it is finally about dreaming, and the millennium affords us the opportunity to dream BIG.
If a “millenialist” is someone who takes the dream of our human potential seriously (at this time), then artists are natural “millenialists”(among other things) in that we tend to be in a constant state of “dreaming”. The future is always an unwritten chapter to us. My art has been and continues to be about one simple observation. Meaning in every human life consists of an interaction between our “inner” world and our “outer” world. Look around at the culture we’ve created and you’ll see representations of our psychic reality. These two worlds (which are really one) always react and interface with each other. Discoveries in one will always affect the other. What will be the new discoveries in this hopeful millennium? What new potential lies hidden waiting to be discovered? None of us can know for certain, but if we want a glimpse of the new human millennium then let’s look to the artists, for they are the ones who presage the developments and discoveries within the psyche that will be played out in the physical realm we call our world.