CULTURE IS OUR OPERATING SYSTEM

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” ALAN WATTS

CULTURE IS ALL AROUND US. It’s the system of meanings that allows us to understand our world and to communicate this understanding to others. Culture is necessary for our very survival. Without it we wouldn’t know who or what we are, nor how to function beyond rudimentary biological life. Think of it this way: culture is to us as an operating system is to a computer. You can power up a computer with electricity, but without an operating system the machine just whirrs away, never booting up. The same goes for us. With just food and water we might be able to live, but without culture we’d be little more than a meat machine whirring away without ever being able to do anything meaningful. Culture is the operating system of humanity, and if we are going to change the way humanity operates, we need to be able to hack the culture. 

YEAH, BUT… WHAT IS IT?

Culture is the raw material of art activism. If you are a legal activist, then law is the material with which you work; if you are a sculptor, your medium might be stone, wood, metal, or plastic. As art activists, culture is the stuff we mine and the resource with which we build. Culture is also what we create — through our actions, performances, protests, and other demonstrations — in order to communicate our messages and meanings to others. But culture is complicated. It’s a word so commonly used that it’s hard to nail down exactly what it is. This slipperiness is not a problem in day-to-day use, but because it is a fundamental building block of art activist practice, here we need to be more rigorous and to define what we mean when we use the word culture. 

An initial definition might be this: culture is what a society creates in order to represent itself or express its ideals. This is the definition of culture that might be given by an art historian, a museum curator, a governmental culture minister, or a character in a TV sitcom. Culture as art. 

BIG C little c

But there’s another, broader way of understanding culture. This is culture as the patterns and byproducts of everyday life: the languages we use, the rituals we perform, and the unspoken rules we abide by. It’s what is created and recreated through work, play, conversations, and everyday interactions in our homes, schools, jobs, and places of worship. Culture surrounds us: it’s the material from which we create our lives and make sense of our world. It’s this definition that people like anthropologists, sociologists, and marketers use. 

Stuart Hall, a founder of the academic field of cultural studies, usefully distinguishes between these two primary definitions by referring to Culture as art with a big C, and culture as life with a small c. Culture and culture are interrelated. Think, for example, of ancient Greek marble sculptures. These nude forms are stone expressions of the myths and human ideals, moral and physical, of the Greeks who created them. But where exactly did these ideals come from? Well, it depends on your worldview. Plato thought an encyclopedia of ideals existed in a netherworld that only the artist or philosopher could access and bring down to earth. Modernists, on the other hand, tend to believe it’s far-fetched and egotistical to suggest a spirit guiding the sculptor’s chisel came from the heavens. People from a godless school of thought believe these ideals “rose up out of the ground” on their own, and were expressed in the artwork, strictly shaped by the everyday concerns of the people who created, appreciated, and financed it. Greek culture gave rise to Greek Culture. 

Whether you believe such ideals are handed down to us from the heavens, or are simply a reflection of the people’s imaginations who express them in art, the point is, statues created from these ideals in turn become the standards to which society compares itself. Having created these representations of muscular gods, the Greeks no doubt compared their flabby, earthbound selves to the sculptures to see how they measured up, perhaps walking away with a bounce in their step, or a personal pledge to cut back on the olive oil and wine over the coming moon. In this way, Greek Culture helped to shape Greek culture. 

Considered together, the relationship is something like this: Culture works as a representation and reinforcement of culture, and culture shapes and is shaped by Culture. This cyclical relationship might be pictured like this: 

ART ACTIVISTS CREATE CULTURE

As art activists we create Culture: creative forms we think best represent and communicate the ideas and ideals we would like others to share. For example, we might make a community mural that projects an ideal of how the local neighborhood could be. We do this in the hopes that people will see the mural and be inspired to change their community so that it is closer to the painted ideal. Or we might design a performance piece that warns of the evils of cancelling God and the family unit. Either way, we are producing Culture in order to influence culture. 

At the same time, the Culture we produce necessarily arises from the everyday culture in which we live. This is why it’s so important to be self-aware of our own cultures that influence our creations, and why our murals and performances will be more affective and effective when the ideals and imagery they depict are generated by the community itself, using signs, symbols, stories, and values that are true to the people that comprise it. 

The relationship between Culture and culture is not straightforward, and neither can be said to wholly determine the other. The process is more complex because of us: people. Culture and culture manifest as human creations, and we can consciously and creatively intervene in the relationship between the two, shaping the C/culture around us. This means that all Culture is local. What an art activist produces in Toronto will be different to what his counterpart in Orlando creates. Since local cultures are diverse, Culture is diverse too. This is why exporting an art activist tactic from one part of the world to another simply doesn’t work. 

EXERCISE: MUSEUM FIELD TRIP

Time: A morning or afternoon

Culture is a slippery word. Stuart Hall, a founder of the academic field of cultural studies, usefully distinguishes between Culture with a big C, or what we think of as art, and culture with a small c, or the patterns of everyday life. Culture and culture are interrelated and art activism uses both. In this exercise you are going to go to a museum — either physically or virtually — and look for how culture influences Culture and how Culture influences culture. 

1) Grab your sketchbook and take yourself on a trip to a museum. If you don’t have a museum nearby, find an art history book or visit a museum’s website. The Met, Louvre, British Museum, and Rijksmuseum have some of the largest online collections, but most museums these days have at least some of their collection online. 

2) Wander around the galleries and stop in front of an artwork that interests you. It doesn’t have to be one that you like, it could be one that really irks you, or just puzzles you. What matters most is that it holds your attention. Ask yourself: what sort of culture produced this Culture?

Here’s an example: Fountain by Marcel Duchamp (1917), consists of a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt”. 

If you were to ask educated people from the late 18th century to 1930 what the purpose of poetry, music, or art is, they would have replied “beauty.” And if you had asked them what the point of that is, they would have answered that beauty is a value as important as Truth and Goodness. Then, sadly, in the 20th century, beauty stopped being important. 

By looking at this urinal art, what can we say about the culture of the artist, and more importantly, the culture of the person who commissioned the artist? It seems to suggest that beauty is something you piss on…

One could say it was a culture that began to rebel against classical ideals of beauty, instead aiming to disturb and break moral taboos. It was not beauty, but “originality” that mattered, however achieved, and at whatever moral cost. This cult of ugliness extended to architecture, too, which has since become soulless and sterile. 

3) Let’s reverse direction, looking for how Culture might influence culture. Position yourself again in front of an artwork (you can stay with the one you were looking at before, or take a different one). Take a long hard look at it, and ask yourself: What ideas and ideals is the artist communicating to their audience?

Let’s go back to our urinal example. The artwork might be a simple representation and reinforcement of “progressive” values.

Now look at the next series of images below. What do these pieces say about our Big C and little c culture? 

Jake and Dinos Chapman, “Zygotic Acceleration” (1995) 

Tracey Emin, “My Bed” (1999)

Damien Hirst, “For The Love Of God” (2007) 

Gilbert & George, “Shitty” (1994) 

Tracey Emin, “I’ve Got It All” (2000) 

After looking at these works of art (or Big C Culture), in our view, it would seem that our little c culture has become increasingly vulgar, self-centered, and offensive, as if beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. It can be summarized by one word: ME. MY profits. MY desires. MY pleasures. Beauty has been flushed down the toilet of western culture, and with it, the meaning of life. 

Now you try. What are all the possible messages being communicated to the audience by the art and the artist? Write these down too.

Don’t be discouraged if what you notice is complex and even contradictory. Good art usually doesn’t have simple messages. Have fun with it. 

CONCLUSION

Culture is an essential part of humanity. It is the system of shared meanings that help us make sense of our world and enable us to communicate this understanding with others. It’s fundamental for our survival, helping us figure out who we are and how to live a more meaningful life beyond our basic biological functions. As art activists, we create Culture. This is when we come up with creative ways to show and tell other people about ideas that we think are important.

Culture with a big C is basically what we think of as art,  while culture with a small c refers to the patterns of everyday life. Big C Culture and little c culture are interrelated, and art activists use their understanding of both to influence and shape the collective set of beliefs, attitudes and, ultimately, behaviors of the population. Remember, this is powerful stuff. It must be used ethically and responsibly.