Culture Care

Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life

Makoto Fujimura

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830891115
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Outreach Magazine Resource of the YearChristianity Today's Book of the Year Award of Merit"Culture is not a territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated."Many bemoan the decay of culture. But we all have a responsibility to care for culture, to nurture it in ways that help people thrive. In Culture Care artist Makoto Fujimura issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we become generative and feed our culture's soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. We serve others as cultural custodians of the future.This is a book for artists, but artists come in many forms. Anyone with a calling to create—from visual artists, musicians, writers, and actors to entrepreneurs, pastors, and business professionals—will resonate with its message. This book is for anyone with a desire or an artistic gift to reach across boundaries with understanding, reconciliation, and healing. It is a book for anyone with a passion for the arts, for supporters of the arts, and for "creative catalysts" who understand how much the culture we all share affects human thriving today and shapes the generations to come.Culture Care includes a study guide for individual reflection or group discussion.

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ON BECOMING GENERATIVE

Bringing Beauty into Our Lives

As a newlywed couple, my wife and I began our journey with very little. After Judy and I got married in the summer of 1983, after college, we moved to Connecticut for Judy to pursue her master’s degree in marriage counseling. I taught at a special education school and painted at home. We had a tight budget and often had to ration our food (lots of tuna cans!) just to get through the week.

One evening I was sitting alone, waiting for Judy to come home to our small apartment, worried about how we were going to afford the rent and pay for necessities over the weekend. Our refrigerator was empty and I had no cash left.

Then Judy walked in, and she had brought home a bouquet of flowers. I got really upset.

“How could you think of buying flowers if we can’t even eat!” I remember saying, frustrated.

Judy’s reply has been etched in my heart for over thirty years now. “We need to feed our souls, too.”

The irony is that I am an artist. I am the one, supposedly, feeding people’s souls. But in worrying for tomorrow, in the stoic responsibility I felt to make ends meet, to survive, I failed to be the artist. Judy was the artist: she brought home a bouquet.

I do not remember what we ended up eating that day, or that month (probably tuna fish). But I do remember that particular bouquet of flowers. I painted them.

“We need to feed our souls, too.” Those words still resonate with me today.

Is Judy still right? Do we, as human beings, need more than food and shelter? Do we need beauty in our lives? Given our limited resources, how do we cultivate and care for our souls? And how do these questions apply to the larger culture?

My life as an artist, and as a founder of International Arts Movement (IAM), has been in pursuit of questions like these—not just internally or for my own sake but with a growing global network of people. What began as an admission of my own failure to be an artist has now given birth to many principles that govern my life as an artist, father, husband, and leader. I call them generative principles. What started out as Judy’s care for our own souls has blossomed into an effort to extend that care into our home and our churches, and into a vision for culture at large. What I call culture care is a generative approach to culture that brings bouquets of flowers into a culture bereft of beauty.

An Artist’s Journey Toward Generativity

I have found that what I am asked to do often seems impossible. How can I make a living as an artist? How can I support my family as an artist? How can I support a growing movement as an artist? These challenges seem to expand with every opportunity, but in my mind they come back to the same generative principles.

This book launches a series of essays and conversations on culture care, to which I invite the contributions of artists, curators, critics, patrons, and other lovers of the arts and participants in culture. We anticipate more books on culture care, and the theological underpinning for my thesis will be laid out in my upcoming book on a theology of making. To help frame the conversation for different types of thinkers, I begin by briefly considering three G’s sparked by Judy’s act that have come to characterize my approach to generative thinking:

• genesis moments
• generosity
• generational thinking

In the next chapter, I will draw these elements together with more formal definitions of the terms generative and culture care to help shape and catalyze an ongoing conversation.

Bringing home a bouquet of flowers created a genesis moment for me. Judy’s small act fed my soul. It renewed my conviction as an artist. It gave me new perspective. It challenged me to deliberately focus on endeavors in which I could truly be an artist of the soul. That moment engendered many more genesis moments in the years that followed, contributing to decisions small and large that have redefined my life and provided inspiration for myself, my family, and my communities.

Genesis moments like this often include elements of the great story told in the beginning of the biblical book of Genesis: creativity, growth—and failure. Two of these elements are common in discussions about arts and culture. God creates and calls his creatures to fruitfulness. Adam exercises his own creativity in naming what has been created. But the story also runs into failure and finitude.

Generative thinking often starts out with a failure, like my failure to think and act as an artist. I have discovered that something is awakened through failure, tragedy, and disappointment. It is a place of learning and potential creativity. In such moments you can get lost in despair or denial, or you can recognize the failure and run toward the hope of something new.

The key to recognizing genesis moments is to assume that every moment is fresh. Creativity applied in a moment of weakness and vulnerability can turn failure into enduring conversation, opening new vistas of inspiration and incarnation. To remember what Judy did, to speak of it with others, to value her care—all this is generative, as her act can be honored and become a touchpoint for others, leading to the birth of ideas and actions, artifacts and relationships that would not otherwise have been.

The bouquet was also an emblem of generosity. Judy’s generous heart—more generous than mine at that moment—valued beauty over the day-to-day worries that had so nearly narrowed my focus. Generative thinking is fueled by generosity because it so often must work against a mindset that has survival and utility in the foreground. In a culture dominated by this mindset, generosity has an unexpectedness that can set the context for the renewal of our hearts. An encounter with generosity can remind us that life always overflows our attempts to reduce it to a commodity or a transaction—because it is a gift. Life and beauty are gratuitous in the best senses of that word.

Judy’s bouquet is only one of many instances of generosity in my life. I was able to become an artist partly because of my parents’ generosity and encouragement. Both my father and my mother encouraged me when I desired to pursue the arts. That, for an Asian family, was extremely unusual. Music, painting, writing, and creating have always been part of my life. I took them for granted and thought that everyone’s homes were a nurturing environment for creativity. Then I went to middle school and discovered I was an anomaly! It was then that I started to realize I somehow had to defend my time for creativity in a culture that does not nurture creative growth.

Artists have a deep capacity to develop and share generosity and empathy, to point toward abundance and connections. We learn generosity as we try to communicate with a new audience, or help people express what they cannot otherwise articulate, or say something meaningful into the void. Even an artist who journeys alone, like the poet Emily Dickinson, can develop a sense of communicating or communing with someone—the reader, nature, God—and so strengthen critical generative capacities to bring beauty into the world. An encounter with the arts can lead to generative thinking as generosity supplants our quid pro quo expectations. (In the sciences too discovery is linked to the generosity of information shared among its practitioners.) The effects of generosity begin with gratitude and lead to places we cannot predict.

As I reflect on Judy’s simple act and on my life in the arts, I am more and more convinced that anything truly generative is not isolated. Generative values are given to us as a gift by our parents and predecessors. They grow in conversation with the past and in our intention to speak and create so as to cultivate the values of multiple future generations. Generative thinking requires generational thinking.

Culture formation is generational, not birthed in a night. Generative thinking can inspire us to work within a vision for culture that is expressed in centuries and millennia rather than quarters, seasons, or fashions. People in the arts work in conversation with artists of the past as they are shaping the future, attempting to produce work with enduring qualities that might in turn speak to new generations.

I have seen gratuitous acts modeled by Judy’s parents and family. I have failed at times to appreciate my own parents’ generosity—but at least I have had the receptivity to repent! My father’s generosity in particular has led to so many blessings in the world that he did not expect or even realize—all flowing from his love for art and music. Such acts from Judy’s and my parents are now reflected in unexpected ways, not least in the lives of our creative children, all of whom deeply value beauty and model generosity.

Even the term generative is a gift to me. My father, Osamu Fujimura, is a pioneer of acoustics research. I was born in Boston because he was doing postdoctoral research at MIT with Noam Chomsky. Recently I invited my father to attend an International Arts Movement conference. As we walked together to the TriBeCa Performance Center where I was about to give a keynote, he asked me what I was to speak on. I told him the speech would be called “On Generative Culture.” My father responded, “Interesting . . . the word generative . . . that was my thesis topic.”

I knew that. I had even read the thesis. But for some reason I had sidelined this influence and forgotten to link my theme to my father’s lifetime of work! He was instrumental in bringing Chomsky’s Generative Grammar Theory to Japan. I was grateful for the rediscovery and was able to present my version of generative thinking with a proper attribution of his influence.

Our lives are directed or constrained by paths paved by the generations before us. Sometimes we can trace the paths, as I did with my father. Often they shape us unawares. What is true of legacies from our parents is true also for our communities and racial and national histories. Cultures are not created overnight. We are affected by layers of experiences, personalities, and works of previous generations. Cultural histories affect us far beyond what we are able to recognize—or, sometimes, admit.

Generative principles flow out of generational blessing toward creativity. But the positive examples of my wife and my parents are all too rare. Many people look back on what can seem to be generational curses rather than blessings. I created IAM and continue to advocate for the arts from a conviction that all people need a place of nurture toward their creative growth. Acts of generosity can inspire genesis moments even out of generational failures.

This book is the first in a series on culture care that will expand on these and other generative principles and apply them to several cases. It is my hope to engender conversations and so gather a community of people committed to generative living. This, it should be emphasized, is not an end in itself but a contribution to the greater good. Generative paths will birth resourcefulness, patience, and general creativity in all of life. They lead to cultural—and human—thriving.

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CULTURE CARE DEFINED

Culture care is to provide care for our culture’s “soul,” to bring to our cultural home our bouquet of flowers so that reminders of beauty—both ephemeral and enduring—are present in even the harshest environments where survival is at stake. We may need to learn to cultivate these reminders of beauty in the same way flowers are cared for and raised. Culture care restores beauty as a seed of invigoration into the ecosystem of culture. Such care is generative: a well-nurtured culture becomes an environment in which people and creativity thrive.

At this point it will be helpful to gather the threads to find a working definition of my main terms. At the most basic level, we call something generative if it is fruitful, originating new life or producing offspring (as with plants and animals), or producing new parts (as with stem cells). When we are generative, we draw on creativity to bring into being something fresh and life giving.

We can also approach generativity by looking at its shadow, degenerate, the loss of good or desirable qualities (a term also frequently used of generations). What is generative is the opposite of degrading or limiting. It is constructive, expansive, affirming, growing beyond a mindset of scarcity.

One of Noam Chomsky’s early definitions of “generative grammar” refers to the set of rules that can be used to create or generate all grammatical sentences in a language.1 He was looking in human languages, as did my father in his work in acoustics, for a universal generative principle, an explanation of our ability to construct seemingly infinite phrases by switching out elements from a finite vocabulary and grammatical framework. Building on this, we might say that a generative approach will identify and model the “grammar” or conditions that best contribute to a good life and a thriving culture.

Discovering an...