“Utopia/Dystopia”

With over one hundred photo and photomontage works from the past 150 years assembled in a single room, “Utopia/Dystopia,” taken as a whole, is as much a study in jarring ruptures and envisioned continuities as the images and objects displayed are. The Kunstkammer-like installation ranges across modern political aspirations and private reverie, as well as their darker complements, in various cut-and-paste styles. The cartoonish critique of John Heartfield’s rotogravure German Natural History, published August 16, 1934, in the magazine AIZ, in which the heads of Weimar Republic leaders are superimposed over metamorphosing pupae, meets the Surrealist cinematic beauty of Toshiko Okanoue’s little-shown collages like Falling, 1956, in which a headless female torso parachutes through the open floor of a rat-infested locker room to a cityscape below. Rare archival documents, such as Esaki Reiji’s proto-Photoshop advertisement of a multitude of infants, Collage of Babies, 1893, mix with contemporary fantasies like Josh Bernstein’s triptych After Four Days, 2011, a reimagining of imperiled Gulf Coast conquistador Cabeza de Vaca through mixed-media self-portraiture.

The unabashedly synthetic approach, both on the level of the exhibition and the individual works, emphasizes the paradox of separating utopian and dystopian vision. Often the difference is a matter of (historical) perspective or mutually dependent proximity. Throughout the exhibition, the promise to remake the world is never far from the threat of undoing it, and often these impulses appear, juxtaposed, in the same work. The timely inclusion of Arata Isozaki’s ink, gouache, and gelatin silver print Re-ruined Hiroshima, project, Hiroshima, Japan, Perspective, 1968, shows haunting remedial architectural constructions that simultaneously seem to emerge from and return to a postnuclear Japanese landscape. Even the most idyllic views, such as Joel Lederer’s digital compositing of Second Life greenery in the ink-jet print 200804012143, 2009, take on cautionary undertones in the close company of other images that reveal, and perhaps once helped conceal, tragic realities.