And so now we do know what a master-piece is and we also know why there are so few of them. Everything is against them. Everything that makes life go on makes identity and everything that makes identity is of necessity a necessity. And the pleasures of life as well as the necessities help the necessity of identity.
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But what can a master-piece be about mostly it is about identity and all it does and in being so it must not have any. [...] Moments are not important because of course master-pieces have no more time than they have identity although time like identity is what they concern themselves about of course that is what they do concern themselves about.
(Gertrude Stein, What are Master-pieces, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, England, UK, 1936, published 1940, Conference Press, Los Angeles, USA)
Being able to imagine and realize outside the constraints of what Stein aptly calls necessities binding us, but with and within the necessities that make us exist, remains a task for anyone involved in the necessities of daily life, including politics and political decisions and processes.
Far from being a process to be watched with the (petit)bourgeois suspicion against the medicine-person and the shaman and their expertise and resulting power inbalance, later made into a kind of caste of specialists called nobility, any invention, any progress is the result of countless experimentations and trials and errors.
However it also remains a fact that depending on the personal situation, dealing with life's various specific necessities depends not only on personal ability and learning, but also on the means that are available. And so the anger and frustration from not having such means is of concern for anyone who wants invention and progress to happen sustainably on an ever changing planet (partly because of such innovations)
In his book "Frederick" (1968) Leo Lionni demonstrates very clearly how the mice collecting food for the winter days would look at Frederic who collected colours, impressions, created words, poems, which he later shared when the food was up and virtual was used to help with the visceral. There is an echo from times of extreme pressure, incl. raves in cities in Ukraine being bombed, to counteract the violence :
During the early days of the [HIV/AIDS] epidemic, humor, sexuality, and even music seemed questionable, in the face of so much horror. They very quickly became essential.
(Paul Rudnick, US-American playwright, incl. for The Addams Family, author of Jeffrey a comedy about HIV/AIDs from 1993)
It is possible to see the understandings of intelligence, ability to "read between lines" = work with context in the moment and of intermedia, incl. as it was used by Elaine Summers (1925-2014) in the same space that can come to exist between necessities that would otherwise drag away from what could be happening in such open, less-defined timespaces.
And while innovation absolutely needs very concrete work with very concrete necessities for the trial and error of concrete development and progress, this potential, as in play, the experimental, even when done with·in very refined parameters, remains the kind of movement we could also call akin to our understanding of movement and dance.
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