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Originally Posted by roachboy
martian: there's nothing utopian about that image.
people imagine "utopia" as a state--it wouldn't be, and that isn't a coherent way to think about social reality, either in the present or in the future. if you like the idea of heaven, that'd be a state. our world is process, like it or not.
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Naturally. A utopian state may be depicted, however, even if it is static and therefore unattainable. I think everything one needs to know about the concept of utopia is contained within the etymology of the word.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
the image provides alot of information and there's no reason to go outside it, really. representational pieces like that are self-enclosed and self-enclosing. so you can read off from that material it provides you.
and if you look at the information, the center of the image is not the city and not the museum of rusticity arrayed around the lagoons of god-knows-what that pour out from underneath this city (about which you know nothing except there's some strange affinity for pointy things abroad in it)--it's the pipes.
i read the whole piece from the pipes outward.
the organization of the piece is a series of prompts as to how to read off from it.
if you don't take them into account, then you're not talking about the piece at all.
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You read the whole piece from the pipes outward, but that's not the only way to read it. Or, more accurately, there are different ways of interpreting that. I see the pipes and the underlying body of water as a division, seperating the ultra-technologist image from the simple agrarian one. Given the slightly negative portrayal of the high-tech city, one could read the image as a criticism of the technological advancement at all costs outlook, or as a yearning for a simpler lifestyle. I see both images as ultimately detached from reality, which is of course why I think the word utopia is a fitting description of either. It's notable that there are as many or more people depicted revelling around the bonfire as there are actually working in the lower portion of the image, whereas the upper portion depicts no actual people at all, and thus creates a stately and somewhat forbidding image. Neither one is true-to-life, nor is the piece when taken as a whole.
I think it's a mistake to approach any art as completely self-contained. Not every artist goes to the dadaist extreme of relying on the viewer's interpretation, but all art is inherently subject to some level of interaction with the viewer and therefore somewhat subjective in nature. I'm unwilling to get too involved in a discussion of art appreciation here because I do prefer to stick to the thread's original premise, but at the same time I don't know that we can discuss this work without considering the viewer's position and the validity of subjective interpretation.