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The Human Community of Commonality and Creativity

Illustration: Heinrich Dolmetsch. Examples of Arabic decoration, 1887.

The other day someone accused The Textile Blog of exploiting decorative work outside of my own immediate culture, for profit. Now anyone who runs a blog within the creative field knows that very few are ever more than vehicles either to expose themselves as creative individuals, or to help inform others. Most certainly do not make a profit, I only wish mine did!

It does not really matter who accused me, or from what cultural background they were from, suffice to say that they perceived that because I was British that automatically meant that I was still indulging in some form of cultural exploitation for profit. I am the first to admit that the British Empire was a black stain on the history of the world and it is something we as an island may never be able to live down. Having said that a few high level apologies by government and monarch to those we did exploit would not go amiss.

However, never one not to see an opportunity for growth and illumination, the criticism of my exploitation got me to thinking about who really owns what and whether there is such a thing as a culturally copyrighted distinctiveness, one that works to such a degree that it doesn't suffer contamination from outside, or as I prefer to think of it cross-cultural communication.

Illustration: Heinrich Dolmetsch: Examples of Chinese decoration, 1887.

Today we are well aware that we share the planet with seven billion others, we are also aware that we have, literally at our fingertips, a means of instant communication only dreamt of by previous generations. We have, despite clumsy interference from politicians, a chance of significantly deepening and forever expanding our interaction with each other both culturally and geographically. Many of us can now forge contacts with a range of individuals whom we may never meet face to face. For the first time in our perceived history we have the chance of becoming a singularity, an intimately interconnected concept, a full human community of equals irrespective of cultural or geographical location. A great step forward for the species at least for some point in the future, but have we truly been a species that has lived in isolation and mutual distinctiveness until this contemporary moment? 

While, to a certain extent the above is true, even in the world we live in today, we have also been interacting, cross communicating, and intently conversing ever since we were able to stand upright as a species. Human communication comes in many forms from language, to gesture, from dance to drawn artwork and pattern. Pattern and decoration has always been such a great insight into the idea of human interaction, cross-cultural insemination, the process of over-layering, the enmeshing of different cultural perspectives and worldviews.

 

 Illustration: Heinrich Dolmetsch. Examples of Gothic decoration, 1887.

Even cultures that we tend to see as uniquely defined and distinct with little obvious outside interaction would not have always been that way. Most of our early ancestors travelled across the planet following herds and looking for new environments, so often they would have encountered different human groups and communities, trading conversations, genes, and ideas, long before they ended up in the isolated spots of the world that perhaps we more often associate them with now.

Each style perspective, whether it be medieval Christian or Islamic, the cultures of North and South America, the complex and intermeshed cultures of China and India, the cultural variety of Africa and Australia and so on, are in their own way made up of a myriad of complimentary and opposing cultural viewpoints and styles. All have been constantly added to, with pattern and decoration taking on different cultural codes through colour line, and motif.

However, this doesn't by any means leave us today with a junkyard of disparate and unconnected pattern, it instead leaves us with a unified multi-cultural framework to which we can all constantly have access to, and perhaps more importantly, can also contribute towards. It is a framework produced over time by our ancestors, generation after generation, irrespective of whatever cultural or geographical background they occupied.

Illustration: Heinrch Dolmesch. Examples of Japanese decoration, 1887.

That perhaps is the real significance of who we are as a species and also gives an indication of our potential future strength. We understand, through our family connections that we live in a series of links and bonds with other human beings. These connections link us to parents and siblings. We also have further bonds with cousins, first, second and sometimes third. However, this bonding is exponential and can carry on to hundredth and thousand cousins. In fact, every human living on the planet is our cousin no matter how far removed from our immediate family. There is no human being alive or dead that we do not have a direct linkage with and therefore, there is no human being that can be isolated from the human community as an outsider, someone who does not belong.

Some may see this article as an elaborate means by me of trying to imply that all cultures serve the one that is present at this particular moment, in other words he's just trying to justify exploitation, the quarrying of cultural emblems and motifs, with fancy words. However, I think there is much more to this than justification. As we move, with the internet's help, to an ever closer bonding of humanity, then we have a better understanding of what we all share as a species, rather than what we jealously guard as our own and no one else's. What we have in common becomes more important than what separates us.

 Illustration: Heinrich Dolmetsch. Examples of Iranian decoration, 1887.