COMMENTARY : A Battle of Wills : FEAR OF THE M WORD : COUNTERPOINT: A poet argues that multiculturalism is about fair and equal opportunities to make art; tribalism isn’t snobbery, it’s a conscious and retaliatory cultural withdrawal

Multiculturalism, the newest conceptual play toy of the intellectual avant-garde, seems to have rattled more than a few nerves. Far from a simple topic of collegial debate among artists and cocktail party liberals, the whole notion of a more integrated American aesthetic is fast becoming the catalyst for action among money moguls and neoconservative thinkers throughout this country.

Put simply, the fight over American culture--and who directs it--has descended to a very basic and pragmatic level of power and influence. For example, based on recent comments from the dean of Yale University in defense of Western culture, Texan Lee M. Bass wrote a check for $20 million to endow 11 professorships for studies in Western civilization.

Like two great armies posed for battle, the values and methods of Western culture are going head to head with those of other cultural systems. Western logic and rationality are being questioned and often replaced by non-Western notions about relationships and associations that defy logic. The lines have been drawn and the first serious blows are being dealt.

Until recently the fight had been waged by intellectuals from each camp, and victories amounted to a staking out of territory. But lately the war has assumed a more vicious character and the true stakes of the conflict have emerged in clear relief. Can this society be inclusive of other cultures and produce a new, more advanced national paradigm, or will it become a closed system of sedate apartheid?

All of this is taking place at a unique juncture in our national history. Whatever else might be said of these final hours of the twentieth century, they are gothic: barbarous and terrifying--both politically and spiritually. Somewhere between the once-accepted adoration of things European and the romanticized utopia we envision as our more eclectic future, we have blurred the distinction between what we fear and what we loathe. So, like Bass, or the ethnic isolationist who prefers obscurity to co-opting, we defend ourselves.

It is onto this conceptual landscape that the ideal of multiculturalism has exploded. And, for better or worse, Los Angeles, a metropolis of stark dichotomies, has become the testing ground for the shaping of tomorrow’s new cultural world order. This is the city where a multilingual, polyethnic culture is springing up faster than you can buy a bag of oranges at a freeway off-ramp from a newly arrived Guatemalan peddler. In fact, it’s now a cliche that L.A.’s diversity and extraordinary demographic shifts mean that multiculturalism will succeed here if it can succeed anywhere.

So far, the results do not bode well for cultural diversity here. Gordon Davidson runs the Center Theatre Group; Henry T. Hopkins, formerly of the Weisman Foundation, will soon take over as chairman of the UCLA department of art and its Wight Art Gallery; Earl A. Powell III directs the L.A. County Museum of Art; Steven D. Lavine is the president of CalArts; Kurt W. Forster is the head of the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities; Richard Koshalek is the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. (This is what the left calls hegemony and the right calls a monopoly.)

In his often-disturbing social history of Los Angeles, “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis points out that multiculturalism serves the purposes of the major institutions. As he says, it “signifies no necessary commitment to the city’s own community arts centers or diverse street cultures, who generally lack the corporate support that endorses Japanese theater or European ballet. At its worst, ‘corporate multiculturalism’ is an attitude that patronizes imported diversity while ignoring its own back yard.”

A classic case in point, and one of the city’s lingering contradictions, is the decades-long invisibility of its Chicano artists. Despite the fact that their ancestors settled the area, named it and have long lived here, they are what avant-garde artist and satirist Harry Gamboa Jr. calls a “phantom culture.”

For all their sheer weight in numbers, Angelenos of Mexican descent are absent ciphers within the circles of local cultural power. Gamboa calls its artists the “elite of the obscure.” They have received more recognition and respect in Germany or Japan than they have in their own city. It should be no wonder, then, that a brand mark of Chicano art has been its blatant disregard for Western aesthetic criteria and a conscious divergence from those standards and double standards.

And it’s not just Chicano artists. Nearly every ethnic artist who has thought about it also rejects Western supremacy. This city’s ignorance of “its own back yard” also breeds a conscious and retaliatory cultural withdrawal.

The identification with one’s group to the virtual exclusion of others is often a defense mechanism. It’s due to a combination of subtle and not-so-subtle factors that--in the context of a lifetime of observing prejudice--becomes a basic means of emotional survival.

Lack of access is perceived to be deliberate and conscious negation on the part of majority institutions. Eventually, exclusion gives way to bitter resentment and even paranoia, and ethnic artists begin to develop a profound hostility toward Western dogma. They consciously opt to concern themselves with their own community, which is quite capable of confirming artistic worth. In fact, the home culture stands up quite well in comparison with the vaunted mainstream. This has so nettled some cultural conservatives that columnist Charles Krauthammer has coined a term for this counter-rejection: “the new tribalism.”

For their part, many white people have tired of hearing ethnic groups complain about unfairness. Even the non-racist wonders how--after all the affirmative action, civil rights and anti-discrimination laws--the still-disenfranchised can ask for more. When you’ve heard these complaints for 10, 20 years, you begin to think that it’s nothing more than the whining of inferiors who can’t make it in a system built on merit.

The anger and resentment on both sides is that multiculturalism has boiled down to a nasty brew of politics and, especially, economics. Everything now adds to the sense of offense in both camps. Distortion begins to build on distortion. Whites resent ethnic artists’ demand for entry into institutions built with white money for Western culture. Ethnic artists resent white institutions for having a lock on funding and access.

Indeed, the means is access, but the ultimate aim is what any artist anywhere in the world has always wanted: a book published, a play produced, a film made. As long as the dollars are firmly in the hands of the same people who have always controlled them, the whole process for ethnic artists becomes an absurd exercise in futility.

L.A. artist Betye Saar, an African-American whose work often reflects her heritage, puts it well when she says: “Eurocentric art is but a small portion of the world art now, and (ethnic) artists are growing increasingly impatient with situations that make them beg for credibility and are derisive or indifferent to them. It just isn’t worth it to put up with that sort of backwardness when there is so much going on out there.”

The art itself is both the saving grace of multiculturalism and the magnet for so much criticism. When “The Heath Anthology of American Literature” was published, a collection that included significant numbers of women and ethnic writers, the New Criterion responded with great disaffection.

In almost rabid tones, Hilton Kramer and Co. called the anthology “a monument to the intellectual bankruptcy of the multicultural imperatives it champions.” This is mostly political rhetoric, but it illustrates deep beliefs. It would have been preferable if the work itself was examined on its own aesthetic terms, but under the current conditions of the debate, that is not going to happen for the foreseeable future. The apologists for Western culture have drawn the line in the sand.

The debate over multiculturalism in the arts is itself part of a larger controversy. Across the umbrella term of “political correctness,” cultural diversity has been grouped with affirmative action, quotas and sensitivity toward others, and severely criticized for giving undeserved advantage to minorities and women.

What we see displayed in all of this is fear--fear of the unknown, of the future. In the arts, the fear is that the work will stand on its own. And it does. Whether in film with Spike Lee, in theater with August Wilson and Philip Kan Gotanda, in literature with Amy Tan, in visual art with Gronk, the art is holding water. It speaks a truth. That’s its latent power.

Peter Sellars, the controversial Anglo director of the Los Angeles Arts Festival, who has borne his share of praise and disdain for its orientation toward non-Western cultures, says art has its own life.

In his view, “the arts are just a way of preparing people for the reality in the making, the America to come. History’s in motion. That’s why there’s been these emotional movements to cut the arts. The arts are about how people really live and think. Art survives no matter what. The more you try to crush it, the stronger it becomes.”

Ironically, many of the very people who are making this vital new artwork are, for the most part, only tangentially interested in the debate over multiculturalism. Gamboa, who has taught at CalArts and the Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design, and received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Getty Trust, says: “In East L.A. nobody’s talking about it. That discussion only occurs in integrated environments and mostly by intellectuals and academics.”

Entering the discussion means using the very weapons honed to near-perfection by the West: rationalism, logic and a profound and abiding belief in positivism. After all, it’s Western culture that split the head from the rest of the human being with its Cartesian motto: “I think, therefore I am.” That says it all. Western culture has built the temple of rationality, a metaphysical cage that imprisons anyone who wishes to enter. The West wrote the rules, and you enter at your own risk.

Set as a counterpoint against the traditional Western mind-set is a perspective that challenges its very basis. Rather than having a single reality, this view believes that there is a spatial and temporal multiplicity of realities. The profound ambiguity of existence means that there is no hierarchy, only a syncretic process of constant metamorphosis. In this world view, paradox and coincidence, rather than linear logic, are the actual methods to the truth. There is no ending and no beginning. This is not exotic thinking, it is just different.

There is no denying that Western assumptions about how the world works are being questioned. Here in Los Angeles, a multiplicity of voices is literally transforming the landscape. Social structures are colliding, and different systems of consciousness are coming into contact with one another.

Tensions on both sides have built to the point where the unresolved issues accumulated over generations must play themselves out. It would be gratifying to see a true exchange and cross-fertilization between cultures, but that seems something that could happen only in an ideal world. We have reached the point where too much has been said on all sides of the issue. For the moment, multiculturalism in Los Angeles is little more than a false promise.

If Bass’ check or--more germane for Angelenos--the $3-billion value of the Getty Trust mean anything, it’s that the wagons are being drawn into a circle. Do not expect things to cool down. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that the President of the United States stood up and castigated political correctness. In truth, the fight over multiculturalism has only just begun.