Thursday, January 11, 2001
Utopia at New York Public Library
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Utopia, the Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, is the subject of an ambitious program of exhibits and programs organized by the Bibliotheque nationale of France and the New York Public Library. The 550 objects are exhibited on the 1st and 3rd Floors of the NYPL at 42nd Stret and Fifth Avenue, and will close January 27, 2001. Run, do not walk, to catch the show.
If the thought of seeing what philosophers, social reformers and dreamers of two millenia envisioned as improvements to this vale of tears makes you yawn, don’t. Think of it as an art show, an opportunity of seeing books at their most glorious, when the printed word was created for the masses (allright, for the many), yet imitating the precious forms of beauty painfully formed by the hands of monk/artists in their cells, who sometimes took years to copy a single text, with illustrations. In this exhibit you will see some of the best early books, incunabula created as copies of illuminated manuscripts, depicting imaginary people, their dwellings, and continents that never existed. Garden of Eden appears in several varieties, including one by Theodore de Bry, better known for his 1590 American Indians, perfect physical specimens with no sagging busoms, who live in an idealized state of nature (although they roast and eat their enemy prisoners);
The search for utopia started with the one that man lost - Adam and Eve’s Paradise - and continued, with Saint Augustine’s City of God, with dreams of the golden Jerusalem ( although there are earlier intimations, in Plato and in Ovid’s Golden Age). The Medieval land of Cocaigne was a poor people’s paradise, with plenty of food and sex, whereas Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia was virtue-dominated. He invented the term, derived from the Greek "a place that never was" (as in topography and topology), An ideal one would be eutopia, and a terrible one distopia - as the ones created by Hitler and Stalin, whose posters proclaimed workers’ paradises, with the "progress" produced by concentration camp and Gulag labor. The exhibits and the films shown on the 3rd Floor provide the graphic evidence (don’t forget to look at the books that warned us, by Upton Sinclair, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell). Then, there are the modern industrial realities, as exemplified by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and photographs of men and machines, the warnings - H.G. Wells and Upton Sinclair - and the withdrawals from main-stream life, see the flower children of the 1960s
Utopia can be fun - think of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver who wakes tied up by the tiny Lilliputs (there is a modern counterpart of an astronaut flat down, surrounded by ant-like space aliens). Swift gave us also the giant Brobdingnagians, the noble horse-like Houyhnhnms whose language has no word for lies and the gross humanYahoos whose language is nothing but lies (what a counterculture name for an information system; did the corporate founders really know what they were doing? That reminds me of the unsuccessful builder, who advertised his houses as Jerry-built.). Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is utopian, as are the several modern imaginary voyages that come to mind (some are hoaxes, such as Walter Traprock, Joan Lowell, the London pretender who invented a Formosn language, none of which are included in this exhibit).
Of great American interest are the early maps, Amerigo Vespucci’s booklet that gave America a name, and the Columbus Letter, Sebastian Munster’s map and the Green Globe of 1506 with its shapely South America, seldom seen in exhibits . Now you have a chance. A striking American example of an Utopian thinker is Thomas Jefferson, who transcribed his original Declaration uf Independence, underlining the passages deleted by his editors, the Second Continental Congress, including a long one condemning slavery. Jefferson characterized their work as mutilation, and sent five hand-copied transcripts to his friends (three have survived). Let the Jeffersonian detractors put that in their pipes and smoke.
Of yet more American interest are the architectural planners of ideal cities - William Penn, who successfully squared off Philadellphia in 1682, and Governor Oglethorpe who did the same with Savannah. Frank Lloyd Wright, the New York grid of 1811, the Washington, DC. diagonals of Pierre L’Enfant, although mentioned in the catalog, are not part of the exhibit. American utopian societies - the Shakers, Mormons and some communities - are represented in the exhibit.
Some 17 institutions, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Donnell branch, China Institute and CUNY are participants in the exhibit consortium. A fine weighty tome, Utopia, The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, price $27.50), edited by the exhibit’s curator, Roland Schaer of the BnF, with Gregory Claeys of the University of London and Lyman Tower Sargent of the University of Missouri, is a veritable cultural history of the European and American experience.
We have found the phrase missing from last week’s column, third paragraph. It reads:
"Room stylists" clean up after you,
Utopia, the Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, is the subject of an ambitious program of exhibits and programs organized by the Bibliotheque nationale of France and the New York Public Library. The 550 objects are exhibited on the 1st and 3rd Floors of the NYPL at 42nd Stret and Fifth Avenue, and will close January 27, 2001. Run, do not walk, to catch the show.
If the thought of seeing what philosophers, social reformers and dreamers of two millenia envisioned as improvements to this vale of tears makes you yawn, don’t. Think of it as an art show, an opportunity of seeing books at their most glorious, when the printed word was created for the masses (allright, for the many), yet imitating the precious forms of beauty painfully formed by the hands of monk/artists in their cells, who sometimes took years to copy a single text, with illustrations. In this exhibit you will see some of the best early books, incunabula created as copies of illuminated manuscripts, depicting imaginary people, their dwellings, and continents that never existed. Garden of Eden appears in several varieties, including one by Theodore de Bry, better known for his 1590 American Indians, perfect physical specimens with no sagging busoms, who live in an idealized state of nature (although they roast and eat their enemy prisoners);
The search for utopia started with the one that man lost - Adam and Eve’s Paradise - and continued, with Saint Augustine’s City of God, with dreams of the golden Jerusalem ( although there are earlier intimations, in Plato and in Ovid’s Golden Age). The Medieval land of Cocaigne was a poor people’s paradise, with plenty of food and sex, whereas Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia was virtue-dominated. He invented the term, derived from the Greek "a place that never was" (as in topography and topology), An ideal one would be eutopia, and a terrible one distopia - as the ones created by Hitler and Stalin, whose posters proclaimed workers’ paradises, with the "progress" produced by concentration camp and Gulag labor. The exhibits and the films shown on the 3rd Floor provide the graphic evidence (don’t forget to look at the books that warned us, by Upton Sinclair, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell). Then, there are the modern industrial realities, as exemplified by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and photographs of men and machines, the warnings - H.G. Wells and Upton Sinclair - and the withdrawals from main-stream life, see the flower children of the 1960s
Utopia can be fun - think of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver who wakes tied up by the tiny Lilliputs (there is a modern counterpart of an astronaut flat down, surrounded by ant-like space aliens). Swift gave us also the giant Brobdingnagians, the noble horse-like Houyhnhnms whose language has no word for lies and the gross humanYahoos whose language is nothing but lies (what a counterculture name for an information system; did the corporate founders really know what they were doing? That reminds me of the unsuccessful builder, who advertised his houses as Jerry-built.). Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is utopian, as are the several modern imaginary voyages that come to mind (some are hoaxes, such as Walter Traprock, Joan Lowell, the London pretender who invented a Formosn language, none of which are included in this exhibit).
Of great American interest are the early maps, Amerigo Vespucci’s booklet that gave America a name, and the Columbus Letter, Sebastian Munster’s map and the Green Globe of 1506 with its shapely South America, seldom seen in exhibits . Now you have a chance. A striking American example of an Utopian thinker is Thomas Jefferson, who transcribed his original Declaration uf Independence, underlining the passages deleted by his editors, the Second Continental Congress, including a long one condemning slavery. Jefferson characterized their work as mutilation, and sent five hand-copied transcripts to his friends (three have survived). Let the Jeffersonian detractors put that in their pipes and smoke.
Of yet more American interest are the architectural planners of ideal cities - William Penn, who successfully squared off Philadellphia in 1682, and Governor Oglethorpe who did the same with Savannah. Frank Lloyd Wright, the New York grid of 1811, the Washington, DC. diagonals of Pierre L’Enfant, although mentioned in the catalog, are not part of the exhibit. American utopian societies - the Shakers, Mormons and some communities - are represented in the exhibit.
Some 17 institutions, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Donnell branch, China Institute and CUNY are participants in the exhibit consortium. A fine weighty tome, Utopia, The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, price $27.50), edited by the exhibit’s curator, Roland Schaer of the BnF, with Gregory Claeys of the University of London and Lyman Tower Sargent of the University of Missouri, is a veritable cultural history of the European and American experience.
We have found the phrase missing from last week’s column, third paragraph. It reads:
"Room stylists" clean up after you,
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 4:48 AM 
