Generic life ("gLife") in Metro Hawai'i is evoked by keiki birthdays celebrated on the morning news, anonymous commuters clogging the Middle Street merge, and Perry and Price's target audience.

Imagine gLife as a broad, gently sloping bell-shaped curve. Because this curve is almost flat, temporary spikes produce local distinctions that have little effect on its overall shape. This curve was drawn by history. Hawai'i did not achieve European/American modernity via violent insurrection (like Haiti vs. France) or the "gift" of independence from a colonial power (as England granted Jamaica). Its life curves are steeper, clearly defined by despair and hope at either end.

Hawai'i was, euphemistically speaking, "adopted" by U.S. Mainland commercial and military interests, and therefore does not suffer from the same socioeconomic crises as those (other) island nations. A generic life replaces despair with desire and hope with comfort, and occupies the curve's expansive middle. Though despair and hope exist here, if one can't be associated with Hawai'i's self-image, then neither can the other.

GLife is so comfortable that local spikes are required to generate interest beyond immediate concerns and everyday actions and reactions. The commercial media do this by presenting threatening images of personal, economic and social crisis; natural and man-made disasters; and crime. These images simultaneously require us to make a personal choice between comfort and desire while treating us as a homogenous mass.

This makes it difficult to appreciate or approach Hawai'i's actual problems. Addressing our complex dependencies on the nonlocal (for energy, commerce, agriculture and security) exceeds the capacities of a gLife and shatters Hawai'i's modern mythology. Changing the quality of the curve requires the midpoint to be raised, forcing whatever occupies the middle toward the extremes. Images that are capable of doing so oppose common commercial individualism with a call for collective action — or at least a different mode of public dialogue.

The show now at The ARTS at Marks Garage makes the attempt. It bears a fantastically ambitious title: "Just East of West: The geography and culture of In-Between. New art as a tool for understanding the social mechanics and global economics of working together."

Curator Rich Richardson secured three anchors: the profound satirical prints of Masami Teraoka, a group critique of Hawai'i as-it-is curated by Erika Johnson, and an experimental art+commerce+teaching collaboration between surfboard shaper Eric Walden and Bhutanese monk Sangay Richen. The remaining panel-selected work is the result of an open call. Though not all work was created in direct response to the call, the overall result is a far-from-flat curve that is full of local spikes that penetrate the theme to varying degrees.

Powerful art invites us to radically recognize a form or concept, to experience it as if for the first time. A tank on Waikiki beach, as visualized in Alan Konishi's screen print "Aloha Ambush" (part of Johnson's "Plotting Paradise" project) would shock anyone's sensibilities. Konishi's tank is parked amid an array of Hawaiian visual cliches: Diamond Head, 'ulu quilts and flower lei, rainbow, sunbathing tourists. The tank (next year's Hummer?) is intentionally out of scale but visually balanced by its symbolic weight: the gun lines up with beachgoers' heads, and the unfortunate are crushed beneath its treads. Is this what martial law in paradise (again) would look like? So long as there was a honu or plumeria sticker on the turret, would anyone care?

Erika Johnson's screen print "Par for Course" answers the question with a decisive "no." Her stretch of Hawai'i beach is viewed through a fish-eye lens, with SUVs peeking over the horizon. Her grotesque caricatures of tourists using various national flags for beach blankets are depicted in foreshortened perspective. All but the pink Brit are sun-baked beyond brown. Johnson's tourists mingle with local wildlife: a giant cockroach, a centipede, a flock of hungry pigeons, the obligatory mo'o, a sand-eating baby and a beachcomber with metal detector. Like the curve of gLife, the scene lacks visual depth and functions as an aerial view. Suddenly we are looking down on cultural flotsam delivered by currents of professional aloha.

How to address the unwanted side effects of our economy? One answer is to export it. Chris Reiner turns the hidden crisis of waste management into a concrete expression: the Opala Kai, a ship built out of debris and rubbish and designed to haul the same. The sculpture is an argument, not an answer; not talking points, but storytelling. It operates at the scale of its pedestal and is legible in terms of the fishhooks, baskets, wood scraps and cooking pots that are wired, glued and woven together. But it also is easy to imagine this boat at full size, one of many docked near Aloha Tower among the tugs and fishing boats, supporting a new economy based on repurposing, improvisation and invention.

This is tangible cultural sci-fi that can help us visualize a future that isn't sustainable because some miracle takes all the problems away, but because we've done the hard, collaborative, dirty work to solve them. As the tendrils of U.S. military power drift silently through the "Pacific Theater" like a school of man-o-war, we enjoy a relatively stable backdrop of culture, class and ecology.

Instead of experiencing overall differences in the intensity of life, gLife is sustained by cultivating spikes. That's why surfing, skindiving, eating out, nightclubs powered by "raw sexual energy" and office gossip all pursue extremes and push limits. "New art" needs to be injected into this viscous cultural matrix with a collaborative spirit of solidarity and futurism analogous to the one fueling the pursuit of sovereignty. Though none of the artists featured in "Just East of West" seem ready to adopt Henry Noa as their head of state, their best efforts should be seen as an attempt to develop an accessible, popular, anti-generic way of acknowledging that the curves of progress are defined by various intensities of hope and despair, not comfort and desire.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in art, art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i - Manoa.