Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus (review)

The golden age has not passed; it lies in the future.

—Paul Signac

Utopia has long been a subject of investigation for artists, as well as a model for artistic collectives. The exhibition Utopia Matters under the curatorship of Vivien Greene presents case studies from the early nineteenth century through 1933 (when the Bauhaus closed in Berlin) and examines the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice. The international movements included in the exhibition are Les Primitifs, the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Arts and Crafts, the Cornish Colony, Neo-Impressionism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. In that sense, the selection of brotherhoods and movements is fairly canonical, as it focuses on the well-known movements and excludes the more problematic reframing of artistic communities at the ascendancy of Fascism and Stalinism.

The exhibits range from the visual arts to photography, architecture, furniture, and textiles. Thus, the exhibition argues that the artistic communal experiments and projects were taking the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerkinto the utopian arena: the artistic practice was shaped by and indeed shaped the artistic intentional community. For example, The Primitifs and the Nazarenes, both nineteenth-century artistic communities, aimed to revive the clarity and honesty of earlier (that is, classical and medieval) art and thus also pursued an appropriately primitivist and quasi-monastic lifestyle. By the end of the nineteenth century, utopian groups flourished, as artists, architects, designers, and writers embraced aestheticized experience and artisanal traditions in reaction to the unsightliness and commercialism of urban life. The history of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its indebtedness to a variety of predecessors or influential thinkers such as the Shakers, Robert Owen, Thoreau, and Emerson, indicates the different approaches to crafts and preindustrial production. Similarly, and this does not really come out in the exhibition or the catalog, the American and British Arts and Crafts movements differed in their political outlook quite substantially. Following World War I, avant-gardes turned to the utopian notion of harmony, which they saw to be inherent in abstraction, and optimistically endeavored to ameliorate society through art and design. In its choices, the exhibition presents a quite canonical selection of case studies.

Smaller but significant artistic communities such as Hubbard's Roycraft and Stickley's Craftman Farms in the United States; Ashbee's experimental community in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, England; the artistic colony in Darmstadt, Germany, founded in 1899 by Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse; the Abramtsevo workshops in Russia; and the Gödöllő colony in Hungary would have been important examples of how artistic communities were networked across Europe and the United States. An engagement with the Futurists' and Constructivists' alignment with totalitarian regimes would have indicated the important, yet unresolved question in utopian studies regarding the relationship between ideology and utopia. In many ways, the exhibition seems to confirm that twentieth-century utopias had the tendency to turn into horrific dystopias and consequently may be dismissed a priori. The end of history, the end of utopia, means the end of ideology (and thus the end of a fundamental human desire). This is a problematic equation in itself.

The eclectic modern projects that accompany the exhibition show, on the contrary, that the utopian desire has not been quenched. RMB City is an art community in a 3-D virtual world realized by Beijing-based artist Cao Fei as a public platform for creativity. The project explores the potential of an online art community, seeking to create the conditions for an expansive discourse about art, urbanism, economy, imagination, and freedom. Bas Princen's photo-essay Utopian Debrisstands for postmodern, late-capitalist utopian artistry. It engages with the perhaps simply dystopian future of urbanism and landscape. The modern artistic expression of utopia seems to be: "If What We See And Touch are real, What We Breathe And Feel Are Virtual" (RMB City slogan). In contrast to artistic utopias presented in the...