Its centerpiece is Ripon, an interactive video game that took the Cleveland-based artists more than two years to complete. Players sit inside a shantylike structure and use a keyboard and mouse to navigate a drab, yet perilous world filled with burning houses, propaganda-covered billboards and murderous people. The player has only one life; it’s difficult to get past the six-foot-tall marijuana plants or avoid dying in an icy lake, and scoring enough ammunition to kill anyone is even harder. But it’s also nearly impossible to give up on this intriguing experiment, which argues that even societies with the best intentions end in the grim reality of survival of the fittest.

Drawings, sculpture and other works complement the game. The most striking is Ripon Industry, a digital print of an obese couple lying in each other’s arms on the floor of a destroyed meth lab, surrounded by garbage bags filled with boxes of Sudafed.

Hybinette and Richards’s show is technically and visually engaging, but their work’s historical underpinnings—especially its suggestion that idealistic Ripon’s failure hints at our own inevitable self-destruction—are what make it impossible to forget.

— Alicia Eler

If, and only if, you manage to acquit yourself with sufficient èlan on Valentine's Day, you get a treat. It's at Thomas Robertello Gallery, 939 W. Randolph St., where a multimedia installation called Nowheresville, by collaborative Cleveland-based artists Knut Hybinette and Troy Richards, is up through March 8 (thomasrobertello.com). We'll just let the gallery tell you about it and you'll see what we mean: "Taken from the literal definition of the word Utopia, Nowheresville focuses on the ideas and literary work of the French writer and Utopian socialist Charles Fourier: specifically on the experimental community, Ripon, Wis., which was formed to put his ideas into practice. Ripon was a short-lived experiment but would later become the birthplace of the Republican Party. Presenting a historic trajectory that leads toward the near future, Ripon is portrayed as a Midwestern dystopia, infested by chaotic suburban drug addicts, killers, and societal decay." Obviously, this experience will help balance out your chi after spending time in the land of flowers, hearts and chocolate. "The centerpiece of the exhibition is an innovative game created by Hybinette and Richards incorporating video, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and cutting-edge technology. The gallery installation consists of a shanty housing the game, a decaying billboard depicting a video of Fourier espousing utopian dogma, as well as drawings and prints used in the making of the video game." Excellent. Armed with multiple Snickers in your pocket, you have permission to while away myriad hours at this exhibit. And for those of you whose contemplation of love affairs tends toward murderous revenge rather than gentle cooing, you'll notice the handy gift idea illustrated in this piece from the exhibit: rainbow-hued glass shards, created especially for your ex-significant other, with easy instructions for inserting into his or her eyes.

-Kristin Gehring

– Patricia Courson

NEW CITY CHICAGO BY JASON FOUMBERG
Eye Exam
A Mad Pursuit

As a teenager, most of my heroes were insane. Whether it was the influence of the grungy drug-addled kids I hung with or my own personal search for something, anything beyond rote middle-class existence, centerfolds sporting Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd and "A Clockwork Orange"’s Alex hung like proud banners in my suburban bedroom. As role models, their take on reality represented a privileged view. Like a small window cut high in a wall, this view was totally inaccessible to me, and so all the more desirable. Cosmic quandaries, mind expansion, over-stimulation and a taste for violent nonsense seemed productive and fulfilling. Later, when I came to realize that there’s nothing really glamorous about psychosis, that we should not aspire to depravity, I, like most everyone facing independent existence outside of the coddled life, refined my search for the crazies into acceptable neurosis. "Everything great in the world comes from neurotics," wrote Proust, my newfound hero.

For the artist, insanity can mean giving form to limitless imagination. Once lived, though, insanity is chaos. Artist Troy Richards, wishing to adequately represent the madness that rages in war-torn cities far away to an all-too-often complacent and carefree America, situated chaos in his own backyard, in Ripon, Wisconsin. The result is a large drawing of a suburban yard filled with puddles of overweight and underdressed slobs fucking, eating and laying about. The clusters of flesh and debased activity call to mind paintings by Brueghel, the Flemish Renaissance master of the carnival.

"The Neighborhood" also came to look a lot like a free-love commune, much like the one founded in the mid-nineteenth century in Ripon, Wisconsin based on the tenets of Charles Fourier’s utopian manifestoes. It seems that the type of chaos Troy wished to impose as a lesson on the Ripon citizens was already part of their heritage.

Fourier, a French philosopher active in the early nineteenth-century, had a total vision of human history. He saw a future where humans could grow tails. It is purported that he coined the term "feminism," but he also promoted sodomy. Perhaps it was ultimately his theory of a work ethic infused with excessive leisure that prompted followers to form communes in many American cities, including one in Ripon, and one in New England frequented by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fourier’s popularity waned as industriousness became the norm in America, but as late as the mid-1940s, one century after Fourier’s writings came and went, André Breton, the father of surrealism, wrote a long-form poem in honor of him. "Let them say you cherished fond illusions," writes Breton, seeing in Fourier a fellow seeker of the wide-open mind.

Like a conspiracy theory, the associations between the Ripon commune and Fourier’s visionary-bordering-on-insane social treatises grew fast and deep. Troy teemed up with artist Knut Hybinette to explore the underbelly of Fourier’s ideals, which soon ballooned to represent the current state of affairs. Troy and Knut refer to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll as today’s overstuffed ideal. They see Fourier as a symbol of a cyclical movement in a society where we strive for perfection and yet are constantly misled by illusion—where entertainment is often mistaken for depth of personality.

And yet, escapism is still so attractive. One of the major pieces of output from their research is a multi-player immersive video game. Characters are dropped into a desolate world overrun with marijuana plants and vacant buildings. As in any video game where you wield a gun, there are others out to kill you and the goal is to survive. Knut and Troy explain, though, that the player is not the hero of the game, but merely an extra. Chances are you will die rather quickly once disaster strikes. Sorry, you don’t have any super-powers.