Art, the Community, and Global Well-Being

The Cross-Cultural Project 

David W. Ecker

No sane person would not welcome global well-being as a future state of affairs for all people on earth. In fact, well-being is widely thought of as a basic human right. Why, then, we must ask, is there so much suffering inflicted on humans by humans around the world? The historical record provides a ready answer: fundamentally different conceptions of well-being and its achievement have been projected within and across cultures. And the religious and political conflict over human rights continues in many parts of the world. While the concept of well-being is reflectively addressed in some of the world's oldest texts and surviving icons, it is clear that this concept must be addressed again, albeit in contemporary terms. To put it simply: What are the constituents of well-being and the conditions for achieving it 

Progressive political leaders in many countries are turning to science and technology in efforts to solve global ecological problems that directly impinge upon quality of life. And artists in every culture imaginatively portray in multiple ways their view of the human condition - ¬as it is and as it could be. Surely, we all have contributions to make, and there are many world organizations coordinating these various activities.  an example, the Consortium for Well-Being in the 21st Century was formed in Cagliari, Sardinia, in December of 1995, by U. S. and European institutions (including the World Health Organization) to develop projects for enhancing cultural, nutritional, and environmental aspects of global well-being. My working group contributed the following objective: "To promote and encourage the bringing together of artists of various cultures to interact with each other, to collaborate on projects to bring about a better under standing of different peoples and living conditions within their respective communities." Wisely, the Consortium has not attempted to define well-being.

I would propose, here, that such terms as "art," "the community," and "well-being" remain open concepts to allow for as many alternative or supplementary definitions to come forth as can be justified. My argument is that the present meanings of such value-laden terms are already linguistically shaped if not culturally determined. If useful conceptions are to emerge from our various cross-cultural projects, then free and open inquiry must prevail. To lend credibility to my proposal, I would like to offer a brief first-person account of one such long-term cross-cultural project, an international art movement that has made divergent approaches to "art" provocative because vital, yet also visible and viable. But first I ask you to imagine, for a moment, what the related terms "human" and "community" might come to mean in the near future.

A strong Western belief holds that each human being is a unique self situated in a particular time and place in a historically evolving world. How will this belief fare in the 21st Century? We should be concerned since current biological research has already made multiple human cloning a frightening possibility. And recent success in reconstituting DNA material in plants threatens to make human control of the evolution of all living species - including humans - an even greater moral and political issue. We do not have to wait, however, for developments in the laboratory to re-think social being in the world. The rapidly growing global participation in every conceivable project over the Internet can be viewed as a radical democratization of access to information, hitherto available only to the offspring of socio-economic elites as "higher education." The proliferation of "chat rooms" in cyberspace raises a larger question for society: What constitutes a human community within the exponentially expanding boundaries of a virtual universe? Computer-artists, museum curators, and art educators are already programming their answers. One may wonder: if art is reduced to information on a superhighway, what will be the human cost?

Of course, there are other forces at work that will surely alter traditional ways of life and notions of a life worth living. The mass media as well as social scientists and anthropologists have documented the impact of the ongoing globalization of a capitalist economy and the spread of Western popular culture and the English language, not to mention the omnipresence of one world superpower, on even the most remote non-Western cultures. These forces, in different ways to be sure, collectively project a kind of universal dream, if not the reality, of global well-being. In reality, the key to future well-being may be in learning how to maintain the present diversity of all living things in the face of these homogenizing forces. It is new widely accepted that deforestation and loss of savannas and tidewaters are causing an irrevocable loss of species of plants and animals, and the resulting reduction of valuable gene pools. Less acknowledged is the continuing reduction of the world's languages and cultures which negatively impact ethno-linguistic groups, even to the extent of their loss of self identities. I voice these broad concerns to provide a framework for understanding some of the Compelling motivations of Participants in the cross-cultural project I now wish to recount.

I begin with the last Plexus event in which I participated, the live performance "Viaggio del Planeta Arte" held in Rome on July 23, 1997. Many international artists joined together that day to create paintings, installations, murals, graphic arts, and mime theater. Our immediate purpose was to produce artworks and collect cultural artifacts ultimately to be transported on the Elizabeth, a fishing boat, from her horne port in Carloforte, Sardinia, to Gorree, Senegal, the port from which most African slaves were transported to the New World. For all the divergent events I witnessed, the . underlying moral purpose was cultural reconciliation. Since this event, Sandro Dernini, Coordinator of Plexus International (and one of its founders )., has proposed in a letter to Mame Balla Sy of the Embassy of Senegal,. Who witnessed the Plexus performance, that proceeds of the fifty-six artworks collected (and any in the future) be distributed proportionately among producer, vendor, and a Plexus Trust fund to be established in Dakar.

For the future, the Voyage of Elisabeth wil1 require cultural navigation over the Internet. At each "port of call" local artists and artisans and all interested institutions would be invited to join a global community , each :group participating in. its distinctive way. Thus the project would be promoting cross-cultural well-being by supporting some of the world's oldest artistic traditions in their cultural settings by means of the newest technology. It remains to be seen how financial support will be found in the global "free market" economy.

It would be utterly misleading to imply that only artists are navigating global cultures, however. Scientific and academic communities have been heavily involved in the central events that have led us to today’s symposium. So a brief chronology would be useful here. Again, I shall refer only to the events in which I was a player.

As an art educator as well as an artist-researcher, I had several roles to play in the meetings of 1989 at New York University, where Sandro Dernini, Angiola Churchill, John Gilbert, Ochekulwu Odita, Mico Licastro, and myself, together with Plexus artists and members of CUANDO (a local New York cultural organization) formed the Christopher Columbus Consortium. We planned a series of public events' joining the academy with the community of the Lower East Side of New York, where the NYU art department is located. Cultural reconciliation emerged very early as the appropriate theme of these events in light of the celebrations of Columbus's discovery of the New World then being planned by major cultural institutions. Our proposal of art as cultural navigation led to a meeting in Rome in 1990, hosted by Dean De Marco, where the Well-Being project was conceived. That same year I addressed the artistic and aesthetic qualities of well-being and the function of art as qualitative problem solving, both in Rome and Carloforte, while in these venues Monsignor " Dante Balboni and the Ambassador of Senegal, Youssouph Baro addressed the spiritual and political aspects of well-being. We held our first symposium in Carloforte in 1992, followed that year by a Round Table event at City Hall in New York on the occasion of Human Rights Day and several meetings in the cultural affairs offices of Dennis DeLeon to establish the International Well-Being and Reconciliation Committee. As you remember, we formed the Well-Being Consortium at ours econd symposium in 1994. And, in 1996, I participated in the special art event on the occasion of the World Food Summit held in Rome. Among many memorable gatherings, I fondly recall cooking an Indian dinner for Sandro, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and others in Sandro' s apartment in Rome, after which we sketched a performance piece called "Cambio di Rotta." If one had only this listing of events, one could not fail to notice the many organizational transformations, the changing cast of players, locales, and sponsorship. Needless to say, my experience was non-linear. Where artists predominated, there was little in the way of a fixed agenda with objectives that everyone could accept. Yet I gained confidence over time that collective creative projects reaching across cultures could only work when they proceeded in an open, interactive, and democratic manner.

In global terms, our projects must remain multi-disciplinary and multicultural, while at the same time be grounded in. the real communities where people live, and perceived by them as good. for them. I sincerely hope that we will be pleased with ourselves at the end of this symposium in forging a comprehensive conception of global well-being. But as I've said in another place, it is in understanding how others see us and in understanding the other on the other's terms that will place the most demands on our. work. Making a contribution to well-being as defined by others is the challenge.

In the time remaining, I would like briefly to locate Plexus movement in relation to New York University, from which I have just retired, and the International Society for the Advancement of Living Traditions in Art, which I now direct full-time. Actually, my participation in the events I've just described was the result of my interest in the living traditions of Sardinia, and in particular in –documenting the practices of bladesmiths on the Island. I was not part of the original Plexus group. I was introduced to Sandro in 1990 by Angiola Churchill, artist and art educator, and my (then) colleague in the N.Y.U. art department, and I became his academic adviser. His PhD dissertation, "A Multicultural Aesthetic Inquiry into 'Plexus Black Box,' an International Community- Based Art Project," was one of some fifty dissertations I have guided to completion over a "time-span of thirty-eight years. My graduate students quickly became my colleagues in research. They collectively represented the major cultures of the world. Trained as artist-researchers, their aesthetic inquiries yielded information that enhanced an, "inside understanding" of selected artistic practices in China, Japan, Korea, Malysia, Taiwan, Tibet, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kuwait, France, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and many in the U. S., including the post-:modern "art world,' as well as Pueblo and Ojibwe cultures. My own research as an artist-blacksmith in India resulted in an international symposium on Damascus steel held in New York City in 1985. Co-directed by Dr. G. N. Pant of the National Museum, New Delhi, this meeting of the bladesmith's art was sponsored by N.Y.U. the .Metropolitan Museum of Art, and my organization, ISALTA.

Members of the Society are artist-researchers concerned not only  to preserve and nurture those arts in danger of being lost but also to promote multi-cultural art education in both "third-world” and industrialized societies.

.My comments here cannot. provide an understanding of the Plexus cross-cultural project beyond a superficial grasp of what it is about. For that, one needs to go to a primary source: Sandro Dernini’s dissertation. The best I can do here is conclude with quotations from it, one from the Preface and the other from the Conclusion.

'Ihe study challenges the current notion that artistic identification is conferred on the artist by the "Artworld.” By claiming a community -based artistic identification, the study grounds art in the experience and local knowledge of “insiders.”

/My/ purpose was to reinforce the role of the artist as a cultural producer unity . . . whose art as a "nutritional" component for well-being in the 21st Century.

And from the Abstract: 

The focus of Plexus is to raise the consciousness in the world community about the interdependencies of the arts, the well-being of individuals, and the reconciliation of cultural differences, through the extention and interaction of collaborative art events, bringing the community and the academy closer together, and linking the notion of ‘art' -- as a culture-bound aesthetic experience-- to the concept of “well-being” as a multicultural paradigm for enhancing the quality of life in the community.