restoring the new:
it's tme to look back to the future
One observation was easy to make.
Artists from all over the world are articulating their political views, their hopes and dreams, by looking back.
That is to say, they are going back to the future. They are looking to history to find a more positive vision of what could be next.
They are not doing what was expected of political artists even a few years ago. They are not doing what some of the same artists were doing a few years ago.
They are not telling stories set now, about now. They are not appealing to audiences to be on the right side of history.
They are heading into the archive to hold up stories that they feel need to be retold, reclaimed and re-formed.
CREATIVE RESTORATION
In the art festival this mood permeates lots of the work, but it is perhaps most apparent in the archive or research project ‘Trans Masc Studies: Memory is a Museum’ by Ellis Jackson Kroese.
In the Fringe Festival, Victoria Melody’s ‘Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak’ is directly a story all about historic re-enactment. Though in the sense that Jaws is not really a film about a shark, this is not really about the costumes. It is really about active communities and ownership and activism.
The international festival had high profile productions looking at the story of the collapse of RBS and the financial crash.
Mary Queen of Rock uses the story of Mary Queen of Scots to talk about the place of women in society and the way that women’s stories themselves are told.
Midnight at the Palace tells the story of the rise (in LA) and fall (in NY) of the Cockettes.
Even when talking about more contemporary issues, or more personal stories, like Alright Sunshine or Mind How You Go does, we see people looking back to quite specific times periods in their lives in order to look forward.
Activist art is something we often understand as rebellious or disruptive, but this is much more about conserving and preserving things other people do not.
THE CONTEXT
That reflects something in the wider culture right now.
There’s a folkore revival afoot that has been growing artistically over the last decade, but is now bubbling into fashion with brands like Heresy, and even to a certain extent in D&G’s more radical and Burberry’s more familiar exploration of heritage motifs.
Cultural critics like Ted Gioia even worry around our collective failure to transmit new culture and art anymore. Or to be more precise, about cultural stagnation.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR PEOPLE WHO
MAKE NEW THINGS
We can argue about how we got here, but clearly creative people do think that looking back has to be a stagnant process.
Can we create old materials to create new spaces?
Going back to the future clearly can be creative. Even radical.
We are entering a period when shock of the new actually seems kind of dull. It is bringing Brewdog energy when you could have brought Guinness.
To gain traction around a new product in the world we may be best to present the innovative things inside a tradition. Or a backstory.
To understand how to change things we may be best to look for what we’ve forgotten, rather than just what we can invent.
To get people to imagine the new, should we show them what we can reclaim together?
