Meaning or McCalgary?

Maryo Ewell was the keynote speaker at the Alberta Cultural Think Tank in Canada, February 21, 2002, co-sponsored by the Calgary Region Arts, Alberta Performing Arts Stabilization Fund, the Department of Canadian Heritage and the EPCOR Center for the Performing Arts. The purpose of the event was "to engage the arts community in the process of creating a shared vision for the role of the arts in Calgary and to investigate collaborations that will empower the arts to achieve a higher level of civic consciousness and commitment."

My parents lived in Alberta — in Edmonton mostly — from 1942 to 46. During that time, they were close friends with any number of Alberta artists. Gwen Pharis Ringwood, playwright, was my godmother. Walter Phillips, painter, after whom the Art Gallery at Banff is named, was a very close family friend. I grew up surrounded by his wood-blocks and watercolors. In fact, last time I visited my mother, we were talking about one of the watercolors that she has on her wall, and she said, "Oh yes, I remember when that was painted. Walter and Gladys and Bob and I, were traveling to Calgary together, and our car just kind of died, and Walter set up his easel and just painted that scene till the mechanic came." And my dad used to tell us Alberta folk stories at bedtime. Here’s one, for instance:

Old-timers tell me that the early inhabitants of Calgary wore tin ears. This interesting fact was explained to me and after I heard the explanation I didn’t, of course, doubt the truth of the statement. You see, it was like this.

Years and years ago newcomers in Calgary frequently went about in the wintertime without covering their ears. As a result a lot of these greenhorns had their ears frozen off. Now these poor fellows didn’t dare go about the countryside without ears, so the local blacksmith, who by the way was also the dentist, was commissioned to make a flock of artificial ears. He tried leather at first, but this was unsatisfactory. The leather got soft and the wearer couldn’t go near a horse without being nuzzled. Finally the blacksmith hit on the idea of tin ears, and they were a huge success, except in a hailstorm when the noise was terrific.

So, the arts and stories of Alberta nurtured me while I was growing up, but of course, being a kid, I never asked about who these artists were, and what they were trying to do with their work. Actually, I’m only now starting to find out what my dad was doing here, and that kind of leads me into what I want to say tonight.

He was director of the Alberta Folklore and Local History project at the University of Alberta — he was working in the Extension Division. He was collecting materials that Extension hoped would help Albertans better understand Alberta and, therefore, themselves, to help ground them during the upheavals of World War II. As the Extension director said in 1944, "[There is] a distinct Western spirit, an optimism that is at once hopeful and fearful, a sense of humor which is the source of many of the tales in the following pages" — the following pages being a book, "Johnny Chinook," that was published as a result of the project. But the book wasn’t important, really, except as a symbol. Thousands of Albertans contributed true stories and tall tales, biographies, bits of the history of their towns, for the more than 1,000 boxes and folders that are still in Edmonton at the Peel Library on the University campus. The idea was that the materials needed to be collected so that the province could become more self-aware. And, ideally, as in the case with "" so that writers could then take historical materials and, through making plays, paintings, poems, dances inspired by them, help Albertans better understand themselves. And, in fact, to help people in Calgary or Medecine Hat understand how they are different from people in Edmonton or Lethbridge. But so what? What is the big deal about a people in a place better understanding themselves? I’m going to leave that question hanging for a minute, and tell you another story about my dad. Fast forward from Alberta, Canada, 1944, to Wisconsin, U.S.A.,1958, my tenth birthday.

I had four friends over and my folks were very mysterious about what was going to happen. When my friends arrived, we were led to the back yard. Three large pieces of cardboard had been propped up against trees. They read, Act One, Act Two, Act Three. We were told that the name of the play was to be "The Diamond in the Corn." We were provided with a big piece of quartz. We were provided with a box of old clothes. We were told that we had one hour, and that all of our parents would be over to watch the play at 4 o’clock. Of course, we invented and produced a play. As I recall, the play ended ambiguously: We searched for the diamond in the corn, but never found it. I realized — but only after about 30 years had passed — that my parents were teaching me to embrace creativity, to embrace a new way of thinking, in the most ordinary of day-to-day events. Why can’t a birthday party be a play?

By now you may be wondering if I’m just planning on telling stories and reminiscing all night. But, taken together, the story of the Alberta Folklore Project coupled with the story of "The Diamond in the Corn" leaves me with the big idea of the role of creativity, even in the most day-to-day, in helping to define a place. And it seems to me, as I look at your agenda for the next two days, that this is what your discussions are all about.

I think that we are at an incredible time in human history, in cultural history and cultural histories. We’re at that strange moment, I think, where we know that everything is changing but we don’t know what it is changing to and we don’t know what things mean, yet.

Birthday parties? What do they mean? Remember that old joke: A fellow is proudly showing an ax to a buddy. "That’s my grandfather’s ax," he said. "Gosh," said his friend, "that’s in beautiful shape for such an old ax." "Oh, I had to replace the head a couple of times. And I replace the handle every five years or so. But I sure am proud of it — to be the third generation in my family to use that old ax." How on earth do you understand meaning? Or devise an appropriate response to what you think you understand?

Just take recent world events of the past few months, for instance. Ten years ago, we all thought we knew what "warfare" was all about. There was a clearly defined "enemy," and that "enemy" was generally a distinct national government or a group of national governments. Not so any more. But the U.S. is applying much old methodology to a new situation these days.

In fact, what is "nationalism" any more? Check out the Olympics. You have a German changing his citizenship and skiing for Spain. Russian coaches for the American skaters. The fact that China participated at all. Yet for the now-famous figure-skating competition you had blocs of judges from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and China voting for the Russian pair, and judges from Canada, Germany, Japan and the U.S. voting for the Canadian pair. Looks like the Cold War to me. Old methodology, new situation.

Or what is "ethnicity," even? In past census polls in the U.S., you selected your ethnicity from among six categories — five racial groups plus "other." In this past census, you could check more than one category. Let me quote Kenneth Prewitt at the New School for Social Research in New York: "Six different categories produce 63 different permutations and combinations, since Hispanic-ness as an ethnicity stands outside that classification, it’s Hispanic-non-Hispanic times 63, that’s 126 different racial and ethnic groups. Once you’ve gone there, there’s no stopping. The Arab Americans want to be their own racial group. The Chaldeans want to be their own racial group. Who’s to say they shouldn’t be? If we can have 63, why can’t we have more? What is a race, anyway, for heaven’s sake? The biologists don’t think it means anything. The anthropologists don’t think it means anything. So, who’s to say we shouldn’t create whatever kind of small racial groups we want to in this society?" And of course, in years past, the ratio of one group to the other, per the census, has guided much public policy, including the allocation of public funds. Uh oh, what will guide us now? There’s a looming crisis of old methodology, new situation.

So, the world has changed, but systems for responding to the changes aren’t there any more. Even at the micro level we can see this.

In my small town, you’ll see American flags everywhere, from huge ones over the entrances to town to small ones on car antennae — but the voter turnout this past fall was the smallest it has ever been. Yet we were all taught that the essence of living in a democracy was the right to vote. You’d have thought that people who really wanted to express their patriotism would have flocked to the polls this fall. Apparently voting isn’t linked to patriotism any more. Yet many people old and young, Anglo and non-Anglo, rich and poor, wanted to make some statement about the war. What is the only model we have that truly brings such a diversity of people together in a common response? Well, sports. It brings people together — even for a brief and unimportant moment — and we have learned that. So, when we want to express something in common with our neighbor, however different he is from me, we behave as though it were the Super Bowl. I suspect a lot of people realize that this is a pretty shallow way of articulating patriotism. But, it’s all we have got as a model now. Old methodology.

Similarly, the "corporate model" is the defensible way to get things done these days. Even government agencies’ long-range plans tend to refer to their former "constituents" as their "customers." In the corporate world, there are tangible things you can measure — number of customer, numbers of shares sold, profit over loss, dollars returned to shareholders. And it seems relatively simple to evaluate. Profit is good. Loss is not good. So, the government and nonprofits turn to this model to describe themselves and their work. But using the model lock, stock and barrel doesn’t make sense for the government — which is supposed to equalize basic services to everyone as a social good — or for the nonprofit world — whose domain is the quality of human life. But in the absence of new ways of evaluating our work, we fall back on the available model. Old methodology.

We are all exceptionally busy people, and it is much, much easier to deal with things that are clear-cut. Dealing with consumer "brands" is easy; why not respond to our country as a brand — who has the time to get involved? Why not exactly emulate the corporate model — who has the time to insist on appropriate vocabulary and evaluation categories when there is a simpler, black-and-white way to go? So, there may be new meanings, but we can’t respond to them because there isn’t a new methodology.

We ask, what’s wrong with definable, predictable, identifiable, measurable?

Then we often ask: Why should I get involved with the redefining, the unknown, the qualitative, the time-consuming, the messy?

My answer is simple. Because if we don’t, we abrogate our commitment to our neighbors, to our communities, to the notion of living in a democratic society. "Alberta" is more than a brand, isn’t it? "Calgary" is something more than a marketing concept, isn’t it? "Business" is more than making profit at any cost, isn’t it? Human beings are complex wholes and as such are more than "customers," aren’t they? "Representative government" is more than having the right to talk but not the responsibility to listen, isn’t it?

I believe that it is absolutely imperative to reintroduce the notion of meaning into public life. In the absence of articulated meaning, we fall back on sports behavior to substitute for citizenship. Brands, marketing and bottom line become the Esperanto — the generic currency — of public life. The opposite of meaningful, I believe, is generic. And we can too easily, not even knowing it, move from McDonalds to McCalgary to McCanada to McGlobe to McHuman.

Perhaps you see now why I am talking about this stuff at an arts gathering. For who better to be articulators, testers, stimulators, redefiners of public meaning than artists and arts organizations? Who better to raise ideas? Big ideas? And help us arrive at new ways of thinking about the new big ideas?

Dear heaven, you may be saying, why is she laying this on us? I have enough on my hands to get the shows hung or produced, the staff managed, the audience members into the house, the funds raised just to keep the doors open! Of course I would like to redefine public life, but I’ll do that after I come back from my ten meetings this week! After I hire a new financial manager! After I finish the grants and final reports I need to write! After I die!

But that is, in some ways, the problem. The arts sector has done a very, very good job in the past decades becoming institutionalized in the best sense. We do the shows. We’re at those meetings. We’ve raised the money for that financial officer. We’re credible enough to get those grants. We are often invited to be part of community marketing efforts, we attract money and political support and audiences as never before, we are part of the concept of "livable cities," we are becoming skilled in making the political process work for us. We have succeeded. And we surely do not want to lose the credibility that we have struggled so hard to gain.

Yet as we have become institutionalized, as we have become a "sector," as we have become more credible, the resources stakes have risen. We need more money to keep the doors open. We need more political goodwill to build a facility. And as we have struggled to do that we have often done it at the expense of other groups in the community against whom we have had to compete for increasingly scarce resources of money, goodwill, volunteers’ time, strung-out schedules of prospective audience members. We are, in fact, segregating ourselves from our communities, even, ironically, as the idea of "more arts for all the people" is becomingly an increasingly accepted slogan.

And as we become increasingly segregated, we compete harder. We seem to devote more time and resources for a smaller percentage of return, whether the return is measured in memberships, grant money or audience members. "Methodologies," then, become the attractiveness of the brochure, the location of the building, and the business savvy of the CEO, and "meaning" becomes relative income, relative audience size or diversity of audience.

Is this "meaning?"

Many of you may know that the RAND corporation — a think tank that tackles policy questions on many economic and political fronts — has just published a huge study funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. It looks at the future of the performing arts in the U.S. and I suspect that their results are apt for all of North America. In a nutshell — quite unfair to the authors, so you arts administrators here may want to download it for yourselves from RAND’s Web site — in a nutshell, the researchers have stratified performing-arts organizations into the small groups with budgets under $100,000 (U.S. currency), the medium and the very large groups like the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The researchers believe that 20 years from now, the biggest groups will still be around, though they will be spending an increasing amount of their budget on advertising, securing blockbuster shows, emphasizing big-name stars, and presenting relatively conservative material to draw large audiences. The researchers believe that the grassroots groups, used to making do on volunteer labor and used to scrounging for every penny, mostly local pennies, will still be there. But they believe that the middle group is at serious risk. They now tend to have audiences that are the "traditional" arts audiences, meaning, largely Anglo, well-educated, aging people. They tend to have budgets dependent on outside money. They often own buildings with mounting costs. RAND predicts that in the years ahead, many will be unable to adjust (find the new methodology) to the changing demographics and economics, and will simply disappear.

Now, very interestingly, RAND notes that the one group of mid-range arts organizations whose audience composition is actually changing to include diverse people (including younger people), and which seem to be getting a different handle on securing resources, are those groups that value their community, and community service, as highly as they value the producing of art. Bill Moskin, writing for Americans for the Arts, goes even a little further in his study of certain "effective" arts organizations — they not only serve their communities, but their art-making responds to the community and in return, the community passionately "owns" the arts organization. And I just read comments from an officer of the Knight Foundation contrasting two arts organizations after Hurricane Andrew in Florida. One called her and said, "Our building was just blown down, but I think we have skills that can help this community heal. What can we do?" The other called her and said, "The hurricane is causing such devastation that our audiences will be affected and we may not survive the year — can you provide us with emergency funding?" The officer from the Knight Foundation observed that the thinking of the first organization — offering their skills to the community — is the kind of thinking that makes them important in the community. The thinking of the second organization makes them unimportant in the community when there are many equally good causes to support and fewer resources. Indeed, this second organization did eventually close its doors, and she believes that in the 21^st century, "what can the community do for me?" thinking will be the predictor of organizational death.

These three snippets suggest to me that, to flourish, arts organizations may have to rethink their role in their community. Deep relationship to the community may be part of — maybe the core of — the new methodology. All arts organizations will probably need to change somehow.

For some, this may mean bringing their art-making and art-producing skills to bear on questions of difference, fear, the meaning of family, the meaning of place, the meaning of roots, the issues of growth.

For others, this may mean changing their notion of community work from one of "outreach" (which, after all, tends to imply that "I’ve got it, and you will be better off if I provide it for you") — from outreach to a genuine inclusiveness. A shift from "for" to "with" and "of." At a recent Grantmakers in the Arts conference, the director of a major community foundation said, "Art outside the context of everyday life, art within a consumption model rather than a participation model, is what makes art not as important as I think all of us would like it to be in the country."

For others, this may mean adding the notion of community art to their spectrum of "real" art, recognizing that community art is much more than art made by non-professionals, but an art form with its own aesthetic, its own standards of excellence, a people’s knowledge of themselves and their place, expressed through the techniques of artforms.

For others, this may mean working closely with players in the for-profit sector and the so-called unincorporated sector -- the people who work in community theater or play music informally in rock-and-roll bands — on behalf of ideas bigger than the artificial distinction among sectors.

For others, this may mean allowing new kinds of people into their decision-making structure, even recognizing that this may change the nature of the organization. Or changing structure altogether and inventing new processes for making decisions.

In short, whether artistic, programmatic or structural, we need to look at something bigger. It is instrumental, yes -- survival techniques. It is idealistic, too — the arts’ response to a changing world.

A philosopher from Northwestern University, Baker Brownell, wrote this in 1950, well aware of how the post-atomic-bomb world was changing. I find it very pertinent now, 50 years later:

Ours is a culture of displaced persons. It is tattered with escape and wandering, and as such is a culture founded on being lost. … What [Hitler] did to millions in the concentration camps, and [Stalin] to tens of millions in the mass deportations, the Western world in general does less dramatically but as effectively to hundreds of millions, swarming homelessly to centers of vicarious and secondary culture. Their lives die out, love rots, and hope is replaced by avid stimulation. In all this, art may become merely one of the seducers to death. Or it may become the insight of life and survival itself.

This means working in a different kind of arts world from what most of us know. It is a world in which we define, and work towards, human ends — meaningful individual and collective life — rethinking, maybe even letting go of, the means of recent decades — means like building performing-arts centers or "professionalizing" the arts. (Remember the Hurricane Andrew example I used a few minutes ago? Well, the end of the story is that the first organization, who lost their building, realized as they worked in the community afterwards, that the building was actually standing in the way of their mission, and they did not rebuild.) It is a world in which we train artists about their disciplines and about how communities work and how they can contribute to community building. It is a world in which we don’t pit the arts against health care or homeless shelters or literacy programs as is the case now. It is a world in which we think about the for-profits as groups to plan and work with, rather than as organizations with a responsibility to support us, the nonprofits.

This has a lot to do with what we call cultural planning. In the first wave of cultural planning in the U.S., resulting plans tended to be predictably about certain things:

• How the cultural sector could work more efficiently together (for instance, a calendar of events to avoid nights when everyone’s season opens at once)
• How they could work together on common needs (united fundraising campaigns, raising general community consciousness of the arts)
• How they could advocate together (strategies for getting to the tables of power, resulting in more resources for the arts sector as well as a higher profile for the sector)

Typically, the plans would identify the logical group to take the lead on getting each of these needs met.

In the second wave of cultural planning, going on right now, plans tend to identify "gaps" in the community. They often create a new organization just for the purpose of filling the gaps, and the arts groups help support the new organization. For instance, the new arts council in the Silicon Valley has two purposes — more arts education in the community, and creating new shared cultural facilities in the community — with a ten-year time horizon to achieve these things, at which time it will dissolve.

But there is a new type of "cultural planning" that we will start to see, I think, and these plans will get beyond the notions of the nonprofit arts as a sector unto itself. The new type of cultural planning will recognize that the arts are also means to a bigger end, a human end. (And, incidentally, this has nothing to do with compromising quality; indeed, it may actually raise the quality bar — but that’s another talk.) The cultural sector will work with other sectors and will address questions like:

• What are the big values that define the Calgary of the future? In other words, what will it mean for someone to say, "I am from Calgary?"
• What should individual life be like? Will everyone’s creativity and desire to participate be valued equally, for instance?
• What should public life be like? Can the arts be a part of enhancing citizen participation in the community dialogue? What will be the nature of public places? Of public symbols?
• How can we as a group, whose currency is creativity, work on behalf of seeing that kind of Calgary become a reality?
• What changes of attitude, aesthetics, programming, or structure does each of us need to make individually to see that kind of Calgary become a reality?

Only when we start discussion questions such as these can we — not just we as arts people, but we as citizens in a society that presumably values democracy — start making real headway. An organizational theorist whom I know says that when we tackle questions in difficult times, we tend to ask narrower, tactical questions rather than broader, meaning-oriented questions. By asking "how" at times of crossroads, we only trivialize who we are and what our potential importance is. Instead, we assume our real power by asking "what" and "why."

As you gather and discuss together in the next couple of days, I would urge that you think not about the arts in Calgary, but rather, about the arts and Calgary. Paraphrasing John Kennedy, we must "Ask not what Calgary can do for us, rather, ask what we can do for Calgary," so that private and public life can be as meaningful as possible.

The Alberta Folklore project was created in wartime in order to give Albertans some grounding in a time of great upheaval. What will be your equivalent, as Calgarians search for common ground in this time of great upheaval?

You can be givers of meaning, and thus, givers of life. And if that is so, then you are the diamonds in the corn that I have been searching for all these years.

Lives are at stake.

The next play, your play, is about to start.

Maryo Ewell is associate director of the Colorado Council on the Arts, with a specialty in community development and the arts. She is the founder of the neighborhood Cultures of Denver, which pairs artists with community organizations in low-income areas of the city; the Arts Education Equity Network, increasing the prominence of the arts in local schools; and a regional folk-arts program in which the state’s four folklorists work in a community-development capacity. She has won several national awards for her work in community arts. Ewell is the daughter of grassroots-theater pioneer Robert Gard.

Original CAN/API publication: March 2002