In the beautiful conversation between Ann Hamilton and Krista Tippett, which I wrote about earlier this spring, Hamilton is formulating very nicely some of the yet unfinished thoughts I have been struggling with the last couple of months. As I see it, she is figuring out some of the things I hoped that Alain deBotton would grasp – but didn’t. Here are some clippings from the above mentioned conversation:

WHERE IS IT THAT WE CAN GATHER AND BE ALONE TOGETHER?
• What are the circumstances for we ? – that I can enjoy the pleasure of something I’m seeing here, knowing that I’m also sharing this pleasure with the person next to me.
• There is an interesting kind of intimacy with this total stranger, which the situation makes possible. And that this can change our whole day. We are alone together.
• Maybe too much togetherness makes us really nervous.
• Finding our own presence, our own gestures, in relation to a larger presence or being: across time, space and cultures.
• As an artist working today: How can we create a circumstance in which those kinds of processes in joining and acknowledging can occur.
• Labor is a kind of knowing. An evidence of someone else’s body in the object. 
• The museum can be (like) a sacred place, soaked in beauty. A place where air and time feels different – calm.

ANN HAMILTON: the event of a thread (2012), Park Avenue Armory, New York

I find the idea of the sacred, as formulated by Hamilton – not as a relation to God, but to a greater, collective non-individual being, incredibly fruitful when thinking about art. Being alone together, being quiet together, letting our body connect to something outside of logic – this is what religion used to do for us, but for many of us no longer have  the power to do. But I wonder; can art? These are the things I like to study.