Reflections on Utopia: Paper Mag

Reflections on Utopia: Paper Mag

Rob Gorski and Andrew Ranville
May 2015

Rabbit Island is featured alongside four other “American Utopias” in the April 2015 issue of the art and culture magazine Paper.

“Utopians are a diverse bunch,” the story begins. “There’s little agreement to be found across the broad landscape of individuals striving to transform society, save for two important factors. First, don’t call them utopians; most of them hate that. Second and more important is the consensus that society is fundamentally–but not irreparably–broken.”

On both points we agree.

Brian Heater, the author, goes on to describe the island’s wilderness character, the Rabbit Island Artist Residency, and some of the project’s cultural spinoffs.

After some hesitation and strong discouragement from concerned friends, Gorski [Rabbit Island’s owner and co-founder] purchased the 91-acre swoosh of forest–located in Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area–deeming it the perfect laboratory for some high-minded concepts regarding land development, society and art. The island became the namesake for the Rabbit Island Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to rethinking development. As a Manhattanite, the notion of continual subdivision is particularly troublesome to Gorski. He handily refers to Rabbit Island’s driving principle as “Conservation 2.0: the marriage of the Google map with Kickstarter and the Nature Conservancy.” Gorski asserts that technologies like satellite mapping and online crowdsourcing efforts, when combined with lessons learned from generations of land mismanagement, can lead to better models for land usage. … “I think that’s a microcosm for all the decisions that we should be making in our daily lives. What am I going to do today? What am I going to make today? What am I going to sell today? What am I going to buy today? And whatever I choose to do, how am I not going to fuck up everything around me?”

The issue’s cover feature, Kanye West, in his free-flowing take on the American Dream, contributes, “I believe awesome is possible and I believe that beauty is important. When I say ‘beauty,’ what’s your current definition of beauty? When I think beauty, I think of an untouched forest, only created by God’s hand.”

We agree here as well. Save the part about God as used in this context, of course.

However, this highlights some contradictions relative to artistic success in our culture that we believe are worth discussing. Many of the artists regularly featured in magazines such as Paper, elsewhere in popular culture, and in contemporary museum culture, have been graced with various degrees of celebrity as a result of stylish and/or important ideas they have conceived and brought into the world. However, the popularly accepted metrics of what is stylish and important–a phrase used here to signify that which is celebrated by critics, curators, and other cultural arbiters–have historically been dissociated from a thoughtful and holistic understanding of the physical world.

An interesting circle has been traditionally created: New Creative Idea. Fans. Celebrity. Success. Magazines. Museums. Repeat. Rarely in these progressions to artistic and societal success are references to ecology. Of course there have been celebrated and poignant examples of artworks engaging with ecological concerns in the last half decade or more, even those considered social before “social practice” was the art world’s stratégie du jour. Presently, it stands to reason that the hyper-connected and hyper-recycled creation and consumption of culture results in a danger of missing the truly profound. How is it that we can be so connected but still so detached, our feet rarely touching the soil, both literally and figuratively? Magazines like Paper might highlight celebrity inanity as much as thoughtful projects embedded in dirt and trees; but both now exist most readily on an Instagram feed, living and dying in influence and audience as the minutes pass. It appears participants in both camps universally value intact nature for what it is—as Kanye evidently does—regardless of whether their creations were working for or against it universally. It is an odd juxtaposition.

If many popular artists were to ask themselves the following question, what would their responses be?

Does your work positively influence the intelligent organization of our natural world in absolute terms? Does your work help in any way to mitigate the mistakes of cultural and environmental history we have inherited?

Modern understanding of our natural reality, as well as our cause-and-effect relationship to it, dictates a new ethical perspective. We must consider this when acting creatively, lest we risk acting selfishly in the absolute. A filter of modern knowledge needs to be placed between the classic spark of imagination and the contemporary execution of work. Until recently the making of art relied solely on the historical standards handed to us by tradition, experience, and education. From our new point of view, however, art history might be reviewed and re-ordered, and might lead to considerable reshuffling of what is actually considered important. God forbid one day $179.4 million dollars gets spent on re-furbishing an ecosystem, as an act of conscientious creation, rather than at an auction uptown.

In the end, of course, we can choose to do whatever we like creatively while presently limited only by what markets and laws will bear. We suggest, moving forward, that we should necessarily be judged according to a holistic understanding of ecological reality. If it is not artists pushing into this space, then who? 

Revisionist history can only move so far into the present, with the evasive phrase “if we only knew then what we know now” falling flat in light of real-time understanding of global concerns. Neither artist nor politician can sidestep climate change, or food and energy shortages. Additionally, if we are forever contextualizing our work to important works and cultural moments of the past—a standard that auction houses and museums tend to value that lacks basic ecological and geo-spatial understanding—are we not bound to continually applaud ideas that don’t quite reach the level of true relevance in our own time? 

We believe that new understanding of reality delineates new ethics within that reality. New work shouldn’t be defined by old ethics, nor by a limited understanding of natural reality, regardless of how entrenched this may be in our historical tradition. At some point we have to cut the cord. We need a new vantage point. We need a new set of rules.

Today, becoming a relevant artist is harder than in past times given the need to account for so much new and conflicting information, yet this is what is demanded of us. An artist, it is said, is meaningful to their time when they successfully express the undercurrents that shape their time. In the past it was the norm that one needed only to create something aesthetically beautiful, or brilliant, yet without account for its environmental cost, in order to inspire applause. In our time material ignorance is losing acceptance as evidenced by degree shows; headlines in major newspapers; and most importantly, the feeling we all carry around in our subconsciousness. The elements that make up the mediums used to bring an artwork to fruition are not decentralized, but rather finite nodes in our ecological reality. Each piece of plaster, pigment, celluloid, and circuit connects back to the physical world. And our comprehension of that world is expanding. The last twenty years have seen the dawn of the Internet, daily satellite perspectives of the world, concise understanding of watershed ecology, genetic understanding, migration patterns, and so forth. Our spectrum is much wider than it was in the 20th century. Our art must be too. 

Perhaps this then signifies an end to the pre-conscious era of creation, where action without fundamental ecologic accountability was acceptable. As the spectrum widens and our understanding grows, should this not recalibrate old metrics related to perceiving and making art? Should not our conscience change to reflect the natural realities that we now understand to be true? Meaningful creativity is not impossible in this context, but it does require a new capacity for critical thinking relative to the beliefs, opinions and observations written above.

This is the premise of Rabbit Island. Our project is not “utopian,” as Paper suggested. It is simply rooted in an honest take on the modern world. It is an attempt to address cultural inconsistencies using creativity and reason. When finished—if it can ever be considered finished—our project will leave many more acres of forest organized sensibly and protected than when we started, in addition to the ideas we project outwardly from the experience. This absolute natural outcome could be looked upon by posterity as the most important thing that we will have created as a community, perhaps. Or perhaps we will have helped create a sensible cultural vernacular to move forward with. Regardless, our project is not afraid to call spades spades, especially in relation to the need for art to be coupled to ecology, and to be held responsible in absolute terms. Art, after all, is the purest form of creation, and thus serves fittingly as a symbol for all human constructions.

Satellites, Islands, and Ethics

The Newest Rabbit Island Google Photo: Notes on Satellites, Islands, and Ethics

Rob Gorski
March 2014

Recently Google uploaded a new satellite image of Rabbit Island. It is an amazing shot. From a camera fixed in orbit 423 miles above our planet you are able to discern features that, until recently, you needed a wetsuit and goggles to see. In amazing detail, you can see, 25 feet under Lake Superior’s surface, the island’s stone reefs. Off the northern tip you can see Moon Break (first surfed in July of 2013 by Ben Moon and Rob Gorski), a right break that forms when north winds blow from between Louis Point and Bete Gris farther up the Keweenaw Peninsula. Off the southeast point, you can see a shallow underwater sandstone ledge that creates breaking waves given an east or northeast blow greater than 20 knots. Those waves build over several hundred miles of fetch from Canada, crash over Rabbit Island, and then flatten again when the depth drops to a deeper blue. With our 13-foot Boston Whaler we’ve surfed some of those waves, too. If you look more closely in the shallows, you can see shoals that native Lake Superior Redfin Trout use for spawning. These shoals are made of layers of head-sized rocks, the result of more than ten-thousand freeze-thaw cycles splitting apart Jacobsville sandstone as it rises to form the island. According to fishermen we’ve bumped into in Calumet, on clear, calm days late in the year you can see trout spawning in these shallows, and when scared by a boat, scurrying between stones, hiding in the many nooks. 

Up out of the water you can see the white cobble shoreline, and inside it a dense, green forest canopy. If you look more closely, you can also see individual mature trees, including several we’ve climbed. Off of the southwest point, you can see a dead and weathered deciduous tree that the island’s eagles frequently perch in. On the southern shore you can see a large white pine that toppled in 2012, and which, though partially submerged, has survived two seasons of ice and waves. We call it Big Leanie. On the northwestern shore, you can see the new shelter we began building in 2013—and you can see the roof on it, which we finished on August 10th. A quarter mile south, there’s main camp. The Rabbit Island School camped in the pines there from August 11th through the 17th, but none of their tents are in the satellite image. Four miles to the west, in Rabbit Bay, you can see the small harbor at the mouth of Lahiti Creek where Sisu, our Montauk 17, and our 13-foot Sport, rest on the southern dock. We pulled the boats out of the water on September 15th. By then, leaves were turning yellow, yet there’s no hint of yellow in the image. Taking this into account we estimate that Google shot this photo between August 18th and September 13th, 2013.

All told it is fascinating to consider how this small remote wilderness has now been archived. It is indeed an interesting time to be an environmentalist, and also an artist. Possibilities are certainly changing.

Scrolling around it is interesting to study this image of an ecosystem viewed in its geographic whole and reflect on the overarching idea that everything rising here above lake level will remain, so long as American contract law is valid, unimpeded forever. The island is 91 acres, of course—a mere speck on the scale of a region, state, country or continent—yet in the context of our culture this land and this image represent ideas that we believe are broadly relevant: intentional non-development, the assignment of value to intact watersheds, incorporation of non-financial environmental costs on balance sheets, restraint, community involvement in conservation, wise legislation, honest scientific inquiry, creative expression, the celebration of the natural rules of the game, rational reclamation, etc. The very fact that such satellite imagery of our planet exists changes the ethical fundamentals that every generation going forward must apply to land use.

Giving a voice to these ideas within our culture is one of the goals of the Rabbit Island project. Encouraging others to pursue similar projects is another. Contextualizing land to creative energy in plain terms is a third. Accordingly, it is logical to wonder whether the concept of this image—of this watershed, of those uncut trees—can ever be recreated on a larger, organized scale, and projected upon land where ecosystem integrity had previously been lost to subdivision. (A related essay exploring this can be found here.) We believe that such ideas must necessarily become part of our culture. As the ability of society to reasonably organize itself sustainably continues to progress we believe that wilderness, like art, will continually be seen as evidence of a civilized people, and, as a corollary, that a civilized people will become capable of creating the conditions necessary for sensible organization of environments on a larger scale than the individual. Wilderness, where it exists, after all, exemplifies civilization in our modern world. 

As the snow accumulates on Rabbit Island and the ice on the shore thickens, we’re preparing for our 2014 Artists-in-Residence. Others are working on a handful of independent projects, continuing various scientific experiments, readying the second annual Rabbit Island School, and seeking the IRS accreditation of the 501(c)(3) Rabbit Island Foundation, a professionally-managed, crowdsourced, conservation fund. Still others are reporting last year’s artist activity, and—we’re crossing our fingers here—planning a fishing derby in late July. Summer’s coming, and it’s exciting as ever.

There is No Antonym for Subdivision

There is No Antonym for Subdivision

Rob Gorski
2012

The English language does not have a fitting opposite the word subdivide, strangely. Combine, reconstitute, aggregate, multiply, unite and others come close, but none serve as antonyms in the context we use subdivision and none are closely related to economic principles underlying the way we subdivide. This nuance within our language signifies a subtle but very large cultural theme underlying almost everything else that we undertake as individuals and as a society. With the benefit of modern data aggregation and visualization it is clear that we have had many irrational blind spots in our historical land use patterns. How we arrived at the satellite images of today from a native environment that existed only a few centuries ago is fascinating. Rabbit Island adds relief to this idea by offering well-controlled exhibition within finite borders. Rabbit Island is a rare gem—an undivided parcel that has escaped the normative pattern of subdivision.

In the 1400’s America welcomed its first European settlers and small sections of forest were cleared and settled. The whole of the continent thus suffered its first cuts. Over the next several generations these initial events evolved slowly into the divided parcels we have today and the acts themselves become, perhaps, the enduring metaphor for the larger American settlement experience. Purchase, profit, divide, repeat… a way of life goes on and on, though never in reverse. An abundance of forest has been swapped for an abundance of subdivision.

Conservation was a relatively late idea in the context of America’s history (it wasn’t until 1872 that the first national park was created) and today the commodification of remaining developable land around the remaining open spaces continues and new, ever-smaller lines in the land map books continue to be drawn. This change plods along so slowly as to hardly be perceptible from within the daily routine, but lots and parcels are continually marketed and cut into sections, acres, portions of acres, square feet, etc. Final lines are being drawn. Get yours while you still can, the cry of real estate agent goes. Prices only go up. Supply will never change. The system will never move in reverse.

I protest this idea. The fact that subdivision happened and continues to happen with such binary imbalance in winner-take-all fashion, and that land is then taken off the table, is, on a fundamental level, uncivilized. As it currently stands one of two things generally happens to land within the framework of our cultural practice: 1) conservation gets to a parcel of land first and locks it in, or, 2) subdivision gets first crack and development progresses without regard for collective ideas and smaller units of land are ever-passed to successive generations. The larger picture on the map only becomes more polarized as time horizons are extrapolated further into the future. This binary historical example has obvious limitations that are in conflict with contemporary understanding. In a civilization that no longer has the luxury of new frontier, it is only logical that recycling of existing land, in a manner consistent with reason and scientific advance, becomes a basic requirement for maintaining civilization. Yet thus far in our history this has not been conceived on an organized scale. It doesn’t even appear to be part of any serious conversation. Our society’s founding documents and legal precedents were, after all, conceived in a time flush with frontier. Foresight apparently has its limits.

It is clear that very little opportunity for parcelization and road access has been missed and open space in America has suffered a death by a thousand cuts, leaving only remnants of land. Development has most certainly won a lopsided victory over conservation in the binary American historical experience. Only about 30% of land is set aside in programs for the public intended to retain or celebrate broad stretches of natural function. Of this allotment the vast majority is unevenly distributed in western states and Alaska, and, more specifically, concentrated in areas of uneven terrain (mountains), areas containing an excess of water (everglades), areas without enough water (deserts), or regions having inclement weather patterns (far northern latitudes). If you scroll across the country from the perspective of a Google satellite it becomes evident that there is not a single area of ecologically important scale that does not fall under one of these categories that has been given pardon from development.

As a result “locavorism” with respect to visiting intact natural ecosystems is not possible for the majority of the population in our country. Thus, a divide is formed whereby cultural institutions primarily benefit those living proximate to urban civilization while intact wilderness areas, northern forests, southern swamps and southwestern deserts serve mainly the relatively light population density surrounding them. In very few places do the two ideas exist reasonably adjacent to one another and almost nowhere has nature been celebrated simply because it is nature without a caveat. Rabbit Island can perhaps claim a cold winter for receiving pardon from historical development, though the fact that it was given reprieve at all at this point in history is amazing.

Empirically the evidence of land division is striking and what has been lost in most places east of the Rockies or in states without long winters is profound: anything involving systems, ideas, or populations that cross individual property lines, migrations, salmon runs, climax forest communities, apex predators, clean rivers, expansive views, dark night skies and stars, the fundamental experience of uninterrupted nature, etc. Certainly we value these things and our heritage is founded on them, yet, peculiarly, there is no organized mechanism to un-divide land hundreds of years after we started cutting it up. Why is this? This is a big question for society and perhaps—and in all seriousness—is on equal footing with the big questions of previous generations: Why were women not allowed to vote? Why were unions allowed when before there were none? Why was Medicare created? Why were black children and white children assigned different schools? In hindsight it appears absurd, of course, that there were times when such unjust disparities went without recognition. So too does it seem absurd that society has no way to un-divide land on an ecological scale with the intention of giving people reasonable access to the fundamental rules that nature provides. Will the next several hundred years of American experience witness a continuation of the historical example of subdivision or will the pendulum swing in a new direction given our collective understanding that now spans from DNA to Google Earth? It seems an obvious inference to suggest that something must change. This is not to say that civilization should move in reverse or that technology should be shunned, but simply that it would be an advancement if nature and the urban environment were organized more rationally so as to maintain a full spectrum of experience including the untouched, the gridded and everything in between—on a more local level. A mechanism for this does not exist. Herein lies vast potential for things to be organized more intentionally for the benefit of all.

Our predecessors have subdivided relentlessly and our system is set-up only to continue this. Apart from the few sparks of genius, foresight and political will that popped up along the way (national parks, national forest system, private preservation, etc.) as we moved westward from Plymouth Rock our modern maps illustrate the unintended consequence of our development heritage. It is striking in aggregate.

Land is generally purchased on an open market with two motivating premises: development and profit. Historically these ideas have manifested themselves in various forms of subdivision and parcelization. (Think of a farm that was nearby when you were a kid that was bought and turned into a subdivision, or the brownstone single family house that was purchased and renovated into several one bedroom apartments, or even the field and forest that was there before the row of brownstones even existed. Consider the island of Manhattan—the ultimate example of land use study—sold to Peter Minuit in 1626 by the Lenape tribe to manifest itself as smaller and smaller subunits of private property over time). The common thread in all of these transactions of property is that the effect on the integrity of the land is never part of the bottom line. And the process rarely moves in reverse. In the end because of our society’s individual liberty and participation in a market that does not fully value the costs of development we have had the freedom to historically subdivide without the requirement of foresight. When these subdivisions are summed we see that there are significant unintended consequences: namely, there isn’t very much land left that isn’t subdivided. Collectively this limits opportunity for citizens to observe intact open spaces that resemble whatsoever their historical baseline, especially near population centers. Indeed this is an odd and ironic historical loophole in the code of American ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’.

Subdivision is, of course, against everything that Rabbit Island stands for. Rabbit Island will never be subdivided and the miracle that Rabbit Island remained unsubdivided and unlumbered when it was purchased in 2010 is its most remarkable feature.

The native environment of Rabbit Island juxtaposed to contemporary society is intriguing because the island retains rare fundamentals that can figuratively represent many parts of life (arts, civil discourse, sciences, food, culture, conservation, reclamation, government), and its intact, natural purity and strict isolation make it a unique location to illustrate contrasts.  The human mind is generally drawn to things organized well and the fact that Rabbit Island is 90 undeveloped acres is the middle of a lake makes it very different from 90 acres in the countryside surrounded by roads, subdivisions and farms, etc.  It is also very different from 90 acres surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness within a vastly larger national park. It is circumscribed and thus very tangible to the human mind. This isolation doesn’t allow “cheating” when experimenting with sustainability projects and stands as a simple analogy upon which one can attempt to tip some of society’s conclusions upside down.

In the end the island leads to the question “what if things were different” and challenges one to act on this. This underlying theme is admittedly very much a work in progress and each person who visits the island will potentially interpret this idea very differently, though hopefully in time a concrete set of observations and rules can come of the overall experience.  The Rabbit Island concept leads one to attempt to synthesize the world in some sort of fundamental order.  Further, it forces one to assign values and pass judgments regarding larger society—a society which has, in many senses, already played its cards and passed its own judgments (for better or worse).  It inspires ideas related to medicine, naturalist thought, the suburbs, what is considered classic, what is considered art, etc.

Overall, in life art plays a significant role, but it is not in and of itself encompassing. The same is true of activity on the island—politics, policy, finance, society, etc. All maintain relevance—albeit from a perspective founded in the baseline of wilderness/frontier. Wilderness, after all, is said to hold the answers to questions we as a society have not yet learned to ask.

Perhaps then Rabbit Island’s highest intention is to serve as a symbol of the larger society rather than solely as a studio for an artist or group of artists singularly. In that sense the entire project becomes a work of art.


Image: ‘All Streets’ by 3rd Floor at Fathom.