10: How Activist Artists Like Milenko Matanovic Are Rebuilding Democracy From the Ground Up

Threshold Questions / Delicious QuotesWhy is our democracy struggling, What's wrong? Right now the default modality is that we are at our worst with each other. And that troubles me because we are robbing ourselves of the possibility to understand, first of all, the complexity of our time and second of all, to prepare ourselves for a future that would work for all of us.How can the process of community art-making help strengthen a struggling democracy?This is not an academic idea. This has been tested, and I'm more convinced than ever that we live in this treacherous and wonderful in between times right now, and the quality of this in-between time is that the music, the background, the understanding has changed, but our habits have not. So, we still dance to the music with all the dance steps. And so, it's absolutely vital to start learning the new dance, ... unless we learn these new qualities and apply them to daily activities, and everybody has a chance to that. A staff meeting can be a mini kindergarten for learning collaborative practice, ... what interests me right now, is everyday democracy and how opportunities are everywhere and inviting us to rise to the occasion. ... That's the foundation for which the change will happenUnder what conditions can we rise to our better selves?So what we've learned is when something specific is at stake, it's easier for people to flip from their differences into what can I contribute ... which is powerful. So, when it's abstract, we just argue about how we're different.What is the artists job when our collective capacities are threatened?We artists do not do it for them, they do it with them. Artists need to accept responsibility that they ... they need to put their ego aside. And when they exercise, the ego is within the framework of what the community wants, rather than what the artist wants, and then you invite people to become artists, to turn into construction workers and artisans and crafts people for a few days and do something together.TranscriptBill Cleveland: I met Milenko Matanovic on the US/Mexico border. We were there to confer with a couple of dozen other citizen artists from both countries to explore the audacious idea of creating a common ground cultural space, that literally straddled the border physically and creatively. The aim was to establish a creative laboratory for arts-based strategies for changing borders from dividers to cross community connectors--- not just for North America but for the whole world. Like I said it was audacious. Anyway, one amazing outcome from that cross-cultural collaboration festival was that one of the two countries actually signed on to crazy idea. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure which one opted out. Another important outcome was the birth of the Pomegranate Center, which has served as the platform for Milenko’s community collaborations for the past three decades. In the decades since that border summit, I have come to know that challenging assumptions, poking holes in the impossible, and good-times-for-all are hallmarks for Milenko's way in the world. As an artist and designer, as a writer and speaker, as a teacher and philosopher, as an organizer and provocateur, Milenko Matonovic above all a hands-on maker and doer--- a creator on a lifelong journey to help communities realize what he views as the real American Dream -- grassroots democracy.Our conversation took place in February of 2020, just as the gathering storm of the pandemic was appearing on the horizon.Part 1: An American DreamBC: I like to dive in and first of all, begin with you describing what your work is.Milenko Matanovic: My work now is to think about the invisible currents that are moving through our society, and try to answer the question, how can a democracy work better? So, I'm interested in questions that are much more than questions of an artist, a traditional artist would ask. I think that something is happening in our society that should be worrisome, and I'm trying to look at that now that I have the privilege of more free time, and reading, and researching, and talking with my colleagues like yourself. Something is going on and I'm trying to understand what it is and I'm trying to provide some answers. BC: So given that there is a long history that preceded this particular moment where you are in a space where you can reflect, could you describe how you came to this and just a bit of your history and obviously touching bases on your on your artistic career, but also, the time you spent, in the trenches at the pomegranate center? MM: Sure. So, I'll go way back, I grew up in former Yugoslavia in a truly remarkable city with roots going back 2000 years. A kind of city where you walk and feel safe and you explore all the time and you bump into friends. Architecturally designed around the principles of placemaking because it was intuitive to the people who built that place. It's not by coincidence that we had to invent the term placemaking because it was lacking here. It was not needed in that city. So great, great memories of the city, great memories of spending several in a tiny village that basically existed in a pre-industrial fashion when I first visited it. But the society itself was a little bit foggy. It was like people were covered with heavy blankets and the joyfulness, the lightness, the excitement about the future, the optimism, creativity, all those were qualities lacking from the daily culture that I bumped into. I had a sense early on that something was wrong with that picture. You know, I think in retrospect, the leaders, political leaders in former Yugoslavia worked very hard to keep an arranged marriage between different cultural groups going, and that all exploded, as we know, in those atrocities after a hard hand of Tito disappeared. I was born only three years after the end of the Second World War, so my early memories was of very humble existence. You know, we turned off the lights because if police would see lights in two rooms from the street, they would knock on your door. So, the energy was so precious. Memories that everybody was trying to tell me who I should be, and who I should become, and how to behave, and I've rebelled against that. I looked with envy across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, and I said to myself, here is a country where people deliberate their future together. They go to town halls, and they float different ideas, they wisely select the best ideas and they join their forces to make them happen. You know, that was the idealistic perception of healthy democracy, and I had this yearning for that state of affairs because it was utterly electing lacking in my early experience. Nobody ever asked me what I thought.BC: So, you became an artist [chuckles] MM: That's exactly right. That's led me to the only place where I could go and still keep some kind of integrity with myself, and I was very lucky to bump into friends who were thinking similar thoughts. Long story short, I ended up working with a collaborative artist called Group OHO, which is kind of a combination of two Slovenian words or "oko," for eye "uko," for ear. And we said that's kind of the media in which will be working in the center. The senses will engage.But I think, you know, I started in a very traditional way. I painted and I start to make some sculptures. But then one summer I discovered the different approach that shaped my entire career afterwards. Everybody was making objects, and what was the most important is the object that they were created. And I scratched my head and said, what if I start playing by different rules, which is that I will always try to learn from the setting first and then I will do something that highlights the setting rather than boast my own genius, and so this idea of collaboration has been with me for a very, very long time. But that was kind of a conscious beginning of that journey. BC: So could you talk about some of this work, share some examples of how It actually placed the setting and the foreground. MM: So I use the simplest of materials, like wooden sticks and string, connecting them together into a long snake and put them on top of the river, they would float on the river, and start visualizing the invisible currents that were under the surface of the river. So. So what kind of art is that? It's an art that highlights something in a relationship, right? It's not Milenko putting sticks in the river. It's highlighting what was there already. So, it is this idea that collaboration can be expressed in any way, not just between people, but between the artist and the river. I had summer jobs in the printshop, and I would beg them to sell me for very few cheap money, discarded roll of newspaper paper. about maybe 400 feet long. And I would take it to the rolling hills and fold it in the gravity of the hills would start shaping this pathway. So again, is art the paper? No, the paper was just a method to highlight something inherent in the situation that I found. BC: And, then you left Slovenia to expand on these ideas, but your idealistic view on the United States didn’t exactly pan out, did it?When I came to the United States, I...