Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century Darren O'Donnell (bio) Clarke Mackey . Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2010. Click for larger view View full resolution Cover image for Random Acts of Culture. © 2010 Between the Lines. Cover design by Gord Roberson; cover images by Clarke Mackey and Jennifer Tiberio [End Page 90] Filmmaker Clarke Mackey's Random Acts of Culture is a broad survey of vernacular culture, which he defines as "a set of imaginative activities that go back to the beginnings of human life and are still active today ... activities that take place outside of the consumer marketplace and the world of trained professionals" (11). The book is wide-ranging in its search for cultural activities that resist consumerist commodification and includes dips into the worlds of the !Kung Bushmen, Toronto's Dufferin Grove Park, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, the invention of the written word, a riveting chapter on the rise of the modern notion of spectatorship, and a surprising and detailed appearance by folk singer Pete Seeger. Mackey's portrayal of contemporary existence is perhaps bleaker than it needs to be, and tends toward hyperbole with statements like "we are dealing with apocalyptic times" and repeatedly ticks off familiar themes to illustrate this: portraits of the suburban family picking their children up from school in exhaust-belching cars, the preteen daughter buying too-sexy clothes at the mall, the constant invocation of the zombie-walk of consumerism in phrases like "the chronic basic dissatisfaction leads us to buying more and more stuff in an ever-continuing effort to distract ourselves" (24). And the television! The television! The television! The poor ol' TV gets a particularly thorough shit-kicking, which has merit but, hopefully, the evolution of screen-based entertainment toward more sophisticated interactivity will attend to some of Mackey's concerns with the Internet offering a least some fortification of vernacular culture. Clips of laughing babies are about as vernacular as you can get. A chapter on African-American musical forms—with a focus on blues—and its global function as a form with plenty of room for improvisation (in contrast to the rigid Western classical canon) and therefore less vulnerable to standardized consumption, neglects to mention the contradictory nature of hip hop. Hip hop is a musical genre that has managed somehow to remain profoundly open to improvisation, variations, manipulations, sampling, and remixes, while hysterically trumpeting egomaniacal, triumphalist consumer tendencies, all the while managing to function as the global community art form de jour for engaging and empowering disaffected youth. It's this contradiction that is most missed in Mackey's analysis. The book is filled with a never-ending labyrinth of fascinating information. A standout chapter, "Literacy and Its Discontents," focuses on the invention of the written language—featuring an examination of Spanish, in particular, as a modern contraption intended to codify the minds and bodies of the conquered masses. The chapter "The Invention of the Spectator" is another great read, as Mackey creates a parallel track with the evolution of the participatory audience who, in sync with the movements of capitalism, is literally displaced from a raucous position actually sitting on the stage to the dark and silent auditorium where they are now most commonly found. His call for a survey of the history and function of applause was hilariously spot-on for me, as a theatre-practitioner who has often wondered why those damn monkeys out there in the dark keep slapping their hands together. The book is its most disappointing when outlining practices that Mackey considers vernacular (with his admission that he's been meaning to write the book for thirty years ringing true, as his examples don't feel as fresh as they could). While there certainly is a place for the pageantry works of US-based Bread and Puppet, Canada's Shadowland Theatre, and the UK's Welfare State, there is a whole swathe of more current work he overlooks both in the visual arts and theatre worlds that would satisfy his definition—and add some complications to the...