Artistic Anarchy?

Who wants to join me for another late night/early morning thought process?

Great. So here's what's swirling around in my head:

I've been thinking about how works of art can engage people (you know this already). But I had an idea: what if the Artwork (as in the physical object) is not the complete Work of Art. Bear with me here. The painting, rather than being the whole shebang of the Art being presented could instead function as the stimulus for a larger experience that encompasses the Art being presented. Here's a specific example that's been marinating for a while:

What if you encountered an enormous canvas covered in tactile layers of paint, and you were actually allowed to touch it?? Yeah, think about that...Rather than the Painting being the Art Object that you're supposed to contemplate and revere, your interaction with that object becomes something more--an Art Experience. Think about the implications of this process--as people touch the surface of the painting, they will slowly change its presentation by eroding away at the layers. And the most tactile spots, the places that people feel most compelled to touch, will wear away the fastest. The painting will eventually wear away completely and die, but everyone who had the chance to touch it will carry that experience with them for the rest of their life! The painting, in this way, sort of becomes human (in that it dies and lives on through the memories of others).

Or, what if you could be inside a painting, or at least have the sense that you were. This is a really new idea, so I haven't come up with more details as far as the execution (something about building layers that you could pass through visually or physically), but these are the sorts of concepts I'm kicking around.

Anyway, the most important part of these ideas for me is the concept of the painting as a stimulus rather than an end product. There is a whole discourse surrounding work that functions as a void upon which the viewer can project an idea (I'm thinking of Rauschenberg's white paintings, or even Lygia Clark's Arquitecturas Biológicas, which she deemed "completely void of meaning and with no possibility of regaining life except by human support”). But I'm not even talking about the void here. I'm talking about work that functions as the impetus for a larger experience that becomes the Work of Art (maybe a better example would be Edward Keinholz' The Beanery, but even that piece had a clearly defined divide between viewer and object). The point is, I'd rather create objects that incite lasting experiences with the proviso that they won't last forever than create pristine fetish objects that incite nothing but the same tired old viewing processes for centuries. I feel like breaking down the barriers of acceptable behavior is paramount to making something that will last in a real way that isn't just about a surface, image, or object. The potential for interaction--that's the key difference.

I guess we'll see how my upcoming paintings manifest given all of this...I'm definitely gonna try to make the Touchable Paintings, at the very least.