Test Site No. 5: Undoing
This work was created as a site-specific performance at the Hatchery, the site of former alternative communities. The piece, as well as the larger exhibition surrounding it, engaged with ideas surrounding the actualization of utopian ideals. Throughout human history, the desire for improved methods of being in the world has driven visionary leaders to propose ideal models for society. The exhibition aimed to examine the complexities and difficulties that occur when these utopian social plans move from the idealized space of the proposal to actualization in the world.
The project was created for the site-specific exhibition God Will Not Have His Work Made Manifest By Cowards, presented at The Hatchery, Badger, CA on October 12, 2014, curated by Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg.
The impetus for this exhibition stems from a physical site of recurring alternative societies – The Hatchery, located near the small town of Badger in Central California. The Hatchery first gained notoriety as the home of Synanon, a California-based self-help movement turned authoritarian religious cult that rose to prominence in the 1960s and 70s. After Synanon’s collapse, the abandoned Hatchery compound was converted into an Islamic community and school called Baladullah. Formed as a haven for Muslim families to escape the poverty and conflict experienced in larger cities, the Baladullah community fell to rumors of terrorist activity and anti-Islamic sentiment shortly after September 11, 2001.
The paired narratives of Synanon and Baladullah – from their idealistic origins, through their eventual collapses – serve as case studies of the difficulties of actualizing utopian societal alternatives. This exhibition includes works by artists that form connections to the three distinct phases of Synanon’s utopian model – from the personal utopia of self-help, to the communal utopia of an alternative social structure, to its final, universalized iteration as a totalitarian religion. The title of the exhibition – God Will Not Have His Work Made Manifest By Cowards – comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” a text which served as a cornerstone of Synanon’s philosophy. It points toward the intersections of personal effort, social enforcement, and divine authority which underlie most utopian experiments. The artists in this exhibition create works that address and investigate these attempts in their various individual, political and esoteric implications.
This exhibition will take place in two phases. First, a selection of performance pieces developed in connection to the Hatchery site will be shown in a public event at the Hatchery in Badger, CA on Sunday, October 12, 2014. The second portion of the show will be exhibited online at Light and Wire Gallery in November 2014, including the work created on site presented alongside works by visual artists and writers exploring the complexities that come with actualizing utopian ideals.