Utopia / Dystopia Revisited
Yuko Shiraishi – August 2019
In John Carey’s The Faber Book of Utopias published in 2000, he explains that Utopia means ‘nowhere’ or ‘no–place’. Utopia has tended to be taken to mean a good place, but strictly speaking imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all Utopias or ‘nowheres’.
I have always been interested in the subject of Utopia and Dystopia, but the key inspiration for this exhibition has been the work of Ivan Leonidov, which I discovered through reading Akiko Honda’s Astroarchitecture: Ivan Leonidov and Unrealized Architectural Projects in the USSR between 1920s–1950s (2014).
Leonidov has been unkindly treated by history. Apart from a small number of sketches and paintings, little of his work survives. Nor does anything remain by way of notes or commentaries he may have written. He is therefore presented here as a forgotten presence, an architect who never existed, an intriguing ghost from the past. By inviting him into this exhibition, my hope has been to re–open a window onto the meaning of Utopia / Dystopia such as Leonidov experienced in Russia and the Soviet Union.
During the 1920s, Leonidov argued, as a member of the Constructivist movement, that architecture had to adopt alternative perspectives through which to view the world. He explored new forms of media such as film and photography in the development of a methodology that Honda has called Astroarchitecture. This led him to extend the idea of the bird’s–eye view to the ‘view of an astronaut’, which he used in his later years to design imaginary landscapes and cityscapes. His drawings often incorporated illustrations of the aeroplanes and airships from which he imagined his aerial views were taken.
This exhibition is less about architecture by architects as about ways in which practitioners working in a range of different media think about and address architecture in their work. Tadashi Kawamata, Richard Wilson, Kathy Prendergast, Mike Nelson, Alison Turnbull, Ben Rivers, Gary Woodley and Mariana Bisti are all contemporary artists, many of whom have been involved in architectural projects during their careers. David Greene, a member of the Archigram group, and the late Frederick Kiesler are both architect/artists whose interests resonate(d) closely with those of Leonidov.
Arata Isozaki has recently written about what he believes is the end of the road that Utopian building projects have come to. He and Terunobu Fujimori are currently proposing the idea of Art Architecture, meaning art born from or created through architecture. This is a little different, I think, from artists’ understanding of what architecture means.
Although Leonidov was an architect, he built almost nothing during his lifetime. Important contemporaries of his included Gustav Klucis, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, László Moholy- Nagy, Liubov Popova and Georges Vantongerloo. Works by these artists are included in the exhibition as a way of contextualising the period in which Leonidov was active.
In contrast to Russian Cosmism, Italian Futurism and its Aeropittura were concerned principally with technology and speed. Representations of aircraft by Russian avant–garde artists of the same period reflected an interest in the cosmos and what flight meant in terms of freedom from the earth and liberation from the force of gravity. The concern was less with physics and aeronautic engineering than with something more transcendental. Nikolai Fyodorov, an important member of the Cosmism movement up until his death in 1903, advocated the idea that pseudo–scientific methods that freed humanity from gravity could be used to create new, harmonious communities in space whose members would enjoy immortality.
This is the essence, it strikes me, of Russian Utopianism as reflected in the work of Leonidov. Release from the force of gravity is central to the work of Russian Constructivists such as Malevich, El Lissitzky and Tatlin. It is also apparent in the free floating figures one finds in Marc Chagall’s paintings. The same is true of Ilya Khabakov’s 1980s installation The Man who Flew into Space from his Apartment. And Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) opens with a scene in which a man appears riding on a balloon made of animal skins. In the following scene the man falls out of the sky just like Icarus, at which point the true horror of reality is revealed to the hero Andrei. Thus begins his Dystopia. It is revealing that Fyodorov’s fantastical writings were increasingly shunned after the Russian Revolution. I feel that this was probably to do with Communism’s aspiration to create an actual Utopia on earth, and partly to do with the deep–rooted Russian belief in the idea of mother earth.
The Soviet Union was formed in 1922. Interestingly, this was immediately after Yevgeny Zamyatin completed his hugely influential Dystopian novel We. This was not published in Russian until 1988 but appeared in translation in many languages during the 1920s, including in English in 1924. In its fictional description of a totalitarian police state, it was a precursor of both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Zamyatin was a naval architect. This is reflected in the futuristic technological descriptions that feature throughout the book, the focus of which is the protagonist’s struggle with his incurable affliction of having developed a ‘soul’.
It strikes me that Russians have always been in search of purity, whether of the soul as in Dostoyevsky’s Idiot or in the extremes with which they have articulated ideas about Utopia and Dystopia. This is different from what you find in the East, where things tend to be addressed in shades of grey.
Eastern philosophies are largely concerned with addressing everyday attachments and worries. To overcome these, wisdom, knowledge and intelligence are required. Even in the 21st century people rely on ancient wisdom such as that articulated in the I Ching (The Book of Changes). The reason why Chinese politicians have traditionally not revealed their dates of birth is because of fears that competitors and enemies will know their weaknesses and periods of vulnerability.
Since the future is unreadable, Utopia means a world without anxieties. Immortality is another key issue, particularly in China. This is famously articulated in Tao Yuanming’s Record of the Peach Blossom written in the early fifth century CE. Generally speaking people in Asia are superstitious. When things are bad, they stand back and reflect, waiting for the better times they know will follow.
The ideal society described by Thomas More in his Utopia (1516) is a well–structured entity built through the will and engagement of its people. This is quite different from what is found in the East, where Utopia is an idealised place to escape to from the harsh realities of the world. In Japan and Korea the desire to return to the womb is widespread. An interesting variation on this idea appears in Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s 1927 Kappa. Near the beginning there is a description of how, just before birth, a kappa (a mythical river creature) is asked by its father shouting up its mother’s vagina whether or not it wants to be born. If it says no, it is aborted.
The modern phenomena of the otaku (nerd or geek) and the hikikomori (someone who withdraws completely from society) can be explained as forms of ‘wombism’ or the creation of a small, personal universe which a person wants never to have to leave. This is the opposite of the grander scale Russian longing to escape from the forces of gravity. The prevalence in Japan of capsule hotels is not just a matter of the cost of accommodation – it is also to do with the comfort derived from being cocooned in a womb–like space. A traditional version of a similarly confined space is the tea room, in which host and guests sit in close proximity to one another while enjoying drinking tea and composing poetry. The interior of a tea room is a magical space in which tension and relaxation co–exist.
Katsuhiro Otomo’s epic Dystopian manga Akira, serialised between 1982 and 1990, was a Japanese and international sensation. An anime version was released in 1988. This was preceded in 1984 by Hayao Miyazaki’s children’s anime Naosicaä Of the Valley of the Wind in which he depicted a post–nuclear Dystopia. The 1960s and 1970s were the golden age of Japanese manga. This was followed by the flowering of Japanese anime, which took the world by storm during the 1980s. The subject matter of many of these two popular and influential formats were Utopias and Dystopias.
The background to this was Japan’s unique experience of having seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated by atomic bombs, this followed by living under the shadow of hydrogen bomb tests conducted in the Pacific Ocean from the 1950s onwards. The horrors of nuclear destruction found expression in the birth of Godzilla in the 1954 film of the same title. A terrifying monster at first, Godzilla gradually turns into an ally of humans and an object of sympathy. This seminal film undoubtedly paved the way for Japanese children’s fascination for the themes of Utopia and Dystopia. This is quite different from the children’s world conceived by Walt Disney.
More recently, in 2011, there was a resurgence of fear about atomic power triggered by the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant that followed the major earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan and the ensuing tidal wave. Whether the result of a bomb or an accident, nuclear radiation is a terrifying toxin that cannot be heard, seen or smelled. It is a reality that cannot be felt as a reality. The area around the Fukushima nuclear plant is now covered with endless arrays of storage tanks for radioactive water. There is no end in sight. It is a Dystopian nightmare created by a combination of natural forces and human activity.
The destruction of the environment caused by humans is one of the great issues of our time. It has not only triggered movements such as Extinction Rebellion, but has also presented itself as a major challenge for architects and city planners. Isozaki has written an intriguing if depressing analysis of the failure of so many of the Utopian projects that have been planned or undertaken since the late eighteenth century.
It is interesting in this respect that in the sixteenth century Thomas More envisaged the existence of a Utopian island – a ‘New’ Atlantis – in an as yet undiscovered part of the world. With Google Earth and other mapping technologies available to us today, we know that no such place exists. On the other hand, for better or for worse, the emergence of this kind of technology allows people to create virtual spaces and to lead lives detached from their actual physicality.
With the advent of AI, nanotechnology and genetic engineering, humanity is faced with ethical questions that many people believe have no answer. We have few if any adequate moral compasses to guide us, and while it seems on the surface that the world is functioning, we also sense that its core is rotten. The natural world and we who occupy it are sitting on a metaphorical volcano whose tremors we sense but whose destructive power we are unable to imagine. If people have always dreamed of Utopias, they have fantasised even more strongly about Dystopias.
Where are we going now?
Bibliography
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Film & Animation
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Translated from Japanese by Kyoko Ando & Rupert Faulkner.