Lizard (Roaming Penzance)

Lizard was born at Roaming Penzance in 2013. Roaming is a community interest company that facilitates change, most often change in consciousness. It offers a kind of studio situation, with opportunities to draw, paint, bake, talk, dig, model, carve, etc. The people who join us, one day a week, may be “homeless,” whether by choice or not, may be seriously troubled in a variety of ways. The situation raises really good questions about “art”, “objects” and “ownership”, to say nothing of things like storage, preservation, appraisal, exhibition, insurance…

Flusser did not define “artistic” gestures in terms of particular materials or in terms of an intention to produce images. He categorised them as aesthetic gestures, as distinct from gestures of “work” or “communication”. For him, specifically, smoking a pipe was a kind of aesthetic gesture, a form of ritual; perhaps more startling is his aligning of religious ritual in the same category–markedly different, yet still aesthetic in character. He saw aesthetic gesture as “acting out,” that is, expressing a unique way of being in the world. Art then becomes something like a level of commitment: an artist is one for whom “acting out” is the very most absorbing, insistent, important thing in the world.