Just as John Donne reported his discovery – that ‘no man is an island,
entire of itself’, but ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ –
so Thoreau could announce that “the smallest stream is a Mediterranean
sea”.1
In the particular, macro potential is revealed. Comprising just 90
acres of undeveloped land surrounded by 31,700 square miles of water in
Lake Superior, Rabbit Island is a utopian attempt to colonize our
imaginations. In establishing this project the artist Andrew Ranville
and his collaborator Rob Gorski stake their claim to an ancient Western
cultural tradition – one that invokes the island topos to
negotiate relationships between the real and the imaginary, utopia and
dystopia, selfhood and otherness, centre and periphery. In so doing, the
Rabbit Island residency also deploys the trope of the shipwrecked
sailor, separated from his contemporaries, who must make the world anew.
How the world is (re)made – which elements are to be carried over from
the past and which are to be discarded – constitutes the moral or
political import of productive isolation.
As territories separated from other lands by water, islands are easily
mythologized as Edens, Arcadias or places of exceptional danger. They
are, paradoxically, both safe havens and sites of upheaval.2 The tension – and interest – generated by island tales sometimes centers on the distinction between protagonists having been cast away, by accident or banishment, or having cast something aside.
Some characters oscillate between these two states and settle on a
reverse position; those who find themselves lost may begin to relish
their situation, others who have initially chosen isolation and
unfamiliarity can find themselves pining for home and renouncing their
previous rejections. The key dramatic question is whether to change or
stay the same, and resulting answers partake of the ancient quest genre
when they are reported upon the traveler’s return to their place of
origin, or to subsequent generations who have benefited from a contrary
decision not to leave – to put down roots in a new land.
The two great shipwreck stories of the 18th century, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, stage island worlds as a challenge to the respective castaways’ epistemological systems.3
In the latter novel this is a source of comic satire and discovery,
conversely, Crusoe sets about re-asserting the efficacy of his
established outlook in the face of alien alternatives. According to
Linda Colley, Defoe’s book presents a parable of empire ‘through the
conquest of a paradise island and its sole inhabitant by superior
British individualism and ingenuity’.4 In contrast, Swift’s Gulliver finds his national conceits ‘transformed by exposure to a range of island peoples’.5
On Rabbit Island there are no Lilliputians, Brobdingnagsas or
Houyhnhnms to encounter, let alone any remnants of the Chippewa who once
fished Lake Superior, so post-colonial negotiations with other people
do not seem to be the most obvious function of the project. Yet, in
their comments on Rabbit Island’s difference or particularity Ranville
and Gorski keenly emphasize its lack of geographical subdivision. By
highlighting this lack of man made boundaries life in the rest of the
United States is thrown into relief: This is a continental nation that
has been conceived according to ‘imaginary lines in the soil’ –
arbitrary enclosures. According to George Simmel, such limits are “not a
spatial fact with sociological consequences but a sociological fact
that forms itself spatially”.6
The American ship of state has so often created difference where there
was once identity, and homogeneity where difference previously reigned.
As in other continental nations, whole races have been invented with the
stroke of a cartographers pen and first peoples subsumed – to name but a
few outcomes. But this is by no means a unique issue; complications
attached to continental boundary lines are cause for so much
international strife in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. On a
somewhat smaller scale, subdivision allows some people to inhabit
islands of security and satiety – green zones, shopping malls, mansions
and democracies – while others are all at sea on street corners and in
refugee camps. The issue of access and exclusion grows ever more urgent
under globalized economic conditions, as does the ecological impact of
reducing the complex distribution of naturally occurring life to islands
of relative orderliness and simplicity. For every well-manicured
suburban lawn there is a corresponding degree of lugubrious sprawl,
testament to a ‘future of humdrum practicality’.7
As a teenage skateboarder Ranville was attuned to the (sub)urban regime
of spatial enclosures, their official functions and enforcement. As a
young artist his Trespassing series of photographs documented his
rejection of this system. The fruit of a nighttime flâneurie –
climbing onto rooftops, sneaking over the connecting walls and levels of
downtown buildings – they recorded “arresting interactions” between
“temperatures of light and architecture”. Later, in the spirit of the
first Europeans to settle the North American continent, he began to toy
with the idea of creating a ‘new world’. Future Island (2009) was
a takeaway installation/sculpture that consisted of a sapling housed in
a planter-box, to which a boat anchor was attached. The tree itself was
of a variety that thrives in a flooded environment. The potential buyer
of the work was given instructions to pitch it into a canal or
similarly unnatural body of water. The fast-growing plant would then
absorb nutrients through its specially designed box and, aided by the
anchor, put down roots. If left alone for long enough it would grow into
an island. The birth of a new land would be the result of ‘guerrilla
gardening’, inspired – perhaps – by an activist practice that has
emerged in recent anti-globalization protests, wherein the manicured
grass of public squares is reclaimed/planted with vegetables. The
implicit challenge of Future Island was to colonize existing spatial determinations with a new reality.
*
‘We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality’, wrote Thoreau in Walden.8
This remark by one of the heroes of American letters addresses the
danger of realism, understood as conventional definitions of human
success. The vain reality is the faltering ship itself – the wrack of
hubris – rather than the shores, inlets and islands of knowledge that
one must necessarily explore when the craft is abandoned. ‘One
generation’, he intones, must forsake ‘the enterprises of another like
stranded vessels’.9
The aged structures, creaking with presumption, are no longer fit for
purpose. Having been driven aground in the manner of so many boats
otherwise useless in a storm they lurch in the changing breakers – false
sanctuaries that need casting off in order to choose life afresh.10
Ranville and Gorski’s project is both the literal fulfillment of this
simile and an attempt to test its power in our contemporary age. Leaving
the mainland behind for a period of intellectual and creative trial by
nature, Rabbit Island residents must achieve their goals through humble
means. Most importantly, their goals must shift – be recalibrated – by
the context specificity of their new home. With only the most essential
tools from the old world available, artists must attempt to tease
meanings and take suggestions from the landscape, to work with it rather
than impose their own will fait accompli. Ranville’s The Amphitheater
is a signal example of this economical methodology – the soil clad
roots of a large naturally felled tree repurposed, through the simple
placement of log benches, as a mise en scène for future
spectacles. With this work the artist stakes out the residency program’s
concern with collapsing the distinction between practicality and
performativity, nature and artifice.
In attempting to choose art – through a new kind of life, in a new land – afresh the Rabbit Island project is in sympathy with Walden’s
nods to the pioneer narrative of discovery. Thoreau’s advice to ‘be a
Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, not of trade, but of thought’ encapsulates this imaginary. But
the question remains – does this approach merely amount to a retreat
from the world? Can isolation have a wider social implication?
It is sometimes pointed out that Thoreau’s house was not so far from the
nearest town, and that his frequent visits to the latter render his
rhetoric of self-sufficiency hypocritical. But, as W. Barksdale Maynard
has convincingly argued, Walden must be viewed as a contribution
to and comment upon the contemporaneous literature of ‘villa-retirement’
and new architectural thought that emerged in the mid 19th Century.11
His was a vision of the good life as peripheral but not too distant
from the urban fabric – a pioneering contribution to the concept of
suburban living. The structure in which he lived was not a log cabin but
a ‘house’. The infamous Michigan native Theodore Kaczynski, who
borrowed from Thoreau’s example when constructing his notorious
hermitage and bomb-making workshop, was similarly in contact with the
outside world. As Mark Wigley said of him, far from being disconnected
the terrorist ‘ruthlessly exploited the ever-present intimate ties
between isolated cell and dense urbanization’.12
Though he refused to attach himself to the telephone, water or
electricity lines that were only a few miles away, he kept his mail box
on the nearby road – utilizing the mail network to ‘distribute his
terror’ and get his neo-luddite manifesto published in national
newspapers.13 Retreats, the critic continues, are
already part of the technological network, part of the
pattern they seem to have escaped. Thoreau was never really isolated. On
the contrary, his withdrawal was a very public act described in a
best-selling book. The ideology of his cabin was actually constructed in
the urban milieu. The settlement always includes within itself what it
nominates as its other. “Isolated” is an urban concept. It is a product
of the city. To leave the map behind is a uniquely urban fantasy. It is
those at the center of the pattern who talk the most about escaping it.
But their escapes are usually just extensions of the pattern,
demonstrations that the city knows no limit’.14
Indeed, today it is practically impossible for people to live on an
island separated from the influence of other territories. As the network
philosophers Thacker and Galloway have said –
‘[i]nside the dense web of distributed networks, it would appear that everything is everywhere
– [there is] little room between the poles of the global and the local.
Biological viruses are transferred via airlines between Guandong
Province and Toronto in a manner of hours, and computer viruses are
transferred via data lines from Seattle to Saigon in a manner of
seconds’.15
Rabbit Island was purchased by Gorski after seeing an advertisement on
an internet classifieds website. In the same networked manner, monies
for the residency program were generated through an digital crowdfunding
platform. The mundane nature of Gorski’s discovery of the Rabbit Island
arcadia, online, through a website that is also used to sell old
clothing and bicycles, is a testament to the stupendous realms of
possibility that sometimes pass unnoticed within our everyday landscape.
The degree to which the Rabbit Island project takes place in a
geographically isolated environment is offset and activated by the
distribution of the project’s outcomes online and through an exhibition
at the DeVos Art Museum. The island is a studio site enabling creative
meditation and production on the potential of sustainability. Without
the exhibition and other documentation it might just be an puritanical
retreat. Its Adirondack shelter, containing a kitchen, library and fully
stocked tool shed formally echoes the austere shaker-like construction
of Kaczynski’s cabin, suggesting a similar lesson to the one Thoreau
hoped to impart with his boast that his own house cost only 28 dollars
to construct – namely, that riches – spiritual or otherwise – can be
discovered in a context of worldly frugality.16 Ranville’s return to Northern Michigan University with the fruits of his labor also parallels his previous work Seven Summits, completed for the 4th
Marrakech Biennale in 2012, in which the artist scaled the seven
tallest peaks in the Western High Atlas range and extracted a stone from
each summit before transporting them to Marrakech to be displayed in a
temporary installation – bringing the mountain, so to speak, to
Mohammed.17 The function of the Rabbit Island retreat touches wider territories than the immediate geographical setting.
At a time when Western societies operate according to the mechanism of
information capitalism, when American agriculture and industry must be
subsidized by the government in order to successfully compete in a
global market, when shifting ciphers on computer screens, creating
memes, shuffling and deploying preexisting symbols are the tasks most
familiar to young people, the creation of islands of material production
becomes a priority. Our generation must learn greater economic
self-sufficiency, satisfaction in work and the ecological benefits that
accrue to such worldly reorganization. It must also develop platforms to
report successful strategies to this effect. We need experiments and
propagandists. The Rabbit Island project is a utopian outpost of
practical desire. As its temporary inhabitants come and go this vision
will expand and deepen, and reach shores beyond Lake Superior.