Art and green-building innovation rolled into one

Photo by Thomas Hawk

For at least a decade now, we’ve been told that our civilization is going paperless. Most of us have heard that prophesy, looked around at the stacks of Kleenex and 8-by-11-inch printer sheets we go through, and had ourselves a good snicker.

Even if newspapers, magazines and books do at last end up entirely on our glowing screens, we’re still going to have an awful lot of  waste paper lying around from the previous few centuries of reading, writing, sneezing and wrapping. Fortunately, Ratko Maltar has a creative idea for what to do with it. 

Maltar, a native Croatian now living in the Northeast Ohio area of the United States, has figured out  a process for rolling used sheets of  paper such as magazine pages into small, sturdy “beams” that can be formed into panels or blocks for building materials or used to create artistic shapes and images. He  calls the process “Irogami” (color folding) and has developed eight different ways of rolling the sheets. Depending on what kinds of paper he uses, the beams can be plain or brightly patterned.  

This could keep a lot of  TIMEs and Tiger Beats out of our landfills. Maltar’s plan to develop a  computer program allowing designers to experiment virtually with Irogami constructions, images and holograms may even bring help us consider our promised “paperless society” with somewhat straighter faces.

Maltar came to the U.S. 13 years ago and started out working for Lincoln Electric in the Cleveland area, he said.  ”It was my dream to come here and I had to sacrifice [for years] to come here” to America,  Maltar said. 

Eventually, with experience in fields he lists as operations analysis, quality control, marketing analysis and new-product development for electronics and machinery manufacturers (”I like numbers”), Maltar took the next step and became an inventor and entrepreneur, putting his expertise to good use on Irogami. 

He hopes to find public and private partners to help him develop the technology for all of his Irogami applications, because he sees his invention having a positive social impact as well as an economic one: helping the environment as a green building material, providing an inexpensive and versatile art and design tool for students and professionals alike, and providing everyone – from  children to prisoners -with an agreeable, therapeutic craft.

Said Maltar, “You get calm, you have busy fingers, you start to think in prudent way.”

Got MLK? For some, that glass still isn’t full

My husband and I marked our 23rd anniversary this weekend. Before going out to dinner, we went to the art museum in hopes of catching the big touring Gauguin exhibit before it closed. It was sold out for the day, but that was ok – we stayed to revisit the fabulous permanent collection.

While we were wandering through the Winslow Homers and Thomas Eakinses,  I heard someone call my name and turned to discover a friend of mine named Tracey coming into the gallery with her partner. I hadn’t seen either of them in a long time and, in the course of chatting, I mentioned that we were celebrating our anniversary. Tracey said, “It’s our anniversary, too!” and asked how long we’d been together. When we asked the two of them the same thing, Tracey said nine years and her partner said 10. We all laughed a little about that, and then Tracey said, “Well, our date isn’t is as exact as yours.” 

Tracey and her partner are gay.  They love each other, have made a home together over many years and have the same deep bonds of affection, life experience and mutual reliance as any long-wedded couple. But in our state, they are not allowed to marry.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we can be astonished at how far our nation has come in the struggle for civil rights for all people. But as long as we deny some of our fellow citizens their freedom from prejudice, deny them equal treatment and opportunity, our work is not done and our  society is not a success.

In this, as in so many things, creativity is an answer – a path to tolerance. At Geniocity.com, we talk about the many benefits of  creativity and innovation, from scientific advances and wiser laws to more adventurous art and better-educated children. But the greatest result of creativity is open minds.

That should be reason enough to encourage it. And yet, I know it won’t be sufficient for those who like their progress to be lucrative. If you’re among them, you may be interested to hear that the reverse is also true: Tolerance is a path to creativity. The more accepted and encouraged people feel, the more imaginative and productive they are. The freer they feel to live, think, speak and experiment, the more great inventions, discoveries and artistic expressions they create. And the more creations people bring forth, the more we all prosper - materially, intellectually and spiritually.

Equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people will be our nation’s next big breakthrough - a throwing open of doors in our brains and hearts that have long locked in fear and locked out sense. It’s going to happen eventually, so let’s speed it up and stop wasting the talents of Americans who’ve been repressed, threatened and cheated out of the peaceful open life that could allow them – and us as a nation – to flourish.

I’d like to live in a country where fine human beings such as Tracey and her partner can have a wedding anniversary as other couples do. I’d like them to have the freedom to imagine and dare that comes, paradoxically, when you feel that you truly belong. I’d like the word American to mean a people and a culture that value, yes, the content of each individual’s character, but also the vision, the originality of thought and the skill that fill our individual heads - and that don’t care which consenting adults our sexual organs attract us to.

What about you?

Can arts and culture make waves with ‘Ripple Effect’?

The U.S. arts-and-culture sector has been searching for a long time for the most effective way to tell its own story – the story that will finally and reliably convince Americans that arts and culture matter tremendously to our society, provide real benefits for everyone and deserve to be nurtured and taught, practiced and promoted and, above all, financially supported.

How can the Joe Six-Packs and soccer moms of the 50 states be persuaded to care about cultural enrichment so much that they’ll write checks and vote for more taxes?

Opinions on that have changed over the decades. In the 1960s, arts and culture were perceived and/or positioned to represent the values of great European civilizations American G.I.s had seen first-hand in World War II and the Great Society they hoped to build at home: They were the marks of a gifted, prosperous and benevolent people. Over the next 40 years, as the pendulum of political and economic reality has swung between closed minds and tight fists on the one extreme and orgiastic abandon with money and self-expression on the other, arts and culture have gone from extolling their effects on soul, spirit and status to emphasizing their impacts on economic development and students’ academic success. 

The latter arguments have been working pretty well in some communities lately, especially with civic leaders and elected officials desperate to help their cities survive the current recession and the larger transition to high-tech knowledge economies requiring trained creative workforces.  But those aruments are rather complicated – and the general public doesn’t respond to complicated terribly well.  What it responds to is the likes of “Eat Mor Chikin.”  

So now the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati, Ohio, believes it has discovered a simpler and better message for arts and culture – one that will make the difference with its own community and others. A study the fund released Monday finds that the phrase “Ripple Effect” best and most vividly conveys to the general public the idea of benefits spreading from arts and culture to everybody. In addition, it finds that two specific kinds of good effects prove most inspiring to members of the public and most likely to elicit their financial support for arts and culture. First: that vibrant, activity-filled neighborhoods result from arts and culture. Second: that arts and culture can connect and bring together a community’s diverse residents. 

The study closely resembles a business-branding process. It used focus groups of diverse area residents to test what arts benefits and catch-phrases captured people’s imaginations, gave them the message that arts and culture make their community better, and fired enthusiasm about “sharing responsibility” (i.e. financially supporting) arts and culture.

” ‘Ripple effect’ is a kind of shorthand – people have a common understanding of what that is,” said Margy Waller, vice president/arts & culture partnership for the Fine Arts Fund. “It’s a way of starting a conversation with them. People get very excited about it.”

The two particular ripples that move them to take action on behalf of the arts imply a kind of economic benefit – neighborhoods where there’s a lot of good, engaging, connecting activity going on - but don’t stress dollars-and-cents issues or training and educational outcomes. That’s because those issues tended to elicit undesirable responses from the focus groups, the report explains: Pitching educational benefits led people to zero in on the needs of children, not the  broader community, while the topic of economic development resulted in people thinking about other economic factors, such as jobs  and natural resources, that they believed were more important than the arts.

The study concludes that the “Ripple Effect” concept has the power to reorient people’s perceptions of arts and culture, that it “positions arts and culture as a public good – a communal interest in which all have a stake – and provides a clearer picture of the kinds of events, activities and institutions that we are talking about.”  Once the two specific ripples of vibrant neighborhood and connected residents have enlisted people’s enthusiasm and active support of arts and culture, then the community conversation can expand to include other arts-related benefits, Waller said.  

 The study may represent the first time anyone has scientifically applied a standard business-branding process to arts advocacy. But arts advocacy has long embraced the very similar processes of political and advertising campaigns in trying to get legislation passed, tax issues approved and candidates elected.

What’s at all new about the “Ripple Effect” seems to be the specific tweak given to the arts-and-public-benefit argument. And whether the study’s conclusions are borne out or not will depend on how the Fine Arts Fund and other cultural groups put that tweaked message to use, said Tom Schorgl, president and CEO of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Cleveland, Ohio. Questions such as where the ripple message will be aimed geographically within Cincinnati, what kinds of neighborhoods will be targeted, and what success will look like need to be answered before the ripple concept can be called effective and useful, Schorgl said.

Americans for the Arts, the national service organization for the arts and culture sector which has been following the development of the study, will likely help get word out about it by providing information to Americans for the Arts members, said Mara Walker, the organization’s chief operating officer. In trying to get people to recognize the value of the arts, she added, “you need as many arguments in your pocket as possible.”

That means the way to reach community leaders about arts and culture may still be through economic development and education, even if the “Ripple Effect” ends up favorably influencing the general public. Because which argument works best, Walker said, really depends on who you’re talking to.

Mek Mor Rippuls

Feed thy soul … and stomach?

So is cooking art?

The idea that it is seems to be gaining traction, and not just among foodies. Dinner comes out of contemporary restaurant kitchens these days looking like architecture (or at least a vertical section of sedimentary strata) and featuring exotic combinations of ingredients that turn ordinary menus into what read like excerpts from Dune (and, maybe someday, seafood into winged codpieces….). Cooking shows make the poaching of eggs and the chopping of jicama a drama a la Rambo. The raspberry sauce drizzled around molten chocolate cake resembles an unsigned Pollock.

Iron Chef Michael Symon even shared a 2008 Cleveland Arts Prize for bringing national attention to the city’s culinary creativity.  

 But the question has continued to drift through my head like the dubious aroma of mystery meat as I’ve watched Julie & Julia - the recent movie about famed chef Julia Child and the disciple who tries to make every one of the recipes in Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking – and subsequently read Child’s memoir, My Life in France.

Clearly, kitchen geniuses such as Symon and Child have many things in common with artists. Their creativity leads them to experiment with new and surprising combinations of elements. They possess an eye for presentation that’s pleasing in color, form, texture and composition. Their rigorous attention to craft ensures the highest and most consistent quality of execution and result. And on top of all that, they’ve worked hard to gain a thorough knowledge of, and expertise with, all the tools of their discipline, from foodstuffs to pastry bags. I suspect that Rembrandt did not know more about light and paint and canvas than Child knew about heat and meats and pans.

And if someone argued that food can’t be art because it disappears by the end of dinner, I’d have to point out that many works, such as avant-garde performance pieces, are intentionally ephemeral and are no less art because of it.  

But I would agree that food – and cooking – are not art. And here’s why: Art is about content, about an emotional or intellectual message of some sort that the artist is trying to impart to his audience. And food and cooking don’t have any.

Food can create a mood. Heavy and dark? Light and frothy? Comforting? Challenging? Yes. But you won’t find what’s on your plate deliberately leading you to evaluate human relationships, feel loss, ponder the effects of technology or consider death. (I mean, if it did, would you want to eat that?) Like most art, well-prepared food does delight the senses, but it doesn’t inform and enrich the mind. Instead it nourishes the body.

That’s not art. But I think you could call it love.

(Photo, top, from Sweet Mary)