Art has always come from the margins, at least the art that mattered.
The last time Jews had a major artistic impact was about the middle of the twentieth century. In the US, in literature, there were fiction writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley. Poets like Emma Lazarus, Allen Ginsberg, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich and Marge Piercy. In music, composers like the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, Jerome Kern and Leonard Bernstein. In jazz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Stan Getz. In popular music, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carole King and Neil Diamond. In the visual arts, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacques Lipchitz, Philip Guston and Louise Nevelson.
In Canada, the most influential Jewish mid-century cultural figures included A. M. Klein, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman and Leonard Cohen.
It was the last time Jews weren't mainstream.
They were either immigrants themselves, usually born in another country and brought over as infants, or, more often, children of first-generation immigrants. They straddled a cultural divide between the New World and the Old World, between a new language and cultural tradition and the languages and traditions of their ancestors. In effect they were equi-distant from both.
It was that friction, that tension, that afforded them the perspective they needed to develop a new perspective on their adopted culture.
It was from that position, as outsiders, that they were able, to fight their way in, culturally speaking. To demand their place at the table, against a certain amount of resistance, and ultimately to gain acceptance by reinvigorating their adopted culture with what they could offer artistically.
That process of revitalization has played out over and over again. The outsider brings a fresh voice and perspective to a mainstream culture in need of re-invigoration. In Canada, in literature, we've seen it in recent years with African and South Asian voices, and then Asian voices, coming to the cultural fore.
But once they arrive, then what?
Their art becomes part of the mainstream. Part of the existing cultural soup. And like any ingredient in a recipe, blended-in and barely distinguishable from the entire dish.
It's why no one talks about 'the Jewish writers' anymore. They are just writers.
I began to wonder: if it's art from the margins that re-invigorates the culture, where is the margin of the future? Where will we find the outsider-artists who are positioned to provide the perspective that helps us better understand who we are?
Perhaps, as culture in all forms becomes increasingly dominated by digitization, the margin will be found outside that realm. I don't mean people who simply don't use computers, or artists who insist on painting with oils on canvas rather than working digitally. I mean something more fundamental.
Digitization isn't simply changing the way we communicate. It is changing the way we understand the world.
More and more of human experience is being translated into something that can be recorded, measured, stored, searched, transmitted and reproduced. A photograph becomes an image file. A book becomes a collection of searchable words. A song becomes a stream. It's all data.
The digital world is extraordinarily good at representing things. But art is more than just representation. It's a record of human experience: love, grief, memory, physical presence, silence, loneliness, aging, death, desire, intuition, mystery.
They can be represented digitally, of course. We can photograph a face, record a voice, write down a memory. But the representation is not the thing itself.
Perhaps this is where the next cultural margin will emerge.
For the immigrant artist, the distance came from living between two cultures. He could see his adopted culture from the inside and the outside at the same time. The future outsider may occupy a similar position between two worlds: the digital world and the world that exists beyond digital representation.
And this outsider need not reject technology. In fact, he may be completely fluent in it. He may use it more effectively than anyone else. But he will retain an awareness of what it cannot contain.
That awareness could become a new source of artistic perspective. Because, by definition, the artist's modus operandi was to see and express what everyone else has stopped seeing and expressing.
The Jewish immigrant saw the absurdities and assumptions of American culture because he hadn't grown up inside them. The immigrant writer could hear the language differently because it wasn't quite his first language. The child of immigrants could look at his parents' world and his adopted world simultaneously and see things that belonged to neither.
Perhaps the artist of the future will do something similar with the digital world. She will live inside it, but also outside it. She will understand the language of algorithms, platforms, screens and networks, but she will also be conscious of the things that cannot be expressed in that language.
She might discover that the unexplored territory isn't somewhere else. It's right here, found in everything that remains stubbornly human after we have translated almost everything else into information.
Perhaps that is where the next great art will come from. Not from a new ethnic group or a new immigrant culture necessarily, but from people who occupy the margin between what can be represented and what can only be experienced.
Every successful outsider eventually becomes part of the mainstream. That is how culture renews itself. The outsider enters, changes the culture, and eventually becomes indistinguishable from it.
Which means that the margins never disappear. They simply shift. For a long time, they were found at the borders between countries, languages, religions and ethnicities.
Perhaps the next border is between the digital and the undigitized.
And I don't mean that traditional art forms like poetry, stories, music and visual arts will be abandoned. In fact the opposite may happen. Digitization may be deemed an assault on the forms of art experience that we have cherished and enjoyed for millennia and that could spur an embrace of those forms with even more relish and vigor, in a protective way, as a mother protects its beloved child.
But one thing is for sure. Somewhere along the border between the digital and the non-digital, or should I say the human, someone is already looking at the world in a way the rest of us haven't yet learned how to see.
