Utopian Dreams: Threshold festival's visual arts programme

Maybe it’s because we’re presented with countless retrospectives, reunion tours, ‘it wasn’t as good as the old days’ narratives and vintage culture that we perhaps don’t have much time to really think about the future. Maybe it’s because we’re still very much entrenched in crisis that fixing the present is much more urgent. Instead of investment, we’re faced with cuts, reductions, and regression, while culture is still too concerned with revivals of revivals, ironic takes on formerly revered forms. But sometime not too long ago the future was ours, bright and amorphous. It was where science made leaps and bounds and asked questions, as did art and social reform; and governments put money and faith into programs that were specifically designed for the betterment of society.

When did it all change? It has been argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall, and communism as a very real threat to Western capitalism, meant that history was finished – 'history' meaning the struggle to arrive at the complete, good society – and we thought we had found the answer in liberal democracy and free, libidinous markets. The consequent decade was a victory lap for globalisation, and there was no rival to compete with the West ideologically, culturally or scientifically. The complacency of capitalism meant progressivism in science and arts did not matter, and government support waned accordingly. Dreams of flying cars, perfectly designed metropolises, food pills and subservient robots are now filed into the ‘failed future’ drawer.

Like most trends and styles from the 20th century, futurism has had its fair share of being turned inside out and reflected on by the postmodern eye. Retro-futurism, however, has an added meta-displacement of sorts; it was out of step with its timing already, so its 'revival' gives it an extra contextual frame – and it's retro-futurism that this year's Threshold festival of Music and Arts takes as the point of departure for its arts programme, titled 'FUTURE VISIONS'. Chris Carney, a third of Threshold’s directorial team, credits the initial kernel of inspiration to fellow director Kaya Herstad Carney’s “fascination by the picture-perfect yet ironic image of the nuclear household in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the US. It was such an optimistic time, yet there was so much darkness too in the form of apartheid, McCarthyism, the Cold War and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.” Despite the country's domestic and foreign conflicts at the time, the optimism of the 50s and 60s meant the future was still at stake. Torchbearing artists, scientists, architects and theorists were encouraged to address the accelerated social change by devising future-proof concepts – and although enough of these ideas ran out of steam, what remains of these dreams still provides a huge source of inspiration for artists today.

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“We are trying to be ethical, support local, organic... This is in essence the pursuit of some sort of ‘retro-future’” – Chris Carney

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Computer graphics team Sparkle* VFX is teaming up with designer Adam Irwin of Splinter to look back at large-scale urban renovation and the endless possibilities presented by burgeoning technological advances. “We’re going to produce a series of photo-real posters as if you were looking at 2014 from the view of 1950… lots of flying cars, neon, overhead railways,” details Sparkle*’s Glenn Maguire. They'll be taking inspiration in particular from Liverpool’s postwar regeneration: “I would have really liked to have seen the overhead walkways [a project initiated in the 60s, with its last tunnel demolished in 2007] completed; there are still bits of them lurking about by the Liver Building. Admittedly some of them were eyesores, but along with the overhead railways we seemed to have lost something that could have been great.”

There are plenty of visions of the future, however, that have thankfully passed. All the technological and social optimism manifested in urban planning and transport could have easily been levelled had the Cold War stalemate resulted in mutually assured destruction. “Back then, you had two groups of people who may as well have been called ‘Team A’ and ‘Team B,’ pointing nukes at each other jibing 'I bloody dare ya.' Absurd? Definitely. Terrifying? Absolutely,” says Liverpool-based illustrator Tommy Graham, who will be exhibiting at District, when asked to reflect on the paranoid nature of the 20th century. For years, there was a very real threat of nuclear war, nearly coming to a head during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the Able Archer scare in 1983. However, Graham continues: “Compare that to today, when any mad bastard with a cack-handed approach to international politics can get hold of a WMD and fire it off like a pissed uncle on bonfire night. Give me the Cold War any day,” suggesting that Cold War politics are still present, just under a different guise of tyrannical states. Graham specialises in comic-book inspired portrayals of the human condition, subverted by humorous and irreverent gestures. Alongside an ongoing theme of mushroom clouds and roving automatons backgrounded by crumbling cities, a large part of Graham’s work is transfixed by sci-fi dystopianism. It makes for arguably dark subject matter, but, compared to what technology has to offer us today for inspiration, he’d prefer to work with the madness of years gone by. “There's nothing aesthetic about modern day attack drones,” he says. “Ugly, boring looking things. I suspect this was done on purpose, so that they're harder to parody.”

But if it's not a vision of the near-destruction of civilisation at the hands of decades of fighting, what will the future look like? Long-time Threshold collaborator and artist Robyn Woolston’s practice is very much concerned with the reality of human production and waste. In the four years since she and the festival first worked together, Woolston’s reputation has come on leaps and bounds; she won the Liverpool Art Prize in 2012, and has had her work exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery. Her installations are bold, unfussy statements on the amount society disposes of non-renewable sources. So although not strictly in line with either the optimism or paranoia of retro-futurism, Woolston's work, according to Chris Carney, “raises the very essence of the future we are facing as a result of the future the previous and present generations tried to forge.”

Other Liverpool-based artists showing include upcoming illustrator That Girl, known for a series of colourful gig posters, and installation artist Leon Jakeman, of Red Dot Exhibitions, who contemplates a retro-futurism stripped of technological ornamentation. Joining from further afield are art collective Pack of Wolves, planning a series of utopian/dystopian works inspired by jet punk, fine artist Adam Collier, and sculptor Sarah Nicholson, who proposes to create a curiously described 'biomorphic organic work.'

“We are trying to be ethical, support local, organic and try to leave as little impact as we can,” Carney says of what Threshold hopes to achieve with its FUTURE VISIONS programme. “This is in essence the pursuit of some sort of ‘retro-future.'” Half a century’s worth of scientific experimentation and naïve optimism, and realising that perhaps we went too far, too quickly, is fertile ground for exploration. In contrast to our current situation of dulled stagnation, looking back at futures past seems a sure-fire way to get us dreaming again.