HOLY MULTI-CULTI MAYHEM, BATMAN!
It's a good thing Ayn Rand isn't alive and kicking on the City Council or the new Arts Commission initiative that resuscitates the core of multiculturalism would never have gotten off the ground. Not that anyone's fears of the multi-culti cult ever proved true-unless you equate occasional bouts of academic wiffle-batting with the irrevocable loss of free will-but there are those who claim identifying and celebrating individual cultural groups leads more toward separation than integration. To such naysayers, the Arts Commission says, "Pshaw!" and, "We've got 83,500 bucks this year to identify as many cultural groups as we can."
Yes, but why?
It turns out that, while the rest of us are still stuck on how the city is divided roughly in two between those of us who believe Wal-Mart is an earthly paradise and those of us who believe it's tough to purchase paradise in bulk from price-enforced wholesalers in China, the Arts Commission has perceived a deeper, more meaningful cultural divide. The much-talked about, oft-quoted and strangely overused-in-real-estate-brochures idea that Santa Fe is tri-cultural is, it turns out, decades out of date. We are, like most places, a mani-cultured coat of influences and the Arts Commission has seized upon the idea that arts and culture is the best way for diverse ethnic groups and other cultural varietals to come to know and respect each other.
At a sparsely attended media launch last week, arts commissioners, two city councilors (one in the audience, one with a microphone) and one mayor described how the Commission's mission (is that like conjunction junction?) is to honor and promote cultural voices, a term that "encompasses our geographic, ethnic, economic and religious diversity while acknowledging our common voices." To that end, the project has two phases that, in the parlance of Donald Rumsfeld, fall into the categories of the known unknown and the unknown known. We know that the first phase of the project is to locate artists and cultural practitioners who are unknown to the community at large and then in the second phase to do something with them that, at this point, is unknown, but we know we intend to do it. Taking the helm of the first phase, cultural survey, which is intended to identify and document these various groups, is anthropologist Christy Snyder.
"When people immigrate to a new area and bring cultural practices-everything from music and dance to language and food-these practices impact, and are impacted by, the intersection between existing cultures and new cultures," Snyder says.
Although locating below-the-radar cultural groups in Santa Fe-Tibetans? Nigerians? New Caledonians? Gnomes?-in Santa Fe will largely be an investigation in word of mouth and the following of noses, Snyder is confident that the process will turn up more than you might expect-a similar survey she did in Albuquerque turned up 49 distinct cultural communities. "Obviously, the number is going to be lower in Santa Fe," she says. Once the survey is done, phase two of the project will involve encouraging and promoting public expression, exhibition and exchange between all of those groups (and the old-school tricolor). Exactly how is left undecided-as different cultural groups become stakeholders in the initiative, their input will be
used to figure out how to create public programs, school interfacing, festivals and what-have-you.
It's a tough enterprise to be critical of-my only hope would be that it empowers the city, in the future, to consider
seriously how different cultural groups that might not be described by ethnicity enter into similar reciprocities with the life of the city. I'm talking about youth culture, queer culture, contemporary spiritual cultures-"cultural voices" come in all kinds of tones.
EGG ON YOUR FACE
One cultural voice that suffers from outward attention deficit is art that is frickin' funny.
The Golden Egg
, curated by Sheila
Wilson at Phil Space (1410 Second St., 983-7945) corrals a veritable bevy of artists who think with a kink and use humor as a disarming element in their work. The very best thing about
The Golden Egg
, however, is that it's not just an art show, it's a book. Currently available at the gallery as a special edition for $40, it's a large, square-format, full-color book with an introductory essay by Wilson that pulls from Samuel Beckett and Georges Bataille to back her essential argument-nothing is quite so effective as humor for "exploding our systems of order and value." Sure, 40 bones could buy you a few cocktails or a one-night nitrous oxide laugh fest, but it's a bargain for the delirious cross-section of comedic culture represented across a full range of brows, and from simple to complex, in
The Golden Egg
. To keep tabs on when a larger run of the books will be available (maybe for less $), visit
.
