December 12, 1997

You've seen these things before, right? You stare at them a while, cross your eyes, focus a little in front of the page or behind it, and suddenly a pattern that wasn't apparent before pops out at you. Once you've seen it, you can't avoid seeing it. Is it an optical illusion? Or is the illusion the two-dimensional image you thought you saw?

Culture is a lot like that. When most people think of culture, they think of things like opera, ballet, or art museums. If not that, they think of some "political correctness" issue-multiculturalism, ethnocentricity, African-American culture - or something exotic, like Japanese culture. Most people fail to recognize that they are a part of culture.

The American Heritage dictionary defines culture as "the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristic of a community or population." That includes a lot-raves and rock bands, television, movies, and radio, scuba diving, skydiving, and bungee-jumping, computer games and education, politics and religion - virtually everything we do and communicate constitutes "culture".

Somewhere in the depths of Being and Nothingness, Sartre pointed out that, as no living human being is a finished product, we are forever and constantly in the process of self-invention. In the process of inventing our individual selves, we invent humankind. Our choices - our television viewing habits, records we buy, videos we rent, even down to the way we speak and the jobs we choose-invent the culture in which we live.

When you look at a painting, see a movie, listen to a song, or leaf through a magazine, you first see the obvious two dimensions of the work. Try focusing a little off the page, though, and a new pattern emerges. Now that you've noticed it, you can't stop seeing it. Watch a television show about angels, for instance. Focus just a little to the right of the screen, and the twelve-step pseudo-spirituality that blossomed in the eighties pops out. Now watch X Files. See the mistrust of government that pervades contemporary America? Look at the Slim-Fast ad; see the unrealistic expectation that women should all be supermodel thin?

I've been thinking about culture a lot lately. On Halloween, I interviewed artist Arthur Rayford for a Deland newspaper. As we talked, he sat on a small stool, painting a still life. A comforting smell of turpentine and tung oil mingled in the air with classical music coming from the public radio station. On a table beneath a pegboard hung with tools, a foot-high statue of a fat, grinning Buddha rested. Carved from dark wood the color of Arthur's skin, it held its arms above its head, fingertips together, palms up, as if to summon from the sky the source of all creation.

A select few artists so internalize their discipline that they seem to create effortlessly, as if they were merely a conduit to something beyond themselves, drawing their creations from the sky - much as that Buddha might draw the power of creation in through its upraised palms. Rayford is one such master. "I never went to school for this," he told me. "Sometimes life just stops you-and every time you get stopped, you get a chance to do something different. My destiny drove me to this."

Funny...I'd been thinking about "destiny" for a while, too. For months, I'd had this feeling that I was about to do something new and different, or that all the things I'd been doing would converge and I'd know, for the first time in my life, what I'm doing and why. I started thinking that I'd better develop a unifying sense of direction soon - by the end of October-and if I didn't, I was in deep shit. It was Halloween - the end of October. It was pouring down rain, and I was hungry. I didn't have any food in the house, I needed to finish my article about Rayford, and I didn't want to go back out in the rain. I didn't mind asking someone else to get wet, though, so I ordered a pizza...pepperoni, black olives, and jalapenos - heavy on the japs. In the middle of the night, the hot peppers decided to remind me of their existence with a terrible case of heartburn. I sat on my bed drinking iced tea, apologizing to my digestive system, smoking cigarettes, thinking about a weird jumbled dream I'd had about artists, deadlines, theatre crap...
...and suddenly a thought entered my mind unbidden and out of nowhere: "I'm documenting the culture of western society at the turn of the millennium."
What? That sounds important.
"...documenting the culture of western society at the turn of the millennium."
So that's what I've been doing? That's what "Notes from the Cultural Wasteland" is about?
Why "wasteland"? While culture is forever in the process of self-invention, it is also in the process of self-destruction. As movies and television develop, theatre suffers. As electronic recording technology grows, the symphony disappears. As our ability to communicate with one another expands, so does the "community" characterized by the "products of human work and thought"; the result is the homogenization of culture across geographical boundaries and the destruction of that which is ethnically unique.

Look around some more. Focus a little in front of the tattoo on a teenager, just behind the pierced nose. See the rejection of traditional culture? See the desire to belong to a simpler, safer one? Look at Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ", the infamous photo of a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine. See the disgust with the trappings of organized religion? See the yearning for something...for something that will show us why we're here and give us a sense of purpose?
...something that will, as Rayford said, "stop us," and lead us to our destiny.

--Morris Sullivan - Staff Reporter for Impact Press

Morris Sullivan Morris Sullivan has written "Notes from the Cultural Wastleland", a column of cultural criticism, for four years. It first appeared in Tabula Rasa, then Eleven, and now Impact, where he also writes regular feature stories. He has written and produced five plays. His "Weekender" columns run in the Thursday edition of "Go 4 It", the A&E section of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and he's contributed to The Orlando Weekly and other area publications. Sullivan holds an MBA and serves as financial officer at Theatre Downtown. Other Articles I've Written