Manhattan project: Jeffrey Kastner on Friends of William Blake

ArtForum, Sept, 2004 by Jeffrey Kastner

Idealistic? Perhaps. Yet as Chan noted, the entire enterprise is inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier, the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century utopian socialist who, with Blake and the influential feminist author Kathy Acker, make up what he described as the project's trinity of "patron saints." To this group Chan might have added that great fin de siecle rebel Oscar Wilde, whose discussion of utopianism in his brilliant and confounding polemic on politics, society, and the role of the artist, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1890), seems to have been channeled almost directly by the spirit of The People's Guide. "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at," Wilde wrote, "for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias."

Jeffrey Kastner is a New York--based critic.