Call of the Wild

Almost everybody’s had a Greta Garbo moment, a sudden, sharp-elbowed desire to be alone. When life harasses us or hurts us or fails to live up to our expectations, solitude provides solace, the opportunity to lick our wounds or tend to thoughts that, although they belong to us, have become thin and strange through neglect. And yet, for all our yearnings for splendid isolation, it is an impossible dream. The way of the world, its interconnectedness and dangers, means that to maintain our apartness (or its pale copy) we must share it with others. Perhaps the best policy, then, is to take shelter among like minds and hearts. If those nearest to you think and feel as you do, reality clamours a little less, and (when the sun is shining or when you’re lost in music) you may almost convince yourself that you live in a serene universe of one.
Not all of us can afford this fantasy. Diplomats can’t (imagine the diplomatic incidents), nor can politicians, policemen, poets or anybody whose life is lived in the force field of difference that fizzes and crackles between one person and another. It’s pretty common, though, to want things we can’t have, even though this wanting causes us pain. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Fears in Solitude, Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion’ opens with a description of ‘a green and silent spot’ inhabited by a man (Coleridge himself?) who ‘would full fain preserve / His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel / For all his human brethren’. Fearing a French invasion of Britain, he at first identifies it as divine retribution for the nation’s ‘vices’: its blood-soaked empire-building, its liberty-inhibiting bureaucracy, its worship of wealth and war. We might almost read this list as a Romantic manifesto in negative, were it not for the protagonist’s shift in gear half-way through the poem, when (having totted up the horrors an invasion might visit on Britain) he comes out in favour of tossing France’s forces back into ‘the insulted ocean’ should they attack. It’s tempting, of course, to interpret this as an example of the well-rehearsed political journey between dovish-ness and hawkish-ness, or even liberalism and conservatism, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Rather, having implored the British to repent ‘of the wrongs with which we stung / So fierce a foe to frenzy’, the protagonist returns to his verdant privacy, where he hopes, perhaps against hope, that his ‘filial fears’ will ‘pass like the gust’. Coleridge’s poem is, in the end, about how difficult it is to isolate oneself, to find peace on a peace-less planet.
If ‘Fears in Solitude’ speaks to contemporary geo-political events (and it should), its protagonist’s position speaks to the work of David Thorpe, whose collages seem stuck on the horns of the world and its dilemmas, gouging themselves more deeply with every attempt they make to pull themselves off. Since 2000 Thorpe’s work has been preoccupied with representing the architecture of a fantasy separatist community which inhabits a wilderness that, with its pines, peaks and vast skies, might be located in some epically unspoilt corner of North America. The buildings here hover somewhere between sci-fi slickness and the rough stuff of craft, resembling wooden rocket ships (Life is Splendid, 2000), five pointed-stars (Evolution Now, 2000–1) or pebble-dashed, all-seeing eyes (House for Auto-Destiny, Imaginative Research, 2000). Sometimes groups of tiny figures stand in front of these structures, holding hands or raising them heavenwards in what might be an act of worship or a well-regimented workout routine. Looking at these pieces, they appear steeped in Utopias and Utopian thought spaces, whether real or imagined, or claimed by left or right: the writings of Gerard Winstanley and William Morris, the American landscape as painted by the Hudson Bay School and the myth of Manifest Destiny, the Michigan Militia and David Koresh’s compound at Waco, the music of Sun Ra and the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff and the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (1983). Art, though, should always be more than a box in which to put a bunch of contrary objects or notions, and what’s interesting about Thorpe’s work isn’t so much its theme (right now the concept of Utopia, in the art world at least, has all the buzz of a sleep-deprived wasp) as how that theme rubs up against the way his works are thought through and made.
Key here is Thorpe’s method. Although in reproduction, or at a distance, his collages resemble paintings or pencil-crayoned drawings (they have featured in the surveys ‘Edge of the Real: A Painting Show’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and ‘Drawing Now: Eight Propositions’ at MoMA, New York, but never, oddly, in a show concerned with collage), when one gets up close and personal with them, they atomize into beautiful, painstakingly
applied compilations of scalpelled paper, dried bark and flora, mass-produced jewellery, slate, modeller’s wood, oxidized glass, net curtain, pebbles and Play-Doh. Thought about for a moment, the business of their making is very different from that of painting or drawing. There is no romance in collage, no semi-mystical relationship between mind and hand. Instead, the medium offers drab, farm- or factory-worker labour, with one’s freedom restricted to how one reorders pre-existing fragments of reality, and what meanings one maps onto them. In this, and in its solitariness, Thorpe’s practice echoes the central problem faced by the founders of separatist communities, namely that, however much one wants or needs to start over, the old world lingers like a tender, stubborn bruise.
While Thorpe’s community is a fantasy, it’s one that’s curiously fuzzy at the edges. Although it has a logo (the pentagram) and a set of wistful, allusive hymns (published in the artist’s 2003 book A Rendezvous with My Friends of Liberty), it has no name, and we’re given little or no clue as to its belief system, customs, culture or political or economic structures. Compared with, say, J.R.R Tolkien’s encyclopaedically itemized Middle Earth, or even the mise-en-scène of the average Saturday morning cartoon, Thorpe’s Eden is low on believability-upping, Boy’s Own-style detail. This lack of specifics, though, is important and holds out its own form of freedom. By never giving us a firm place to stand within his fiction, the artist allows us to recognize it as a fiction, not a space to retreat to but one in which we might worry away at real-world questions about art, the social contract and what it means to be alone. Perhaps the best example of this raggedy myth-making is ‘The Colonist’, a 2004 show at Tate Britain in which Thorpe’s fantasy broke free of the bounds of the collaged two-dimensional surface and stepped, a little confused as to what it now was, into three-dimensional life.
Hung on the walls of Tate Britain’s Art Now space, the collaged works in ‘The Colonist’ were heavy with fantasy architecture and grey, snow-full skies. In History is Nothing, the World is Nothing. Our Love Can Make Us Clean (2004) what might be a meeting-house or banqueting hall sits high in a mountain fastness. Windowless, it refuses to acknowledge anything beyond its own thick-timbered walls, just as it refuses to give away the secrets they conceal. Perhaps what lies behind the beams are objects such as Eternity and Resistance (2004), a torpedo-shaped, leather-strapped sculpture-cum-buoyancy-aid-cum-mini-totem-pole, or The White Brotherhood (2004), a sloping, triangular construction of wood and glass sprigged with a sharp, bowed dowel that was somewhere between an architectural model, an objet d’art and a weapon, or even The Protecting Army I–V (2004), five dark wooden screens, set here and there with frosted windows, that divided up Thorpe’s exhibition space, providing (importantly) points of entry and resistance, penetration and privacy.
The ambiguity of these objects, however, coupled with their knowingly provocative titles, makes them more than simply fantasy furniture or faux anthropological deposits. Rather, they’re fraught clusters of material, fed up with life as it is and yet confused as to what they might like life to be. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what most artworks are: appeals for purity, separateness and thinking space, laced with a fear of loneliness and a half-formed idea that, out there in the world, they might do something a lot like good.