ABSTRACT
Quite unexpectedly, the figure of utopia has reappeared across the arts in the past few years, often alongside a renewed sense of empathy, reinvigorated constructive engagement, a reappreciation of narrative and a return to craftswo/manship. In the last decade there have been numerous international exhibitions and symposia, anthologies and monographs reappraising utopia, ranging from a big budget threeyear exhibition program at the Arken Museum in Denmark (2009-2011) to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s popular Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in England (2008), to the controversial performances by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana which call for the realization of a Jewish utopia in Poland (2010-present). Indeed, Obrist, following Immanuel Wallerstein (1998), explicitly called for a return to thinking in terms of utopia, eutopia and utopistics so that we can once again conceive of the future. In this essay, we wish to examine the return of utopia in contemporary art by deliberating on the practices of three artists – David Thorpe (1972, UK), Ragnar Kjartansson (1976, Iceland) and Paula Doepfner (1980, Germany) – within the broader context of post-and metamodernism. We argue that the utopian turn is part and parcel of the shift from postmodernism to metamodernism that took place in the 2000s. Each of our analyses concentrates on one particular aspect to this shift: the discussion of Thorpe’s collages concentrates on the reappropriation of postmodern conventions of intertextuality to create a sense of community; the discussion of Kjartansson’s performances focuses on the adoption of postmodern irony to generate a feeling of sincerity; and the discussion of Doepfner’s installations engages with the use of postmodern melancholy in order to invoke hope.
