Andreas HuyssenNostalgia for Ruins

cultural amnesia

museumised by theme parks

memory has become a cultural obsession

of monumental proportions

real can be "mythologized”

while mythical can create strong effects

of reality

Avant-garde:

collective phenomena

Dada movement, futurism, surrealism, situationists = radical futuristic UTOPIA

= hope for radical political changes (both left & right)

= manifestos

marginalized artists, writers, composers, thinkers

opposed to mainstream commercial values

the formative years of modernism

rejected artificially synthesized mass culture = industrialization

manufactured forms = new consumer culture

Greenberg in the 30’s Mainstream media = direct product of Capitalism = substantial industries Manufacturing profit-fixated motives ≠ ideals of true art kitsch: phony, faked, mechanical culture -- pretended to be more than

they were

Rosenburg, progressive culture in the late 60’s• ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role • “avant-garde ghosts” ↔ changing mass culture • profession = pretense of overthrowing it

Hand-drawn still from Kentridge animation, 1989

Kuitca, El Momento, 1989

Architecture ↔ imaginary urban landscapes urban imagination ≠ fantasy permanent residents, immigrants, tourists

Proliferation of museums ↔ Memory boom

MACBA Jewish Museum

“Melancholy is as palpable as a tangible reality.”

Politics of memory = social/ethic conflicts Battle of historical memory Collective memory not working Memory hierarchies = bad idea

Holoaust memory -- slavery memory

Discourses: reinforce Historical Memory

Modernity = Politicised religious fanaticism

Past ≥ future Past nostalgic desire = desire for somewhere else Nostalgia as distorted utopia Ruins = desires of past

Nostalgia: Homesickness longing for something far away or long ago negative coding in modernity Utopia in reverse

Ruins: Past as both present & unaccessible Nostalgic trigger

Ruins: the imagined present of a past that can now only

be grasped in its decay.

Real ruins of different kinds function as projective

screens for modernity’s articulation of temporalities and

for its fear of and obsession with the passing of time…

Necessary Utopias

Not obsessed with past

Organize the future

The end