Picasso and Moldova

If you’re a fan of Piccaso perhaps you’re familiar with the allusions to African folk art that pervade many of his cubist works. Some background for those of you who actually have real jobs and don’t have time to read “Cubism;” Cubism originated during the fermenting years of the early 20th century as artists, to express their anxiety with an increasing impalpable world (Einstein was brooding on relativity, Freud was probing the unconscious), began to utilize the subjective and geometrically exaggerated forms of art works from what were considered primitive cultures. The point Picasso and the modernists wanted to make was that a mask painted by tribesman 4,000 years ago was just as expressive (and more genuine) of the human condition than the academic styles being taught in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

A pivotal attraction to Moldova for volunteers like me seems to be analogous to Picasso’s fascination with African art. I recently had a conversation with a Moldovan friend during which I heard myself telling her, after complaining about the way I was treated at the bank, how I find refuge in being able to readily identify the sources of my moods here. Remember Philadelphia when we first met and the answers we gave each other about why we were going to Moldova? “I just want to meet different people and laugh with them,” “I think it’d be a great experience to live in a village without running water,” and “I heard that Eastern European woman rock the casbah!” Last weekend I walked 30 minutes out of my way for one of the few vending machines in this country that dispenses coffee. Two years ago buying coffee from a vending machine wouldn’t exactly have been one of the notable events of my day.

Picasso’s attraction to primitive art, likewise, was based on its power to convey, in the framework of western art, how voluptuous and haughty western culture had become. In today’s politically correct culture, however, and its obsession with cultural relativism, Picasso can be accused of oversimplifying and romanticizing the “primitive” cultures he sought to invoke in his art.

I’ve certainly let my bias’ taint my experience here. For example, my penchant for downsizing all problems into their economics has allowed me to regulate the vexing problems of Moldova to a case of unfortunate geography because, after all, that’s the most culturally appropriate answer economics gives for why some countries are rich and some are poor. Why geography? Read, “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” The problem is I’ve let this bias swell to a general perfidy in international development-if this mess is indebted to Moldova’s geography spending thousands of tax payer dollars on, oh I don’t know, some 96 hour assiduously detailed business course for 17 year old girls who come just because the instructor is foreign, and has blue eyes, isn't really going to help the cause is it? I suppose, however, that it’s helping something.

This occurred to me after reading “Cubism:” What happens when you put this highly institutionalized and somewhat whacky cultural exchange, which occasionally refers to itself as international development, in the hands of the sloppy, barely out of college, and rather unpaticular American middle class? It’s as if Uncle Sam is giving us this whole poor country as our open canvass and, for the low price of two years, we can drip and splat everywhere our bureaucratic and results obsessed culture.

Can we avoid painting Moldova into a sloppy and farcical caricature of itself?