Overlaps, Intersections and Conflicts: An Introduction to Arts and Culture

"Culture" is a roomy idea, one that can be stretched to accommodate everything human beings create. If you want to know what culture is, just take a look around. First, inventory the landscape. Now, mentally remove everything that comes under the heading of "nature" — sky, weeds and the dirt they grow in, those crows sailing overhead, the squirrel frozen in its tracks, the sweet drifting scent of spring blossom. Everything that’s left, that’s culture. Culture is the sum-total of human ingenuity: language, signs and symbols, systems of belief, customs, clothes, cuisine, tools, toys and trinkets, the built environment and everything we use to fill it up, and the cherry on the sundae, art.

Art is emblematic of culture, its purest expression. Where language carries its instrumental burden — "stop" and "go" can’t accommodate much subjective meaning without triggering the mother of all traffic-jams — and furniture must bear our weight, where religion must contain our radical amazement and cooking stoke our energy throughout the day, art alone traffics in the uncut substance of culture. As a result, it can be adapted to serve many purposes, very often functioning as a flash-point for cultural conflict or a platform for cultural assertion. Art is the canary in culture’s coalmine. In community art — rather than loitering hopefully, beaks in the air — the canaries get together and put on a show, telling the miners like it is.

In this introductory look at the relationship of culture to arts in the community, I want to start with a brief exploration of the concept of culture and its contested aspects, then finish with some of the related challenges and opportunities it suggests for community arts.

In Raymond Williams’ wonderful little book "Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society" (buy it today if you don’t already own it!), the etymology and definition of culture takes up almost six pages, covering everything from the centuries-old narrow agricultural sense ("sugar-beet culture") to the narrow contemporary sense of culture as a suitcase packed with all the arts ("music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film"). In between, though, he touches on the polymorphous, mutating, dynamic nature of the word, which is what I like best about it, because that is what makes it ring true:

It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions and confused answers.

Culture is what we collectively make of the raw ingredients of life. Everyone participates in culture, even those who have no particular interest in art of any variety. And merely by participating — by exchanging words, observing customs, involving oneself in communal celebration and grief and the milestones of community life — everyone participates in creating and disseminating culture.

For many decades, the general trend has been toward a finer and more nuanced conception of culture. There isn’t all that much we can confidently say about "American" culture these days, because we now realize that as a cultural category, "American" is too big, too clumsy and encompassing to generalize. Even within the United States, the regional categories that used to say so much have become unwieldy: when you talk about "Southern Culture," what do you mean? The Gullah heritage of South Carolina’s low country? The Vietnamese communities of southernmost Texas? Cajun Louisiana? The Appalachian culture of eastern Kentucky? Mexican farm and factory workers in East Tennessee? Personally, I find it a very good thing that we are forced to see more and more particularity (and the deep commonalities that emerge from it) rather than lumping people into blunt-instrument classifications like "black" and "white" and letting it go at that. Maybe if we really see each other, my hopeful thinking goes, we’ll be more inclined to treat each other with respect.

Cultures overlap. I’m the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. My memory is saturated with the tastes and smells and sounds of that diasporic culture, but I could no more live there than in a museum. My own choices have taken me into other cultures I find more accommodating: the feminism-meets-Hassidism politicized spirituality of the Jewish Renewal movement; the virtual society of activists and intellectuals who — however disparate their starting-places — find a meeting of the minds and hearts in the liberatory values and accepting customs fairly common in my generation, the generation of the’60s. Nowadays, almost everyone experiences multiple cultural participation, with roots in one or more heritage cultures and branches in the ways of life of our chosen communities and affinities and in the massive, global complex of commercial culture, permeating almost every corner of the earth. This simultaneous belonging, the interpenetration of cultures, is the character of 21^st-century life everywhere but in the most remote and isolated places.

Some people see this as fine and dandy. But cultural conflict is a feature of our era, and the most hotly contested issues fall into three main categories:

"Family values." Cultural "conservatives" is a misnomer, I think for a movement sustained by religious fundamentalists who endorse the radical project of applying their own values and standards to the cultural commonwealth. Instead of the cultural fluidity described above, they propose as superior cultural values heterosexuality, chastity and obedience to their chosen moral authority. They have made a large splash (and lots of contributed income) condemning artists who posit choice and diversity, from Andres Serrano to Marlon Riggs to Holly Hughes to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. There are lots of articles about all of this on the Web; I recommend an hour’s surfing if you want a quick look at the recent history of freedom of artistic expression. Try starting with the overview article "Who’s Behind the Culture War?" by Mark Schapiro and the National Coalition Against Censorship site. Pat Buchanan put the right-wing position most succinctly at the 1992 Republican convention, I think, when he said this: "There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America."

"Cultural democracy." Even as so many individuals experience multiple belonging, the means of support for cultural creation and dissemination are not equally distributed, creating obstacles to true multiple participation. In every society, those who control material resources, political power or even intellectual infrastructure also control the legitimation of cultures, deciding which ones should be enshrined in red-carpet institutions and which ones treated as negligible subcultures; which ones should be valorized in the media and which ones defamed through stereotype and slander; which ones should be nourished with the material means to creation and dissemination, and which allowed to fend for themselves in the "marketplace of ideas." In the transnational struggle over cultural policy of the last four decades, "cultural democracy" describes the position of most community artists, advocating pluralism, participation and equity in cultural life and cultural policy. A good starting place for Web-surfing is the all-text archive maintained by my husband, Don Adams, at Webster’s World of Cultural Democracy.

"Globalization." Right-wingers are by no means the only ones concerned about cultural values. A great many other people worry about the trend toward "globalization," the increasing economic irrelevance of national boundaries and growing interdependence of worldwide trade, capital and population, driven by marketing imperatives. The cultural upside of globalization is that every day more people around the world are able to communicate via the Internet, sharing, exchanging and supporting each other. The cultural downside is the penetration of Western commercial cultural industries into all societies, overwhelming heritage cultures with mass-produced commercial cultural products. To see how seriously this threat is being taken, check out UNESCO’s recently adopted "Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity."

Although it is tempting to see culture as something given or permanent, the inescapable truth is that human beings make culture, a project that is never complete but always in process. Sometimes we do it unconsciously, as through our consumer choices, our associations, our spontaneous individual and collective expressions. But we can also do it with conscious intention. Purposeful interventions into the realm of culture come under the heading of "cultural development."

Think of it in the same way as "economic development": When the businesses and services, investment capital and job opportunities in a community are not sufficient to provide people with decent livelihood, economic development is needed; development efforts create the economic infrastructure needed for opportunity and prosperity to flow. Culturally, a community can be similarly blocked and undernourished: Opportunities to learn, communicate and express a community’s cultural commonwealth can be lacking, with inadequate training, facilities, support for artists and projects; cultural development efforts apply knowledge and resources to building the infrastructure needed for creativity and communication to flourish. Some of the most powerful cultural-development strategies use arts work to articulate cultural critiques or aspirations, propose new cultural directions, shine a spotlight on overlooked cultural contributions, or help people realize their potentials as creators of culture.

Community artists and arts organizations play vital roles in cultural development in more ways than I can count. Here are just a few of them, each exemplified by a link to a U.S.-based project — just one of many possible — from the Community Arts Network’s Reading Room.

• Unearthing buried or forgotten cultural history and bringing it back alive through theater — Roadside Theater; murals — the Social and Public Art Center and other arts projects.
• Creating public forums for discussion of cultural issues — Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.
• Making space for alternative visions and cultural issues in mass media — Mountain Community Radio, WMMT 88.7.
• Asserting the value of diverse cultures and promoting cultural communication — Atlatl.
• Preserving and extending living cultural heritage — Elders Share the Arts.
• Asserting everyone’s right to make art and take part in making culture — Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.
• Using community arts to focus community development — The Village of Arts and Humanities.

To me, the most interesting relationships between art and cultural development are being made in the international community-arts movement, particularly in the developing world. Beyond the United States, artists are working with other community members to respond to the accelerating side-effects of globalization. These include the replacement of traditional forms of cultural transmission and expression with centralized, mass-produced commercial forms, mass migrations due to political repression or economic "restructuring," and the resulting impacts on family life and health. Working in Asia, Africa and Latin America — on what a friend of mine calls the "bleeding edge" of globalization — these community artists truly understand how culture is the medium and container of all social meanings, and how art reminds us of our reasons for living and dying, of everything that is worth the struggle. If you want to be inspired, check out these examples:

• PETA, the Philippine Educational Theater Association, is one of the oldest and most successful popular theaters in the world, having played a key role in EDSA, the Philippine struggle to throw off the Marcos dictatorship. They’ve done incredible work with groups of women and youth in remote regions, and their methods (for instance, the Basic Integrated Theater Arts Workshops) are renowned throughout Asia. They maintain a theater ensemble at home in Manila, as well as school of people’s theater and an impressive array of programs.
  
  
• Abhivyakti Media for Development is based in Nashik, India, and dedicated to promoting popular control of economic and community development. Most of their work entails assisting organizers to create and use low-cost media to tell people’s own stories in their own ways. Many of their projects focus on youth, women or the environment.
  
  
• Feral Arts is an Australian community arts group based in Brisbane, and pioneering the use of new media for community cultural development. Check out its "Placeworks" project that enables a remote indigenous community to put its history online.
  
  
• Near Cuernevaca, Mexico, Mascarones Popular Theatre Group — an outgrowth of Mexican and Chicano liberation movements — has built the Nahuatl University, dedicated to preserving and applying the ancient wisdom of the culture of Anahuak to the predicament of both indigenous and nonindigenous people today. The site is worth a look for the university’s physical setting — four main pyramid-like buildings oriented toward the four ancient cardinal directions and painted in murals depicting creative forces — as well as its content.
  
  
• Trilby Multimedia is the site of a longtime British community artist, based in Birmingham, who is using creative skills learned from murals, festivals and other face-to-face arts projects to create interactive computer-based multimedia serving community development aims.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with all of these international artists over the last year or so, and many others besides, in preparation for a book Don Adams and I are editing. I’m excited about the project because it will provide a tool that documents the intrinsic connections between community arts and cultural development around the world. The connections seem so clear and strong to many of us, but have unfortunately been less visible to those outside the field. "Community, Culture, and Globalization," an anthology of essays by these practitioners and theorists of community arts, will be published by the Rockefeller Foundation later this year, and I’m sure APInews — a great resource for the field — will tell you how to get it.

Arlene Goldbard is a writer who has also consulted in a wide variety of public and private agencies, most of them involved in cultural policy, artistic production and distribution and cultural-development planning and evaluation. Contact her at goldbard@oz.net.

Original CAN/API publication: March 2002