Some issues with a lack of identity

[pasithea]

I commented to a friend the other night that I found his sense of and searching for cultural identity fascinating to me because it is something so alien to me. I don't feel any real connection to people or their traditions and rituals and I've never had much desire to go searching for anything like that.

On the other hand though, it does leave a certain amount of void and difficulty in my world. As a for instance: I've spent a good chunk of the weekend studying the work of Brian Froud and works under his direction. Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal as well as various art books and pictures online.

Go ahead and mock me. I like his work a lot and I wouldn't mind making my own work turn somewhat more in that direction. The brownies and goblins I made from scraps of forest detritus definitely have that feel and a few of my more complex pieces of artwork have gone somewhat in that direction too.

But one thing he makes heavy use of in is work is traditional celtic knot patterns whereas I feel a certain reluctance to do this.

It's fine for him. He was born to it. It's part of his world and his heritage. Probably I could make a similar claim for myself but it wasn't prevalent in my childhood, not part of my world or my culture. If there was anything to my world it was an american folk and some southwestern pattern.

Southwestern on the other hand belongs more squarely to native peoples who I am also not a part of. I sit in a shallow culture that is between worlds, the old and the new. A culture too young and too fixated on other cultures to have developed a strong sense of its own place.

How do I create things that best tell my sense of identity and speak of my world? Am I to be confined to stars, stripes, and the blandishments of hotdogs and hamburgers or should I act like a true american and appropriate whatever cultures I see fit, writing my own interpretations of their meaning and asserting my insignificant knowledge as the dominant authority?

I would love to incorporate more pattern into the details of my work but all cultures feel so foreign to me that any styling I use tends to make me feel intrusive to a people and history that are not mine.

Is my only option to create my own completely unique ornamentation and pattern which steals from a myriad of others or is there some compromise I've missed which feels authentic and respectful of others?

Comments

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

While spirals, key patterns, and knotwork did reach amazing heights of sophistication in the celtic people's art through the millennium, they don't own it. If the math of the knots and the richness of the weaving appeal to you, pick up the key patterns and spirals? Those haven't been riverdanced to death and key patterns are so common to tablet weaving it has a world low tech white noise feel to it. And spiral work can look so much like mon that hey look! a mon!
Want to borrow my books on how to construct all three?

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

http://www.d.umn.edu/~ddunham/dunham.pdf

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

How do I create things that best tell my sense of indentity and speak of my world?

Use what is in your world. If you are surrounded by Southwestern imagery, then by all means use it... but I'd be surprised if you were surrounded by that.

Instead, use the images that you yourself see. Use what surrounds you. For example, even if you're not an expert on Chinese culture, you are an expert on Bay Area culture, which includes some Chinese elements.

[paka.livejournal.com]

I would like to give you a succinct answer but I can't.

My personal perspective is really screwed in this context; born heir to Norsemen and nomads, I was then told that my ancestors were (rather than a rich heritage of musicians, circus performers, scam artists and bandits) a particularly sterile version of what they must have been - and then I was told in so many ways that heritage was also worthless. I am still being told that by my society today. Trying to figure out "who the hell am I anyway" is very much linked to self-esteem questions, because I've been dismissed as culturally worthless from so many angles and it is impossible not to overlap that with being dismissed as personally worthless. Because cultural stuff has that personal relevance for me, and your self-esteem is that much better than mine, I don't think you'd have the same stuff going on. My stuff with culture is probably a little more like your feelings about gender.

Cultural appropriation is a hot button thing for me because I don't know where boundaries are. Where do you draw the boundary between "hey, these other guys had the right idea" and "it's wrong to use this"? How do you judge that respectfully towards yourself as well, when the question of cultural appropriation often sounds too much like someone telling you, once again, that you're shit, that you don't have a right to anything? I don't know.

I feel that only using influence from one culture would be a mistake, art wise. We are hybrids and the pretense would be in only drawing on one culture - having a visual mix up of styles feels more like it honors being witness to a variety of cultures.

Please forgive me if I'm being a little too self-centered in addressing this from a personal perspective.

[smashwolf.livejournal.com]

I am in the same dilemma, and have been for some time. i want so desperately to have a culture and tradition to call my own... to be a PART of something. But I cna't. I have no family heritage, even. my human family, and upbringing is largely boring, no faith, no heritage, just middle class consumerism, with no real meaning or purpose.

I am adopted, so even if I wanted to dig, I don't know my real identity, and I don't have any grandparents, or even distant relatives in the adoptive family with any even remotely rich ancestry, culture, or , well anything.. I can't even draw any lines back to any events in history.

It's all very lonely, and I need to feel like I at least COME from a background that matters... but I can't.

[zeeth_kyrah]

I don't do a lot of callback to my "heritage". I could join the SAR, but there's no point. My family line comes from the Welsh, from the Scots-Irish, from indigenous peoples (most likely including Indiana Miami since I found that picture in the Prairie Museum with a Miami chief who looks exactly like one of my uncles and I have the nose for it like so many others, but there may have been others since white folk called everyone in the area "Sioux" and a great-great*X grandfather had a native wife).

I went looking for culture, and ended up a New Age nobody. So instead of culture, I'll just build me and be a culture of one, to appropriate a phrase from TNG (referring to Data's search for his heritage).

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Patterns.

There's always something to use. When I want to fill space I'll use the pretense of screen patterns, I'll use hatching, or I'll use the angular shapes I got from Jack Kirby.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

The pattern which has emerged in my work is that of synthetic people who have no family and were created with no good purpose in mind, or at least people who are cut off from their family and isolated from people around them.

Identity

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

The problem, I think, is that the dominant cultural symbol of modern "Western" identity is "appropriation." It's the willingness to look to any source for inspiration, and to create new meanings from old ideas. Sure, this is used as a bad thing. Assimilation is too often meant crushing conformity and the obliteration of local custom in favor of meaningless homogeneity. However, just because an idea has been misused, doesn't mean it can't be used right. Consider the humble remix, or the mashup, or the collage. The art of quilting, of taking the old and distinct and creating the new and unified, would be one example, in my mind, of "American culture done right."

Of course, if this still doesn't do it for you, then "Western heritage" has a rich cultural detritus from which to pull powerful symbologies. We can trace the evolution of the scientific method from the Arabs; through the Persians and Phoenicians; then to the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Romans. One deviant desert cult that got out of control notwithstanding, ours is a rich heritage of testing limits, of exploring unknowns, of refusing to let "I don't know" be the whole of an answer. Even when we're gloriously wrong, we pursue our visions as far as we can, chasing the dream of understanding. The punch card, the skyscraper, the lightning rod, the integrated circuit, the telescope, the steamship, the locomotive, the music of the spheres, phlogiston, the dodecahedron, the Bohr atom model.