Meander 5: Small, powerful ideas for a lifetime of use
This is the fifth post dedicated to the powerful meanders in my life and the lessons they offered.
No river can run in a straight line longer than ten times its width, even in a flat valley. If the river is fifty feet wide, it will stray from its course in five hundred feet or less. This is due to shifting sediment accumulation along the river's path, causing variable current speeds. When the currents become strong enough to eat into the banks in some areas, the river begins to meander.
Meander 5: Small, powerful ideas for a lifetime of use
I have just returned from my birthplace, Slovenia, where I first started making art. Renowned Slovenian film director Damjan Kozole decided to make a documentary film about the Group OHO, hence the reason for my visit. He felt that our group did meaningful work and wanted to get our thoughts on record while we, ‘teenaged seniors’, are still around. Mr. Kozole's goal was to focus on 1966-71, when our group was active, and to explore how those early artistic practices influenced our lives and work afterward. He brought us together for four days, interviewed us, and filmed our conversations. Now he and his team have to sort out some 50 hours of material to find anything worthwhile for the final edit, no small task, and the film is due to be released next year.
As you can imagine, it was a time of memories and reflections. It was also a time to connect the principles that guided us at that time with what I continued to practice after we disbanded in 1971. For me, it was a gift to have a few days to think about the long arc of my work, and here are some principles we discussed:
Learn first, art second: My fellow artists and I agreed that creating art was a side-product of our collaboration: that the main achievement was that we started to think differently. We did not buy into the ideas promoted by our leaders, and instead of fighting them, we felt better served developing our own ideas for what mattered. So we had to pay attention to our own thinking and feelings. When making art, this meant being attentive to the setting and celebrating the qualities neglected. I would look for currents of water and wind, for the path of the sun and the stars in the night sky, and make art installations that celebrated the things taken for granted by others. I realized then that if I did not take time to study the situation first, my interventions would cause unintentional violence and hurt. One cannot be a ‘bull in a china shop’. Instead, the word OHO combines two Slovenia words: OKO = eye and UHO + ear, the two senses we utilized in our work. I think I wore them out so much that now, 50 plus years later, I need glasses and hearing aids to continue to listen and observe.
Change is necessary: we knew then that we were living in a rapidly changing world, and we wanted to be at the vanguard of that change. We intuited that we needed to replace old habits of using power to subjugate people (and enemies) with collaboration, where our differences instead contributed to greater understanding. We tried out new approaches by abandoning the traditions that brought us to a destructive state of affairs. During my OHO years, making art afforded me with the opportunity to address big ideas in a small and quick way. Later, after orienting myself to the United States, I combined art with democratic practices. In former Yugoslavia, I had an urge to express my uniqueness and individuality and not conform to collectivity. I found the opposite in the USA: we celebrate individuality to the max, but our communities suffer.
Integrated art: We began by looking to the pre-industrial past for answers and became intrigued with traditions of vernacular architecture and working with the spirit of the place—known in Latin as genius loci. Integrated art’s goal is to integrate beauty and design into streets and parks. Unobstructed by the traditional ambitions of fame and prestige, we instead spilled our activities into streets, parks, fields, rivers, and forests, and integrated them into human and natural settings.
From objects to collaboration: stand alone art assumes that art is meant strictly for museums and homes of the wealthy, and artists create objects distinguished by their talent and ingenuity to promote and sell in those markets. We challenged that assumption and replaced it with creating gentle installations that highlight qualities already present, either in nature or in urban settings. It sounds simple, but it was a profound shift to not use the natural and urban settings as backdrops for OUR art. It is where the imperative to collaborate and serve took hold of me. Let us not impose our will on the world, let us highlight the world’s will for all to appreciate in a new way.
No blaming: in a politically charged atmosphere, (no, times haven’t changed much), we focused on tiny solutions in order to combat big problems. It is a ‘solution by a thousand paper cuts’ modality. A little goes a long way to solve our problems, and if we accumulate a large number of small victories, those big problems gradually diminish. We must be forward thinking to capitalize on any momentum achieved, not rooted or overwhelmed by past failures, despite what or whom we believe might be the cause.
Art is not propaganda: I did not appreciate artists who signaled their intentions and used art to proselytize their ideologies, guiding their audience on what to see. To me, this violated the integrity of each person's ability to observe and arrive at their own conclusions. Instead, I would focus on finding the shape and form that would, without explanation, lead the viewers to a possible insight. I wanted others to think for themselves rather than falling into ideological pathways prescribed by others. During the Pomegranate years, I never wanted people to 'join us.' I wanted them to engage with the great questions of our times and do something worthwhile together in the artistic tradition.
Humor and play: I decided long ago that humor and creativity are intertwined. I used humor in my art, employing inexpensive materials to illustrate grand ideas. For example, I used a light bulb sticking from a black tarp paper to simulate the view of the Earth from space—an inexpensive version of what the astronauts saw from the moon. The United States spent billions traveling to the moon, I provided the view for five dollars! I was in awe of seeing our lonely planet from space and I wanted to share this expansive feeling using the simplest materials. The ethereal beauty of that image… the duality between our apparent insignificance and our uniqueness in the vast universe was overwhelming to me, and I wanted to try and express that view using humor and art. To use a common art term, the photograph provided a completely unique perspective on ourselves, a perspective that no one had seen before. It was a truly revolutionary moment in human history to look at ourselves from that distance. And I commemorated that revolutionary moment with a simple light bulb and tarp. I hope that humor resonates as powerfully as it did in my mind!
No violence: I was learning to see things from multiple perspectives and responded negatively to all people who acted as if their version of reality was the only one. Early on, I realized those people tended to create a binary world where I had to agree or disagree. I saw, and continue to see, the certainty of their conviction as the inevitable cause of future violence. By creating a ‘with us or against us’ paradigm, battle lines are inevitably drawn.
When I founded Pomegranate Center in 1986, 15 years after the OHO group disbanded, I carried these ideas forward. By then, I had already identified two key issues I wanted to address: fragmented democracy and wasteful cities. And instead of providing answers, I would engage people with questions and appeal to their better selves. In time, I developed a process whereby community members identified a project vision, designers and artists expressed the community's ideas, and those separate forces were brought together for an actual project build — the whole process taking just a few months from start to finish. I collaborated on over 60 parks and gathering spaces around the Pacific Northwest and beyond, with artists, architects, craftspeople, and builders, including: James Hubbell, Chiaki Takanohara, Duncan Chalmers, Bree Dillon, Ilisa Goldman, Heinz Sodamin, Heidi Breeze-Harris, Paul Olson, Katya Matanovic, Amna Alvi, Paul Sorey, Deanna Goldy, Eric Higbee, and many others.
In addition to our gathering places, Pomegranate Center convened hundreds of gatherings to help diverse communities develop shared goals. People requested to learn more about the process that led us to succeed in these projects. In response, the “Pomegranate Method” was born— a training program to prepare organizations, communities, and individuals for collaboration. Since then, many workshops have taken place across the USA, New Zealand, and Slovenia, and we have passed on our methods to over a thousand people who hope to take this knowledge and utilize it in their own neighborhoods. In 2017, after three decades of leading, I stepped away to use my practical experiences to mentor new leaders and assist governments and organizations in integrating collaborative practices.
Rivers have essential directions from their source to the sea, and temporary yielding to the contours of the land, speeding up and slowing down, turning and twisting. Rivers never deny their journey, even as they may temporarily run away from their destination. My life is like that, and the essential ideas have taken many forms. It all started when my brilliant colleagues in OHO and I dared to turn sideways and create original and unusual art. The spirit of that collaboration continues to burn within me, and I continue to make art.