Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of stories highlighting the five J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize installations in the Exhibit Columbus exhibition opening with a ticketed gala dinner and preview party Aug. 20 and running through Nov. 28.
Mankind has long daydreamed about finding an idealized vision of a society.
During the upcoming Exhibit Columbus exhibition, local residents and visitors will be able to see art and design pieces collectively called “Alternative Instruments.” Artist and designer Sam Jacob says the installation symbolizes many different layers of utopian visions developed over the past five centuries.
Jacob’s multi-featured exhibition is one of five to be awarded a J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize for this year’s event, which runs from Aug. 20 through Nov. 28. Individual elements include textile banners, backlit signs, neon and even weathervanes along Washington Street, between First and Seventh streets in downtown Columbus.
In the exhibition, the oldest layer of utopian vision goes back to the 15th century during the “European Age of Discovery,” when trade routes were expanded to find new sources of wealth and bring Christianity to new lands.
The first concept of a perfect society is usually credited to the novel “Utopia,” written by Sir Thomas More and published in 1516. The story describes the imaginary island country of Utopia in the New World. It’s a place with no lawyers, good behavior based on openness, communal ownership of property, the education of both sexes and almost complete religious toleration.
Symbols used by Jacob include the measuring chains used by the British to claim territory, followed by references to the nearly one hundred utopian colonies established in the U.S. between the American Revolution and the Civil War. All of these groups, which consisted largely of Europeans, were all attempting to build a radically new type of society, which Jacob says reveals an intellectual impulse that has always flowed through the American experiment.
One effort to build a utopian community specifically cited by Jacob is the small town of New Harmony, Indiana, located on the banks of the Wabash River in Posey County. Founded in 1814 by separatists from the German Lutheran Church, the residents of New Harmony built 180 buildings during the 10 years they resided there. Many are still standing today.
During the Victorian era (1837-1901) in Great Britain, ugly and dilapidated industrial cities that lacked cleanliness, safe housing and sanitation led many in the British Isles to develop their visions of a better world. It was during this period when a utopian society became linked with attributes such as town planning, education and housing, Jacob said.
Several of these 19th Century English concepts seemed to have their origin in Francis Bacon’s 1627 book “New Atlantis.” In Bacon’s vision, a utopian society would be ruled by scientists who will eventually be capable of producing made-to-order weather conditions, provide hydraulic miracle machines, and devise remarkable advances in chemistry and medicine.
One of the most well-known British writers from this era was H.G. Wells, who wrote three different fictional books on utopian societies: “Anticipations” (1901), “Mankind in the Making” (1903), and “A Modern Utopia” (1905).
“Alternative Instruments’ is intended to show that each vision of a utopian society that has developed over the past five centuries had some link or impact on another, the artist said.
“There’s a lot of layers in this project,” Jacob says. “The pieces I’m making have a lot of references, from Thomas More’ to 20th Century modernist architectural designs in Columbus — and all things in-between.”
Concepts and ideology of a utopian society will sometimes manifest permanently in reality. For example, there’s the grid system of streets found in Columbus and most U.S. communities that many take for granted and assume are used throughout the world.
“As someone who comes from England, the grid system strikes me as a very, very different idea of how to organize the world,” Jacob said. “But it is a New World concept of how to better organize a community to benefit humanity.”
Although some of the artwork will be shipped from London to Columbus, Jacob said most of it is being created by an Indianapolis fabricator who is bringing the artist’s visions into reality.
When the design and art work is placed along Washington Street, the overall impact might look like roadside mid-20th Century Americana mixed with medieval symbolism.
Depictions will include a telescope, a hand holding a symbolic heart, a sea monster, a neon skull — and even a backlit version of British sculptor Henry Moore’s “Large Arch” sculpture outside the Bartholomew County Library. You will also see depictions of sailing ships combined with design and architecture from Las Vegas, an online exhibit description states.
As a whole, all of these items represent the ideas, ideologies, dreams and conflicts about Utopia that have developed nationally, internationally and locally, Jacob said.
“I wanted the viewer to feel that these different pieces are communicating with them, but they won’t necessarily be easy to read,” the artist said. “It might make you feel like you have woken up in a foreign country. In doing that, it will allow you to look at familiar settings in a slightly different way.”
It might be easy to get confused by the quilts hung along Washington Street that contain triangles, squares and circles. But it’s not hieroglyphics. They are messages written with the Utopian alphabet published in early editions of “Utopia.”
While most current editions of the book don’t have it, there are online translations of the Utopian alphabet that will allow local residents to decode Jacob’s messages. It has already been revealed that one message contains a reference about artist Robert Indiana.
When Columbus businessman and philanthropist J. Irwin Miller began to make his hometown what many describe as an architectural mecca, there was a popular mid-20th Century idea that well-designed buildings and artwork can ultimately create a better quality of life for its residents.
But while many people interpret the word “utopia” to mean “good place,” scholars believe Thomas More’s definition was “no place.” A good deal of More’s book is satire, with much of it modeled on exaggerated accounts of European voyages, Jacob said. The book eventually concludes there can never be a real utopia because whenever imperfect humans try to reach perfection, they fail.
That’s one reason why “Alternative Instruments” attempts to respond to Columbus as a site, a place, and a history — but also as fiction, Jacob said.
