A Mexican tourist at Nostalgija Café Bar, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2002
In 2008 the Sydney Biennial presented a symposium featuring Robert Storr and Okwui Enwezor as keynote speakers. Just the year prior, Storr and Enwezor had had a highly public and acrimonious back and forth exchange on Artforum stemming from negative reviews by Enwezor (and others) of Storr’s then recent Venice Biennale. During the Sydney symposium episode, which took place during a Q&A session after Storr’s keynote, the latter lashed out against Enwezor for something he had said in his own presentation about May 1968. Rob Storr said: “he [Okwui] invidiously said that ‘68 is a nostalgia exercise concerned with bourgeois students that should not be allowed to overshadow more ‘real’ —in his view—insurrectionary movements in Asia and so on down the line”. He went on to discuss how while Okwui was 5 years old in ‘68, he in contrast was actually a “bourgeois student” in Paris who engaged in the movement. He discussed how relevant 1968 was for generating dialogue, even while the social movement did not achieve the revolution they hoped for. He concluded: “The results of this were not successful. And I am the last person to be nostalgic about things that fail, and in fact I am not interested in nostalgia at all. But it seems to me that it is utterly invidious to take a general social movement of that time and compare it to a contemporary one in order to say we are now the revolutionary front […] [to do so] is not political: it is reprehensible, and you shouldn’t do it again.”
Enwezor furiously replied to Storr’s “reprimand” (Okwui’s words) by defending his statements, arguing that his point was that May ’68 was a “local phenomenon that was not world-changing”, then accusing Storr of making a caricature of this comments. This then devolved into a shouting match that the poor moderator tried unsuccessfully to quell.
That event aside, the larger Storr/Enwezor curatorial debate is a valuable case study for the history of contemporary curating: it was a confrontation of curatorial philosophies and more specifically around the validation of certain artistic practices that are concerned with politics versus those that are not explicitly so, and more generally around how curators should engage with the political realm. The small, footnote-size aspect of it in this particular exchange which I feel nobody but me might care about and happen to find worthy of examination are the side references to nostalgia.
As it is exemplified by both Storr’s and Enwezor’s comments, “nostalgic” is one of the more biting accusations that can be thrown at in art criticism. It, of course, connotes a yearning for a past that in reality never existed, done in idealistic and uncritical ways. Of those, the greater sin of the nostalgist might be the lack of criticality. In current American politics, it has been observed, uncritical nostalgia can be exemplified by trumpism’s appeal to white racists (“Make America Great Again”) and the utter refusal to allow critical race theory to spell out the historical truths around racial inequity, calling it anti-American.
It is interesting to see how nostalgia often rears its head in art history. I for one sometimes feel that when I was an employee of MoMA I worked at one of the most nostalgic museums in the world— a place so fascinated by its own origin story that over the course of generations it found itself stuck in a quasi-religious, solipsist dilemma: its gospel (i.e. the modernist canon) was largely about validating itself as the pinnacle of the gospel, and in subsequent years it would need to tie itself into knots to be critical of it without dismantling it altogether and ceding its own role as central narrator of 20th century art. In order to explain away or ultimately avoid this nostalgia trap, some tried to mount the Fawlknerian thesis that modernism is not only not dead but is not even past. For example, over the years leading MoMA curators like Kirk Varnedoe argued against the clear-cut division between modern and contemporary art, saying that modernism was in essence a series of “revolutions, questions and arguments of the early 20th century” that constituted “still the ground upon which contemporary art is still based.” In Varnedoe’s perspective, modernism is not really a thing of the past but rather an unfolding narrative that has not yet concluded. If one were to literally follow this view, Alfred Barr’s famous torpedo diagram (ie. his theory that the notion of modernism is a 75-year span progressively moving through time ) would rather have to be drawn like an elastic, ever-elongating projectile that never moves from its original date of inception, now it being approximately 146 years long (which are more or less the dates that MoMA’s collection officially encompasses). As a still current concept, this logic goes, we can’t really be nostalgic about modernism.
Or can we? I would argue that we are never entirely free of nostalgia, even when we think the past is the present, even while thinking that we are pushing forward.
First, a confession: I was likely born with a congenital nostalgic condition. My older sister always remembers than when I was four years old, I once remarked, listening to a record: “I love this music because it reminds me to my childhood.” As I gravitated toward contemporary art, my fascination with the past became increasingly inconvenient, as it seemed clear to me that no self-respecting artist hoping for making transformative art could ever admit to feeling nostalgic.
The word followed me around. I again encountered nostalgia head-on in 2002, when I was in Ljubljana, Slovenia installing an exhibition, and encountered a bar downtown called Café Nostalgija, which of course I was immediately attracted to. Months later, I read Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia, and was excited to find that she in fact referenced this very café in Ljubljana. Boym writes about the anomaly of that place, noting that nostalgia in most parts of the ex-Yugoslavia was frowned upon, as it is seen as the yearning for the communist era (“Yugo-nostalgia” as it was termed). Interestingly, as she also points out elsewhere in her book, nostalgia after the Russian Revolution was seen “ as not merely a bad word but a counterrevolutionary provocation. […] Nostalgia would be a dangerous “atavism” of bourgeois decadence that had no place in the new world.” In sum, and this is a key point, nostalgia is a deficiency for revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries alike.
Boym’s book, at times a personal reflection, historic analysis and aesthetic inquiry, is largely about the way in which the citizens of a rich and powerful nation, seemingly in decline now, are making sense of their past and reify that reading into a strong sense of self. She speaks about the contradictions and ambiguities that we experience with history, and how nostalgia comes to the rescue in unexpected ways to give us a stronger sense of self.
It is true that nostalgia, which historically has been so criticized and dismissed as an illness or a weakness, can nonetheless be a positive force for strengthening our sense of self and a positive view of the future among other things, as psychologist Clay Routledge has argued. But even Routledge acknowledges that nostalgia is a drug that can cause real damage. In other words, as Boym states, “unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters.”
Another recurrent theme is the link between nostalgia and the bourgeois class: mainly, the notion that nostalgia is a feeling mostly for the privileged who have the extra time, the frivolous mindset, and/or the means to dwell on the past. What we have learned from experience in recent years, however, is that nostalgia is not exclusive to the realm of the privileged. As Trumpism has shown, nostalgic-populist appeals to groups of disenfranchised people can be incredibly powerful, and its energy is not derived from the wealthy but from disaffected individuals who feel left behind by the system.
Nor does unreflective nostalgia exist only in the realm of the conservative mind: motivated by it we might actively, even violently, attempt to restore something that was there before—or at least that we think was there before. I wish Svetlana Boym were around still today to comment on today’s Putin regime and his ever increasing push toward authoritarianism. To many, Putin has capitalized on Russian’s nostalgia for the time when the Soviet Union was a superpower, selling the idea of making Russia great again. Historian Timothy Snyder examines this process in The Road to Unfreedom, linking authoritarian thinking with what he calls “politics of eternity”: a political discourse outside of history, which allows for propaganda, myth-making and lies to be taken as truths, without any reflective or critical thinking that could question the dominant authority. This is a kind of implicit nostalgia in action, vaguely promising the restoration of a happier world that is never meant to come to being.
15 or so years ago, author Stephen Wright wrote about the emergence of what he termed Stealth Art. I was always attracted by this idea, even if Wright himself was skeptical of what he considered to be the logic behind of my own work and sometimes even wrote about Stealth Art using me as an example of conceptual malpractice. In the end, I am not sure if over the years the concept has properly sustained theoretical scrutiny and whether it resolved the ontological conundrums it presented (if nobody knows it’s there, how can it still be part of the art discourse, etc.). But today I think we could provisionally borrow a page from Wright’s thinking and turn it over its head to ask if something that ails contemporary art making is actually something like Stealth Nostalgia.
The fact that the influence of nostalgia on the traditionalist mind is explicit and extensively analyzed, might obscure the background role that it also plays in the progressive mind. I worry that the specter of nostalgia is more hidden in the political left than in the right, especially because I am not convinced that we can even be consciously aware —regardless of political leaning— that we are not motivated by a yearning to restore things that we have lost in any particular past. For example, in this vigorous moment of defense of identity politics in art, and the urgency for social action, in the desire to revive a revolutionary spirit, is the construction of an idealized future might be a form of nostalgia? And: to what extent is this effort different, or similar, to the clearly nostalgic invocation that has fueled the right over the last five years? Or maybe the search for both something new and the recapturing of something lost are not at odds with each other, and we might be trying to revisit a project of renewal that was never completed? If so, may a version of this problem be what Enwezor himself once characterized as "incomplete implementations" of the global democratic project, which he titled as part of his first Documenta platform, “Democracy Unrealized” ?
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Shortly after The Future of Nostalgia came out and after my earnest tourist photo moment in Ljubljana, I reached out to Svetlana Boym in order to include her in a panel discussion I was organizing. I never succeeded, mainly due to her many commitments. Yet we initiated a conversation that was deeply inspiring to me. Like many great minds, she appeared primarily interested in exchanging ideas, regardless of the interlocutor. Once she was passing by New York and met me at the café of the Guggenheim Museum where I worked (now that I come think of it, a fitting nostalgic café for this encounter, given that the Guggenheim is a sort of nostalgic modernist monument of its own). Boym wanted to talk about history and nostalgia, of course, but she also wanted me to see her own artwork. She pulled out her portfolio and started putting original photographs onto the café table, which made it a bit of an awkward situation. She was experimenting with what she called “nostalgic technology”, where she would abruptly pull out the paper while it was still in the process of coming out of the printer. Her process also related to the other term she had coined, “Off-Modern”— a kind of symbolic interruption or disruption of history. We stayed in touch on and off until her tragic and untimely passing from cancer in 2015. The Off-Modern later became the title of her posthumous book, a partial genealogical reconsideration of the modernist narrative, part of which Barr created and Varnedoe defended.
Svetlana Boym, work from Leaving Sarajevo series, 2002-2004
I knew that after leaving Russia in the 1980s Boym fought against being defined by her Soviet past. Later she fought, or so it seemed to me at the time when I saw her digital prints, against being a conventional Harvard academic. Overall, her life’s work, so compellingly articulated through the lens of nostalgia, in the end, is perhaps about the fight that we all engage in against our own personal and cultural history and the biases we inherit from that history. She puts it best in the final phrase of The Future of Nostalgia:
Survivors of the 20th century, we are nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems to be no way back.
So it is not a winnable battle, perhaps— rather a situation where we have to best learn how to cope with that condition lurking beneath. We might only be able to identify the shadow of nostalgia in our thinking, and learn to move around with it, knowing it follows us through our life events, both those which are memorable as well as those that are better left to oblivion.
I think of this as a highly interesting article. It touches upon issues that are on the basis of art historiography, and traditional ways that certain subjects are enthroned as objective, therefore critical and others disenfranchised as not for allowing for emotional tones. Just as the example that comes to my mind is the criticisms against Giulio Carlo Argan for instance from a certain intelligence. I think that is very naïve of a certain type of art criticism to pretend to be exempt of emotional touches. The very example you gave here of the not so unemotional exchanges btw the Storr/Enwezor curatorial debate.
I think that the connection between the issue of nostalgia and the debate of modernism is very interesting. I suggest that demands further writing. And I could not stop thinking of the German literary movement of the late 18th century Sturm und Drang that sought to overthrow the cult of rationalism and gave us Goethe and Schiller, that impacted in our understanding of what art is or not in the long run, and that for me had such an overtone of nostalgia on it. I think that I, you, and most of people really, have this strong feeling of nostalgia, perhaps psychoanalysis is the key to understand it. I guess nostalgia is a basic feeling like fear, hope, etc. In Portuguese we have the word saudade that express some of this nostalgic feeling. But what a great piece you have got here Pablo, even in a simple blog post. I think this is big. It touches pressing issues. Thanks.
Super interesting! Thanks!