Hillsborough, New Hampshire
“That is what brings pleasure: to bear witness to oneself, freely and without purpose, within explicitly chosen parameters; to recognize oneself by one’s style, and then to immerse all other gestures (e.g., that of writing and that of conversing with a friend) in this style. From this standpoint, perhaps, we can appreciate the familiar saying about style making the man. In other words, pipe smoking is a gesture that permits us to act out, that is, to find ourselves in the world through our own style. This kind of pleasure can only be defined as ‘aesthetic,’ and so we can now say what was meant by the word art when we were discussing ritual gesture as a phenomenon of the artistic life. The word art means the gesture through which existence “acts itself out,” freely and purposelessly bearing witness to itself, within appropriate parameters. The “artistic life,” then, is the life-form that depends on the style in which gestures are performed. So the ‘artistic life’ is not about changing the world, or about being in the world with others, but about finding itself in the world.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures