Fuse Foundation - for the promotion of cultural exchanges and innovations

Decades ago, in the first Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand put forward this challenge: "We are as gods. We might as well get good at it." At the time, it may have seemed hippie hyperbole. Now it is a bald statement of fact.

We live in a world where engineering new life is becoming commonplace; where the seas are rising and the forests disappearing; where shipping containers, waves of refugees, and viruses stream back and forth across borders; where in a thousand ways the continuity of the past with the future has been shattered. We humans are no longer the people of yesteryear. This planet is not the planet on which we evolved. Our corporatized, mediated, post-civic lives have little to do with that Enlightenment world that gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and The Wealth of Nations. As Yeats wrote, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer," as Marx wrote, "all that is solid melts into air," and the world into which we were born has vanished.

This new world in which we live is a mystery to us. How do we come to grips with our profound ability to shape and reshape the world and the human condition? It is a question that we find ourselves unprepared to answer. In such a situation, it's no longer a luxury to ask the old artistic oraculars: Who are we? Where are we going? What do we want?

That's where we at Fuse Foundation come in. Our mission is to promote cultural engagement with the deep, complex challenges of our day. We've found one of the best and simplest ways in which to do this. We promote the careers of extraordinarily talented emerging cultural innovators.

The temptation to preach is great these days. The injustices of our world are profound. We've all seen those "if the world were a village" analogies, yet somehow we remain unable to connect with reality. Utter destitution, with starvation, disease, homelessness, and despair is more the rule than the exception in many places. The world is rapidly becoming an extended Brazil of wealthy jet-set elites gazing down over vast seas of common people caught in some awful upgrade of the Industrial Revolution, replete with sweatshops, child labor, and poisonous yellow fogs over sprawling shanty-cities. Tyranny, war, genocide, slavery, famine, child prostitution, plague: all are growth industries across vast swaths of the planet. Meanwhile, the West seems lost in its own fog of strip-mall communities, bubble economies, and tabloid culture. We are in bad shape, here at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

But none of this litany excuses the making of bad artwork. Let's call everything from painting and dance to film and creative journalism "art" for the sake of brevity, and not get hung up in definitions. Effective art is transformative, it remakes our vision of the world. Art works best when distinct from political preaching. We don't seek to fund "political art." The art of slogans, and slogan-like thinking is frankly ineffective to our ends, because it's poorly crafted and lacks emotional resonance. Art works best on its own, different level. It does its work down in our guts. It, as Henry James wrote, "speaks to that part of us which is a gift and not an acquisition."

The heartfelt need not be simple. But even when simple and direct, the heartless is dead. "A poem should be an axe for the frozen sea within," said Kafka. The metaphors, delivered though they may be in a wrapping of intellectual velvet, are as hard and real as a piece of slate. Even erudite, learned art grasps us best when we can sense that power running beneath the surface.

Artists need now to understand in their very bones Joyce's injunction that "the writer can be God, but he cannot be a preacher." It's part of the artist's work to construct whole, convincing worlds which illuminate the situation of the audience in some intentional way, but it is never his or her right to preach at them.

Unfortunately, though most political art is bad, apolitical art is not necessarily good. There is certainly plenty of apolitical art in our day--cloying stuff, focused to the smallest degree on the artist's private obsessions; monuments to ego and missed therapy sessions. Why would we want to support this work? Why would we want to encounter it?

There are true masters in the art world, laboring hidden in the deep woods, high mountains, rusting warehouses and small-town garages. The Buddhists of Japan say that the san-nin, mountain sages of great age and wisdom, eat hail and drink mists and fog. These worthies are perfecting their visions and mastering their crafts to produce works that speak simply and plainly to the deepest questions of the human condition, while struggling as best they can to swat the dunce's hat of fame away. They are, of course, essential, and rare, and hard to find. But in Fuse Foundation, these wondrous people are not our problem. The MacArthur "genius grant" folks are already out there looking for them.

Emerging artists face a different situation. For creative people, the early years are critical. When an artist has mastered the basics of craft and technique, and is beginning to push the boundaries of meaning and purpose, he or she often begins a period of rich and fertile work. This is also usually the time when the artist is trying to figure out how to survive. It is here that many inspired, talented people waste years of effort, or just give up altogether. If you doubt how critical this time can be, go find one of those established masters and ask him about his own early career. He will almost surely tell you a story about a key donation, a timely patron, a lifechanging grant, an editor who took a chance--some crucial piece of support that, by arriving at the right time, not only made it practical for him to go on as an artist, but also gave him the courage to do so.

These days, that kind of help is hard to find. Funding from public agencies, such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, has largely disappeared. Private foundations have not made up the shortfall. Academia rarely provides a nourishing environment. And the old system of artistic patronage is as dead as the debutante ball. Emerging creative innovators have few places to turn.

That's what the Fuse Foundation wants to change.

We provide lifechanging grants: grants which bring a substantial monetary award (up to $20,000), networking opportunities, technical assistance, survival skills training, and practical help with promotions and fundraising. Our artistic partners come to us showing obvious promise and extraordinary vision. They leave with work that speaks for itself and the know-how to make a career in the arts.

We're also connecting new patrons and emerging philanthropists with emerging artists and arts groups. Artists sitting alone together in a room will not transmute the cultural conversation--to have a truly transformative effect, they need to be connected to patrons, supporters, audiences, and critics. We're trying a number of approaches to doing just that.

Finally, we're working to provide emerging artists the opportunity to meet other folks-elected officials, scientists, activists, journalists-who are similarly engaged in the deep transformation of society. We want to see if they can learn from one another, if they can form themselves into a network which has the capacity to help us understand what it means to live in this strange day of ours.

Ours is a terrifying and a beautiful period of history. Look for visions which matter, which speak to your heart, which grab you deep in the ganglia and send the shivers running out through your fingertips. And when you find them, hold on to them, and do all you can to support the folks who made them. We'll all be needing their brilliance soon enough.

Alex Steffen (steffen@fusefoundation.org) is president of the board of directors of the Fuse Foundation in Seattle.

Fuse Foundation
1305 Fourth Avenue Suite 303
Seattle WA 98101
206/321-0626, www.fusefoundation.org

The Fuse Foundation does not accept unsolicited applications for its Partner Program. Applications are taken only from candidates put forward by a member of its anonymous nominating committee, which is composed of prominent cultural innovators and civic leaders.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Point Foundation
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