Raymond Williams suggests that there are two definitions of culture. Firstly, the mass media examples that are prominent within society. Secondly, that culture is not just art, it is everything that makes up the shared life of a village, town or society. I am going to attempt to make these two definitions collide in the spirit of Williams with an anecdote.
In 2018 I toured a performance work from Australia to universities in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi’an and Beijing. The work titled Alter was a meditative visual and aural piece of interactive art. Alter was selected for touring because it had no language and could potentially be viewed by anyone, as it did not need to be translated for a foreign audience. Through some quirk of the touring program, some of the selected host institutions were not art universities.
An important part of the work (and quite often my favourite moment) was when the audience was allowed to ask questions about it afterwards. Without fail, the first question was “Why did you make this?”.
This simple question cuts to the heart of what it is to be an artist. It unravels a whole range of responses in the maker which would need to be described through descriptions of art lineages, histories of the makers, cultural specificities of Australia, aesthetic interests and so on and so on. Apart from being a very difficult question to answer due to the abstract nature of the artwork itself, it felt very unusual to have to defend the creation of a work that in our culture would have been understood within a common frame of reference.
We would usually bumble through a series of answers - “it’s a shared experience”, “we are looking at the role of technology in modern culture”, “we are bringing the natural world into this space through technology” - but deep down I knew that there was no good answer to why we made it. I guess the most honest answer to the question would have been “Why not?”.
In a way, it is not the answer that is interesting in this case, but rather the question and who was asking it. The fact that these were ‘ordinary people’ (science students) not ‘cultured people’ (fine arts students) is the more salient point. So often in Australia, I create performance works that are viewed by the same left-leaning cultural workers as my previous artworks. This culturally knowledgeable audience understands how to decode the meaning and pass judgement about it. This seems like a very limited view of culture.
Williams goes to length to state that although he is a member of the academy, he is no more able to decipher the world than anyone else. While it is important not to fetishize the viewpoint of a layperson as being purer due to their ordinariness, it is worth noting that those students in that performance space in Guangzhou have as much right to their question as anyone else. They exist within and are an inseparable part of their own culture. And that culture is local, ordinary and specific even against a backdrop of increased globalisation.