Where Culture Happens

Culture happens. That is, it can be curated, but it cannot be created intentionally. To be a part of culture, one has to be in it, participating. It doesn't happen in newspapers or museums. Let me illustrate:

In the mid-1950s, failed bandleader Cass Carr charged amateur shutterbugs $10 to provide them with the location and talent to take nude photographs of women. They began shooting in a makeshift YMCA, eventually moving to the country north of New York City, where the sheriff caught up with them.

Culture happens this way. As much as I appreciate the archival, academic work of museums and universities, they focus on the past. Galleries, meanwhile, struggle too much with overhead to think about where culture might be headed. For art and culture to continue, artists must (metaphorically) kill their mentors, kill precedence.

An exhibition of Rossi's work in a women's boutique kills the notion that art exists in traditional locations (coffeehouses included) with traditional intentions. If we take pleasure viewing a woman naked, does her image become too lewd to accept as art? Do we re-view Rossi's work hanging at Au Boudoir as art, rather than pornography, because each piece is an original, hand-painted by the artist?

Linderman, a Michigan resident in his late 50s and a self-described hermit, gave Au Boudoir the works to sell for around $400 a piece, according to boutique owner Elizabeth Rees, who believes, quite reasonably, that the photographs should go for much more. Linderman, however, doesn't have any children or relatives, so he priced the works to sell. Rossi's shots of Bettie Page have sold, and Rees says more nudes will arrive soon.

Less unlawfully underground than the camera clubs, but seemingly more hush-hush because of its off-street location and generally tranquil atmosphere, a fall concert series run by an art collective in an industrial space—by donation and with no alcohol sales—challenges the structure of music, the idea of music as an industry and our very understanding of what it means to gather.

High Mayhem Emerging Arts' annual concert series invites individuals to be a part of a shared experience, rather than exist within the entertainer-audience paradigm. The series began Oct. 29.

At the Nov. 5 show, titled Re-Imaging the Song, the groups—Wind Up Birds, Thin Air Trio, dc bond, GoGoSnap Radio and Grannia Griffith Story—played to an audience of 20 or so, with emcee Rod Harrison monologuing between acts, on people as God, for instance, or laughter as a gift of illumination.

As one act broke down its set and the next prepared to go on, audience members lingered along the walls or stepped outside to sit by the fire for a cigarette. Many of them members of art collectives or organizations themselves, the 20- to 30-somethings spoke about their work, about future meetings, about…hell, I can't catch every conversation.

But I do recall a palpable sense that something is happening here. The official culture of Santa Fe, described largely by the Plaza and the Railyard, may have taken a hit after the downed economy, but the area's youths aren't content with being told that the heydays are over. They are still doing things. They are making culture happen. It's just hard to talk about until it has already happened.

Santa Fe Reporter