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Reinventing Local Culture
Some years ago, I was brought back to my home of nearly 15 years to speak. It was a great privilege at the time because I realized how much I loved and love Eugene, Oregon.
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Reinventing Local Culture
An Address to the University of
Oregon Art Museum Lecture Series
For ten years, I lived and worked among you as a member of this community. During that time I came to love and respect this place and the people who live here. I became acquainted with your frailties, your strengths, your quirky civic processes, your fierce honesty, your egalitarianism, and your dignity.
My life here was meaningful and rewarding far beyond my expectations. I experienced something rare and precious here—a sense of community and a sense of belonging. As we all know, it’s easy to take things for granted, but when we no longer get something for which we have developed a satisfied craving, we miss it. Well—I miss you.
I’ve been thinking about you. Reflection has a way of distilling the qualities of an essence. In my own mind, I’ve been trying to distill Eugene’s essence to clarify why I found this community such a magical place, so full of promise.
During the campaign for the presidency, Bill Clinton frequently said, “I believe in a place called Hope.�
Well, I believe in a place called home—a place called community. But at the same time, I’m concerned about the state of community life generally and especially concerned with the health and well being of the nation’s cultural sector. There are social, economic, and cultural forces at work out there that threaten all of us because they threaten the fundamental dynamics of community life. I think we all know that—as unpleasant as contemplating threats can be.
The title of my talk is “Reinventing Local Culture.� —that’s culture with a small ‘c,’ not a capital C.
I’ll be trying to address several questions:
• How is creating and defining local culture a pivotal strategy in building and sustaining community life?
• What does “community� really mean and what does creating community life entail?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of artists and arts organizations?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of audiences?
• Why should government care and what are its obligations to the cultural sector?
• What are the community’s role and responsibilities?
My objective this evening is to persuade you to make a personal commitment to turn the tide against the forces of alienation and psychic dismemberment that threaten not only Eugene, but community life in this country. I hope, that as a result of our time together this evening, that you will return to your lives with a firm resolve to nurture your commitment to reinventing local culture and strengthening community life.
But before I proceed with answering these questions, I’d like to first, define what I mean when I talk about community, then offer my perspective on the state of community life today. As you will soon find out, my talk roves far afield from just the arts or just culture. So I ask you to bear with me and I’ll try to tie it all together in the end.
The bonds which strengthen community life are rooted in the recognition that, in some meaningful way, we share a mutuality of purpose—that we are connected by a shared destiny that we jointly create. Our connectedness to one another enables us to create what my friend Frank Gibson described as a “network of mutually reinforcing commitments.� Mutually reinforcing commitments.
Community is a crucible of covenants not convenience. Thus, for community to flourish, promises must be kept. That includes keeping promises that were made in good times when we find ourselves in bad times. Promises are almost always alloyed with sacrifice. Ironically, it is sacrifice itself that deepens the value of our commitments and causes. Principles that don’t cost you anything aren't worth anything.
The foundation of community life is settled on the bedrock of people who keep their word. Kept promises provide for continuity. Continuity. We can depend on people. We can count on things. Community is a stabilizing force in a typhoon of change.
Over the last fifty years, our society has engendered and endured a profound disintegration of community life. The decay of community can be attributed to many things—to human failings like greed, selfishness, and perhaps just laziness. The disintegration of community life can be attributed to what has come to be known as the urban nomad lifestyle—a way of life that is sadly a depersonalized and shallow experience. Community also suffers at the hand of bad economic times. However, I believe that it has primarily been weakened by a lack of attention and stewardship and a poor sense of priorities.
It seems to me that we indict the results of disintegrating community life as the cause. We point the finger of blame at crime, racism, addiction, and exploitation as if these things were at the root of our problems instead of what must have come to pass as a result of our lack of attentiveness to and stewardship of community life.
I’ve been perplexed by recent rhetoric I’ve heard about the disintegration of community life. Personally, I don’t think that community life can be rescued by formulating political strategy on a discussion about family values—especially when the rhetoric isolates, shames, or excludes so many members of our communities. I don’t think that community life will be invigorated by coercion or censorship. I don’t think that community life will be enriched by perpetuating an “I-got-mine, you-get-yours� philosophy.
There are other forces at work against community that are much more insidious and corrupting than simple human failing. The root of their power lies in our perception that these forces are virtuous, and to some extent—they are virtuous. But virtues, driven to excess and accomplished without regard to the means by which they are accomplished, destroy as handily as corruption. I’m talking about the canons of the marketplace as enshrined by the prophets of our economic system: John Locke and Adam Smith. Profit is evidence of prudence and intelligence. Wealth is a sign of benificence of the “Invisible Hand.� The marketplace will decide what is good and meet and worthy. Money evidences thrift. If there’s no demand for something, it’s of little value.�
Evidence of marketplace forces gone awry is all around us. Consider the devastation of healthy companies and the destruction of family-wage jobs through the mechanism of leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers. Consider the over-harvesting of trees in the forests of the Northwest. Consider the scarred landscape of a strip-mined Franklin County, Kentucky. Consider the toxic poisoning of AMAX, Colorado. Consider the exploitation of women in the work force who continue to earn approximately 66¢ on the dollar compared to males working in the same jobs. Consider the prime farmland cemented over in parking lots and strip malls. Consider the oil industry’s response to the Exxon Valdez spill.
Despite some opposition, these things have happened and continue to happen. These excesses, when they are acknowledged, are couched as regrettable casualties of “the system.� The values that caused these products of entropy are cloaked in virtue, values and tradition that have been enshrined as “the best economic system in the world.� Arguably, our system has produced abundance. But it has also produced evidence that we can be as degraded by abundance as we can be degraded by poverty.
The communities whose legacy is toxic waste, oil spills, or an exploited work force naturally take humbrage at these things. When they rail against the tyranny of a system that rapes communities, they are all too often accused of being un-American.
Artists who create work that speaks to these issues experience vicious attacks. Take Karen Finley for example. Her work is a scream of outrage at the exploitation of women and children. When she models that exploitation and holds it up for us to see, her work is described as obscene when its the exploitation that’s obscene. Her reward is to be characterized as undermining traditional American values. Her credibility and character are assailed. Not just in private and not just in the newspaper but on the floor of the United States Senate, and by a public official who is himself promoting the tobacco industry. The mavens of the marketplace and their vest-pocket politicos will never hesitate to marginalize their opposition especially if their opposition speaks clearly, passionately, and convincingly. And frequently, and especially of late, this opposition very definitely includes artists.
For all the benefits that the marketplace bestows, when we allow it too much power, we corrupt it. Absolute power corrupts—absolutely. This is as true for the marketplace as it is for dictators. We can make a tyranny of virtue, if we choose.
The American Way is hard on human beings. It’s hard on families. It’s hard on communities. It’s hard on the land. It’s hard on the arts.
The arts, as a whole, don’t make a profit and are not visibly virtuous in marketplace terms. Because their economic benefits are mostly indirect, their impact is difficult to describe. Their indirect benefits, though powerful, are not understood by the man on the street. And until people grasp that creativity and innovation are the capital of the next millenium, the arts will be not be employed as a strategy for the research and development of a creative and innovative work force.
The American Way is all about being successful. Growth. Getting a raise. Getting a better job. The American crusade quests for the grail of prosperity. Improving one’s station in life. Having more than your parents had. Fulfilling one’s potential.
You can tell a lot about the American Way by noticing what isn’t talked about—Connection. Community. History. Ritual. Wisdom. Inspiration. Spirituality. Honor—those values and principles which secure the underpinnings of community life and which position the rewards of a meaningful life as superordinate to the rewards of an economic machine.
The American Way has created a class of urban nomads where people follow booms and where people follow jobs. The average American now changes careers eight times over their working life.
To be successful in one’s career—or for many of us just surviving—requires uprooting oneself from one’s place, from one’s family, from one’s friends, from one’s community. To move up the career ladder means moving down the road. Success has become one of the most alienating forces in American life.
For us urban nomads and I’m including myself in that definition, success not only means chasing the American dream, but being chased from another dream—a dream of connection and belonging. A dream of being a vital, contributing part of something bigger than ourselves. A dream of growing old with friends helping them through their traumas and imagining love enough that they would help us through ours. A dream of living with people who know, love, and respect us enough to make promises with every intention of keeping them no matter how long or how strenuous the scope of the promise.
The dream I describe is a place where safety and familiarity displace peril and the unknown.
It’s emotionally wracking to fall in love with a place fearing that you may have to leave it shortly. Making friends seems pointless in the face of the eventual move that seems inevitable.
The lifestyle of the urban nomad means not knowing one’s neighbors. Not knowing their history, the history of their families, or the history of a common place we find ourselves inhabiting. Living as urban nomads means that we are deprived of the comfort and security of the familiar. To find the familiar, we go to McDonalds where part of the product is knowing that the place will be just like the one back home in Lawrence or Liberty, Blacksburg or Scottsbluff.
One sad byproduct of the urban nomad lifestyle is hedonism. The pervasiveness of hedonism as a landmark of our cultural landscape is no surprise to me. It doesn’t require a great leap of thought to understand that people who have no knowledge of the history of the place they live or the people they share it with would fixate on the present.
Hedonists stripmine the present. They leave little or no legacy to future generations. They are the quintessential consumer, but they consume like fire leaving little but ashes. A hideous hybrid of alienation and greed, hedonistic lifestyles are marked by addiction and hopelessness. When the past seems obscurely irrelevant and the future seems bereft of promise, exploitation of the present is not such a difficult thing to grasp. The root cause of addictive lifestyles is plain for us to see. Too many of us are uncared for, lonely, and more engaged in dying than in living, experiencing a kind of spiritual bankruptcy that is as soaked with resignation as it is of desperation.
2.1 children. A Jeep Cherokee in the driveway of a three bedroom house. A swingset in the back yard. Sunday afternoon church barbecues. These things have become more a part of the mythology of American life than the reality of American life. The economic forces that have engendered the lifestyle of the urban nomad works against translating myth to reality.
Yet, not everyone buys into the lifestyle of the urban nomad. Many people I’ve known here in Eugene came here and stayed here precisely because they reject the values of the urban nomad life. People who have historically had a deep connection with a place resist leaving no matter how tempting the offer is at the other end of the phone. By virtue of their commitment to their place and their community, they are the bone and sinew of community life.
Their choice is also a challenge. People who stay must ride out the fortunes—both good and bad—of their choice. The evidence is clear that economic and social forces may shove their commitments into the margins. Down-sizing—or as it is more fashionably called—right sizing, mill closures, recession, depletion of natural resources—are among the economic forces that tear at the fabric of communities. The people who are the victims of these forces must either be able to change jobs, change careers, or uproot themselves from their communities and move on.
Witness the sobering forces of structural unemployment upon the people who’ve worked in Oregon’s timber industry. Their grim reality is that there are not only no jobs, but no future either. These people are confronting the painful obsolescence of skills and crafts cultivated over generations which mark the passing of a way of life. And with the passing of that way of life marks the passing of an important feature of Oregon’s heritage and culture.
Another significant landmark marks the horizon of the future. Multiculturalism may be a fad, but diversity is a fact. In California, where I live, 98% of the population growth in the last decade is due to immigration, mostly Hispanic and Asian. Oregon is also becoming more cultural diverse. If we try to go back to the future to the nostalgic notions of a ‘50s ice cream social where everybody was white, everybody spoke English, and everybody was supposedly heterosexual, we’re in for trouble. Community life must embrace and make room for diverse cultures and diverse lifestyles or it will be yet another strategy of exclusion, not inclusion and yet another strategy serving up alienation and disconnection.
Webster’s Dictionary defines community as “a group of like values.� I submit to you that this definition is obsolete. If community life is to be reinvigorated in our times, we’ll have to base our commitment to it on a far richer and pluralistic paradigm. Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot defines community as “a gathering of gifts�—a far more inclusive and pluralistic definition that makes diversity a strength not a weakness. This definition encourages a dialog about common ground and mutual interests. It connects people to one another.
The commitment to build and sustain community isn’t easy. Far from it. Given the realities of 21st-century life and the structure of our economic and social systems, it’s probably patently foolish to hope the urban nomad lifestyle away. Likewise, structural unemployment will be with us a while as well. It’s doubtful that we’ll wipe out addiction any time soon. And we really do have a reasonable cause to fear crime and violence.
In the face of all this, why try to reclaim a sense of community? Why try to reinvent local culture? Why plant a walnut tree when we can’t hope that we or our children will someday take refuge in its shade. Knowing that a walnut tree takes eighty years to mature, it is an act of faith and generosity to plant one. It involves providing for a nameless, faceless beneficiary.
Why plant a walnut tree? Because living without acts of faith and generosity makes for a barren spiritual landscape. When the tree is planted it takes root on the inside, too.
Planting that tree requires that we understand, in our bones, that building community is a legacy of our faith which we bestow upon others. Without generosity, community life will perish. If we are to reclaim a heritage of community life and become the planters of those walnut trees, it will be because there are those of us with enough gumption and dogged determination to believe we can succeed.
One thing that I can tell you, looking backward over my shoulder, is that community life is alive here in Eugene. In some ways it’s a bit anemic, limping along. But there are enormous possibilities for a robust and vigorous community life.
First of all, things haven’t gotten completely out of hand here. The town is still comprehendable on a human scale. It’s possible to walk from one side of the town to the other. You can walk down the street here and see people you know and people who know you. People here are reasonably well-educated and seem to genuinely care about community issues. And most importantly, from my point of view, there is a possibility of reinventing local culture here so that people can actually see something of themselves in the culture that they engage with.
Though the arts are fundamental to cultural life, culture is more than the arts. It’s food, wine, the parks, the rivers, sports. It’s the library, the Eugene Celebration, and a great cup of coffee. It’s the WOW hall and Maude Kerns.
I first came to Eugene as an artist. It was as an artist that I fell in love the place. There were insights that I gleaned as an artist that I’d like to share with you, tonight. They go to the heart of the matter of reinventing local culture.
I’m proud to say that when I was an artist I performed at Carnegie Hall. There’s an old joke about Carnegie Hall. A man on the streets of New York asking for directions inquired, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall.� The person responding said, “Practice.�
That tired old joke is a metaphor for what we think is important in becoming an artist. Not coincidentally, it’s also what we teach our budding young actors, dancers and musicians. “If you want to be successful, practice. If you want to be a star, practice.�
I don’t want to denigrate the discipline involved in apprenticeship and in cultivating technical mastery. But practice isn’t enough. Practice produces technical fluency and sometimes even technical virtuosity. These things are not artistry.
Becoming an artist is least about honing skills and mastering the intricacies of the craft. It is first and foremost the discovery and distillation of one’s authentic voice. Finding an authentic voice is a crucial step in one’s journey in becoming an artist. It is coming to a place where one grasps that one has something to say. Finding an authentic voice is also about claiming the ground on which one stands—owning a point of view. When a person has found their voice, they have discovered a place of resilient and resonant strength—a wellspring of courage, wisdom, insight, and compassion.
Artists have a fire in their belly. They are not among the cadres of uninspired technique-happy automatons that many conservatories and music schools grind out. They have a sense of themselves. They have something to say. They’ve found their voice.
Finding one’s voice is a paradoxical process. While it is profoundly about the cultivation of one’s individuality and uniqueness, it is also about subjecting oneself to the discipline and wisdom of mentors. While it is about fearless self-examination to the point of obsession, it is also about fully opening oneself to the dull aches and the quiet suffering of others. While it is about strengthening the ego to withstand the penetrating scrutiny of critics and the public, it is also about becoming a passageway through which others travel in their search to articulate their own vision.
Wendell Berry said it this way. “[It] grows not only out of factual knowledge but out of cultural tradition; it is learned not only by precept, but by example, by apprenticeship; and it requires not merely a competent knowledge of its facts and processes, but also a complex set of attitudes, a certain culturally evolved stance, in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. That is to say, it requires style in the highest and richest sense of that term.� Finding one’s voice is finding one’s style in the face of the unknown.
It is just as crucial that a community find its authentic voice and articulate its vision. The process is no less rigorous than the one I’ve just described and requires no less commitment and no less sacrifice. For a community to find its voice requires that the community have something to express about itself. If a community is to find a voice, it requires leadership and mentorship. It requires discipline of a community’s chiefs and vision from a community’s shamans.
In our culture, we know who our chiefs are. We have quite a ritual we go through to choose them. But I don’t know if we really know who are shamans are. I’d like to suggest that artists are among the shamans of our time. Their stock in trade is mystery, wonder, secrets, history, and magic—all ingredients in the alchemy of reinventing local culture.
When I talk about reinventing local culture, what I’m really talking about is the process that leads a community to find its own voice and to make its expressions incarnate in its social, cultural, and artistic life.
Local culture, as an expression of the community’s authentic voice should tantalize people with the flavor of the place. It should epitomize local life aware of itself. It should celebrate and chronicle in tangible and vivid ways a community’s journey towards its communal vision.
To accomplish that celebration, local culture relies upon artists and companies within the community. And those artists have a responsibility to create works that serve the community’s need to hear its own stories told and to sing its own songs.
One of Oregon’s stories concerns Lewis’ and Clark’s voyage west. Accompanying on their journey was an artist—one Maximillian Bodmer. His drawings and watercolors captured their adventure. Much as I might wish that I could have shared their discoveries in the moment, Bodmer’s legacy of brush, pen, and paper is my window to their distant reality.
Those artists that live here among us today are chronicling our journey through contemporary life just as Bodmer recorded the Lewis and Clark expedition. Like Bodmer, their task is more profound than just capturing the physical landscape. Their task is distill community life into an essence which endures. If we wish to leave more than a sense of what we were, but rather who we were, it is the artist’s insights, discipline, craft, and passion upon which we shall rely.
The artist’s role in reinventing local culture is probably first and foremost to get together privately with other artists and discuss how they can help reclaim community and reinvent local culture. Artists must stop imitating artistic work that they think will make them successful, and make their own statement.
I can tell you absolutely that I and the vast majority of my colleagues who decide who’s work is seen, for how much, and when in our communities are uninterested in derivative, imitative, or pandering work. We’re looking for the artist who has found an authentic voice, for the artist who has something to say, and whose work is grounded in integrity and authenticity.
In my new job at the California Center for the Arts, I look for artists who are grounded in community. I know from experience that there are therapeutic and spiritual dimensions of art. I want my community to experience those dimensions in work that has grown up among them. The primary thrust of our mission is to present the art and artists of California, thereby preserving and strengthening California’s artistic voice. We want to create a legacy of local culture that is grounded in community and strengthened by virtue of the fact that the work was relevant and meaningful to the people who live among us.
Barry Lopez gave me a piece of insight as to why I’ve had so much trouble dealing with this subject. Barry’s insight is that artists stopped talking about community and local culture decades ago. Those conversations have been replaced by conversations about commercial standing and ways to embrace fashion for lucrative rewards.
In Barry’s own words, artists need to ask themselves, “What is it beyond celebrity that we can accomplish here?�
The audience’s role in reinventing local culture requires that the audience member move beyond being a cultural consumer. Audiences must become stakeholders in the local cultural life. Act like somebody who’s got something at stake! Further, audiences should acknowledge that the artists among them are at least as important, if not more important than the big name who everybody’s heard of.
If the work of local culture is to thrive and flourish, audience members must be a whole lot more willing to take a risk on the unknown. That includes continuing to support the artist whose performance just didn’t work this time. Artists, if they are really generating work, have to take risks. They need to be granted the right to an occasional failure. If audiences don’t create an emotional and financial safety net for the artists and companies who serve them, pretty soon all the audience will get will be safe, sure fire formula-type art. That kind of work, while it may draw audiences for a while by virtue of commercial viability, eventually becomes uninteresting. Formulaic work becomes uninteresting because safe work is predictable, and most of the resonance and power of art resides in the moment of surprise. Most great work communicates how unpredictable we are.
If the artistic output of an artist or a company becomes boring, the audience must take some of the responsibility. Like as not the audience proved through its purchase of tickets that it wanted that kind of work. If audiences want to be invigorated by new ideas, novel productions, and provocative performances, they have to participate—get on boards, become donors, write letters, and most importantly—show up at performances.
The government’s role is local culture is both changing and becoming more complex. Government's role has traditionally been to provide funding, to facilitate fair and equitable grantmaking processes, and to provide the capital and operating costs for cultural facilities. Here in Eugene, through the programs of the Cultural Services Division, local government has taken on an expanded and activist role of seeking to provide an environment where local culture can flourish and grow. I agree with that role. Eugene's local government actually behaves like it has something at stake. It does.
The role of local government may become even more important. Bill Clinton has put forward the name of Alice Rivlin for Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget. A deficit hawk, Rivlin's political and financial strategies pivot on a budget strategy called devolution. Federal funding of the arts is just one of the many Federal responsibilities Rivlin wants to devolve to state and local government. Not coincidentally, the same political philosophy was a key part of Canada's Charlottetown Accords. Canadian federal government sought to devolve the responsibilities for the cultural sector to the provincial and local level.
Whether Rivlin succeeds in devolving cultural funding mandates to the local level is to some extent moot. If you think about this issue strictly in terms of where government funding comes from, it doesn't change much because the majority of government funding for the cultural sector already is coming from local and state coffers.
If you're concerned, as I am, about the policy and leadership dynamics of American cultural policy, and how leadership influences the philanthropic and social service sectors, devolution of culture has troubling implications. It dries up what little funding there is for rural and underserved communities. It may erase the forum for an ongoing national dialog about the role of the nation's cultural sector in addressing broader community concerns. It balkanizes the evolution of American cultural policy. It ceases to provide incentives for funding. And it will inevitably result in another bundle of unfunded mandates.
Too often we see the government as something besides ourselves, a part of the community but not of the community. In reinventing local culture, it is critical that the community erase that distinction and recognize that government is a tool with which communities accomplish what's important to them.
Local government should care—passionately—about the cultural sector and its role in reclaiming community and and reinventing local culture. To perceive the cultural sector as a marginal concern betrays a profound lack of understanding of community dynamics—what causes what. To perceive local culture as bells and whistles rather than sinew and gristle—connecting tissue between the bones and muscle of community life—is the same kind of thinking that perceives addiction as a cause of alienation rather than alienation as a cause of addiction.
The community’s role in reinventing local culture is first and foremost to participate. To speak and to listen. Artists want to know how they should be serving their community. In the conversation Barry Lopez and I had about this subject he said, “I want to talk with my community about what they think I should be doing.�
The community has not only a right but a responsibility to look after its own needs. To ask for what it wants. It also has a responsibility to support what it asks for.
The community has a responsibility to work with its cultural institutions and cultural resources to clarify what the community's expectations are in exchange for its support. It is not an uncommon to find that audiences and communities are not at all clear about the mission of the various components of the cultural sector. I think, to some extent, that this is true of Eugene. In the six years that I worked at the Hult Center, I never got the impression that our mission was clearly understood by the community. It is absolutely crucial that cultural institutions and communities reconcile their expectations.
Due to changes in American culture and lifestyles, our cultural and entertainment institutions are assuming an increasingly important role in our lives. In the seventeenth century when this country was born, people were primarily socialized through work. Fifty years ago, people were primarily socialized through education. According to William Irwin Thompson in his book, The American Replacement of Nature, we now socialize our people through entertainment. Given how compelling—even riveting—entertainment and the arts can be, it is readily apparent to me that we must attend ourselves to shaping the culture which will shape the people we will find ourselves living with.
I'd now like to speak to something nearest and dearest to my heart—the role of cultural institutions in reinventing local culture. First and foremost, I believe that places like the Hult Center must reinvent themselves. They are not vending machines of arts and entertainment. They are not palaces of the elite. They are not music, dance, and theater factories. What they are—what we all should be— is cultural animators. Our role is the animation of the cultural, and arguably, spiritual, landscapes of our communities.
While I am very proud of my tenure at the Hult Center and what I believe the staff was able to accomplish during my time with them, there are things I am not proud of. I never produced a play of Dorothy Velasco's. I never produced a concert entirely made up entirely of Eugene's jazz musicians. I never presented an evening of Eugene's folk artists or arranged a performance of music composed by Oregon composers. These are the steps that must be taken to reinvent local culture. These people tell our stories. They know our secrets. They can encode and decipher the codes in which our lives are written.
These are the things I might have done to further the reinvention of local culture during my time here. I pray that you, and those who care about the stewardship of this culture and this place, do these things. The work of local culture is in the doing, not in contemplation. So go and do. Go and do.
Posted on November 7, 2005 11:54 PM | Permalink
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