Luke Skywalker (Alec Clayton), "Clone Her!," Weekly Volcano, May 19, 2005, 2. (reprinted with author’s permission)

Obi-Wan Kenobi taught me to transport through time and space using nothing but a clear mind and the power of the Force. My first voyage using this new skill took me to a planet in a far distant galaxy and to a time many centuries in the past. Among the inhabitants of this planet are a race of artists who create objects made for contemplation and enlightenment. These artists are the spiritual equivalent of the most advanced Jedi and are today revered as spiritual and cultural leaders.

But this was not during the time frame of my voyage to Earth. In that time the earthlings were in a primitive stage of advancement, and most of the people could not understand the visual and symbolic language of artists. Living artists were lauded by the few but ridiculed and mistrusted by the masses. Artists who were long dead, however, were worshipped as heroes and seers. Even though true artists were mostly unappreciated, the word “art” carried a powerful mystique, and there were many people who wanted to be recognized as artists, even though they had never undergone the rigorous training required and the objects they created were lifeless and uninspired. Ironically, these pseudoartists were more fully appreciated by the masses than were the real artists.

Today, of course, real artists are given the respect they have rightfully earned, and there are no more pseudoartists on Earth. The change came about when works of art were taken out of major marketplaces called galleries and museums and found their place in small venues in small cities that were removed from the commercial marketplace and when artists quit competing for money and fame. Mostly unknown artists in small cities and towns began creating works that were not sold but were freely shared with the inhabitants of their communities.

One such artist was Holly Senn, a young woman in the city of Tacoma, Wash. Senn had worked as a furniture maker and a librarian. She had a great love of books and respect for craftsmanship. Her art used words that she copied from books and put together in new configurations to create new meanings.

In the windows of an abandoned building called Woolworth, she created what looked like a stage set with trees and books and a proliferation of words. The trees were “trees of knowledge,” a play on words referring to a religious myth wherein the first inhabitants of Earth ate the fruit of a tree their god had promised would give them knowledge of good and evil. (For reasons beyond my understanding, this gain in knowledge was in and of itself considered evil.)

Rather then sprouting leaves, one of these trees sprouted words on slips of paper, and the other sprouted podlike fruits made of paper, with sentences from books pasted to the surface. Like fallen leaves in autumn, the ground underneath these trees was covered with old books, mostly children’s schoolbooks on science, history and geography.

The leaves of one tree sprouted the words wonder, provoke, forbidden, extract, reinvent, thought, idea, seed, and borrow—words commonly associated with the seeking of knowledge. The passages from books pasted on the fruit tree were overlapped and incomplete, thus forcing the reader/viewer to puzzle out his or own ideas as to their meaning. Senn recognized that the seeking of knowledge requires effort on the part of the seeker.

Because I am able to transport myself through time as well as space, I discovered that in later years this installation in the Woolworth windows became a prototype for future works that removed art from museums and marketplaces and placed it in places of honor in local communities. Now revered as a historical document, Holly Senn’s Woolworth installation is installed in a prestigious museum where only the elite may visit it. I suspect she would have hated that.

Visit Alec Clayton’s web site at www.alecclayton.com for essays, reviews, and commentary on art.