How do we communicate? Through language using our body, eyes and voices and also the language of signs and symbols. Our world is interpreted through our sense of understanding. Our cultural and cognitive learning is via media and communications. Media is plural for medium and medium is defined as the method of communication.
After fininshing my master's in Media Studies, I've now moved on to studying folk art this year as a docent-in-training at one of the world's best collections here in Santa Fe. So I look at this art form through the specific lense of the media form of the art.
Sand, clay, rocks, paper are examples of media. If we think of media today, we think of newspapers, books and television which use the symbols of the spoken and written language and we've become so literate in our shared languages because we have mass communications that can reach huge audiences because of technical developments, many of which have only happened very recently.
One of the best places to look at Folk Art before modern literacy and mass communication took off globally in the second half of the 20th century is through the Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Designer/collector Alexander Girard stipulated when he turned over his collection, displayed as he created and arranged it, that there be no written descriptions of the art featured. Most of his collection was gathered in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and the Girard Wing this year celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Before mass communciations were available through the medium of the printing press, radio or television (or today, the internet), tools of communication were needed and used differently by different groups. Much of folk art depends on communicating ideas through signs and symbols through a variety of media. Reading these communications as expressed artistically, not through the written word, involves interpretation, often done hand-in-hand with oral traditions.
Literacy is how we define cultural learning and how societies are unified. Literacy lives and dies with cultures. Oral languages are disappearing at an alarming rate and Mandarin and English and Spanish are the most widely understood mass languages today. Folk art is understood in cultural context and mass communications on a global context is new, changing us and our traditions and our world and perhaps destroying folk traditions in the process.
Logographic writing systems -- like hieroglyphics, ideograms and symbols - were once the main tools of literacy. Some of the first symbols that became widespread were symbols of counting, needed for trade between groups. Roman numerals are one example of how early counting systems are still used today. The Arabic numbers, including the use of 0, came to us via trade routes between the East and West. But signs and symbols were used to communicate ideas and the Girard Collection uses many of these in various media produced by a multitude of cultures. Many ideographs have been lost to us and professionals today are trying to unlock these languages. We still don't know the meanings behind rock art and are just beginning to unlock Mayan symbols as we did very recently with Egyptian symbols.
Phonemic orthography upon which the alphabets are based allowed language to spread. Print culture, revolutionized by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral with a new system of easily reproducible communications. Moveable type made ideas available on a mass scale. Traditional folk art is based on cultural art used expressed through various media to share ideas outside of print.
Media Theory and Folk Art...
From a media theorist point of view, the visual homogenizing of the experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background has greatly shifted and weighted our techniques of communication in the modern world. Typography creates social effects that incline us to abstain from incorporating interplay and nuance of personal communication both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions of other senses and fosters a mentality of imagination and reproduction of ideas individualistically. This reduces the communal experience and personal interaction and creates a separative and compartmentalizing outlook.
One of the most notable media theorists of the late 20th century was Marshall McLuhan. The main concept of McLuhan's argument (he is famous for believing that "the medium is the message") is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert an effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization. Print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. Tribal and communal experience is pushed to secondary status in the primacy of the individual experience of mass media.
When you consider that folk art expresses dynamic cultural traditions through media such as textiles, clay, wood carving, paper cuts, tin, wax and just about anything at hand that can be used to symbolize an idea and is shared rather than individualistically created and contained, print obliterates the interactive part of folk art tradition. McLuhan looked at the rapidly evolving media of mass communications -- radio, telegraph, print, and television, allowing communication in the 20th century from one or several to many (which can mean millions as an audience), the communication on smaller scale, one-to-one or one-to-several which is the foundation of folk art, then we begin to see how modern technology is changing cultural expression.
The Continuum of Media Evolution Effect...
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. He saw us moving from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's called this new social organization the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations.
Different media produce varying cognitive effects. Technology is amoral-- it is a tool that profoundly and significantly shapes us and the culture and self-conception of society. McLuhan believed that print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes/ decollectivizes humans by raising the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. "Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism," he wrote.
The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used — and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates — are analyzed together. The cognitive effects of a medium that presents ideas to a passive audience creates a lack of interaction and a dependence on this extreme form, reducing the give-and-take of communication. An examination of the medium/environment relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society and the form of folk art reminds us of a method of communication that predates print as the primary medium and tool of cultural communication.
Folk art carries on a tradition of cultural interpretation within a shared community. In this way, it is a two-way process using varying media, mainly without print.
Folk Art is an interesting subject. As it depicts the cultural and traditional values of a region, it is more close to the people. I really liked the way you expressed folk art through media.
Posted by: Folk Art | March 13, 2008 at 12:25 AM