Contributors: Makoto Fujimura & Jacob Beaird
Heading image: Paul Nash “The Division of the Light From the Darkness” from Genesis, woodcut, 1924. Public Domain, via The Public Domain Review.
A Note from IAMCultureCare
It’s lately felt like the pace of unique “cultural moments” has quickened. We mark each passing week by an increasing succession of similarly era-defining moments, and our newsletters have in some sense been a re-contextualization of what it means to live out Culture Care in “unprecedented”, turbulent times. In the US, the November election is just the latest fracture point exacerbating polarization and toxicity, spurred on by a 24-hour news cycle urging us to measure out our lives not with coffee spoons but with tragedy. (By the way, I do not suggest that Eliot’s Prufrock is the preferred paradigm; it merely depicts a slower, humbler perspective. Perhaps Wendell Berry’s poet-farmer is the virtuous counterpart to Prufrock). Our version of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame is now a much briefer 15 seconds: the time taken to view a video on Instagram or TikTok, which algorithms are designed to promote the most provoking and vitriolic content.
At least, that’s the narrative. I have a hunch, though, that we’ve always lived in unprecedented times, each moment a fresh, new opportunity. We still have the choice between reactivity and proactivity, between an apathetic surrender to chaos, entropy, original sin — the tendency for things to fall apart — and an empathetic commitment to mend, tend, and embrace the New.
What does it mean to care for culture in our present time? It’s the same as it has always been. In his reflection on the Impressionist Movement below, Makoto Fujimura mentions #postdestruction: the idea that the role of the artist is to create something new in response to fracture. He will speak to this at the University of Pennsylvania this coming Monday, November 18 (more details in the Culture Care Events section), but this reality is borne out through the history of art and culture. It is in response to plague, war, flood, devastation, personal and collective trauma, that the greatest works of transcendence are birthed. Their beauty does not justify the suffering but it does point to a reality beyond.
Many of the musicians and works I’m drawn to as a music historian reflect on this. I’m listening to two topically-related concept works this month. American Railroad is out today from Rhiannon Giddens (arguably America’s preeminent folk musician right now) and the Silkroad ensemble, via Nonesuch. The album and accompanying podcast document the songs and stories of the forgotten people who built the Transcontinental Railroad, a potent symbol of our possibility for good and ill. Meanwhile, Steve Reich’s groundbreaking minimalist work for string quartet and tape, Different Trains, is 36 years old this year. Reich’s work — coincidentally also a Nonesuch record — captures his experience traveling via that same Transcontinental Railroad as a boy in the late 1930’s while millions of Jews were being simultaneously transported by rail to concentration camps across Europe. Reich’s music powerfully asks what would have happened to him, a Jewish-American boy, had he been riding those different trains.
The particular horrors of World War II continue to fade from cultural memory, just as the building of the Transcontinental Railroad has, and this election cycle eventually will. And yet Reich notes that even though the “topicality” of the piece wanes, that if the “drama of the topic is well-preserved in the music, then it can survive as long as there are musicians to play it.” This emotional drama — depicted through music and audio samples in Reich’s work, in the folk expressions of Indigenous and African Americans and other immigrant workers in “American Railroad”, and in countless other artistic media — beckons to us as “unheard music hidden in the shrubbery”. It’s the role of artists to hear the music, and then play it.
Jacob Beaird, Editor
A Note from Makoto Fujimura, Founder of IAMCultureCare
In accompanying Haejin to her annual lawyer’s conference, this year held in Washington D.C., I had a day to walk about the Capitol to pray and visit museums. It was a treat to spent time at the “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” exhibit, which just opened at the National Gallery after appearing at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris earlier this year. The exhibit marks the 150th anniversary of the movement.
On May 30, 1871, Paul Durand-Ruel, a Catholic patron of the Impressionists, wrote to Camille Pisarro, one of the elder artists of the burgeoning movement: “Dread and dismay are still everywhere in Paris. Nothing like it has ever been known… I have only one wish and that’s to leave, to flee from Paris for a few months, Paris is empty and will get still emptier.”
The Franco-Prussian war (1870−1871) and the Paris Commune uprising and the fallout (depicted in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables), resulted in devastation in Paris. Then, 1874 arrived. The long-established Salon, indispensable to artists’ careers, had become rigid as part of the “government of moral order”, and the influx of foreign artists (especially women artists) began to create an undercurrent of epochal shifts in culture.
In this seminal exhibit, the works of the Salon are exhibited side by side with those of the Société Anonyme, which was a countercultural group of “transgressive” artists that would become known as the Impressionists (the term “Impressionist” was at first a derogatory term coined by a journalist). As you enter the room, you immediately encounter the most iconic painting of the time — Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872) — next to the then Grand Prize-winning “L’Eminence Grise” (1873) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the most popular painting of the Salon. “L’Eminence” depicts, in a sardonic mode, aristocratic society paying homage to a religious zealot on the Palais-Royal staircase. Of course, today, we have not heard of this painting or Gérôme, and we do not comprehend the inside joke (after studying the painting’s history, I am still unsure of the joke, other than the fact that it was clear then to its viewers) which the painting satirically captures. This intentional paring highlights why this 1874 exhibit is so intriguing. What makes a painting, or any work of art, enduring? Would we remember what we celebrate today, years later, or even a year later?
The exhibit is a must-see, not only because of this intrigue, but because it highlights the important influences that women artists had. One example (among many), is Mary Cassatt, who helped Durand-Ruel introduce Impressionism to Philadelphia and thereby saved the careers of artists like Monet. The contrast of Salon artists with the Impressionists is fascinating, but what is curious is that there were many overlaps, influences, and confluences, like a tributary of a river separating — but all from the same source of the destruction of Paris. The popular Salon artist Corot (who competed against Gérôme and nearly won the Salon prize) is still regarded as one of the fathers of the landscape genre (and therefore the Impressionists), while many Impressionists, like Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, still participated in the official Salon. The #postdestruction movement is both in the established culture and the avant-garde.
The exhibit runs through January 19th. Go see it, for a culture care journey of #postdestruction movement of culture.
Culture Care Events
- Beauty & Justice Lecture Series and Exhibit — Philadelphia, PA, 2024 – 2025. Makoto and Haejin Shim Fujimura selected as University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Social Equity & Community’s Equity in Action Visiting Scholars for the 2024 – 25 academic year, presenting four lectures on the topic of“Beauty+Justice”, NEXT WEEK on November 18, February 11, and March 7, with an exhibition of Mako Fujimura’s works in March. RSVP here for the upcoming events.
- Goldenwood Institute Retreats— Princeton, NJ, Dec 6 – 8. Goldenwood Institute offers retreats from Makoto Fujimura (Nature, Grace & Interdependency) and Haejin Shim Fujimura (Reimagining Justice: Kintsugi Peace Making). Check out the Institute’s website for additional opportunities.
- Windrider Summit—Park City, UT, Jan 26 – 31. Join the Windrider Institute at the Sundance Film Festival.
Do you have a news item or upcoming culture care event? Consider sharing it with us for a possible feature here in the newsletter! Email jacob@internationalartsmovement.org.
Web Links
- New music recs: Caroline Shaw’s soundtrack to Ken Burns’ “Leonardo”, out on PBS Nov 18; Yasmin Williams’ stunning guitar playing in Acadia; Constantinople’s recreation of a medieval Polish Pilgrimage to Jerusalem; Cappella Romana’s A Ukrainian Wedding captures the musical liturgies and marriage traditions of Ukraine, based on field recordings collected before the 2022 invasion.
- Nicholas Ma, Makoto Fujimura, and David Kim discuss Ma’s film LEAP OF FAITH.
- Very neat sculpture exhibition at Kana Kawanishi Gallery in Tokyo.
- Gregorian chant seems to be alive and well in Lyon, France.
- Matthew Milliner’s office is a thing of beauty.
- David Brooks gives a history of educational meritocracy, and what it misses, for The Atlantic.
- The Public Domain Review is a beautifully curated archive. I discovered it and this issue’s heading image via Alan Jacob’s delightfully eclectic blog.
- Nadya Williams on the power of novels, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Joseph Stalin.
- October Belonging Conversation from Julia Hendrickson and Makoto Fujimura.
- James Davison Hunter reconsiders culture wars and nihilism for The Hedgehog Review.
- Also from THR, a tongue-in-cheek but thoughtful examination of our relationship with data.
IAMCultureCare is a registered 501c(3) non-profit organization that relies on your support to continue our Culture Care efforts of amending the soil of culture as an antidote to toxic culture wars. This newsletter and our other programming does that effectively, and we welcome gifts of any size to continue these efforts. You can donate here or get in touch with us about corporate sponsorship!
All content in this newsletter belongs to the respective creators, as noted, and is used with permission. If you would like to submit something for consideration in a future newsletter issue, you may do so by filling out this form or by emailing jacob@internationalartsmovement.org.