By “Life Art,” I mean a creative process that embraces life itself as the primary medium — choosing an actual life situation as the frame for the work, and then working with people, places, tools, materials, stories, and dilemmas that exist in that chosen frame of experience, as a way of evolving that part of the world.

Life Art can be a way of working through trauma, processing a difficult history, healing a community, improving a physical environment, inviting a particular future, seeding a dream, celebrating a blessing — any kind of embodied experience.

As an aesthetic process anchored in physical reality, Life Art evolves the actual world of the maker. It is a never-ending and recursive practice that occurs in time and space, continually suggesting new next steps with each iteration.

In this way, the practitioner of Life Art learns to become attuned to the organic unfolding of life — sensing that which wants to happen next, then ushering those possibilities into reality through the application of their own unique talents and gifts.

As Life Art, the practice inherently seeks to be like life itself: beautiful, generative, nourishing, and otherwise of genuine service to an evolving web of relationships — rewarding the practitioner with the opportunity to live inside the growing work.

The notion of “Life Art” resonates with a number of other practices and movements from recent art history, while also exploring a unique frontier of its own.

It shares certain similarities with the “Performance Art” practiced by the likes of Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, and Marina Abramovic — and the “Ritual Worlds” created by artists such as Matthew Barney, Ann Hamilton, and Tom Sachs.

It also resonates with the public “spectacles” of the early Situationists, and the social choreography of “Relational Aesthetics” as practiced by artists such as Tino Seghal, Andrea Zittel, Theaster Gates, Ernesto Pujol, and JR.

Perhaps the distinguishing feature of “Life Art” is the way in which it embraces an actual life situation as the frame for the work — rather than inventing situations, environments, and worlds for the purpose of the artwork alone.

In this sense, Life Art is ordinary, practical, personal, and sincere — ultimately less about “art” as such and more about life (or more precisely: about applying the creative/transformative powers of art to an actual life situation).

Life Art need not be public, promoted, or even recorded — except when the sharing of the work might be helpful to others (for instance, to help to heal and unify a community, to articulate a vision for the future, or to serve an educational function as in the “case study” offered by In Fragments).

By being less about the maker and more about the maker in service to a larger purpose, Life Art helps to reconnect the practitioner with the original roles of the artist within society — to learn, to teach, to heal, to unify, to create, to inspire.

Before the competitive influence of money, markets, fame, and the corresponding cult of self-promotion, the artist in society was more akin to the shaman, providing an essential function at the heart of the community.

By practicing Life Art, perhaps we can rediscover this form of genuine service.

Some prominent examples in the “art world” might include the neighborhood development projects of Theaster Gates in Chicago, the community portraiture projects of the French photographer JR, the immersive desert environments of Andrea Zittel, or the nomadic creative services of Robert Irwin.

Well-known examples in other walks of life might include the rural homesteading of Helen and Scott Nearing, the intermittent rebuilding of the Ise Grand Shrine by Shintoist woodworkers in southern Japan, or the fake identity cards made by master forger Alice Cohn as a way of saving Jewish children from the Holocaust.

Other practioners might include former New York City tour-bus-guide Speed Levitch (as seen in the 1998 documentary, The Cruise); explorer/photographer Peter Beard; and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, with his notion of psychomagic.

Humbler examples are countless, occurring in myriad situations around the world every day — really whenever an individual applies a conscious aesthetic intervention to his or her local frame of reality, thereby evolving the world.

Ultimately, “Life Art” is just a way of naming and calling attention to that which we’re each doing all the time anyway — shaping our personal realities from moment to moment by how we choose to perceive them. The concept of “Life Art” simply helps to make this dynamic a little more conscious, and therefore perhaps more effective.

You might begin by reflecting on your actual life situation in this very moment:

• What are the weakest parts that could be improved?
• What are the strongest parts that could be strengthened?
• What are the clearest next steps to accomplish one or both of those things?

Asking these questions repeatedly from moment to moment will help you become attuned to the natural unfolding of life, so that you can learn to respond to its signals by decisively doing “the next clear thing” in each situation.

As this practice of doing “the next clear thing” becomes second-nature, you might begin to sense larger transformative potentials that exist in your sphere of reality.

At that point, you might begin to explore the role of symbolic action as a transformer of individual and collective belief — for what is reality if not belief?

The technology of “ritual” may then become useful to you.

“Ritual” is an overloaded word in the English language, used to describe at least three distinct kinds of practices, each of which really begs for a word of its own.

The first kind of ritual is any kind of repetitive action — such as the morning cup of coffee, the Sunday newspaper, or the holiday house that you visit each summer. These kinds of rituals might be better described as “routines.”

The second kind of ritual is any kind of formalized communal practice — such as the wedding, the bar mitzvah, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the Eucharist. These kinds of rituals might be better described as “ceremonies.”

The third kind of ritual is any kind of aestheticized symbolic action that’s charged with clear intentions — such as the rituals that make up In Fragments. These kinds of rituals are designed to function as one-way doors, permanently altering a portion of reality, so they typically happen only once. In this sense, they might be better described as “magic spells” — though the term “ritual” is more innocuous in our current cultural landscape, which is why it’s used throughout this project.

The world of High Acres Farm has been greatly transformed since 2015 when this series of rituals began, a few months before my mother’s passing.

The historic main house where my mother and grandfather once lived underwent a total gut renovation in 2017 — and is now a thriving hospitality offering for the enjoyment of a different visiting family each week, many of whom tell us that their week at High Acres Farm was among the happiest weeks of their lives.

My sister and I built homes of our own here in 2019, and her children are filling the landscape with laughter and life, forming new sets of memories for us all.

Almost every building at High Acres Farm has been the site of one or more rituals, and the hills, woods, fields, and waterfront have hosted multiple rituals as well.

A network of twenty-seven mirrored “lightning transformers” was installed in 2021, encompassing around forty acres of land with a new “energy grid” powered by the electricity from lightning strikes, charging the ground with a specific set of intentions — as a form of “earth acupuncture” unique to this place.

Perhaps in time, we will know more about the role these twenty-one rituals ended up played in shaping the unfolding future here at High Acres Farm and beyond...

My mother is a central figure in In Fragments, and her death and cremation represents a kind of phase change in the series of rituals, initiating a new level of intensity and reality, both for me and for the viewer.

Because she died as In Fragments was only beginning, I never had the chance to discuss the resulting project with her. In her final months of life, she was aware that I was exploring a new artistic practice that used ritual as a way of addressing our family history, and she found that to be quite fascinating.

One day, when she was in her hospital bed in the ICU in Burlington, she was talking to me about her feelings surrounding her impending mortality, and she said in a daze, “When I’m gone, you will finally be able to create your magnum opus,” a sentiment that’s rung in my ears ever since — especially given her obsession with Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, in the final months of her life.

In her life, my mother was a very private person, and likely would have felt extremely uncomfortable about our family story being shared so intimately. And yet, the purpose of ritual is to serve the living — to enable us to live more fully and freely, beyond the constraints of the past. Once my mother had died, I felt it was up to me to choose the best way of working with our family story to heal the chronic fears that plagued her experience of life, affecting all of us who loved her.

Over the past few years since her passing, I’ve encountered my mother several times in my dreams. The first few encounters were strained, and I had to set boundaries against her strong emotions. The more recent encounters have been harmonious, and saw her happily striding through the streets of New York City — confident, purposeful, culturally engaged, and on her way to the opera.

Unlike most film projects, In Fragments was made with a very small crew — really just four people: myself, an editor, a composer, and a principal collaborator.

This tiny crew allowed us to produce the project on a budget of around $75,000 — about half for production, and the other half roughly split between fabrication and the 2021 Equinox Gathering where the films were premiered.

Yes, of course! If you’d like to host a screening of In Fragments, you can use the player on the films page to do so — no further permission is required.

That said, we’d appreciate you letting us know so that we can get a sense of how the films are traveling into the world — we’d also love to hear your reactions.

If you’d like to host an in-person screening followed by a discussion or Q&A with Jonathan, please reach out so that we can explore the possibilities.

To experience the twenty-one rituals, please watch the full set of films.

For more about the films, please explore the rituals and related reflections.

For more about the project’s origins, please see: Working with Life.

For more about the project’s premiere, please see: Seed the Future.

For more about the project’s inspiration, please see: Powers of Ten.

You might also like to explore these books that I found especially helpful:

• Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
• I Am That
• The Way of Zen
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces
• The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Awaken the Inner Shaman
• Wagnerism
• Book of Longing
• The Tao Te Ching
• A Pattern Language
• The Timeless Way of Building
• The Nature of Order
• The Gift