On Cultural Specificity

Disclaimer: Any examples used below are to highlight my trains of thought, and should not be seen as exhaustive or definitive. If you can’t exchange them for your own examples by the end than I’ve failed.

On the Uses and Importance of Cultural Specificity.

Cultural Specificity is, fundamentally, all that separates us.

It’s an essentially leftist position, I know, but a tough one to argue against: Our basic fundamental needs are the same. We need food, water and shelter and, as a species if not as individuals, we need to produce new generations and ensure the environment they live in permits each generation to do more of the same. Basically we’re all pretty much alike.

And at the same time we are all entirely different.

From the earliest stage we have a constant stream of inputs from the family we’re brought up by and the culture we grow up in, and those inputs influence the way we will think, the things we’re attracted to or repelled by and our actions for the rest of our lives.

Reconciling those two states is basically what it is to be human. Throughout life we drift between people and places attempting to find the right blend of cultural input and output in order to settle, satisfying the urges brought about by the way our brains have developed after years of nurture while trying to safeguard our food and water sources, our homes, and, if we’re lucky, our families and our friends.

I’m very fortunate: as a Middle Class, educated, European male I don’t have to worry too much about the basics. My rights to food and water and shelter are protected, while health and social care is such that I’m really very unlikely to loose many of my friends and family in an untimely manner, fatal illnesses and random crime aside. I work to reward myself with new and exciting cultural input, and I even work in an industry that exists solely to satisfy the needs of others during their leisure time. Life is sweet. That’s not exactly true of, say, a Zimbabwean farmer, whose cultural freedoms are restricted to a degree I don’t appreciate and who has to spend his time dedicated to safeguarding those basic rights. But I bet he has an opinion on his situation, and I bet he tells his child that opinion… and I wonder what lullabies they sing across the world?

We are all the same, and we are all entirely different.

I think the best, most human route is to acknowledge that, for the most part, it’s cultural inputs and cultural opportunities that divide us. It’s not new thinking, but it needs to be restated in this context: Hating people for what they like instead of who they are is pretty much a waste of time. Hate them when you know them, hate them when you find out they’ve raped a child or voted BNP, not when you find out they listen to dubstep. Furthermore, don’t confuse the relationship between space and populace: Hedge End and Southampton didn’t give me much chance for some of the real-live cultural opportunities I can get in London, but leaving it doesn’t make me better than those who stayed or those who choose to move there.

That leads to two common questions that go hand in hand: What exists of Mainstream Culture? I’d say everything. Is there such a things as Alternative Culture? I’m not sure there is, and I don’t think there should be.

As a Western European again: We all have an impossible array of cultural choices, and while there are some that allow or exacerbate an oppositional perspective, the reality is that we’re still taking part in the same ‘work for pleasure/to allow pleasure process’ of commercial and capital culture. We’re living in an increasingly connected world now, the internet archiving most daily experiences and pretty much any cultural input available. The key questions are now ‘Can you Google it?’ and ‘What’s the URL?’

Here’s the thing: We live in an era where Cultural Specificity is acknowledged in the manner of our cultural input. I’ve talked about Burst Culture before, but it really is the reality: We ingest bite-sized culture and we trace links between what’s similar and appealing. We have RSS feeds to collate our blog feeds, Facebook pages listing our fandoms and our interests and last.fm pages compiling charts of our personal listening preferences. With these we create our own cultural networks, and these networks are audiences of strangers and friends. They might like similar things to us, but the chances that their lists are identical are astronomically small, because, hey, you have it all to choose from now, because any artist with a flickr account, writer with a blog or musician with a last.fm page has the power to connect to every single person on earth able to access the internet. That’s incredible.

And, yes, it perhaps oversimplifies the point a little, but what’s the use in hating people you haven’t met when we’re all part of the same Venn Diagram?

If the internet provides a platform for such mass access then it also highlights that connecting to everyone is an increasingly unlikely prospect. Two reasons: When you try to talk to everyone by creating a cypher of yourself and your work then you probably wind up saying nothing; If you’re watching, reading or listening to something that says nothing to you then chances are, with the whole of the internet to choose from, you won’t listen to it all that long.

Reclaim the “I”. The author isn’t dead anymore.

The culture of specificity isn’t just about the audience, it’s about the creator. Cultural analysis and the cult of celebrity no longer allows works of art to be judged out of context or in isolation, and why should it? Art is a product of environment and influences, conscious and unconscious, and acts as a barometer of the artist’s mindset at the date of conclusion. Like a Brian Jonestown Massacre album, each Polaroid Press entry should be © Matthew Sheret, 1986 – 2008 – 20??.

If people care about the artist again then the artist has to invest in the work the specificity of the culture around them. Do that and you speak more to people who connect to something in the same way. Don’t simply describe the mp3 that you’re reviewing, but explore how it makes you feel, what it reminds you of and the social environment that it’s coming into from the speakers. A lot of people out there are going to relate to that environment, and relate to those feelings, and they’re going to invest of lot more of themselves in you as a result.

And, get this, every so often you’re going to reach someone who feels the same way you do about some of the same things that you do. When that happens you will smash through the barriers of language and time and space and let someone know YOU ARE NOT ALONE, which is probably the most important message in the world, especially if you do feel you’re in a Venn Diagram of One.

c.spec and I or How David Kohl, Christie Malry and Tim Bisley saved my life.

So, what does this mean for me as an artist?

To begin with it means having a look at what appeals to and has influenced me most out of what I absorb culturally. What am I seeing, reading, listening to or watching that’s touching me deeply and inappropriately?

It’s the stuff where the artist wants to speak to me directly. And, yes, sometimes it’s done with different degrees of diffusion, and there’s always smoke and mirrors involved, but by and large you look at what I get most excited about and what fills me with an energy to create and communicate and it’s the stuff that really wants to smash down the fourth wall of life and tell me that other people are doing what I’m doing and thinking how I think.

I want to do that too. I want to speak to people, and I want to turn heads and mix a little of what’s made me into what I’m making. I’m trying, for certain, to find the right balance, to try and develop my own voice at the same time as abusing and picking apart what I find in others. I find it easy to loose sight of that sometimes, looking to The Polaroid Press at times as something that should just work without investing time enough in seeing to the gears and wheels. But every so often combinations of words and workings just click together and I realise that there’s a technique that I want to keep and make mine.

It’s a lot to live up to, doubtless, but I’ve got years to find my voice yet.

In the meantime I want to soak up others. I will pounce on recommendations and follow the links between art and inspiration and successors until each well runs dry. I will keep myself checked and try not to discriminate people based on what they’re sucking in, and in an act of resistance will insist that those around me don’t fall into that trap, even if it offends their sensibilities.

It has never been so essential to speak to those around us, to not let the specificities of our inputs stop us from getting on. We need to recognise that no matter how fucked up things get, we need the same things, we just choose different things.