Utopian Landscapes

Idealistic

"….This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future."  

-       Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Lorinc, John.  “In the utopian city there’s no trash, no graffiti – and no people.”  National Post

            (Canada) 22 Mar. 2003, Saturday ed. : SP4. 

John Lorinic is an anchor and editor for CNNRadio.  In his article he discusses and reviews a book by art historian Ruth Eaton titled “Ideal Cities:  Utopianism and the (un)built environment.”  Lorinc begins his article by mentioning that as Eaton states, “the human desire to build utopian societies as a response to the grim realities of actual cities stretches back to the very dawn of civilization.”  An important figure in the Utopian movement was Le Corbusier, a “misanthropic” Swiss architect and planner, whose “mathematically inspired urban reform reached a kind of frightening apotheosis, with its dreams of megablocks and identical apartment towers sweeping away the archaic street life of old cities such as Paris.”  According to Lorinc, Eaton’s novel contains images of idealized societies that are both “arresting and seductive: One can sense how these thinkers appealed to their patrons.  Lorinc goes on to state that all of the utopian images are devoid of people, “In the elegant architectural renderings depicting Renaissance Florence and Le Corbusier's dioramas, real people are nowhere to be seen, which reveals something about the essence of utopianism.”  What Lorinc seems to be hinting at is that perhaps we have yet to achieve an utopian society because we as human beings are too complicated, messy, and unsuitable for a perfect world. 

Utopianism is slowly becoming an underlying idea in my imagery.  Creating utopic landscapes that are so pristine and devoid of any human touch that they in turn begin to look bizarre is something that really fascinates me.  Although the ultimate idea of utopia sounds pleasant enough, there is something creepy and almost totalitarian about utopian cities and living structures, where everything is organized and structured  in such a way that nothing is ever out of place, and superflous activity is discouraged. 

Image:

http://blog.roughtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/le_corbusier_vision_paris_smaller.jpg

Candice Breitz Lecture

Candice Breitz’s video installations speak to a range of viewers on many different levels.  Using pop culture to both question and relate to the world we interact in, her work has an air of familiarity, yet the message it conveys sometimes does not.  Using pop culture: songs, icons, celebrities, and films, Breitz attempts to speak in a language that is “shared with all urban dwellers.”  Stating that she is interested in the strange relationship between powerful public characters and an audience with no public voice, it is clear where her attraction to speak in terms of popular culture stems from. 

Breitz’s Love Song series, which reduces classics by artists such as Olivia Newton John and Whitney Houston to mere loops repeating all the “I, me, mys” and “Yous” shows her attempt to strip down the superfluous elements of the songs to what really matters: the ability to project yourself into them.  Breitz’s Mother and Father series also deal with a projection of sorts, but in a different manner.  The Mother and Father series are Breitz’s experiment at how far she can take found footage.  Cutting many different yet unorthodox mother and father characters from well known Hollywood films, Breitz shows the audience how the mainstream media is opposed to the traditional family structure, and questions Hollywood’s job as the “new parents” who are raising us.  While Brietz’s work varies from compiling found footage to prove a point, or cutting and editing it to create a new one, it always manages to raise interesting questions about the world we interact in.