Build Utopia

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Build Utopia celebrates the potential for humankind to not only explore or discover, but to create our own structures, meanings - our own reality.

Build Utopia brings together two figures united in their explosive creative zeal, detonating of conventions, and their remarkable cross-discipline exploration. Both William Blake and Sophie Tabeur Arp fearlessly followed their creative muse, placing the power of human imagination and artistic vision at the core of what we experience, who we are and what we can be. 

'Composition With Rectangles, Squares And Set Circles', the artwork in Build Utopia, is just one facet of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s prolificaly impactful (but under-recognized) work across multiple disciplines and major avant-garde art movements of the first half of the 20th Century. The painting's geometric abstractions mark a creative realm beyond worldly representation, where the interplay of form, color and equilibrium become central to the work itself. This kind of abstraction slots into Tauber-Arp's lifelong dedication to Dadaist utopian ideals of changing society by transforming human perception with radicalized aesthetics. It is also an expression of the progressive ideals of Concrete, Constructivist and Geometric art of which she was an active and influential force.

William Blake is often described as a visionary,  a radical, and the greatest ever English artist, or simply the greatest Englishman, to have ever lived. Build Utopia's words are from his work Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion.

They are spoken by Los, the character which represents the artist’s imagination at work in the material world. In the final chapter, Albion (Blake’s embodiment of man or Britain or the Western world) awakens to discover that Los is Christ and Christ is Los. And indeed Blake’s creativity itself embodies Los’ words. Blake created his own mythology and thus possibilities, recasting through the fire of his own creative vision the materials of religion, history, and knowledge surrounding him.

These two extraordinary, fearless creators exemplify the power of human and artistic vision to disrupt, break and ultimately create our material and moral universe. To create ourselves. To Build Utopia.

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The Artwork

Composition with rectangles, squares and set circles

1939

The sophisticated geometric abstractions here reflect a subtle understanding of the interplay between colour and form. Tension and equilibrium exists in the counterbalancing of black/yellow, red/blue, rectangle/square, overlapped with circle grids. This non-human or non-world art reaches towards the infinite, the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Wassily Kandinsky described Taeuber-Arps use of geometric forms as a ‘whisper more expressive, more convincing, more persuasive, than the 'loud voice' that here and there lets itself burst out."

The Artist

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

1889 - 1943

Sophie Taebur-Arp was an artist at the forefront of many of the avant-garde art movements of the last century. Her prolific, pioneering creativity uniquely crossed disciplines. She worked as a textile designer, painter, sculptor, dancer, writer, interior designer, stage set creator, fashion designer, writer, puppet builder and teacher. The language of abstraction, and her focus on destabilizing and re-drawing fixed conceptions and norms unite all her work.

Born in Switzerland in 1889 Taeuber-Arp taught weaving and other textile arts at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (now Zurich University of the Arts) from 1916 to 1929. Her textile and graphic work early in this period along with Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Melevich are among the  earliest constructivist works.

In Zurich she met, and in 1922, married, fellow artist Jean Arp with whom she collaborated with often. Taeubur was friends with celebrated surrealist artist Max Ernst, and a core member of the Zurich Dada movement, centred on Cabaret Voltaire. The movement celebrated the conceptual approach to making art, often involving unorthodox materials used in abstract, unusual compositions.

The Dadaists blamed rational society for the ills of their present day, specifically the brutality of WWI and the 10 million lives it claimed. Absurdity and nonsense were a tool to challenge and subvert established conventions and open up the new. Taeuber-Arp took part in Dada-inspired performances as a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer also designing sets, costumes and puppets. 

Moving to Strasbourg in 1926 Taeuber-Arp received numerous interior design commissions including her creation of the radically Constructivist interior for the Café de l'Aubette along with Jean Arp and the founder of ‘De Stijl’ art, Theo Van Doesburg. It has been described as ‘the Sistine Chapel of abstract art’. 

From the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp lived mainly in Paris and continued experimenting with design, which included her being the first to use polka dots in fine art. She moved with her husband out of Paris ahead of Nazi occupation in 1940 to create an art colony in Vichy but had to flee due to the occupation to Switzerland at the end of 1942. She dies in a sudden tragic accident in early 1943, poisened by carbon monoxide due to a malfunctioning stove at the house of Bauhaus legend Max Bill.

A fitting way to end this brief intro to Sophie Taeuber’s life might be these two quotes. This first is from the titan of abstract art Wassily Kandinsky:

 "Sophie Taeuber-Arp expressed herself by means of the 'colored relief,' especially in the last years of her life, using almost exclusively the simplest forms, geometric forms. The forms, by their sobriety, their silence, their way of being sufficient unto themselves, invite the hand, if it is skillful, to use the language that is suitable to it and which is often only a whisper; but often too the whisper is more expressive, more convincing, more persuasive, than the 'loud voice' that here and there lets itself burst out."

The second comes from the poet Claire Goll:

‘Arp and Sophie discovered the world anew, with new laws, new communicative possibilities [They were] the polar opposite of artists in tortured search of their own individuality, creeping in to a prison so as not to endanger themselves’

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The Words

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

William Blake 1804 - 1820

Build Utopia’s words come from the last of William Blake’s 'prophetic books' Jerusalem, subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion. These remarkable works are etched in handwriting, accompanied by sketches, figures and huge full etching plate illustrations (the lyric to the famous hymn Jerusalem with text by Blake is not connected to this poem. It is in fact taken from the preface to another of Blake's 'prophetic books', Milton.)

The book tells the story of the fall of Albion (a symbol for man, Britain or Western Europe) and then ultimately the fulfillment of his divine potential. The book is the final volume in no less than a private mythology filled with complex symbolism. The derogatory description of Blakes prohetic books as ‘mystical’ in his lifetime has steadily shifted to ‘visionary’ as their value has been recognized.

The words on Build Utopia, spoken by Los (a prophetic artist, who forges a city of art in his furnaces and whom Albion wakens to discover is one and the same thing as Christ...), are a call to arms to the creative spirit. Blake railed against the status quo, establishment and abuse of class power in ways that have become increasingly central to modern progressive ideals.

The Writer

William Blake

1757 - 1827 

London born William Blake was a poet, painter, and printmaker. A visionary who was unappreciated in his time, Blake is now equally celebrated for both his prophetic poetry and his masterful visual artistry.  His highly unique style sets him apart from many of his contemporaries and means he is now considered perhaps the foremost pioneering artist and writer of the Romantic Age. 

Blake lived all but three years of his life in London and in his early teens undertook a seven-year apprenticeship in engraving. During his apprenticeship, he was sent to Westminster Abbey to copy images. It was here that he claims to have experienced religious visions that later developed his artistic style and ideas. Eccentric and completely captivated by the supernatural, Blake was dismissed as a madman by many of his contemporaries. However the mystical undercurrents in both his poetry and his artwork have contributed to his now near universal acclaim.

Blake was a rebel and ahead of his time in many of his progressive political views. Despite being a devout Christian, he despised organised religion. One of his earlier works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is particularly striking for its rejection of the abuse of authority within religion. Blake also abhorred slavery and supported, at least in principal, both the French and American revolutions. Whilst he became disillusioned with their trajectory, ‘replacing monarchy with irresponsible mercantalism’, he retold them allegorically in his poetry. 

His issues with authority may have seemed at odds with his strong religious inclinations, but Blake’s individuality and rebellious nature provided him with his own interpretation of Christianity. He was strongly opposed to the orthodox theology that promoted self-denial and sexual repression and that which excused pain and injustice as part of God’s plan. He believed that adhering to a rigid moral code imposed by authority figures was oppression of the human spirit and wrote in his rejection of abstinence that ‘Desire gratified / Plants fruits of life & beauty there’. His turning away from the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of organised religion is evident throughout his life’s work.

The complex religious and mystical symbolism of Blake’s work gives it a mysterious quality that is both alluring and challenging, even to a modern-day audience. His individual, expressive style means his cultural influence extends far and wide as both a painter and a poet. Literature Professor and critic Edward Larrissy described him as ‘the Romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century.’

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.” 
―  Auguries of Innocence

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” 

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.” ―  Auguries of Innocence

“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” 
― The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.” 

“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation. ”

“What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song? 
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.” 

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

“A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.” 

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.”

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” 

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” 
―  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.” 

“Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.”

“We become what we behold.” 

“When nations grow old the Arts grow cold
And commerce settles on every tree”

“Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.” 
― Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

“Children of the future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime” 

"The intrinsic decorative urge should not be eradicated. It is one of humankind's deep-rooted, primordial urges. Primitive people decorated their implements and cult objects with a desire to beautify and enhance....it is a sense emanating from the urge for perfection and creative accomplishment."

"The wish to produce beautiful things — when that wish is true and profound — falls together with [man's] striving for perfection."

"All around her is the radiance of the sun... She is full of invention, caprice, fantasy. . . . It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity. The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements. The buffoonery of perspective, lighting, and atmosphere is for her hypersensitive nervous system the pretext for drollery full of irony and wit. The figures of her dance are at once mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic."

Hugo Ball, on Taeuber-Arp dancing to his sound poems in 1917

"It is not possible for us to take ourselves back to the exact circumstances of those in a past era, attempting to create art in the style of the past is always inauthentic"

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