For this year’s series of exhibitions planned by the Styrian art groups Künstlerbund Graz, the Steiermärkischen Kunstverein Werkbund, and the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Steiermarks, a book will once again serve as the starting point for the conception and contents of the artistic explorations: the utopian novel “News From Nowhere”, written in 1890 by William Morris, an unusually multitalented artist. Morris was a British painter, architect, poet, craftsman, engineer, printer, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, and an early co-founder of the socialist movement in Great Britain.

The utopia described in his book represents an alternative to the social conditions of the period in which it was written. Still, it can be understood even without the historical political references or the background biography, and its vivid language remains effective to this day. Morris begins his analysis of society with human needs, not production. In presenting an altered valuation of commodities, work, and productivity, as well as the theory of artistic activity linked to all of that, Morris’s book is surprisingly relevant and worth contemplating today; it also provides far-reaching connections to an even more profound study of art. In his “News From Nowhere” Morris surrenders neither his political nor artistic point of view, and hence he creates a utopian concept of an environment of particular sensuality and sensitivity, as well as an aesthetically experiential one—something that makes the book especially suited to this series of exhibitions. Hardly anyone else has understood as well as he did how to link art, as well as social and political ideas, with life. He not only identified the boundaries between art, craftsmanship, and life, but also wanted to blow them apart. Particularly because of this, Morris remains one of the most relevant utopianists of the past: he believed that it was essential to connect ecology with the dismantling of authorities in order to improve human life; he also focused on the individual’s right to freedom, adding this to the other changes needed in society.

The German linguist Max Nettlau discussed this classic book, which has been published in two German-language versions in the recent past:

“‘News From Nowhere’ is perhaps the best modern depiction of free socialism: the mature work of a cultivated and scholarly person; a poet, artist, and master of applied arts; a man of natural strength and health, permeated by the kind of socialism founded upon human needs, social and revolutionary will, and the yearning for beauty and harmony. And this man was a fighter for about a decade; he engaged in everything needed by young propaganda, sacrificing himself without any personal ambition for a complete kind of socialism that would transform all of humanity—one that did not get stuck on just a few economic and administrative issues, or place trust in new bosses that would lure voters, or in organizations made up of mainly nominal members—through which true socialism can never be achieved. This happened in England between 1880 and 1890, in all of London and its suburbs—for Morris never lost contact with the country, as his taste and his workshops always took him back to the golden Middle Ages, to the time of free cities, of artists who were also craftsmen. His awareness of the evils of his time, of the uniform ugliness of triumphant capitalism, and his will to put an end to it led him toward the future, to visions whose most beautiful product is ‘News From Nowhere’.”

“News From Nowhere” is a cycle that has been developed in a process. Comprising mostly new works developed and supported by the individual participants, its independent exhibitions will show the specifics of the art groups in an arc that the audience can visualize.