Art is an outgrowth of daily experience, of our ancient animal selves, perhaps even the most characteristic and representative aspect of daily life. How could this be, when it seems so clearly otherwise? Why is it, Dewey asks, “art seems to be an importation into experience from a foreign country and the esthetic to be a synonym for something artificial?” In answering this question Sasquatch like to quote his saying: ”…Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth…” …for Sasquatch do not separate art from life.
As Dewey pointed out, art for humans too was not always something separate from daily life. If you were to take a trip to the anthropological museum at UBC and observe artifacts of Northwest Coast aboriginals, you would see exhibit after exhibit of beautifully decorated and even personified utensils used daily by Northwest peoples. “…Domestic utensils, furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars pots, bows, spears, were wrought with such delighted care that today we hunt them out and give them places of honor inner art museums. Yet in their own time and place, such things were enhancements of the processes of everyday life. Instead of being elevated to a niche apart, they belonged to display of prowess, the manifestation of group and clan membership, worship of gods, feasting and fasting, fighting, hunting, and all the rhythmic crises that punctuate the stream of living.”
