Fantastic Cities and Cabin Fever

In 2015, the filmmaker, artist, and writer Penny Woolcock created an imaginary city, Utopia, at the Roundhouse, London, in collaboration with Block9. It staged a blend of miscellaneous pop-up installations featuring Londoners who were each telling their individual stories about inequality, consumerism, gentrification, education, crime, and social media.1 The narrative soundscapes set within an extraordinary design brought to light the parallel lives yet opposite experiences of people in urban environments and, at the same time, revealed their hopes and dreams.Woolcock's current exhibition at the Museum for Modern Art in Oxford, England, shows a part of this project. The video, Utopia (2015), depicts eight people from Camden, London, reading from Thomas More's Utopia with a particular emphasis on the passages on social inequality and utopian economics in Book II. The installation is a mosaic of screens showing the readers reading in close-ups, reflecting, being inspired, and being moved. This lived experience of More's text is perhaps an answer to the skepticism brought to More and to utopia in general—this is a way to activate utopia. Utopia “should be an expansive ‘living room,’ inviting us to consider the basics of ‘what if’ and ‘what ought’ from many different angles.”2 If the living room becomes the gallery, museum, or any public space, even better.A very different reflection on utopia was offered in the exhibition Cabin Fever, shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia. It presented an architectural, historical, and cultural survey of the cabin in North America, curated wonderfully by Jennifer M. Volland and the gallery's curators, Bruce Grenville and Stephanie Rebick. It featured installations, objects, architectural drawings, videos, photography, and my favorite, a display of “Cabin Porn” consumer goods such as flannel shirts, metal cups and saucers, and designer wood tools, all serving to create an “aesthetics of ruggedness.”On the one hand, nostalgic manifestations of homesteads, Thoreau's log cabin, postwar mass culture vacation cabins, and counterculture geodesic domes drew on cabins as the original places of shelter. The section on utopia explored the cabin as an ideal retreat à la Walden, to disengage from mainstream society and live a simple life.3On the other hand, it drew on the idiomatic term so wonderfully described by Bower in 1916: “The mind fed too long upon monotony succumbs to the insidious mental ailment which the West calls ‘cabin fever.’”4 Popular culture turned cabins into standard horror settings, as in The Cabin in the Woods (2012), The Evil Dead (1981), or Antichrist (2009), which visitors could experience in a montage of a cabin horror film as part of the exhibition. Equally uncanny, if not dystopian, was Liz Magor's (1996–2002) re-creation of a survivalist's cabin, stocked with weapons, canned goods, and other necessaries.Architectural plans, models, and photographs reminded visitors that log cabins were originally modeled on indigenous buildings, such as pit houses and Indian lodges. North American models were reflected in and influenced by European immigrants’ traditions of the dacha, Swiss chalets, the Irish stone cottage, and the Norwegian hytte and were created initially, at least, as pragmatic and quick solutions to the need for shelter. When settled, pioneers expanded their dwellings into different kinds of farmhouses based on the building materials in the region.5With modernity, the log cabin became a nostalgic symbol of an unattainable past—a symbol of a simple life, in nature and with nature. Thoreau's cabin in the woods became the archetype for survivalists, counterculture and affluent mainstream dwellers alike. The exhibition showed extraordinary variations of the type from postwar vacation cabins, to the “Parkitecture” holiday cottages in Yellowstone Park, to geodesic domes and micro-houses.The three main themes of this fascinating exhibition—“Shelter,” “Utopia,” and “Porn”—succinctly sum up the iconographic journey of the cabin in the history and culture of the United States from basic shelter to a cultural construct and consumer object. Let's not forget, though, the involuntary housing in cabins promoted by the Rural Rehabilitation Corporations in the United States between the 1930s and the 1980s (and ongoing) to resettle and house socially disadvantaged and homeless families in the countryside (as well as tackle rural poverty) or the emergency relief shelters and refugee camps that provide only temporary solutions to our world's problems.

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