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Finally found it, abandoned to a passing race of dibbles, taking turns to smell dusty or damp over the seasons.
There was an excellent article in the Sunday Tribune (business section) last weekend, written by Maxim Kelly, that drew attention to the recent trend of using nostalgia for advertising purposes.
There are other examples too, loads of them, some of which I’ve written about here
- The new TV ad for Sprite is a pastiche of Shaft, with Sprite bottles substituted for guns.
- The new McDonald’s TV ads cut to a flashback of ‘the eighties’ (I’ve so far seen two versions; one is of an aerobics class, bizarrely referencing fitness)
- Henri Hippo has been relaunched as the icon of Ulster Bank, albeit with a more digitised style of animation than before. I recently saw copy on a Henri billboard that read ‘Remember when happiness was staying up to watch Dallas?’
So there a few notable things here.
Mc Donalds and Sprite are both global corporations, and the signifiers they light on are similarly ‘global’ (ie referring to hegemonic American popular culture). Visually, these two ads also share a very distinct gritty, ‘analogue’ quality when they’re visually quoting The Past.
Henri Hippo is a much more localised phenomenon, with a much smaller audience, and the focus on Dallas as a childhood experience narrows the demographic further – to people around my age (twenties to early thirties) who lived in Ireland at the time. It’s an unusual experience to feel so targeted by advertising, and if nothing else it really makes me interrogate my memory and experience of this time. Do I really remember it like that? Is the story I have belonging to my childhood, or someone else’s?
Ulster Bank has today brought back the iconic 1980s children’s character Henri Hippo who introduced the idea of saving to a generation of Irish children nearly 30 years ago… At the re-launch of Henri Hippo, Richard Donnan, Managing Director of Ulster Bank Retail Markets said: “Henri Hippo will be fondly remembered by a generation of Irish adults who were introduced to the concept and habit of saving through a great sense of fun. Many of them will now have their own children to whom they will want to pass on a habit that will have served them well down through the years. We want to help parents encourage and motivate their children to save.”
From here
There is something larger here about nostalgia marketing and the time cycles that seem to be involved. I don’t know how ‘new’ the use of nostalgia is in marketing, but it seems to be running on a 20 – 30 year cycle at the moment.
In 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud actually wrote about this in relation to contemporary art, pointing out how art in the 80s drew from the ‘visual effectiveness’ of 60s Pop, and art in the nineties seemed to ‘identify’ with trends from the 70s, including a sense of crisis, saying
Fashion can thus create aesthetic microclimates which affect the way we read recent history.
My recent work has involved making objects that use ‘technologies of their time’ in order to reflect on questions of memory, nostalgia and the gaps in collective histories. This has sometimes involved recording a sound or image digitally and ‘translating’ it into an analogue technology. (I know I’m treading all kinds of fine lines here).
Typically this gives the recorded image or sound a much more ‘thing’-like’ quality: unreliable memories, expressions and conversations suddenly become more solid and weighty. Vinyl acetates, 35mm slide film, magnetic VHS tape - all these technolgies are thrown into a kind of sculptural relief when imagined alongside the floating ephemera of mp3s, tiffs and jpegs. Read the rest of this entry »
This year is the fortieth anniversary of the student protests and worker strikes that marked 1968. Given contemporary art’s current fascination with tropes of re-enactment and restaging as ways of addressing past political moments and unrealised opportunities, it seems likely that these events will be re-looked at this year.
I discovered recently, quite by accident, that one of the students I lecture in my history of visual culture class attended the same art institution I did, then at a different location, in 1968. It struck me as uncanny, that I am in a position of lecturing such a person about the situationists. Me, who was not even alive in 1968, and she, who actually participated, if only tangentially in the events of time.
I carried out a short interview with her, extracted below, that touches on some of these ideas about memory, particularly its possibiltites and overlaps with fiction. This will likely develop into a more substantial piece of work in the future… many thanks to Linda for her time and conversation.
‘Ethnographies of the Future takes into account the vast geographies impacted by colonial rule by bringing together artists whose works present a critical relationship to post-colonial identity politics. The artists in the exhibition, with their diverse historical reference points, make clear that the terms of cultural identification are unstable. In installations, videos, and mixed-media works, they suggest an ever-shifting discursive field where the possibilities for defining ethnography are unending. Drawing on histories of the Caribbean, South Asia, Israel, China, Korea and Japan, the South Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, the exhibition addresses colonial rule from a contemporary, global perspective.
Ethnographies of the Future is staged in two parts: a gallery installation that resembles a museological presentation of ethnographic objects and a video screening. Both components of the exhibition capture the time-based aspects of post-colonial identity politics where locational identity, cultural history, and the body as territory, set the stage for a discussion on the construction of identity.’
Artists include Elia Alba, Rajkamal Kahlon, Seung Young Kim and Hironori Murai, Simone Leigh, Ohad Meromi, Marc Andre Robinson, Pak Sheung Chuen, Allison Smith Sriwhana Spong, Roberto Visani with John Movius. On April 16, film and video works by Pedro Barateiro, Lene Berg, Nao Bustamante, Katia Kameli, Grace Ndiritu, Sriwhana Spong, and others will be screened.
Image Credit: Ohad Meromi, Moon Colony, 2005, video still. Courtesy of the artist and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York.
Curated by Sara Reisman, March 18 - May 5 2008 at the Bric Rotunda Gallery
I am currently involved with a research project to result in site-specific artworks in the area where I live. I am finding this difficult as I’m having to confront head-on my position within the imagined polarities of rural/ urban, insider/ outsider, and art that is made for ‘here’ and ‘there’.
A week or two ago I accessed the Irish Times archive and compiled the series of articles written by Emer McNamara, about her move from Dublin to Leitrim in the late nineties (every second Thursday September 1999 – June 2000).
This series was called ‘Living on Main Street’ and contain detailed descriptions that move from observations about people and life in the town (names included), to the author’s personal life, to the sense of the broader social changes happening in the country as a whole, and the northwest in particular. They make interesting, if slightly uncomfortable reading – I can identify with her migration from the east and its economic pull, but not her decision to make such a very public diary. It feels raw to me, and I can only wonder at the social and emotional conflicts that must have played out within the micropolitics of the town.
The Ballroom of Romance:
a place (Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim, Ireland; see the above picture)
a piece of literature (short story by William Trevor)
a film (directed by Pat O’Connor).
The three ballrooms came into being in that order; the literature was inspired by the facade of the building as Trevor drove past one day on his way to Enniskillen, and the film was a rendition of the short story. Amazing that a structure known as the ‘Nissan Hut’ could inspire such diverse cultural productions.
More about The Ballroom of Romance here
The photograph above is by Gareth Kennedy, taken one day while passing on the bus to Enniskillen.
Artist duo McDermott and McGough currently have a retrospective exhibition on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (another one for the collaborative artist couples list).
From the press release:
An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photographs 1990 – 1890 comprises some 120 works created using a wide range of historic photographic techniques, including the use of palladium, gum, salt and cyanotype prints. David McDermott and Peter McGough met when they were both part of the famous East Village New York art scene of the 1980s, and have since become renowned for their seamless fusion of art and life.
In a revolt against the confines of chronological time, they have built their practice through appropriating imagery and objects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have also assiduously reconstructed their lives as Victorian gentlemen – complete with knee britches, top hats and tail coats – immersing themselves in the environment and era in which they feel most at home, and, incidentally, dating their works accordingly.
My instinctual response to this work was unfairly and unjustifiably dismissive. I don’t think it’s the act of performative nostalgia, of literally attempting to live in the past, that spurred this displeasure. I actually think it’s the specific era that the artists chose: Victorianism is so passé. Different ‘pasts’ (that is, historical eras) go in and out of fashion like anything else. I wonder if it is simply their choice of the Victorian era that caused my nose to curl up?
The press release also claims that ‘they also subvert the obvious by incorporating homoerotic and art historical references, allowing the subject to expand outside of its time-capsule-like boundaries and to exist in relation to current cultural and artistic ideals’.
Image above: Bubble of Soap Formed at the Extremity of a Strand of Straw, 1884, 1990, palladium print. Image held here
In Paul Murnaghan’s Memorious, (14 - 28 January 2006), advertising space was used as a platform to announce that the artist’s memory capacity was for sale. Once the advertisement had been read, the work was completed in that form. If the contacts that were included in the ad were utilized, the work entered a second phase, one in which the activator gained control. At this stage it is necessary for that person to make some decisions. Which memory shall be chosen, why this memory, what is its value?
Memory was the first monument, before drawing, photography or object. Like any ideology or belief, the substance of the monument corrupts over time. Memorious offered a functional placebo of commemorative effect. Of course the purchased certificate will not degrade in the same fashion. The dictated text or monument is wax sealed in a document of personal authenticity. The substance may be a complete fabrication, a dream, a wish or a memorial. Here, all is valid and true. It is intended that these manuscripts will resurface at some stage and that individuals will reengage with the content of the text.
from the artist’s website
*Funes the Memorious is a famous story by Jorges Luis Borges that imagines the risks of perfect memory: it concerns a man who possesses ‘total recall’ and is paralysed by it.
Yesterday my laptop died.
I am ashamed to say that I reacted to this news in a similar fashion to how I responded to a recent phonecall notification of a family death: shock (surprising myself at how well I was dealing with ‘the situation’), followed by immersion in attempts at practical problem-solving, followed by belated panic and an overdue sense of hopelessness and disorientation.
Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now – “We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalised in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory ‘out there’ than exists in ‘all of us’. We’ve peripheralised our essence.” *
I was haunted by the loss (of photos, music, work projects, documentation of artwork, pieces of writing, invoices, tax returns) that were embedded in this machine, not backed up. My outsourced memory was not backed up and I had no one to blame but myself. The worst part of the loss were the gaps in my inventory of the things I knew I had lost: the things I couldn’t even remember but had lost anyway. I imagined these things sitting zipped up tightly in yellow folders. These yellow folders had clearly defined edges but blurred-together names; they hovered somewhere close to the right side of my forehead but slightly above it, lost in a blind fringe.
I awoke with a headache the day my laptop died, and it has refused to recede. I’ve had a lot of reading to do and been overtaken with anxiety since I’ve been unable to take notes except in written, paper, form. My thinking has become linear and I realise I’m not entirely used to it. The pressure to internalise all of this material and remember everything now is making my headache worse.
After flatlining, the laptop actually responded to artificial resuscitation but I have been told that the medium-to-longterm prognosis is bad. So we are making the most of every day we have left together.
Today I went out and bought a monstrous backup hard drive. The muscles around my cheekbones and mouth relaxed for the first time since the emergency (I hadn’t realised they had been all pinched together). I experienced a warm, flowing sensation inside my body (not pee or other bodily fluid: something much more ethereal and life-affirming).
Your life is made up of experiences: your music, your memories, your information. As that collection grows, so does the need to save your life.**
I am disgusted with myself for buying into this.
* Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, 1995. ** Printed on the packaging of my new external hard drive.
[the book above is The Future of Nostalgia, by Svetlana Boym]
A recent stay in Berlin found me at Ostel, a hostel renovated as an homage to ‘ostalgie’, in the style of the former DDR. (see this post)
My expectations of the place were of course building it up for a fall, but even still, it seemed oddly, eerily empty. It lacked spirit. And as much as it pains me to say it, it lacked the elusive texture of authenticity, not even that I would know what that was.
The rooms were furnished sparsely, mainly with what seemed like strips of imitation vintage wallpaper and IKEA furniture, peppered with some older items – in our room some beautiful books, a radio/ record player, and a fantastically ugly circular wicker-framed mirror. Builders were at work on scaffolding outside the window, which highlighted the grating, sparkly newness of the place, spotless tiled bathroom and all.
Almost instantly, the experience of walking through the corridors recalled my experience of Hotel Ballymun, something I have not written about here. The parallels between the 2 places are fascinating – one a self-conscious recreation that walked a line between irony and sincerity, manufacturing the authenticity (or the knowing postmodern suspicion of any such experience) craved by tourists; the other an art project that served as some kind of memorial that implicitly traded on such modes of collective experience and cultural memory.
My earliest connection with Berlin are two souvenir shot glasses that were a gift from my cousin Sean. Sean was my eldest cousin who lived in America, who decided to go travelling in Europe one summer, Europe, then as now, having a different meaning and weight to someone brought up in the States than to me. Especially me as someone who probably was barely ten at the time.
I remember him as charming and full of plamás, and a bit of chancer, so it was little surprise in retrospect that he brought back a piece of the Berlin wall. I’m not sure if it had even been taken down at the time, and I remember having difficulty understanding the significance of this smallish, innocuous looking piece of grey concrete. I don’t remember that much about it except that it was smallish (maybe the size of a ten year old palm) and was lighter than I expected something so important to be.
I was born in 1981 and for me the falling of the Berlin Wall is a memory but it feels like fiction. It belongs to a time of the Live Aid concert, mullet haircuts, a certain cut of leather jacket, and not being allowed to watch Home and Away (‘too much sex in it’). I can feel all these memories even though I was not even four when the Live Aid concert happened. They are impossible memories, recorded on the grainy analogue of VHS, and played on a video player our household did not possess until the mid nineties.
Sean died in the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001. I felt his loss and remembered him in Berlin.
Last night I saw the film This is England.
I’d heard good things and generally was not disappointed - was a very well directed, superbly-acted skinhead flick, to be reductive about it. Given my interest in nostalgia and collective memory, particularly in constructed memories and the collision of the pop with the political, I was interested in how the texture of Thatcher’s England would be portrayed. It was actually fairly intoxicating - Rubik’s Cubes, Buckaroo, clock radios and 80s fashion-fashion-fashion was interspersed with the Falklands war and miner’s protests. It was kind of gorgeous.
The kind of nostalgia used in the film portrays the issues (nationalism/ racism and its associated nasties) as entities discrete in time, that can be reflected on from the same comfortable distance as Doc Martens, Culture Club eyeliner and clunky analogue technology. Skinny jeans have made a comeback in recent years, so maybe this is an unfair assessment. Does ideology get recycled with fashion or is it an empty recuperation?
The throwing of the flag into the sea was an implausible closing gesture… it did strike me though that most of the significant action in the film took place within the timespan of one little boy’s haircut, which seemed accidentally, significantly poignant.
A show at the Whitney I’m sorry I’m missing. More here
Image: Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, 1973
The friendly attitude of continental diplomats and businessmen to the emerging Irish Free State, in the form of investment and expert labour, arguably led to the successful founding of the sugar industry in the 1920s. Reubenshafen or Port de Bettavres was the name for the ‘beet port’ behind the sugar factory in Carlow, its name depending on the origin of the speaker (Germany or Belgium).
Reubenshafen Quarter is the only name in the proposed Greencore development on the sugar factory site that refers to sugar, even obliquely, or the site’s previous use. The potential Reubenshafen Quarter is linked to an obscure and little-known history, appropriated by Greencore in order to claim a new corporate identity.
(images courtesy Greencore & First Impressions Ltd). See also issue 3 of The Fold - ‘The Disappeared’, a Workroom Elsewhere project curated by Alison Pilkington and Cora Cummins. Below image: Rabbi Zaiman Alony, a senior member of the Jewish community in Ireland, supervising the packaging of sugar in 1976 in the Carlow factory. For more about internationalism and the Irish sugar industry, see the ‘extras’ section here.
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