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Hashtags: The Impossible Dream

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#utopia #nostalgia #technology #street art #counterculture

Technology and utopia are united in a certain subset of counterculture in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Walker Art Center. The show illustrates the ideals and limitations of the utopian imaginings by artists of the 1960s and early 1970s with early computer graphics imaging, speculative architecture proposals, political posters, and installation art. In contrast to ideal societies, Martin Wong: Human Instamatic at the Bronx Museum of the Arts finds spaces of freedom despite the cascade of social failures that characterized the 1980s.

Clark Richert, view of Drop City, “the Complex,” in El Morro, outside Trinidad, Colorado, circa 1966. Photo: courtesy Drop City Photo Archives

Clark Richert, view of Drop City, “the Complex,” in El Morro, outside Trinidad, Colorado, circa 1966. Courtesy of Drop City Photo Archives.

At the Walker, utopian dreams of peaceful and diverse living are illustrated by Superstudio in a suite of proposals for environments to create better life and death experiences, but they are difficult to realize in practice. Social experiments such as “Drop City,” a landscape of geodesic domes, collapse into entropy almost as quickly as they appear. Citrus trees placed in the galleries by Helen and Newton Harrison wither in the dead of a Minnesota winter, despite the grow lights that require large amounts of power to operate.

View of the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, 2015; Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Portable Orchard: Survival Piece Number 5, 1972-3/2015. Photo: Greg Beckel, ©Walker Art Center

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Portable Orchard: Survival Piece Number 5, 1972-3/2015; installation view, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. © Walker Art Center. Photo: Greg Beckel.

John Whitney’s abstract geometric projection demonstrates the approaches to form that were pioneered during the ’60s through computer graphics imaging. Early computer animations were often visualizations of the mathematical functions driving the computer code. The inherent properties of the code informed the visual aesthetic. Images like these were very influential in psychedelic art, which curator Andrew Blauvelt asserts is an art form warranting scholarship, despite its lowbrow status as the purview of commercial artists, designers, and engineers more often than fine artists. He makes a convincing case for how the psychedelic aesthetic aligns with utopian aspirations that drive progress, inspiring artists in all of these categories to invent tools and design systems in the quest to improve our lives.

Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, CC5 Hendrixwar/Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress, 1973. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2007

Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. CC5 Hendrixwar/Cosmococa: Programa-in-Progress, 1973. Collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2007.

Institutional interest in utopia is on the upswing, due in part to the need to historicize a collective understanding of the late 20th century. Museum environments are not always readily adaptable to the human-scaled values of the ’60s. The Walker installation emphasizes comfort, in the form of Superstudio’s unorthodox body-conforming seats; hammocks and Jimi Hendrix in Helio Oiticica and Neville d’Almeida’s CC5 Hendrixwar/Cosmococa: Programa-in-Progress (1973); and beanbags in the Boyle Family’s psychedelic installation Beyond Image and Son of Beyond Image (1969). These spaces of rest punctuate an otherwise information-heavy exhibition space, rich with archival documents and works on paper. The dream is detailed, and seductive. Still, the elaborate connections between multinational capitalism and global poverty in Öyvind Fahlstrom‘s Garden – A World Model (1973) show that dreaming has done little to change the state of things on the ground.

View of the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, 2015, with posters by Emory Douglas c. 1969. Photo: Greg Beckel, ©Walker Art Center

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, 2015; installation view with posters by Emory Douglas c. 1969.
© Walker Art Center. Photo: Greg Beckel.

One difficulty of historicizing this period in visual culture is that many of its creators were committed to an ephemeral, live way of working. Performance was a way to challenge expectations of social behavior and insert political issues into daily experience. The Cockettes, a legendary San Francisco queer performance group, have a section of the exhibition that illustrates the difficulty of archiving these action-based practices. For them, making art and objects that would live in a gallery or archive was less important than living as fully and freely as humanly possible. That objective included integration, with artists of color playing important roles. Yet the documentation of the period that has made it to exhibition includes only a few perspectives of artists of color. While the founders of Drop City abandoned conventional society, other artists, like Emory Douglas, could not abandon the urban environment in a time of desperate need. As with the Cockettes, Douglas’ theater was the street. His Black Panther Party broadsides were a form of public art that gave voice to protest against living conditions for America’s poor, Black residents. These images are far from utopian. They demonstrate the amount of work required just to get to a humane, rather than ideal, standard of living for many people. This represents another challenge for Hippie Modernism: disentangling utopia from connotations of idealism that stem from privilege and social homogeneity.

Martin Wong. In the Studio, 1992. Acrylic on linen. 30 inch diameter. Collection Bronx Museum of the Arts, Purchase, Asian American Art Fund 1998.1.4

Martin Wong. In the Studio, 1992; acrylic on linen; 30-inch diameter. Collection of Bronx Museum of the Arts, purchase, Asian American Art Fund.

How, then, to reconcile utopianism with inclusion? The paintings of Martin Wong, onetime set designer for the Cockettes, may offer some insight. Martin Wong: Human Instamatic at the Bronx Museum of the Arts includes mostly works created after this Chinese-American artist moved from San Francisco to New York in 1982. Himself an avid collector of the art of the street, specifically graffiti, Wong’s paintings depict the ravaged landscape of the Lower East Side and its largely Puerto Rican community after a notorious period of federal neglect and social destruction. What Wong shows the viewer is hardly an ideal environment, but within it, individuals find freedom and love. The artist’s paintings of rooftops, brick walls, gates, and jail cells belie his theatrical sense of mise en scène. The paintings are portals to a not-so-distant past, nearly turning the exhibition space into the landscape of the street. There, young graffiti writers soar, high on skateboards and love, above the rubble.

Installation view of Martin Wong: Human Instamatic. Photo credit: Joel Greenberg

Martin Wong: Human Instamatic; installation view. Photo: Joel Greenberg.

Other works reflect Wong’s erotic infatuation with firemen and prisoners, exploring the dynamic between hero and convict with the aid of his own and others’ poetic language. This prompts some questions regarding utopia. If everyone is to be included, what support exists for those who cannot for whatever reason abide by society’s rules? Or is the utopian state necessarily a prison, rendered perfect by exclusion? Who is sacrificed for the public good? These paintings are haunting against the backdrop of HIV/AIDS’ decimation of the queer community of color, in which Wong found his family. His own death came in 1999: one of a generation lost to the ravages of the disease.

Martin Wong. Starry Night, 1982. Oil on canvas. 22 x 30 inches. Collection Bronx Museum of the Arts, Gift of Suzy and Joseph Berland 2008.10

Martin Wong. Starry Night, 1982; oil on canvas; 22 x 30 in.
Collection of Bronx Museum of the Arts. Gift of Suzy and Joseph Berland.

Ultimately, one finds utopia in Wong’s work in the golden constellations that pepper the skies above the city’s crumbling walls. The stars are available to all, and to none. There exists perfect order, beauty, and peace. The freedom of the street is heightened by its transgressive nature. The dream of a universal ideal, of heaven, keeps us going when the chips are down, but don’t let that distract us from the work we have to do to make a better life here on Earth.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia is on view at Walker Art Center through February 28, 2016. Martin Wong: Human Instamatic is on view at the Bronx Museum through March 13, 2016.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.


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