TBA festival: Why it matters

A couple of days away from the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art festival started me thinking.  Why is TBA important -- to me and to the city, and by "city" I mean, as usual, the entire cultural watershed? Why do I attend and why should we care about a little,  curated festival of fringe-y performance art, with a little multi-media and visual arts thrown in?

Maybe this is it: TBA presents the greatest concentration of artists struggling openly with the problem of freedom that we have in Portland during the calendar year. And freedom is difficult to handle, for artists and for everyone else, for that matter. We are confused by it, turn our backs on it, resent it, trumpet its virtues without accepting its responsibilities, assume it for ourselves and deny it to others. It is thoroughly perplexing. So TBA provides us with a little living laboratory, a tiny sliver of tissue, that we can slide under the microscope for a good, long look.

Artists are born and start making art in prison.