'We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality’
– Thoreau
For millennia people have taken to islands, caves, far-flung mountains
and cloisters to be apart from profane reality. But the urge to create a
sanctuary in which to pursue human flourishing dovetails all to easily
with the cowardly impulse to avoid facing challenges head-on. The
self-sufficient life is, frequently, one apart. What could be more
self-sufficient, more sustainable, than death? The morbid luxury of not
having to think or lift a finger for other people makes bedfellows of
the corpse, the ascetic and voluptuary alike.
The island is one of our most abiding figures for self-containment and
isolation, and in its long cultural history it has often stood for
paradise. A continuum links the visions of ancient Greek philosophers
and the kitsch offerings of the Easyjet inflight magazine. If it is apart
then it can be separate – untouched – by the fingers of all that
despoil and profane. And so it is that island visions characterize
paradise in the spiritual and religious sense while at the same time
functioning as the most typical cipher for material desires. If the
island that you long for does not already exist then you can always
build it!
The Palm. The World – just two examples of how advances in engineering
have allowed mankind to realize in built form dreams which might, in
another period, have only found expression in language. Looking at the
artificial coastline of Dubai one may be struck by the impression that,
however expansive in scale, our dreams have become less impressive. Facts on the Ground,
a video by the Dutch artists Bik van der Pol which documents the
creation of an artificial island seems to capture this disappointing
impression.
The various island ‘countries’ that make up The World are owned by a
rarified gaggle of celebrities and Mafiosi – their pleasure palaces
surrounded by moats of water and private guards. As with many island
tales, those who inhabit this microcosm (and their lifestyle) serve as
an allegory for our own. A glimmer in the water; a little mirage effect
above the sand, and the false beaches of the emirates appear to resemble
Baghdad and Kabul’s Green Zones – islands of security and satiety in a
turbulent sea of human need. That The World needs constant sand
replenishment in order to forestall its being washed away seems
particularly apropos. At what cost? And what of Venice? Something other
than miles separates our art world from the spaces in which most people
live their lives. We who walk the baking flagstones of San Marco, who
press flesh at the prosecco intermezzo – where chatter moves from the
surface of the exhibition to the decoration of the palazzo, and to the
cut of dresses – we are a savage fantasy, every bit as untenable as the
sinking foundations of the city in which we perform.
Hercules was the tribal hero of the first people to settle the lagoon –
the Veneti – and he became a legendary protector of their new home. He
was an apt champion given the colossal task facing these pioneers – to
lay foundations and maintain lives on shifting sands. Not least because,
as Peter Ackroyd has noted, it is he who ‘acquires by labour what
others claim by right’. Hercules embodies mankind’s power to bend nature
towards his own ends. But in the 20th Century this ability
would lose its moral purpose. The machine gun and atom bomb are to
heroism what Napoleon was to the Venetian Republic – a tidal wave of
defeat. Later, Theodore Adorno was to demand no poetry after Auschwitz.
Perhaps he spoke too soon: we need poets and artists to remind us of our
hubris, to gather together the ragged threads of late modernity and
weave them into images that help us envision our predicament.
Alexander Ponomarev’s Maya: A Lost Island (2000) does just that. A
video work in two parts, the first screen shows the artist scratching
away at a paper map, removing all symbolic trace of the eponymous land
mass. It is erasure performed in a perfunctory manner – all too easy. In
the second video one encounters the realization of this gesture on a
massive scale; footage showing the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy
deploying maritime flares to make a real island, in the Barents Sea,
disappear. The action is an incredible counterpoint to the individual
performance – and is the result of Ponomarev’s negotiations with the
military authorities. With this project the artist draws a veil of smoky
artifice over a place whose very name signifies delusion an illusion.
The second video is equal parts epic, triumphant social sculpture, and a
worrisome case study in which it is apparent that an organized
war-structure has been moved by folly. The last aspect must give us
pause. Somewhere, beyond art, another death dealing system is likely in
thrall to a Don Quixote.
If we are able to create islands, to veil them in smoke or to destroy
them, then don’t we have to powers to preserve them? Antti Laitinen’s Growler
is a video of the artist performing this desire – recording the final
phase of an action in which he removed a large block of ice from a
Finnish lake in winter, keeping it safely frozen until the onset of
summer by storing it in a polystyrene box. He then returned this iceberg
to its place of origin, towing it across the now warm waters by rowboat
until it melted. The romantic image of a lone figure leading his
fragile burden across a sunlit horizon may be beautiful, but his melting
growler invokes receding glaciers, and the planetary rise in sea level
that must certainly attend global warming – a fate that will lead to
islands such as the Maldives being overrun by the surrounding waters.
Let it be noted that polystyrene and related petrochemical products
hasten the melt and eventual deluge, even while they keep the ice cubes
for our beverages cool.
‘We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality’, wrote Thoreau. This
remark 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’. The aged structures, creaking with
presumption, are no longer fit for purpose. Andrew Ranville’s Rabbit Island
project is a contemporary castaway fantasy made real. Comprising just
90 acres of undeveloped land surrounded by 31,700 square miles of water
in Lake Superior, Michigan, Rabbit Island is an attempt to
colonize the imagination: an international artist residency
foregrounding self-sufficiency and context-specific material engagement.
Leaving the mainland behind for a period of intellectual and creative
trial by nature, residents must achieve their goals through humble
means. Most importantly, their goals must shift – be recalibrated – by
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.
In attempting to choose art – through a new kind of life, in a new land –
afresh the Rabbit Island project is in sympathy with Thoreau’s nods to
the pioneer narrative of discovery and the author’s anti-consumerism.
His 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?
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. 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’, and the venerable author was not too far from the local
store to preclude his walking there from time to time.
The infamous Michigan native Theodore Kaczynski, who became known as the
Unabomber, preached renunciation of industrial modernity and pursued
his agenda in a through murderous means. Kaczynski would borrow from
Thoreau’s architectural example when constructing his notorious
hermitage and bomb-making work shop by hand. He, too, was similarly in
contact with the outside world – despite appearances and self-deceptions
to the contrary. Though he refused to attach himself to the telephone,
water or electricity lines that were only a few miles away, he kept his
mailbox on the nearby road – utilizing the postal network to distribute
his terror and get his neo-luddite manifesto published in national
newspapers. Berlin based American artist Daniel Keller obtained
Kaczynski’s hand-made backpack and other accoutrements from a recent FBI
auction. Their inclusion in The Possibility of an Island
foregrounds the fact that – as Mark Wigley has said – far from being
disconnected, the Unabomber ‘ruthlessly exploited the ever-present
intimate ties between isolated cell and dense urbanization’. ‘Retreats,’
the critic continues, are
already part of the technological network, part of the
pattern they seem to have escaped. […] 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’.
Today it is practically impossible for people to live on an island,
apart from the influence of other territories. As the philosophers
Thacker and Galloway relate –‘inside 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’.
Finance is no exception. The island states that make up the world’s
offshore banking network are only geographically distant from the
continents that reap the whirlwind of their speculation and tax
avoidance facilitation. Goldin+Senneby are two Swedish artists
originally schooled as political economists. Their Headless at Regus
(2010) a closed screening at a faceless business centre, where viewers
encounter a film documenting the pair’s investigation of a ‘found’
company in the Bahamas called Headless Ltd. The film, entitled Looking for Headless,
was commissioned by the artists through their characteristic practice
of outsourcing and created by Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones. Like
much of their work, it addresses practices of withdrawal and secrecy in
contemporary financial capitalism. With the Headless project the
longstanding mystery and exoticism of the island trope finds its
contemporary symbolism in the esoteric accounting practices so central
to our current world order. It seems to indicate that while one can
never be isolated, alienation is a different matter.
The earth is an island, and her various continents and atolls, beaches
and factories, pension funds and casinos partake of a whole. Every day,
shifting ciphers on computer screens, the latest memes, glacial melt,
economic shock and fruit out of season testify to this fact. And yet
there are still those who would retreat to Green Zones and shopping
malls. Withdraw if you will, but don’t pretend that the sand beneath
your feet is not shifting.
The Possibility of an Island
