Mona Caron’s Utopian San Francisco

by: Phillip Barcio on September 9th, 2009 | 9 Comments »

“We need some more visions about how in the light of impending disaster we can still strive for a better reality. I am neither a scientist nor an engineer. I am simply an artist. My job as a visionary is not only to focus on what is feasible today, but instead to imagine further, more ideal possibilities, and to inspire people to aim higher.” — Mona Caron

In 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian commissioned San Francisco muralist Mona Caron to illustrate the section headings of their annual “Best of the Bay” issue, where the editors ask readers to go online and vote for the best the city has to offer. Best Laundromat. Best karate school. Best art gallery. Best breakfast.

(To see the rest of Mona Caron’s Utopian San Francisco Series from The Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay 2006, visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery.)

Imagining the best that San Francisco could be was nothing new for Caron, who was already well known in the Bay Area for creating large-scale, utopian public paintings, often featuring optimistic imagery of the future of the city. For example, in Caron’s mural at the intersection of 15^th and Church Street she portrays a historical timeline of the street beginning on one end with an image of the early days of San Francisco and ending with a glimmering, futuristic vision of what the street may someday become.

The futuristic end of the image features a streetscape with no cars present, only light rail public transportation. Most people on that end of the picture are walking. People are congregating on top of buildings, planting trees and vegetable gardens as whimsical dirigibles float by. Rowboats float by on an imagined canal.

“In my murals I reference the very location of the mural,” Caron says, “quoting a sense of the present that includes historical views of the past. By showing the changes that have occurred in that location over time I use that as an argument for radical change in the future.”

Caron believes that by showing hundreds of years of history of a specific location, leading up to and including the present moment, it demonstrates that the culture and the environment and the infrastructure have all come a long way. We have survived dramatic shifts in the past and therefore we can look optimistically toward dramatic shifts that are yet to come. If we realize we used to light the streetlights with whale oil, maybe switching to solar won’t seem so daunting any more.

For the “Best of the Bay” illustrations, Caron seized the opportunity to expand her artistic vision of the future of San Francisco’s urban landscape, a vision dominated by the ubiquitous imagery of the ecological disaster of global climate change.

Imagery of a dramatically risen sea fills the image for the “Best of the Bay: Sex and Romance” section, which features happy sea lions snuggling each other atop a raft floating through a submerged Financial District.

The image for the “Classics” section features a cable car carrying passengers uphill from a post-global warming “Grant Street Beach.”

The “Outdoor and Sports” section features a tightrope walker traversing a line between two skyscrapers overlooking a sunken Chinatown, Embarcadero and Ferry Building.

Caron did not only imagine an ecological disaster, she says, “but also a utopian state that arose out of the disaster. I imagined a different kind of economic structure and hints of a different use of public space.”

The “Food and Drink” section shows an image of a rooftop farm where carrots are being harvested as free-range chickens run around at the diners’ feet.

“It’s the slow food image,” says Caron. “If you read the menu it’s all stuff grown on the streets of San Francisco. It’s extremely local. El Pollo Feliz means the happy chicken. The chicken is still alive when you order it, it is so local.”

“I am not advocating vegetarianism. I am advocating a more personal connection to food. If you want meat it means someone has to kill an animal. If people had to deal with that fact, most of them would probably eat a lot less meat. If you had to kill your own chickens you would eat fewer chickens.”

The image for the “Shopping” section shows monkeys playing with dollar bills in the trees while humans below give and receive possessions freely at a “Swapping Center.”

“The monkeys are more like innocent beings and they’re trying to figure out what to do with the money,” says Caron. “The monkey pictured up high has figured it out. It can hoard the bananas and give them out in exchange for the money. I am showing the absurdity of it compared to the activity going on below.”

“That’s the kind of thing that in the case of a disaster would probably happen spontaneously. People would show their solidarity. I wish it would happen outside of a disaster. I wish we could switch gears outside of this hyper-individualistic sate of mind and out of this feeling of fear toward other human beings.”

How far she believes we still have to go before we achieve the progressive cultural state Caron envisions is revealed in the image she created for the “Reader’s Poll” section. It is an illustration of a young woman inserting her consumer profile into a vote box adorned with a flying pie and the words “imagine democracy.”

“One thing I was sort of joking about is that by voting for the best businesses you are giving away your consumer profile,” Caron says, “the consumer profile of the Bay Guardian readers.”

A vote for “Best of the Bay” not only pats a local business on the back, it facilitates the paper’s market research by accumulating data on the consumer preferences of the Guardian’s internet-savvy readers for click-counting web-vertisers.

“I was also relating to this pie in the sky notion that by shopping better you can change the world,” says Caron. “Like some people believe they can save the environment through consumption of ‘green’ products. I think there are limits to the way you can influence the world by simply shopping correctly.”

Caron believes her work can make a positive impact on those who encounter it, either on the street or in the media, by challenging viewers to find beauty even in the face of cynicism and serious struggle.

“Which part of human nature do you want to pay attention to? What happens if you assume the best and what happens if you assume the worst? What does our landscape look like when you assume the worst? You are going to get more and more bad behavior the more you keep people alienated. I think it is crucial to keep envisioning radical positive change. The more you assume the best, the more beautiful our public infrastructure and public space will be.”

Caron manifests her philosophy concretely and eloquently in her public murals.

“Every time I paint a mural people ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid people are going to graffiti over it?’ OK well, it might happen, its true, but should I act on that possibility by not doing anything then? Because that’s the other option. Let’s not do a pretty thing in this public space because someone might mess it up.

“I put myself out there assuming other people will not mess it up right away. I just trust. I have acted according to that trust for 12 years and for me that has worked out great.”

(Below: Mona Caron works on her current project, a mural at the intersection of Jones and Golden Gate in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.)

View Mona Caron’s Utopian San Francisco Series in the Tikkun Art Gallery.

To see more of Mona Caron’s mural and illustration work, visit www.monacaron.com.