No Go Home

The group exhibition is organized by Los Angeles-based writer Jan Tumlir around the work of Clark Richert, whom the Gildar Gallery represents. Richert, a founding member of the dome-housed commune Drop City in the mid-sixties, once occupied the far-flung epicenter of the radical counterculture. In contrast, the other six artists featured alongside him were born between the years of 1963 and 1976, and therefore would have arrived to the drop-out party at once too early and too late. Their various contributions to the show evidence an attempt to work through this event, a decisive moment at which none were fully present but that is later understood as foundational. This entails a series of movements backward and forward in time, activating the lingering strains of heroic modernity within our postmodern moment across the dividing line of the first “generation gap” to be identified as such.

No Go Home, the title of this exhibition, invokes the call to adventure of the modern barbarian. This is the one who forsakes all tradition, the “destructive character” that Walter Benjamin analyzed in his 1931 essay of the same name. “The destructive character,” he writes, “knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.” This is for Benjamin a “cheerful” enterprise “because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.” The cozy precincts of an overstuffed domesticity are here opposed on principle; for the destructive character, they constitute a no-go zone. But those words of blunt refusal also belong to his much younger and as yet un-socialized counterpart: the child throwing a fit at Disneyland, let’s say. Whereas the utopias of modernism took shape upon the tabula rasa of a negated old world, the ones that follow are increasingly products of consumer choice, an ever-expanding array of pre-set styling options that may be combined in any way we see fit. The youth cultures of the sixties would seem to be antithetical to either end of this equation, but they can also be seen as guiding the transition between them.

The youth cultures of the sixties would seem to be antithetical to either end of this equation, but they can also be seen as guiding the transition between them. In the cultural imaginary, Drop City might now be situated somewhere between the glass house and the magic castle, a functionalist phantasmagoria. Looking back, we can see how sixties ideals of dematerialization, minimal living, anti-capitalism, and nomadism have been factored into our current “design for life.” Once radical proposals oriented toward reducing one’s participation in the economy as a producer and consumer of goods and services are routinely coopted by the “green industries.” Claims of non-ownership or communal ownership are status quo on the Internet. The borderline between work and leisure, and perhaps more significantly between anti-employment and non-compensated labor, grows increasingly vague. The commune finds its new home in the corporate offices of Google and Apple, where the workforce is also encouraged to eat, sleep and play on premises. Global outreach is an indispensible part of maintaining a local profile. Moreover, in regard to both material and informational commodities, the element of bricolage so integral of Drop City is irrefutably asserted: we are all scavengers and recyclers of a readymade world.  

However, this is not to suggest that there is nothing new under the sun. As the counter-cultural initiatives of the hippie vanguard are converted into a range of pragmatic solutions in architecture, product design and communications, attention is drawn toward those aspects of it that remain un-assimilative: parody, travesty, caricature, absurdism. These terms have to be renegotiated from the current perspective, which is post-ideological and/or post-idealistic. The works that comprise this exhibition take leave of the utopian horizon in favor of the heterotopia, an idiosyncratic and carnivalesque upending of the existing “world order.”