Secret Gardens

Elaine's Secret Garden: Drawing Utopia

© Paul Beuchat

Last summer, like every summer since 2003, like I will do again in a few weeks, I was house-sitting and watering the plants in Elaine Kowalski and Elton Bash’s East London garden.

Looking around I noticed an old wooden birdhouse hanging from one of the lower branches of a tree. I gazed at it for a moment and as I did I realized that I was looking at—literally—the unlikely event of a house hanging from a piece of string. In a sense, I saw it as if for the first time.

I was savouring the poetry of this vision when I noticed the dog. Half-hidden among the bushes under the birdhouse, the statue of a dog stared out, alert, as if protecting the memory of a long gone tenant. I thought to myself, “a stone dog guards a derelict birdhouse hanging from a tree in an English garden.”

Then I began to draw.

Is there anything as futile, expensive, ephemeral and frustrating and yet as exciting and rewarding on a personal level as making art today?

Probably not.

In spite of the many times fruitless struggle against materials and the seldom successful quest for the spiritual, many thousands of artists live and work all over the world today.

An entire economy of galleries, museums, dealers, collectors, journalists, critics and curators revolves around the figure of a human being gazing at the world around him, attempting to make sense of what he sees.

Contemporary society places a premium on the artist’s role in proposing reality, on his ability to define, envision and connect landmarks in a geography of the mind, to navigate through this invisible reality and tell the mythical story of this journey.

Independently of the economic and other interests surrounding each individual artist, the very existence of today’s art world is determined by society’s deep-rooted belief in the uniqueness and value of the artist’s inventiveness as well as his capacity to give concrete form to his vision.

This vision combines here - now reality with the artist’s view of how things might be or should be—his Utopia.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines Utopia as “an imaginary island depicted by Sir Thomas More as enjoying a perfect social, legal and political system” also as “a place, state or condition ideally perfect in respect to politics, laws, customs and conditions.”

Other authors add that “utopias are about how people should live, about human nature, and the meaning and purpose of life, dealing with perennial problems, happiness, good and evil, authority, the state, religion, knowledge, work, sex, equality, liberty.”

By introducing a distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, Marx and Engels marked a decline in the influence of utopian thinking in social reform. After them, utopian projects and real-life manifestations of utopianism retreated into a “practical utopia” role as models of reference rather than functional realities.

Utopianism viewed as the capacity to envision a reality beyond what is immediately perceivable by our senses is crucial in the sense-making attempts of the artist. Whether it is used as a strategic weapon or to conceive and visualize an imaginary reality, its purpose is to break down the brick wall of ‘here-now’ logic and see beyond.

In the study of utopianism there are three basic positions: those who believe utopian thought is a significant expression of man, those who condemn it as wrong, stupid or perverse and those who remain ambivalent about it.

Among the first, Paul Tillich argues that it is impossible to understand history without utopia, which he sees as the motor for human progress and an opening up to the new. Similarly, Frederick L. Polak, discusses the key cultural role of utopianism in people’s definition of the future, linking man’s yearning for utopia to his nature.Man’s desire to overcome the negative in life makes Utopia necessary as a form of mental space providing a functional gap between elements of reality.

Polak further explains that society’s images of the future at a given time emerge from what he calls “the split man” in reference to mankind’s capacity to split reality into the existing and the imaginary, freeing itself from “the oppressive grip of the here-now.” As a result, he says, “the human mind spiritually emancipates itself from spatial-temporal limits of existing reality and tries to cross the borders of the unknown.”

For Polak, the course of history is determined “by its preceding and prevailing images of the future interacting with all social forces.”

Linking past imaginings of the future with the emergence of present-day reality and, I would add, with the notion of the avant garde, Polak points out that “if we understood better where to look and what to ask, we would see that part of the future is being recorded now in images already operative or in process of creation.”

In this sense, when a group of artists reacts to the early stages of decline of the social projection of a given world view, the collective force of their shared vision displaces the images of the pre-existing cultural order. But even art produced by the avant-garde of a period will inevitably fail to embody the spirit of another, as if ideas whose internal coherence is a reflection of specific historical circumstances must necessarily fade away in time along with such circumstances.

In his book "The Empty Space", Peter Brook describes this aging process in connection to theatre, but his views are applicable to the arts in general:

“All the different elements of staging—the shorthands of behaviour that stand for certain emotions; gestures, gesticulations and tones of voice—are all fluctuating on an invisible stock exchange all the time. Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience and other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events, join in the rewriting of history and the amending of daily truth […] In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived and its conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it. In this sense, the theatre is relativity.”

In real life, the unseen, the unexplained, the un-formed and the un-built rush forward as a formless flow, always in the process of becoming but never fully settling into the specifics of here-now reality, momentarily evading historical demise, a quality reflected in the traditional understanding of drawing as a tentative medium.

Bertrand De Jouvenel has said that the lack of clear images of these utopian visions causes mankind anxiety. This anxiety fuels a burning desire in the artist to create such images and thus remedy the absence of a visual or material counterpart for an inner vision of almost overwhelming force. In doing this, to paraphrase Tillich, the artist seeks to make visible “the telos of his own existence, what he is essentially. ”

Therefore, the artist’s burning desire, his utopia, is to join these two realities through his work. This includes himself and his physical, personal, social and historical surroundings. In other words, his essence as an artist is not detached from his surroundings or his work but includes them.

Theodor Adorno has said that “any attempted representation of Utopia places unbearable constraints on its very nature,” which is that of the unformed and the ineffable. Therefore, the envisioning or enactment of the artist’s utopia requires a medium offering the least possible material and formal resistance. This medium, I propose, is drawing.

Tom McDonough refers to the broader issue of representing Utopia stating that “one may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner.” He points out the paradox that even though utopia is a “determined negation of that which is” it is not possible to depict such visions without reference to familiar aspects of the reality to be transformed.

He adds: “Every representation of utopia is simultaneously its undermining. We only know the truth of utopia, the strength of its negativity, to the extent that it is not represented. Essentially, any concrete image of utopia falsifies the utopian project by setting definite limits to its subject.” Representing utopia involves the paradox of having to use pre-existing visible reality to make an invisible imaginary both visible and intelligible and to find organic place for visions of utopia within the broader context of physical reality.

In doing this, an essentially intangible and mobile flow is anchored to the specificity of indexical references, limiting the scope of a language that is closer to oral tradition at the same time that it undermines its potential to express a complex and mobile reality.

Examining the social history of drawing through the process of learning how to draw, Ann Bermingham describes the reality in which the medium emerges as one “intersected with social, political and practical needs,” a reality characterized by“the aesthetization of the self and the things of everyday life.”

In such a context, she says, drawing becomes a social practice with a dual representational and also aesthetic role, aiming to represent an environment made up primarily of interacting elements of information, a form of translation, I would add.

Last summer a door, or perhaps a window opened for me in my mind, and I could see the vastness and wealth of Elaine's small East End garden. There was magic in every corner, if only you could see it. In retrospect, I realize now the closeness and similarities there is between Elaine as a woman-artist and her garden. Wild and unkept, but so alive, struggling against encroaching urbanism and darkness, flawed, busy, productive...

I completed a series of 100 drawings last summer.