70% THEORY/30% PRACTICAL OPTION
Tim Walker
rational eclecticism”, pastiche is no longer a coherent style grounded in the referent of historical reality, but rather the illogical and random borrowing of codes which simulate a variety of historical moments themselves.’ (Easthope, A & McGowan, K. 1992: p254). The result is an ‘impeded ability to represent our own time and locate our own place in history’ (Jameson in Dika, 2003: p2). According to Jameson, this loss of history mirrors the same anxiety felt in Western cultures after the cultural shifts and dislocation of the industrial age, when people longed to return to a slower, simpler way of life (Jameson, 1991). Fashion archivist Robin Muir, an enthusiast of Walker’s work, would agree with the latter point, ‘Such introspection...happens in times of uncertainty. Well, perhaps, we’re in dark hours now: Spiralling acts of destruction appear commonplace, so too inhumanitarian gestures, the repression of basic human rights...and, as one commentator recently put it, “the sickness of our popular media.” Is it any wonder that the brightest among us look backwards?’ (Muir, 2008: p9). Samuel, conversely, argues that this kind of representation is not symptomatic of a contemporary disillusionment
but simply a feature of ‘popular memory’, which he claims ‘prefers the eccentric to the typical; the sensational to the routine.’ (Samuel, 1996: p6). Unlike the history of the professional historian, which ‘is apt to present itself as an esoteric form of knowledge’ (Samuel, 1996: p3), the aesthetics of popular memory ‘could be described as polyglot, drawing in one register from the quotidian and the familiar, while in another playing with the Gothic and the uncanny.’ (Samuel, 1996: p282). Certainly, there is no attempt to disguise the elements of fantasy, theatricality or humour in Walker’s work. ‘I know that the world I am painting is not a reality. It is a whim, an entertainment to provoke something in people, whether as escapism or relief. I think that is very valid.’ (Walker in Sinclair, 2008). In the final chapter of this dissertation, I explore the trend for contemporary fashion photography that not only references the past, as does Walker’s work, but in addition recreates or simulates the aesthetic of photographs taken almost three decades earlier.
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