THE WILLINGNESS TO BE FOOLED

I tend to find the bigger holidays - Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter - rather complicated. I enjoy the smaller, sillier days of celebration - Groundhog Day, April Fool's, Arbor Day - markers of the season that have the smell of paste and construction paper. In elementary school, they were often an excuse for artmaking - maybe that is the appeal.

Today I was thinking about the the ability to be fooled and how it changes over time and circumstance. I have memories of times when I was able to truly fool someone or times when I was totally taken in. The masked anticipation of the fooler, the necessary innocence or distraction of the foolee and the joyful, rueful moment when all becomes clear.

The best pranks are lightly constructed - relying on a structure already in place and then diverting from it just enough to make the joke. The fooler and the foolee share a vocabulary which makes the joke work and more connections can take the prank or story to a deeper level. I may laugh at the NPR's clever fake news stories but I can be taken in completely by the custom-tailored tall tale. The one to be fooled must be open to the trick on some level for it to work. Children, who are so often open and present, are easy to fool. As we build our layers of experience, it is harder to reach through our defenses but unexpectedly rich and satisfying when we do.

I have been thinking about all of this in relationship to the connection between artist and audience. As audience, we connect to art that references our daily life in some way but also presents possibilities we haven't imagined. We have to be open to a new way of thinking, feeling and seeing, willing to be tempted away from our usual paths and constructs, vulnerable to the uncertainty of the unknown.

As artists, we use just the necessary amount of skill and craft to construct a world and then wait with anticipation for our viewer to connect - to "get it." Stretching ourselves, we rely on others to come out on the limb with us, pulled along by details that resonant with their own lives. We can set up the situation and create the initial impulse but the art happens - like the joke - in a space we can not control, in the space between what we have created and the willing audience.

So let us all be open to being fooled, today and every day, open to making art, smelling paste and diving into that space.