User:Lbattich/Thesis complete draft 10 may

MDCGRS04_Graduate Research Seminar_2014-2016

Graduation Thesis (in progress)

Lucas B

Chapter 1

My studio practice is centred on an overall concern with our relationship to history: cultural debris, the re-appropriation of tradition, and nostalgia. The purpose of this essay is to examine the nostalgic tendency prevalent in much of contemporary artistic production, as well as critically consider my studio practice in relation to this tendency. The contemporary nostalgic tendency is of course not only limited to artistic production; on the contrary, this production reflects a larger cultural undercurrent. The nostalgia that interests me here is not merely an individual sickness (mine, others, etc.) but a collective symptom, an historical emotion.

In order to better clarify this nostalgic impulse in contemporary practice, I will situate this investigation within the discourse of the shift from the macro-category of the postmodern to the concept of the contemporary. It can be argued that the critical discourse of postmodernism (and its related cognates "postmodernity" and "the postmodern") has run its course as a useful critical term for accurately assessing the contemporary global situation. The analyses of Terry Smith on primary tendencies in the current condition of contemporaneity in art (^ footnote? "in the aftermath of modernity, and the passing of the postmodern" [(Smith, 2008, 1]) will be used as starting point for my examination of nostalgia.

In an article published in 2006 Smith identifies two wider tendencies within contemporary art, which he also develops in later writings (see Smith 2011 and 2012). Given the passage from the 'modern' and ‘postmodern' to the ‘contemporary', in this article Smith attempts to examine the concept of the contemporary and the value of a macro-description of contemporary art. In his analysis Smith considers contemporaneity as a current critical and cultural term that goes beyond the mere sense of being temporally simultaneous. Even as descriptor of current concomitant events, Smith admits that "recently, in most ordinary usage—in English and in some but not all other European languages—[the term modern] has surrendered currency to the term contemporary and its cognates. (Smith, 2006, 700-701)

Smith argues that artists today have embraced and engaged with the contemporary world’s teeming multiplicity – its proliferating differences, its challenging complexities – in ways in which the macro-descriptors of modernity and postmodernity fail to fully encompass.

Departing from the insight that "multiple temporalities are the rule these days, and their conceptions of historical development move in multifarious directions" (Smith, 2006, 702), Smith goes on to sketch two main tendencies as exemplary forces in current artistic discourse within these multiple temporalities. These tendencies are presented as antinomies, in the sense that their internal logic and discourses are seemingly incompatible with each other, yet they can be considered together in a wider global context. Smith advances these two descriptive characterisations then as "polarities of a dichotomous exchange, the central regions of which are occupied by a mainstream that is, paradoxically, dispersive: the spilling diversity of contemporary practice."

The tendency that interests me for the purposes of this essay is what Smith considers as a continuation and revival of the Modern: "contemporary art, as a movement, has become the new modern or, what amounts to the same thing, the old modern in new clothes.” (Smith, 2006, 688)

In an updated text of his article published in the edited book Antinomies of Art and Culture (2008), Smith writes of this tendency:

"One mainstream returns to modernity, to revised visions of its richness in the West, of its multiplicity and distinctiveness elsewhere, and of the tensions across its many borders. The presumption here is that this revisioned modernity will return to take up a paradigmatic role, hopefully one less conflicted and deadly than that which reached its apogee in the twentieth century."

This tendency marks for Smith "the institutionalization of Contemporary Art as a recursive refinement of high Modernism." (Smith, 2008, 16) He identifies the late critic and curator Kirk Varnedoe as aptly illustrating this tendency. On the occasion of millennial exhibitions held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during 2000, Varnedoe writes:

"There is an argument to be made that the revolutions that originally produced modern art, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have not been concluded or superseded—and thus that contemporary art today can be understood as the ongoing extension and revision of those founding innovations and debates. [...] Contemporary art is collected and presented at this Museum as part of modern art—as belonging within, responding to, and expanding upon the framework of initiatives and challenges established by the earlier history of progressive art since the dawn of the twentieth century."

(Varnedoe, 2001, 12)

The second large tendency, according to Smith, consists of a more engaged artistic strategy in relation the contemporary world, the political and economical process of globalisation, and the discourse of globalism and cosmopolitan citizenship. This conception of contemporary art lies at the intersection between culture and globalisation, which "marks the limits out of which the postcolonial, post–cold war, post–ideological, transnational, deterritorialized, diasporic, global world has been written." (Smith, 2008, 6) It is important to note in passing that by his own admission, Smith's discourse is rooted in "major world art distribution centers", and in particular the art exemplified in major international events such as Biennales — including events like Manifesta and Documenta. For instance, he uses the 2002 edition of Documenta 11, curated by Okwui Enwezor, as an exemplar of this second tendency. Smith's characterisations thus are prey to the changing institutional stances toward the global contemporary world, where Enwezor's directorship of Venice Biennale in 2015 may fall short of embodying Smith's own description of this tendency.

David Geert's nostalgic neo-formalism

David Geers (2012) points to a recent revival of modernist tropes in artistic practice that are germane to the lager tendency of a nostalgic (re)enactment and continuation of modernism: "a slow gravitational pull, in both production and reception, toward a less reflexive and more nostalgic attitude.” (Geers, 9)

"My conjecture is that this revival is a return to foundations not unlike similar returns during periods of great anxiety and upheaval." (Geers, 10) (cf. Boym on the rise of nostalgia during times of upheaval)

According to Geers, this resurrection of formalist concerns to the obliteration of criticality "represents a nostalgic retrenchment on the part of an art world threatened by technological transformation and economic uncertainty that now undermine its hierarchies and claims of cultural precedence." The (institutional and traditional) space itself for the discourse of art seems challenged. As a symptomatic response to this challenge, the unreflective revival of modernist tropes is an attempt to hold on to this space.

Geers terms this general tendency under the label "neo-formalism", highlighting the formal aspects of current practice's engagement with modernist works. That is, the neo-formalist tendency is preoccupied with the visual or rather "formal" surface of modernism, and generally eschews any real engagement with the discourse and theories that underline the original modernist formalisms.

Geers also highlights that this tendency puts "emphasis on performative production (read process) and abstract form". In the absence of any critical discourse behind these practices, "process", "materiality", and "the simplicities of artistic labor" become the rhetorical keywords in which they are contextualized for the larger public.

Such "resurrected interest in material experimentation and anti-pictorial opacity" acts as a resistance to the "perfected illusionism" latent in digital media and a hypermediated relation with the world. Yet it is also a conservative tendency. It aims to conserve and preserve that relevancy of (traditional) artistic discourse that positions the work of art as an autonomous object:

"Today’s neo-formalism nevertheless pursues an art of intuitive, aesthetic arrangement that satisfies the need for formal continuities and simple answers during a particularly complex time." (Geers, 10)

This tendency of a return to modernism and formal concerns is patent not only in the works produced by artists themselves, but also in the viewing public, curators and collectors. As Geers puts it, the neo-formalist (nostalgic) work "greets a pre-primed spectator, already indoctrinated into the codes and mythologies of the modern, who happily welcomes it as a return to old certainties – an echo of a lost golden age." (Geers, 14)

Geer's characterisation of neo-formalism has been refashioned in contemporary art criticism in the label "Zombie Formalism", coined in 2014 by artist-critic Walter Robinson. Robinson's coinage is a succinct distillation of the overall tendency to re-enact modernist tropes in contemporary culture. On his choice of terms Robinson writes:

"'Formalism' because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting (yes, I admit it, I’m hung up on painting), and 'Zombie' because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s “black paintings,” among other things." (Robinson, 2014)

Jerry Saltz humorously expands on the ubiquity of this tendency within the established art institution, a tendency particularly successful in term of market sales, and widely appealing to speculator-collectors.

"The ersatz art in which they [high-yield risk-averse buyers and dealers] deal fundamentally looks the way other art looks. It’s colloquially been called Modest Abstraction, Neo-Modernism, M.F.A. Abstraction, and Crapstraction. (The gendered variants are Chickstraction and Dickstraction.)" (Saltz, 2014)

In this context, consider Smith admonition against such prevalent neo-modern tendencies in what he calls "official Contemporary Art":

"If it is to be truly contemporary, rather than an update of comfortable Modernism, the art of today must respond deeply to the complex conditions of contemporaneity." (Smith, 2008, 16)

Shift from postmodern irony to contemporary nostalgia

It is important to notice that the passing fad in art criticism of such buzzwords as "Zombie Formalism" is only a small example of the larger tendency of a continuation and (re)enactment of modernism in contemporary art, as described by Terry Smith.

Within this larger tendency, and beyond the niche of neo-modern formal abstraction, it is possible to note the shift from postmodern ironic quotation (where we can situate the critical project of artists associated with the Pictures Generation), to the rather genuine use of citation and invocation of ruins and the modernist past.

"Appropriation then is about performing the unresolved by staging object, images or allegories that invoke the ghosts of unclosed histories in a way that allows them to appear as ghosts and reveal the nature of the ambiguous presence."

(Verwoert, 2007).

In this context, contemporary “invocative” practices in art are echoed in Svetlana Boym remarks that at the "early 21st century exhibits a strange ruinophilia, a fascination for ruins that goes beyond postmodern quotation marks."

Already during the 1990s cultural criticism tended to acknowledge the prevalence of a nostalgic impulse in contemporary cultural production. This resurgence of nostalgia was usually conceptualised as an interrelated occurrence with the demise of post-modern irony as a central artistic and literary strategy. (See Hutcheon and Huyssen).

Within this shift from postmodern irony to contemporary nostalgia, it is relevant to mention the analyses of Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker on what they term meta-modernism (Vermeulen & v.d.Akker, 2010). The sweeping generalisation implied in their use of the term meta-modern as a cultural and historical style of the contemporary period means that their descriptive project is necessarily sketchy and incomplete. Nevertheless, Vermeulen and van den Akker are correct in the description of a widespread move beyond the postmodern "years of plenty". In their analyses, contemporary Western culture is characterised by an oscillating motion between both modern aspirations and postmodern self-referentiality and irony.

In the context of a nostalgic reprisal of modernism, the meta-modern signifies a patent shift from postmodern criticality to genuine modernist gesturing. In this shift, reflective nostalgia plays an important role, in which the pendulum of both modernist and postmodernist strategies belies an impulse to dream "potential futures rather than imaginary pasts."

Chapter 2

"Today the canon appears less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through." (Foster, 2002, 81)

"The real problem of history is the inequality of progress in the various elements of human development, in particular the great divergence in the degree of intellectual and ethical development.” (Schlegel)

Within the contemporary Terry Smith locates a wide inability to think the future, which is interrelated with an obsession with the reinterpreting and scavenging the past.

"While belief in the persistence through the present of ongoing formations is widespread, the forms in which that might occur seem less predictable. Obsession with the past, and concern about the complexities of the present, have tended to thicken our awareness of it, at the expense of expectations about the future." (Smith, 2008, 9)

This infatuation with the past reveals the undercurrent of a nostalgic impulse. In this context Svetlana Boym's study on the concept and cultural occurrences of nostalgia provides a suitable critical background to consider the contemporary nostalgic impulse in art, as well as in my own practice. As Boym perceptibly acknowledges, echoing David Geer's comments, "nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals." (Boym, 2002, xiv)

"If at the beginning of the twentieth century modernists and avant-gardists defined themselves by disavowing nostalgia for the past, at the end of the twentieth century reflection on nostalgia might bring us to redefine critical modernity and its temporal ambivalence and cultural contradictions." (Boym, 2002, 31)

Boym considers nostalgia in an expanded sense, which has more purchase within the temporal than the geographical. In her conceptualisation, nostalgia is a symptom of a relation not to a particular land or geographical space, but rather a "yearning for a different time", that is, a peculiar relation to different temporalities, often imaginary.

"Nostalgia is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy."

Introduction to the concept of nostalgia

The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots: nostos = return home, algia = sorrow. The word was coined by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. Hofer believed that it was possible ”from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one's native land.” (quoted in Naqvi, 10) Among the first victims of the newly diagnosed disease were various displaced people of the seventeenth century, freedom-loving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad.

With the advent of Romanticism, nostalgia passed from being curable sickness, manifested in bodily symptoms to be treated and studied by scientific medicine, to a more abstract condition – an incurable disease of the soul. Rather than being an object of medicine, nostalgia passed onto the realm of arts, literature and philosophy. For the Romantics, nostalgia was not a disease that could be cured by returning to one’s native land, as the eighteenth century doctors believed; it signified a longing for something that cannot be repossessed. (Starobinski, 94) For the Romantic, nostalgia is a longing with no returning.

According to Boym, to slow rise of modernity during the Enlightenment provided a shift to a different conception of time from the predominantly Christian eschatology that dominated Europe, with its universalist aspirations. The modern – and secular – conception of time is marked by a central teleology of progress.

In the context of modern progress, nostalgia stopped being a disease of yearning for the homeland (as it was initially conceptualized by the Swiss doctors in the 17th century), but rather became a longing for a lost time, either a time located in past history, or an imagined home within an imagined (future, utopic) time. The constant acceleration contained in the ideology of progress, manifested in a rapid pace of modernisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century, has en exacerbating effect on the creation of mythical conceptions of different times. "Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values." (Boym)

In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. Nevertheless, according to Boym, nostalgia is at the same time deeply imbedded in the discourse of modernity, and thus in its contemporary aftermath:

"Nostalgia is not “antimodern”; it is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another." (Boym, 2007)

Setting a critical vocabulary: on two different nostalgic tendencies

In order to better investigate the manifestation of contemporary nostalgia in art and culture, it will be necessary to use a more specialised and defined sense of the term nostalgia. For my purposes, Boym's own delineation of two different nostalgic impulses will provide a suitable critical base: “two kinds of nostalgia are not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” On the one hand there is what Boym terms restorative nostalgia: "Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” (Boym, 2002, 41)

Most projects driven by a restorative nostalgic tendency do not consider themselves nostalgic at all:

"This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time." (Boym, 2002, 41)

Whereas reflective nostalgia stresses nostos, reflective nostalgia lingers in algia, “in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.” Reflective nostalgia is a tendency aware of its own nostalgic impulses, yet it does not attempt a recovery or return to some mythical past. Rather, reflective nostalgia thieves on the notion of the impossibility of any nostalgic return; it is "enamored of distance, not of the referent itself."

By using the term reflective, Boym points that this nostalgic tendency also contains the possibility of the criticism of its own nostalgic feeling. In this sense, the loss — the object of nostalgia — is never completely recalled; there are no obsessive attempt to rebuild the lost home or object. Instead, "this type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary.” Reflective nostalgia is aware of the mythical and constructed nature of its own sentiments; aware, as Boym puts it, "of the gap between identity and resemblance." (Boym, 2002, 50)

This reflective approach to the nostalgic impulse thus allows to maintain a critical distance from the object of nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia "reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.” (Boym, 2002, 49-50)

This topology of nostalgia will be useful in distinguishing different degrees and hues contained in the nostalgic impulse along a range of different artworks.

To go back to the preliminary concepts introduced in the first chapter.

The topology of two different nostalgic forms presented by Boym can be used to add a more nuanced view to Terry Smith's description of the tendency of revival and continuation of modernist tropes.

Within this tendency we are able to distinguish different practices that display a reflective or restorative nostalgic project in varying degrees. "Zombie Formalism", for instance, may be taken as an example of a manifestation of restorative nostalgia. It seeks to conserve and preserve the institutional status quo afforded by autonomous artworks in the conventional sense, by embracing the well-tested formal aspects of twentieth century modern abstraction. In its own restorative project, “Zombie Formalist” works — and the contemporary variant of neo-formalism — look back at modern abstraction as a solid institutional rock.

However, not all contemporary work that is set in dialogue with modernism need to advance the "presumption here is that this revisioned modernity will return to take up a paradigmatic role." (Smith, 2008) Boym's notion of reflective nostalgia can be used to add a constructive and critical element to Smith's characterisation of this main tendency in contemporary art.

In the following chapter, I will use this topology of nostalgia to help situate my own artistic work among this tendency.

Chapter 3

Retrograde Chapbooks

The publications grouped under the series Retrograde Chapbooks present existing texts from the history of modernism and the avant-garde, where all sentences have been re-arranged in the inverse order. The series is issued in a limited edition of hand-bound chapbooks, printed on archival quality paper, bound with a crimson cover and hand-stitched in silver thread. Thus far, four retrograde manifestoes have been published, appropriating texts by F.T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara and Theo van Doesburg.

In Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, retrograde refers to the operation of time-reversing the tones in a musical series, while maintaining the original pitches and rhythms on the sequence. Retrograde Chapbooks acts as a literary counterpart to Schoenberg’s retrogression technique. In altering the order of sentences, the immediate meaning and readability of each sentence is nevertheless maintained, but the overall sense is displaced within the text as a whole. Retrograde Chapbooks proposes an all too literal “going-back” movement to the power of early avant-garde manifestoes. The intention here is neither to criticise the original texts, nor to question their authorship, but rather to present a symptomatic nostalgic desire.

The resulting altered manifestoes embody this nostalgic impulse both in their physical and conceptual form. Regarding its physical form, the hand-made quality of the publications, and the overall design and materials, were chosen to point to the traditional conception of the poetry chapbook, which carries its own conservative and nostalgic baggage as a twentieth century literary medium. On the other hand, the literal regression of the text’s sentences marks a conceptual regression. The alteration is not so intrusive to the extent that the original texts are unreadable. For example, a Dada manifesto by Tristan Tzara or Marinetti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto do not loose any of their rhetorical power by having their sentences altered. For this reason, the regression of sentences portrays rather a conceptual regression. It underscores the patina of time — manifested as a loss of impetus perhaps — that inevitably permeates the original historical texts today.

Retrograde Chapbooks ultimately refuses to present the historical texts in their original form, and by the act of regression the distance of these texts is emphasised. Applying Boym’s critical distinction between reflective and restorative strategies outlined in the previous chapter, the chapbooks embrace a reflective approach.

Restorative nostalgia is concerned with the perpetuation and recreation of heritage and tradition. In Boym’s words, this tradition is "often an invented tradition — a dogmatic, stable myth that gives you a coherent version of the past." In contrast, the altered texts repudiate the easy and ready return to the certainty of the historical texts and its mythologies. While exemplifying a particular nostalgic stance, the work is at the same time emphatically thwarting the impulses of a conformist and unreflective nostalgia.

While Retrograde Chapbooks does not construct a restoration of the avant-garde myth, it does rely on this myth to some extent. Following Boym’s remark that reflective nostalgia does not deny its longing, but attempt to reflect on it, it can be argued that the conceptual retrogression (and literal retrogression of a text’s sentences) conveys the impossibility of a restorative project: every journey backwards will only produce a distorted text.

This inability to engage in a restorative approach, however, means that the work does not attempt any future-looking or present-shaping project. In this sense the publications remain somehow cynically engrossed in a backward gaze – particularly when put in contrast with the avant-garde impetus the texts had in their original context. In short, Retrograde Chapbooks embodies a nostalgic attitude while at the same time acknowledging the constructed myth that fuels this attitude, and the impossibility of fully recovering that myth.

Graduation project

My graduation work is a single-screen generative film, where the imagery is computer-generated in real time. In the work certain decisions are delegated to a random algorithm, thus making a generative animation with different configurations each time it is played.

The imagery in the film is divided into distinct elementary shapes: rectangles, circles, hexagons, grids, arcs and curved lines. These elements form the basis of a choreographed animation. The algorithm sets an element at random within the screen, and animates it with certain movement also selected at random.

The geometrical elements, as well as the general aesthetic of the work is in part inspired and derived from El Lissittky's Proun series (the name Proun is derived from the Russian wording for 'Newly established art form', though Lissitky did not provide a precise definition for these terms). This series, initiated in 1919, consists of paintings, drawing, lithographs, and the spatial installation Proun Room from 1923. The Proun series was Lissitzky's exploration of spatial elements, and a continuation of ideas from Suprematism. In particular, the proun pictures express space without specific directions.

In a more general context, Lissitky was part of an avant-garde group who believed that abstraction – the artistic mirror-image of technological progress – was a harbinger of utopian social values. As abtraction was cleraly seen to be the artistic expression of technological progress, technology itself was taken to be part and parcel of such utopian ideals. For Lissitky, this progress was best exemplified, not only in technologies such as the radio and the airplane, but more crucially in advances in mathematics and theoretical physics. The Proun series was directly influenced by advances in non-Eucludian geometry, and theories of the 4th dimension in mathematical space. (Levinger) In a sense, Lisstzky strove provide a basis for Suprematism in mathematical and scientific advances — rather than in the transcendental space of Malevich.

According to Manuel Corrada, mathematics provided three roles to the Russian avant-gardes: first, it was a metaphor for progress; second, it provided a language of pure forms and shapes. (as in Malevich non-objective shapes, for instance); and third, mathematics could directly infuence the theoretical artistic notions, as it was the case with El Lissitzky. (Corrada, 377)

"The image of space presented in the Proun discloses differences with methods of space organization in pre-existent analogue media to the point of showing a procedure of computation algorithm in their logic." (Lee et al., 2003)

"We see that on the surface (plane) of the picture, the PROUN ceases to exist as such and becomes a building surveyed from every direction — considered from above or examined from below. The result of this turns out to be the destruction of the single axis that leads to the horizon. Revolving, we are screwed into space." (Lissitzky, Theses on the Proun, 1920, §4)

Graduation work and reflective nostalgia

My work does not try to critique Lissitky's utopian aspirations, nor attempts to consign his project as a failure. Instead my work tries to explore – with a mix of nostalgia and of criticality — what would mean to hold such belief in technology today. Instead of concentrating in advances in mathematics or fundamental science, I decided to concentrate in the fuel of contemporary technology: digital technologies and the internet.

It is a moot point to consider whether Lisstiky (as any other avant-garde artist of his time) was justified in holding fast to the belief of progress in technology. This is not the issue in my work. The real issue is whether those beliefs are justified today.

By making an (albeit nostalgic) invocation of Lisstiky's Proun works, I attempt to situate today's belief in technological progress bis a bis a century-old modernist utopia.

In terms of reflective nostalgia, my work involves – to some extent – a nostalgic reprisal and appropriation of Lissitky's abstract avant-garde project (and, by extension, the general milieu of early Russian and European avant-gardes.) This invocation is explicit in the formal qualities of the work. these include the choice of elementary shapes for the animation, which are directly inspired and sourced from Lissitky's Proun works; it also includes the set of movements assigned to each geometrical element, movements that were inspired by the early abstract films of Hans Richter, the work of Viking Eggeling (who collaborated closely with Lisstzky), and Lissitky's own spatial installations: Proun Room (1922) and the Cabinet of Abstraction (1927) — installations that, albeit considered a static medium, gave the possibility of adding a temporal dimension to the whole, as the spectator moves within the space. [Given Lissitzky preocupations with notions of space, it comes as no surprise that he would prefer the possibilities of movement provided in real space, to the illusory space of film]

The nostalgic invocation is not the only component to my work, however. As Svetlana Boym points out, reflective nostalgia stresses the notions of loss, yet without embarking in a reconstructive project. In fact my work proposes the argument that such a reconstructive project will not only be impossible, but undesirable: it would mean holding a dangerous enthusiastic belief in the current progress of technology.

In approaching these themes (of nostalgic invocation and critical engagement with our modernist past) in a studio practice, there is the danger of perpetuating the idea of a failed avant-garde. This prevalent view was best expressed and theorized by Peter Bürger in the 1970s, in his book The Theory of the Avant-Garde. For Bürger, the historical avant-garde movement failed at their aims. One sign of this failure was the rampant institutionalization and musealization of their provocative works. The avant-garde was internalized and tamed by the very institutions which it initially opposed. Though this issue is not directly pertinent to the purposes of my essay, I would argue that this view is not fully guaranteed. In fact, Bürger’s argument, although intuitively popular in contemporary art in general, have come under much criticism since the English publication of The Theory of the Avant-Garde in 1982.

In my own work I abstain from making a judgment whether this failure is legitimate or not. My work is not directly concerned with this question. For, regardless if we consider the modernist project a failure or a success, it is a project that has been already left behind. My work addresses this gap: the relation to the modernist past from a contemporary culture standpoint. In order to maintain a critical view of this relation, I have endeavoured to avoid falling into the easy judgment of proclaiming the failure of modernism.

Instead of judging upon the past, my work is more fruitfully seen as inviting judgment upon the present. That is, upon our contemporary relation to the gap previously mentioned.

Following Boym’s characterisation of reflective nostalgia, we can think of this gap — the relation to the modernist past from a contemporary culture standpoint — in terms of what she calls "the gap between identity and resemblance." A reflective project would be aware of this gap, of the impossibility of attaining identity with a particular historical work or event — that is, the impossibility of reenacting a nostalgic past.

This impossibility can be further clarified in light of Arthur Danto’s comments regarding the contemporary state of the art world, which he terms post-historical. Danto acknowledges that it may be possible for an artist today to create a work of art formally and visually similar to the art of a previous period. But it is not possible for said artist to recreate the historical imperative, intentional or otherwise, that an earlier work may have had.

“[It] is possible for artists to appropriate the forms of past art, and use to their own expressive ends the cave painting, the altarpiece […] or whatever.

[Yet] It is not possible to relate to these works as those did in whose form of life those works played the role they played: we are not cavemen, nor are we … Parisian bohemians on the frontiers of a new style.”

(Danto, 198)

Conclusion

Returning to the concepts introduced in the first chapter, we can now assert that the topology of two different nostalgic forms presented by Boym can be used to add a more nuanced view to Terry Smith's description of the tendency of revival and continuation of modernist tropes.

Within this tendency we are able to distinguish different practices that display a reflective or restorative nostalgic project to varying degrees.

"Zombie Formalism", for instance, may be taken as an example of a manifestation of restorative nostalgia. It seeks to conserve and preserve the institutional status quo afforded by autonomous artworks in the conventional sense, by embracing the well-tested formal aspects of twentieth century modern abstraction. In its own restorative project, Zombie Formalist works — and the contemporary variant of neo-formalism — look back at modern abstraction as a solid institutional rock.

However, not all contemporary work that is set in dialogue with modernism needs to advance the "presumption here is that this revisioned modernity will return to take up a paradigmatic role." (Smith, 2008). Boym's notion of reflective nostalgia can be used to add a constructive and critical element to Smith's characterisation of this main tendency in contemporary art.

As explored in the last chapter, in my own studio practice I engage with artefacts from the modernist past. This involves a degree of nostalgia, while also trying to maintain the reflectivity in Boym’s topology of nostalgia. This reflectivity is sought in emphasizing the awareness of the gap in our relation to the past – a gap of identity and resemblane

The danger of conflating formal similarity with actual embodiment of historical significance — a recurring restorative nostalgic approach — is well stressed by Danto:

“There is a difference to be drawn between the forms and the way we relate to them. The sense in which everything is possible is that in which all forms are ours. The sense in which not everything is possible is that we must still relate to them in our own way. The way we relate to those forms is part of what defines our period.“ (Danto, 198)

In this paper I have tried to show that, even though our period may be partially defined in terms of nostalgia, it can embrace criticality and reflection.

Bibliography

Boym, Svetlana. (2002) The Future of Nostalgia. New York, Basic Books.

Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents”. The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer 2007).

Corrada, Manuel, (1992) "On Some Vistas Disclosed by Mathematics to the Russian Avant-Garde: Geometry, El Lissitzky and Gabo", LEONARDO, Vol. 25, No. 3/4. pp. 377-384.

Danto, Arthur C. (1997) After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

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