international??
'Salad' by Till Nowak, from 'Will Work For Food'
I’ve been reading reviews of a brand new cookbook – ‘Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States’, by Chris Fair – a work concurrently tackling the apparently fundamentally diverse subjects of international relations and food preparation. Slight grammatical issues aside, (the recipe teaser page on the website contains, for instance, the following sentence: As elsewhere, feel free to remove the cinnamon stick, cloves and peppercorns before serving. I don’t both and nor do most folks I know cooking this stuff. Now it’s been a while since I’ve attended an English grammar class, but I’m pretty darned sure that ‘I don’t both’ don’t fit no grammar pattern recognizable to no English speaker), anyhow, these aside, the idea itself is one I applaud. The entire concept of eating another country’s food in order to identify more closely with the people of said country is one that seems wise and important to me. Also there is a ‘How Evil Are You’ test which you can take to prove yourself a cognoscente of unsavory historical figures’ favorite snacks. My result – not evil enough. Disappointing.
a work by chinese artist zhou wei hua
The whole thing really brings me to a question that seems absurd at first – how international are we, really? After centuries of autochthonous artistic tradition, nations are now blowing the boundaries of their art wide open. After a long tradition of developing their own, intimate, personal art worlds, artists are now exposed to a pandemonium of outside influences. Obviously one cannot claim that international exchange of artistic ideas was not previously possible – artists have always drawn influences from other artists. Now we’ve opened the flood gates – our New Age brings us the possibility to be intimately acquainted with the day-to-day development of art trends in China, Colombia or Saudi Arabia. Conceptual cross-fertilization is at an all-time high. But are we reading it right?
Take for instance ( – again – ) Murakami Haruki, Japanese novelist of pulsating world renown. The attraction of his works to his Japanese audience reportedly lies in their Western flavor – the music, the spaghetti, the hard boiled crime novel feel of the surrealist plots. On the other hand, his Western audience reports finding him appealing for his very otherness from that which is Western – for his Japaneseness, if you will. Now indubitably Murakami Haruki novels are marked by both Western and Japanese influences – but is it not odd that what his Japanese audience finds attractive about him and what his Western audience finds attractive about him are directly opposite things? Do we crave the Other for the Other’s sake, or are we speaking a Universal Language at last?
a work by chinese artist chen jing
Looking at the international design and art scene, I keep wondering – do we like foreign influences simply because they are far from that which we are used to – and therefore far from our emotional lexicon? We like them, perhaps, because we can interpret them in any way we like – since we really have no clue as to the interpretation intended by foreign artists, or the emotional anchors of their work to their national heritage. Something new and wonderous that comes from alien ground – perhaps it’s a greater challenge to produce something new and wondrous which is still tied to your own little local sense of self.
On the other hand, as we start to live inside our machines, work day to day with colleagues half across the globe, and keep our eye on all international news, slowly we are forming ourselves into trans-nationals – building bit by bit that international heritage. I’ll be excited to see where art and design goes in the next decade – will we reach out further afield, or will we retract a little and sink more comfortably into our traditional selves?