The Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture (SPWC) was a Toronto arts organization in existence from 1986 to 1991 that explored environmental and ecological issues from an artistic perspective in a "quirky and innovative" way. The SPWC was best known for three programs: a literary magazine, The Journal of Wild Culture; artist-guided walks, "landscape readings"; and a series of cabarets, The Café of Wild Culture.
The organization was a unique hybrid. The oxymoron "wild culture" tweaked the interest of contrasting types: artists, scientists and activists, and the efforts made by the organization to develop creative projects and discourse around the term were well received. It was concurrently accepted as an arts organization by artists and an environmental organization by environmentalists.
The organization was resurrected in 2011 and is now producing an online magazine based in London and Toronto.
Art and ecology
The style of the organization was determined by how participating artists expressed themselves around the undefined idea of "wild culture" (also see "wild culture"). While calling for new articulations of wild culture through its projects, at its height the society filled the cultural vacuum in Toronto with an eclectic kind of "thinking man's" fun and provided a forum for experimentation amongst performance artists. The broader public was encouraged by the SPWC to engage with questions about nature and art, while frequently congregating in the outdoors. This audience was also attracted to the organization's ability to 'soft pedal doom and gloom while partying for the planet".
During a landscape reading on the aboriginal history of downtown Toronto, poet M. T. Kelly offered a view of how the SPWC sought to affect its audience: "There is a bridge between history and landscape. To get people to change their view of the environment, you can't just argue in economic terms. It's an emotional thing. People act politically when they get emotionally involved".
The notion of "wild culture" grew out of multidisciplinary artist Whitney Smith's experience of "a spiritual updraft in the art spheres" while foraging wild foods in the Ontario forest that he sold to local chefs. From 1982 to 1985 a series of three performances, "Fern Policy", explored the possibilities of artistic growth in the nature-culture ecotone. In May 1985 Smith made the first public announcement on the formation of the society at a Toronto art event, "L'Affaire 'Pataphysique", that presented examples of 'pataphysics by local artists parodying theory and methods of modern science. Following this event Smith began recruiting artists to help develop The Journal of Wild Culture.
Defining wild culture
Though there were attempts by the organization to define "wild culture", there was never an accepted definition. Smith preferred his colleagues and audiences to find wild culture's meaning through the titles of the projects in which it appeared, where the social context was at play; that is, that there existed a serious-sounding and possibly genuine academic journal published by a preserving society with a long name, all devoted to a subject no one knew anything about. Negotiating the serious and the non-serious in a way that made sense and entertained became part of the artists' work.
Before there was Smith's recent definition of wild culture ("the articulated ecotone between what humans do and what they can't control in nature"), no single explanation existed around which the S.P.W.C artists" work was done. Some said that it was the vagueness of the idea, the inability to pin it down, that made it so attractive. In the absence of concrete description, Smith offered a metaphor, which he has recently modified: On the surface of a transparent painting is the human geographic reality that is part of our everyday life, and in the background are elements of nature, seen and unseen, that are very much alive but that people aren"t always aware of, whether out of convenience, ignorance, apathy, or any state of unconsciousness or self-centeredness that contributes to the disconnection from our primal history and our present psychic hold on the home terrain. Wild culture is the two planes, foreground and background, seen together.