Common Sense consists of a 5 drawings and a text. The work was made during 'protoapartment', organised by protoacademy in Edinburgh in 2000. The definition text was made through contributions from other protoacademy members, and other friends and family whom I was in contact with at the time of the project. (I also compiled a definition-text as part of A Small Collection of Improvisations in 1999).
At the time I posted this text on the protoacademy website (now obsolete):
It was during one of our discussions in the proto-apartment, we were talking about the reasons why science was valued above art as a provider of answers, and I had this deep seated feeling of having been cheated rise up inside me and I exclaimed: "it's starts in school, where we think we are taught about the world, but then we grow up and we realise one by one that it was all wrong, the physics is wrong, the history is wrong, the maths is wrong, the art... the lot. And then we have to begin all over again, unlearning every thing we took for granted..." Why don't we trust children with the truth? We are caught in a crazy cycle. Adults pass on their fear of uncertainty, by acting as if things are really simple. But things are complicated, and we know very little for sure. I wonder what would happen if we admitted how little we know, and if we told our children how it is - things are open to question! Maybe children would grow up with less fear of the unknown and maybe they would develop an uncanny ability to see through things.
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| Special Thanks go to protoacademy and all the contributors to the definition. |