Category Archive

After the first day at the Utopian Studies Conference I can say that:

1. Utopianists are no more stylish than your average academic;

2. Are more likely to be male than female;

3. They are much more likely to smile at you for no reason [than your average stranger at a conference].

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

1. The new TV ad for Sprite is a pastiche of Shaft, with Sprite bottles substituted for guns.
2. 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)
3. 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 »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

[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. 

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across this comment on the jezebel blog: 

The hottest porn I’ve seen recently, by the way, was on some site where they had a video of the day and it was from the 70s. Two girls, one guy, real tits, unwaxed bush, shaggy-haired guy with chest hair … it was hot. People looking normal having sex

Nostalgia for ‘authentic’ porn. Where will it end?

[and that's right, I didn't feel it necessary to add a visual to this post].

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.

Film website

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.

Seán Lynch: Joseph Beuys’ Irish Energies (reconstruction) 2007; peat briquettes, butter; original made in 1974

A number of discussions with fellow artists recently have involved the idea of re-enactment, and why so many artists seem to be so drawn to it as a strategy at present. In Ireland this might include artists like Jesse Jones and the 12 Angry Films project, or Seán Lynch, whose work frequently revists anecdotal, unreliable or surprising histories, or Brendan Earley’s revistations of Modernism. My own interest in re-enactment tends to veer towards the kitsch and an interest in unearthing political threads embedded in such popular cultural productions - this is explored particularly with a body of work being made with Gareth Kennedy. Sources for retelling and re-enactment here have included a Dallas TV script (1987), the film King Kong (1977), and an advertising jingle for Gulf Oil, based in Bantry Bay (1968).

This trend has also being reflected inwards within the art world itself, particularly within performance art, for example Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces (2005), which involved the re-enactment of key performance works by other artists. (See Caitlin Jones’ post on the topic at Rhizome here). She suggests that the impulse to re-enact is either an homage or a repetition, but there are perhaps other impulses at work too.

It seems to me that the impulse to re-enact is caught up with a sense of nostalgia, maybe a ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ like that suggested by Walter Benjamin. It seems clear that the artist re-enactment is related though distinct from the Hollywood remake, which is a different impulse altogether. Where Hollywood seeks to remake stories already told, artists seek to re-enact stories that went unrealised. Svetlana Boym points out that the twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia - they are twin impulses, caught up with a sense of optimism and potential failure.

Portion of bread given to Thomas Ash while on Hunger Strike, Dingle Library/ Leabharlann Daingean Uí Chúis

Yesterday’s words were gathered around the town from conversation, observation, questions, emails and books. It’s interesting to observe a picture of the place emerging, and how that’s informed by the words I’m trying to extract. I’m aware that these words are impositions I’m making, more in the spirit of addition than uncovering, and it’s interesting to watch myself doing that. Now that the week is ending, and the presentation is due to happen today, my ability or attempts to think a little bit more through Irish are sadly dissipating.

Previous posts have addressed the topic of nostalgia, and mentioned how different and particular words are present for it in different languages. Almost invariably these words emerge at the formation of a new national state, or come to consciousness after a war or revolution. (See this post) I was interested in the possibility of there being an Irish equivalent after the emergence of the Free State, and I’ve been trying to track it down. Part of this journey of course lies in the extrapolation of what nostalgia is or feels like - longing, sadness, homesickness, sentimentality… and for what - place, time, or something else. It was interesting to see these conversations emerge from the question (asked in Irish) about how to locate this feeling, idea, single word. 

Suggestions made to me and argued over included uaigneas (more like ‘loneliness’); bheith buartha; maoineachas. Most people were unable to locate an exact word, which makes me think perhaps I am looking at the question backwards in terms of ‘untranslatabilty’. Finally I ended up with a series of dictionaries in the library - the most appropriate place really (see photos) - and reached what seems to be the definitive answer: cumha.

Yesterday’s words: tír grátheoir (patriot - literally ‘country-lover’); ag iompú catsúla ar (making eyes at); cuidsúlach (eyecatching); tnúthán (longing); cúlaitheach (retrogressive); barántúil/ údarach/ intaofa (authentic); sochar (profit); inneach na cainte (texture of speech)

There are plans in Milwaukee to build a public sculpture of the Fonz, the character from hit TV show Happy Days based in the city.

Visit Milwaukee, a non-profit group that promotes the city as a tourism and convention destination, is leading an effort to raise $85,000 to commission the statue. So far, Visit Milwaukee has raised $45,000, and the group is confident it will meet its timetable of unveiling a bronze Fonz in 2008, said Dave Fantle, the agency’s vice president of public relations. The agency already has contacted four artists and hopes to choose a sculptor by the end of October, he said. Visit Milwaukee got the idea of a Fonzie statue from TV Land, a cable network that broadcasts reruns of vintage shows. TV Land has donated six sculptures commemorating memorable TV events or characters to various cities, such as Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore). All six sculptures are from shows mainly popular in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, in keeping with TV Land’s focus on its baby boomer audience.

So this potential statue seems to represent a doubling of nostalgia, the twinning of the desire for a past located in fiction: the Happy Days sitcom was produced in the 70s and 80s, in a setting two decades earlier.   

See here for a vox pop of opinions from Milwaukee residents.

Once this nostalgia buzz gets going it is very hard to stop. Plans for future posts involve etch-a-sketch, spirograph, holga cameras, super 8, rubik’s cubes, connect 4…. in the meantime here is a great photo from 1968. (This is clearly the dangerous type of nostalgia, possibly in its original contagious sense)

Photo ©  Ed Van der Elsken, Belgie 1968 Twins - Courtesy Hasted Hunt

Tetris (Тетрис) was originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in June 1985, while working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. The Soviet bureaucracy licensed and managed Tetris, and advertised it with the slogan “From Russia with Love” (on NES: “From Russia With Fun!”). Because he was employed by the Soviet government, Pajitnov did not receive royalties. Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, moved to the United States in 1991 and founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers.

Thanks to J who recently told me about the Soviet origins of tetris. I find this completely fascinating. She also made a reference to how it specifically addressed a thought-to-be feminine/ domestic psychology, but I haven’t been able to find out anything on this. This was what really got me hooked as we were talking about repetitive labour/ leisure activities - she had Tetris and I had needlepoint embroidery - which is also based on a grid system. Very curious.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard about the flourishing of leisure activities in Soviet Russia. Since time had no monetary value, there was space for people to develop rich interior lives. As my granny used to say, some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

(mental note - check out William Moskoff)

Cadbury’s Wispa is being reintroduced, following a period of extensive consumer campaigning (online petitions, stage storming at Glastonbury…)

On Facebook, there are 93 ‘Bring Back Wispa’ groups with almost 14,000 members. Feelings for the retro chocolate bar run as strongly on MySpace and Bebo. During the 1980s Cadbury used a string of actors and actresses to publicise the Wispa bar: Ruth Madoc of Hi-de-Hi!, Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington of Yes Minister and Windsor Davies from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum were among the celebrities who appeared in the Wispa campaigns. The Wispa will sell for a recommended price of 42p per bar. Its 1983 launch price was just 16p [UK prices]

The Wispa was introduced in the year I was born, 1981, and phased out sometime in the early 2000s. Wikipedia has since told me that ‘Subtypes of this bar included Wispa Gold (caramel filling), Wispa Bite (caramel and biscuit filling), Wispaccino (coffee filling) and Wispa Mint (mint layer).’ None of which I recall but it’s only the basic one they will bring back anyway. (It’s being called ‘Classic‘)

I never really liked Wispas but I’m sure I’ll partake of one, all the better to remember memories and imaginings that aren’t really mine.

Image: 80s icons - Sky

Various emerging nations began to claim words for the acute sense of longing associated with nostalgia, or homesickness maybe. These words supposedly could not be translated properly, but must be understood in that language (the tongue of the homeland, so to speak). Milan Kundera speaks of the Czech litost; there is the Polish toska; the Portuguese and Brazilians have saudade; and Romanians claim dor.

I’m investigating if there is an Irish equivalent.

‘pop culture is the collective dream of the unconscious’

This acute observation is from Adam Lawrence, a Rolling Stone journalist played by John Travolta in a 1985 film called Perfect.   In the film, he travels to Los Angeles to investigate a drug case and decides to write an exposé of the health-club craze of the 1980s. He sets out to trash the fitness craze as just a replacement of the shallow singles bar scene of the 1970s. He even has a title in mind: “Looking for Mr. Goodbody.” As he researches his story, Adam meets Jessie (Jamie Lee Curtis), a sexy fitness instructor who has little use for scribes like him and bad history with reporters. Adam charms the reluctant Jessie, and before long the hot couple is ‘working out together–in more ways than one’. Suddenly Adam is faced with a quintessential dilemma of journalism: Can he be Jessie’s lover and still ridicule her friends and workplace?

I saw this now pretty obscure film at about 2am one morning when there was nothing else on and I was most likely suffering from a bout of insomnia. I don’t remember picking up on this particular quote but I do remember thinking it was pretty remarkable for a mainstream film to have such critical insight into contemporary culture. Lawrence/ Travolta’s quote came up in conversation with Jesse (a different Jesse, with a different spelling) as we were preparing for an interview about her work. It was only when she described the film in more detail as we were actually doing the interview that I realised I had seen it too.

This struck me at the time as a really amazing coincidence, and it still does. It always surprises me the sense of connection that I feel with people through this kind of memory, the surprisingly rich and nuanced texture of it. And it seems to describe something about how popular culture might operate as a kind of reservior of collective memory… somehow Bosco, a particular TV advert, a momentary fashion fad, can really locate a personal biography within an era.

This is of course cynically exploited by the endless recycling of ‘I (heart) 1970s’ and ‘Top Ten X’ shows; remakes of 70s, 80s TV shows as films; and so on and so on. But in a roundabout way, this only reinforces the texture of the quote itself, and I wonder about its potential.

Ostalgie is a German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. It is a portmanteau of the German words Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia). Initially, all GDR brands of products disappeared from the stores and were replaced by Western products, regardless of their quality. However, with the passing of time some East Germans began to feel nostalgia for certain aspects of their lives in East Germany. Ostalgie particularly refers to the nostalgia for aspects of regular daily life and culture in the former GDR, which disappeared after reunification.

Many businesses in Germany cater to those who feel Ostalgie and have begun providing them with artefacts that remind them of life under the old regime; artefacts that imitate the old ones. Now available are formerly defunct brands of East German foodstuffs, old state television programmes on video and DVD, and the previously widespread Wartburg and Trabant cars. Now Berlin has opened Ostel, a Friedrichshain budget hotel rampant with Communist-era design. Most notable are the clocks in reception showing the time in Moscow, Berlin, Beijing, and Havana, and the room choices of a larger “Stasi-suite” and a multiperson “pioneer camp.” And of course expect brightly colored 1960s-style wallpaper and portraits of former Communist officials and public figures.

I’m currently looking into ideas of ostalgie and the contemporary legacy of lebensreform with migrations of German people who have moved to certain areas in the west of Ireland. All under development.

(source - good old wikipedia. See also ‘Germany Battles over Right to Reminisce’, by Clare Murphy/ BBC news online; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3077054.stm)

Yugo-nostalgia, translated from jugonostalgija / југоносталгија, is a little-studied cultural and psychological phenomenon occurring among some citizens of the former Yugoslavia, specifically toward the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). While its anthropological and sociological aspects have not been clearly recognized, the term, and the corresponding epithet “Yugo-nostalgic”, is commonly used by the people in the region in two distinct ways: as a positive personal descriptive, and as a derogatory label.

In its positive sense, Yugo-nostalgia refers to a nostalgic emotional attachment to idealized positive aspects of the SFRY… economic security, socialist ideology, multiculturalism, internationalism and non-alignment, history, customs and traditions, and an allegedly more rewarding way of life. In the negative sense, the epithet has been used by the supporters of the new regimes to portray their critics as anachronistic, unrealistic, unpatriotic and possibly treacherous. Present manifestations of Yugo-nostalgia include music groups with Yugoslav or Titoist retro iconography, art works, films, theater performances, and many organized, themed tours of the main cities of the former Yugoslav republics (mostly Belgrade and Sarajevo).

Image: Some 1,000 people gather near a statue of Josip Broz Tito during a ceremony commemorating the 26th anniversary of his death in Sarajevo, May 4. Getty Images

I’m reading a book by Svetlana Boym at the moment, The Future of Nostalgia. I’m intoxicated with it.

Boym’s thesis resonates somewhat with Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ in that she distinguishes between ‘restorative nostalgia’ and what she sees as the critical potential inherent in ‘reflective nostalgia’.

 The term nostalgia has its roots in medicine… during this period, from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, that doctors diagnosed and treated nostalgia, it also had other names in various languages — mal du pays (country sickness) in French, Heimweh (home-pain) in German, hiraeth in Welsh, and el mal de corazón (heart-pain) in Spanish. Cases resulting in death were known and soldiers were sometimes successfully treated by being discharged and sent home. Receiving a diagnosis was, however, generally regarded as an insult. Cases of nostalgia, which sometimes occurred as epidemics, were less frequent when the armies were victorious and more frequent when they suffered reverses. Nostalgia was, however, still diagnosed among soldiers as late as the American Civil War.  Nostalgia occurs in a particularly potent form after political revolution - French Revolution; Russian Revolution; recent ‘velvet’ revolutions of Eastern Europe.

Boym sees the contemporary manifestation of nostalgia as inherently tied up with the modern condition - the twentieth century is bookended with futuristic utopias at its beginning and nostalgia at its conclusion - in this sense nostalgia is not just an individual sickness, but a historical emotion, negotiating the relationship between personal biography and collective memory.

I’ve always thought nostalgia was slightly dangerous but I wonder to what critical uses it could be put, if the sense of longing could be redirected from the past (or an imagined past) to somewhere else.