Reflections on ‘We are Seven’
Charlie Gere
In the 1790s the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friend Robert Southey intended to establish a community based on ‘pantisocratic’ principles on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania in the United States. For various reasons the idea was abandoned. Soon after, Coleridge met William Wordsworth, thus initiating one of the most famous and productive friendships and collaborations in English literature.
At the invitation of Grizedale Arts and the Wordsworth Trust seven artists from New York, Ian Cooper, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Rachel Foullon, k8 Hardy, Adam Putnam, Dana Sherwood, and Allison Smith, recently returned the compliment and came to Grasmere to set up a month-long experiment in communal living, with the title ‘We are Seven’, after one of Wordsworth’s more morbid poems. Though the project was based on Romantic principles of ‘forced idleness’ and the artists were not required to produce actual artworks, it was clear that the communards were possessed of a strong work ethic. A twice-weekly seminar programme was set up, and individual artists undertook assiduous research about the area.
Despite being in the vicinity of what Grizedale Arts Director Adam Sutherland described as the ‘motherlode of Romanticism’ the Seven did not seem to engage with much with the Romantic legacy that so palpably haunts Grasmere and the Lakes. What appeared to most interest the Seven, judging by the output presented at the Grasmere Sports, were traditional techniques such as dry-stone walling, supposedly traditional Lakeland crafts (actually mostly revivals/creations of Ruskin in the late 19th century), booths at agricultural fairs, beguiling objets trouvés, and memorials.
Interestingly this fascination with the rural and the pre-industrial is as much a characteristic of utopian communes as is the desire to develop radically new modes of living together. From the Romantics through to the hippy communes of the 1960s and 1970s, such experiments were often motivated by nostalgia for an idealised and sometimes reactionary vision of a prelapsarian, preindustrial model of community. This can also be seen in a particular strain of English visual arts, which includes the pastoral fantasies of the Pre-Raphaelites, the mediaevalism of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Ruskin’s revival of Lakeland crafts, right through to the Brotherhood of the Ruralists in the 1970s.
The romanticisation of the rural landscape informs and indeed deforms much of how the countryside is understood in this country. The English countryside is and always has been a complex, contested and highly politicised environment that is continually changing, often in difficult and antagonistic circumstances. This was revealed with great clarity in the furore that continues to surround the banning of hunting by dogs, a measure that, whatever its rights or wrongs, goes to the heart of the question of how we conceive our relationship with our rural environment and ecology. The Lakes is not just about dry-stone walls and rural crafts. It is also about the effects of tourism, the necessity to deal with increasing volumes of traffic, agribusiness and its relation to big supermarket chains, the effects, both good and bad, of new technologies on rural communities, the rights of land owners versus the freedom to roam and so on.
I am sure that when and if the seven communards choose to make work that reflects on their brief experiment in rural, communal living, they will do so in a way that takes account of the complexities of the environment they found themselves in. I hope that Grizedale Arts, the Wordsworth Trust and other rural arts bodies continue to enable similar projects, involving bringing artists from cities to the countryside. This might encourage artists and others to respond to the countryside as a complex, contemporary, postindustrial and postmodern phenomenon, not as a place of sentimental consolation to retreat to from the harsh demands of a technologised society that supposedly only exists elsewhere.
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