The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins—it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Here, Ryan S. Jeffery undertakes a utopian thought experiment at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, prompted by the exhibition Beside the Edge of the World, on view from November 9, 2019–February 24, 2020.
Beside the Edge of the World, installation view, The Huntington, San Marino, November 9, 2019–February 24, 2020. Photo: Ryan S. Jeffery.
On November 9, 1989, young East and West Germans greeted one another in celebration on top of the Berlin Wall. I was eleven years old when I watched the televised images of liberal democracy’s triumph beam into the family room of my parents’ Bay Area home. My father, so I was told, half-jokingly whispered to my mother: “This will be our last good Christmas.” As a telecommunications engineer who worked with, and sometimes for, the US Government, hacking the phone lines across the Iron Curtain had been his career. My dad’s joke wasn’t the only one going around at the Cold War’s finale: there was also the one about how history had ended. As far as my parents knew, if history was indeed ending then it looked liked my father’s career would go with it. Neither of them could imagine the boom of the long ’90s waiting just over the horizon. This was when Silicon Valley was still a laboratory for the US defense industry. Soon it would be a laboratory for capitalist disruption and a playground for venture capital, and ultimately anoint itself the techno-utopia that has arrived today.
On the eve of November 9, 2019, exactly thirty years after I watched history end, I stood in the gardens of the Huntington Library for the opening reception of a show titled Beside the Edge of the World. A collaboration between the Huntington and the arts nonprofit Clockshop, the exhibition reconsiders Thomas More’s Utopia—specifically, a first edition of the book from 1516 that is housed in the library’s collection. Three artists and two writers were invited to respond to More’s literary work and its fanciful map of the Isle of Utopia through the Huntington’s distinguished archive of books and antiquities, as well as its botanical gardens. The resulting projects span mythical medieval sea creatures, two ancient kinds of magnolia flower, utopian communities in California, the imperialist redrawing of the southern US border in 1848, and the suppressed histories of pioneering African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More’s venerable thought experiment serves as a prompt for both what could be imagined and what has been forgotten.
Robin Coste Lewis, Inhabitants and Visitors, 2019. Installation view of excerpt, Beside the Edge of the World, The Huntington, San Marino, November 9, 2019–February 24, 2020. Photo: Ryan S. Jeffery.
More coined the name of his island by conjoining the Greek words ou (“not”) and topos (“place”). Hence, as the exhibition label points out, Utopia means “nowhere.” But half a millennium later, it remains unclear whether the fictional island is meant to be a place that could really exist, but happens not to; or if it truly is a terminus of pure naive fantasy. Is it the hierarchical barbarism of our sociopolitical arrangements that’s being satirized? Or is it me, for believing society could be ordered in a better way? Standing in the Huntington’s gardens at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains with the smell of two weeks of Californian wildfires hanging in the air, the bitter feeling of it being the latter was hard to shake. As I write these words, bushfires in Australia have shifted into their third month, having consumed some 25.5 million acres. To contemplate the “nowhere” of Utopia in the face of ecological collapse and its surrounding politics feels at once imperative and counterproductive.
History is filled with the dashed hopes of utopian projects on every scale. The somewheres that More’s nowhere has inspired range from Robert Owen and William Morris’s utopian experiments to Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Indeed, there is no private property in More’s island society. This is particularly resonant in one of the stories from Rosten Woo’s project, Another World Lies Beyond (all works 2019), an audio tour based on the research of California historian Robert Hine, whose papers are housed in the Huntington Library. The principal character of this story is not a person but a tree—the world’s largest. Hine’s research reveals how the founders of the Kaweah Colony, a utopian socialist commune established in 1886 in the southern Sierras, named a massive sequoia after Karl Marx. When the US government created the Sequoia National Park and evicted the commune, the tree was renamed after General Sherman. As the guide turns the listener’s attention to a small grove of sequoias on the Huntington’s great lawn, it explains how the map of the national forest was drawn not by congress but by The Southern Pacific Railroad—also the source of the fortune inherited by Henry Huntington. The interrelationship between dispossession, primitive accumulation, and the wealth required to achieve preservation on the scale of the Huntington is a dynamic of political economy Marx likely would have described as a contradiction.
Rosten Woo, Another World Lies Beyond, 2019. Installation view, Beside the Edge of the World, The Huntington, San Marino, November 9, 2019–February 24, 2020. Photo: Ryan S. Jeffery.
The power dynamics of property relations are made striking in the juxtaposition between the story More tells in a priceless 500-year-old book and the imposing glass encasing it, and further underscored by the list of Henry Huntington’s financial assets on display in a centennial exhibition in the next building over. But I felt it most viscerally when confronted by the sparse words of writer Robin Coste Lewis’s poem, presented in a small booklet, called “Inhabitants and Visitors.” Lewis redacts and rearranges words from a chapter of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) to sketch a glimpse into the perspectives of free Black people who lived around the famous New England pond during the Antebellum period. What first struck me was the amount of lines that appear in the first-person possessive; some pages are almost entirely filled with lines like: “My mere presence…” “My inquired concern…” “My dent in the earth…” Reading this poem drew me further into myself while simultaneously sending me elsewhere, specifically to the dystopia of chattel slavery in the US. The chosen words of the text express the historical enormity of white supremacy’s legacy on an intimate scale. Statements from another’s time and place that are impossible for me to truly imagine become questions that are incumbent on me in the present moment. What are the effects of my mere presence? What shape is my dent in the earth? How does my dent affect yours?
It’s likely that More looked to Greece for more than just a name for his fictional island. Radical theorist Karl Kautsky pointed out how some thought More had based his imagined society on Plato’s Republic. Meanwhile, the property-hungry settlers of the American colonies also fancied their pastoral Republic a version of Plato’s. Thus the settler-colonial variant of Utopia, an imagined endless frontier patiently waiting for white protestant hands to transform it into dominion. By the twentieth century, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek had to remind conservatives of their dream for a Utopia of property rights. Socialists, Hayek urged, weren’t the only ones who could describe the world they wanted. And here lays the straightest line to the voices from my parents’ television that cheered history’s end at the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, the French philosopher Louis Marin summoned the story of More’s island to respond to utopic claims of “democratic hyperliberalism,” to warn of the dangers in declaring an ideological endpoint. “It is precisely at this moment,” he wrote, “while new, or very old and frightening, frontiers appear or reappear, those of nationalistic, racial or religious exclusions—precisely at this moment that it is worth recalling the fiction of an island that appeared at the dawn of a period for which our present time would form the twilight.” Marin’s point was that despite the exuberance of free-market utopians, More’s story was meant as a horizon for our shared real, not an actual destination. If the frontier of Utopia were reached, then so would the limit of imagining the world any differently.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Laurel Sabino y Jaguilla, 2019. Video still. Single-channel video with sound, 11 min. Courtesy of the artist.
So how to turn to the imaginary without abandoning the shared urgencies of the material world? In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s film for the Huntington’s exhibition, she points her camera at the institution. Set in two locales, the Huntington’s botanic laboratory and the lush biodiversity of the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, the video tells the story of two genera of magnolia flower threatened by deforestation and climate change. Muñoz juxtaposes two different strategies of preservation by shifting the viewer from the Huntington’s laboratory, with its mission of preservation, to the rain forest threatened by colonial austerity and global warming. The former reveals the human capacity to organize the world’s material resources in a quest to understand it, while the latter simply shows the act of documenting an unknowable and increasingly unstable world. Between the two lies the contradiction ecological collapse poses for the task of preservation. Put simply, the act of preservation means to protect something from change. But if human societies are to be preserved, then nearly everything about them may need to change.
There’s a certain audacity to utopic thinking at this particular moment in history. The reactionary impulse to preserve whatever one has—no matter how much or little—often feels like the dominant mood. Yet to follow this logic reveals its own audacity, if not a barbarous absurdity. Climate activist Naomi Klein recently pointed out how liberals that once met her calls for radical change with optimistic free market solutions have increasingly moved toward aesthetic doomism. The reality of accelerating ecological collapse has revealed just how immutable imagination can be. For many, it seems, dystopia’s familiar somewhere is easier to imagine than Utopia’s better nowhere. x
Ryan S. Jeffery is a filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles. His upcoming film, An Unsatisfying Metaphor, tells the story of modern globalization through the lens of the World Trade Organization’s private art collection in Geneva, Switzerland.