For anyone who’s spent time watching the news recently, the idea of an earthly utopia probably seems pretty attractive (and entirely out of reach). A land of bucolic plenty, balmy weather, harmonious relationships and no Jacob Rees-Mogg. And if you need a few pointers for what exactly a twenty-first-century urban Arcadia would look like, artist Fiona Tan has come up with her own version.
Titled ‘Elsewhere’, Tan’s 16-minute video makes up the main part of this show at Frith Street Gallery’s Golden Square space. It was created after Tan noticed that people seem to prefer wallowing in the dirty sludge of imaginary dystopias than dreaming up rose-tinted visions of a better world.
The film charts one day, as viewed from the window of the artist’s LA studio, from morning fog dissolving into sunshine through to a nightfall punctuated by winking lights. The scenes are narrated by the type of therapeutically calm voice you’d get on a CBT app. Breathe in for three, out for five, and picture a time where humans live in harmony with nature and all wars have been neatly abolished.
Tan’s aim is to conjure utopia without irony and, without being patronising, there’s a sweet-hearted earnestness to the whole project. But it also ends up revealing the inevitable flimsiness of this type of blue-sky dreaming. At times, it feels too close to a well-meaning Miss World contestant showing her pearly-whites and telling the audience, ‘I just want world peace!’
The more interesting part of the exhibition are three so-called ‘endless’ videos of LA traffic streaming along the nighttime freeway. Red lights, white lights, the river of traffic flows on and on and on and on. Occasionally someone changes lane, normally without any obvious impact on their journey time. Then it carries on and on and on and on and on.
It’s the sort of film you could imagine watching in the milliseconds before having a true existential crisis. Crumpling into a sobbing heap on the gallery floor, fists smacking the concrete at the futility of existence as encapsulated in rush-hour traffic. Because of this, the footage is oddly beautiful. But then, as Tan knows, we always prefer dystopia to utopia.