Today we celebrate unlikely but uplifting combinations

Pierre Hugyhe wants ever day to be a celebration, so he asked some of his artist friends to come up with a reason to celebrate on days that we don’t have a holiday at the moment.

Pierre has used his exhibition at the Tate Modern to display the new holidays to the public for the first time.

The day I am most looking forward to is the day celebrating our sense of anticipation. But no date has been set for that yet.

The most enlightening holiday will be the day of rational certainty. On that day we will be enjoined not to cross our fingers or worry about stepping on the cracks in the pavement. The horoscopes won’t be published. Temples, churches and mosques will shut their doors for the day.

The results of the day will be interesting. Can we base our lives solely on things that can be rationally proven? We don’t know what time is, or how many dimensions there are in the universe, or why the universe was created, or why a table feels solid when the atoms that it is made of consist mainly of empty space. We need metaphors, assumptions, beliefs, and maybe even faith, to bridge these gaps.

The day will necessitate a temporary laying aside of the existing public explanations of the nature, purpose, and destiny of the universe. It will thus provide you with a bit of space to come up with your own answers to these questions, whichever answers help you pursue whichever type of life you most want to live.

Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way urges anyone wanting to make more use of their own creativity to come up with their own view of why the creator of the universe created it and what that creator is like.

I like to think of the creator of the universe as a being that is not all-knowing, but is instead all-learning: learning from the new things that are happening all over the universe all the time. That learning isn't stored by the creator seperately from the universe, the learning is stored in the universe itself. The universe works to both use some of that learning and to keep on creating new situations for new learning.

The creator of the universe created it because no universe had been created before, and the happiness and beauty it could potentially generate might well be worth the inevitable pain.

Later in the year another Hugyhe holiday will celebrate the future. The curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asked his artist friends to tell him what they think the future is. It is a nice twist, a curator asked to produce a work of art by an artist and doing so by curating the comments of other artists to create an exhibition within an exhibition within an exhibition. All the artists have come up with different little straplines for the future, thus confirming that not only do we not know what the future holds, we don’t even know what the future is.

We at World Flapjack day are a little disappointed that that this French led endeavour has not come up with a day to celebrate any of the wonderful things found in patisseries.

To make up for this omission we are proposing to make July 8 the celebration of ‘unlikely but uplifting combinations’.

On this day evey year people will be enjoined to take the day off to combine different things that they like but don’t normally do at the same time. This is so often a sure fire recipe for happiness in life.

The inspriration for this day came from the Banauchoc: a pain au chocalat with banana in. (you can get them from the Panos bakery on the concourse of Brussels Gare du Midi station).

Some of the things I like doing are: playing chess, having a bath, meeting new people, learning new languages, getting fresh air. In Budapest at the Szechenyi Baths you can stand for hours in an open air thermal bath, play chess with a waterproof chess set and improve your Hungarian.

We at World Flapjack Day support Pierre’s endeavour. and will be celebrating each of these new holidays as they come through the year.






Photos of Szechenyi baths by phnk