Ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time. Walter Benjamin saw in ruins “allegories of thinking itself,” a meditation on ambivalence.
Nostalgia is not merely anti-modern, but coeval with the modern project itself. Like modernity, nostalgia has a utopian element, but it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space.
Looking back at the ruins of the twentieth century, we see more paradoxical mergers: between suprahuman state models and human practices, between individual aspirations and collective pressure, between ascending dreams and down-to-earth everyday survivals.
The off-modern gaze acknowledges the disharmony and the contrapuntal relationship between human, historical, and natural temporalities. It is reconciled to perspectivism and conjectural history. Thus, the off-modern perspective allows us to frame utopian projects as dialectical ruins—not to discard or demolish them, but rather to confront them and to incorporate them into our own fleeing present.
Project Japan: Metabolism Talks… : An oral history by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist documenting the first non-Western avantgarde movement in architecture, and the last moment that architecture was a public rather than a private affair…
I think nihilism is a realistic outlook, but I see both positive and negative aspects in the approach of the main character. His self-imposed exile from existing institutions: work, school, family, etc., is certainly positive, but his difficulty in communicating with other people in the same situation is relatively hopeless. More and more, intelligent young people are put into this almost hopeless situation.
Maurizio Cattelan La Rivoluzione siamo noi (We are the Revolution), 2000 Polyester resin, wax, pigment, felt suit, and metal coat rack Figure: 123.8 x 35.6 x 43.2 cm; Coat rack: 189.9 x 47 x 52.1 cm.
Maurizio Cattelan: ALL November 4, 2011–January 22, 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim New York
