The Nostalgic Impulse Lucas Battich “Today the canon appears less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through.” (Hal Foster, 2002, p. 81)
Zoe Beloff, ‘Glass House’, video-stills, 2015
The cultural bequest of others is for us to uphold,
of the modern teleology of progress, nostalgia became a
process, recreate, and to police. What is remembered
longing for a lost time, either a time located in the past
and how is one of the paramount jobs not just of
history, or an imagined home within an imagined
museum curators and archivists, but of the whole
utopic, even future time.
artistic populace, from institutions to dealers, collectors, and, most importantly perhaps, artists
In our forward-looking progress-obsessed times, it may
themselves. In dealing with this legacy, it seems all too
seem uncritical to look back with a nostalgic tinge to
easy to aggrandise the splendor of past achievements,
some past artistic grandeur, be it the Dutch old
often to the denigration of our own cultural times. In
masters, the formal concerns of modernism, or even
this respect, it is helpful to be aware of any nostalgic
the anti-nostalgic spirit of the early avant-garde. But
impulse that may affect us.
not all nostalgic impulses are naive or uncritical. In her perspicuous study of the malady, Svetlana Boym deline-
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots. Nostos
ates two different nostalgic impulses, which provide a
signifies “return home”, algia signifies “sorrow”. The
critical basis to address the nostalgia often displayed,
word was coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in
both implicitly and explicitly, in the arts of our time. On
1688, who thought his scientific neologism was
the one hand, there is what Boym terms restorative
particularly suitable “to define the sad mood originat-
nostalgia, which “puts emphasis on nostos and proposes
ing from the desire for the return to one’s native land.”1
to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory
Among the first victims of the newly diagnosed disease
gaps.”3 Politically motivated nationalist revivals, and
were freedom-loving students from the Republic of
reconstructions of past monuments fall under this
Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants
category. In fact, many projects driven by a restorative
working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers
nostalgic tendency do not consider themselves
fighting abroad. With the advent of Romanticism,
nostalgic at all. There is a reflective nostalgic tendency
nostalgia passed from being a curable sickness and an
on the other hand which emphasises algia. Reflective
object of medicine, to a more abstract condition in the
nostalgia does not attempt a recovery or return to some
realms of literature, philosophy and art.2 In the context
mythical past, but thrives on the notion of the