The Bad Old Days. Again. And Again ...
Over at Owen Hatherley’s blog, Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, is an interesting piece on ‘austerity nostalgia’, extracted from a recent lecture he gave at Chelsea College of Art.
Hatherley tracks the recent trend in British graphic and product design for images and objects that consciously hark back to the paternalist, institutional aesthetics of the 1940s and ’50s: posters and pamphlets simply typeset in GillSans, catchy slogans that exude an authoritative ‘everything’s going to be OK’ calm. This ‘austerity nostalgia’ could be read as a British take on the ‘New Deal’ era graphics that inspired some of the designers working in support of Barack Obama’s US presidential election campaign, yet here in Britain there’s little of the sense of political optimism that reinvigorated the US electorate late last year. We’re mistrustful of both New Labour and the Conservatives, unemployment is on the rise, businesses are falling like flies and the country grinds to a halt at the first hint of snow. The misplaced nostalgia for the ‘simpler’, ‘happier’ times of 1940s and ’50s Britain – when class barriers were fiercely rigid, when racism and sexism was socially more acceptable, when homosexuality was illegal, when rationing was still in force, when half our cities were still bomb-sites – seems markedly more fantasist than based on any feeling that something concrete can be done to affect change here in the UK. If anything, the newspapers of late have been far more retro-1980s than retro-1940s: industrial action, economic trouble, threats of ‘three-day weeks’ and power outages, old Thatcher cabinet member Kenneth Clarke back in the political front line, the escapist ‘Brideshead Revisited' revisited once again (as it often is in times of national anxiety).
Contemporary art’s penchant for borrowing from its early 20th century history would never be so bluntly described as ‘nostalgic’ or ‘retro’, but arguably in some cases, I suspect this is exactly what it is. Art’s referencing of prewar Modernist sculpture and painting, or Russian Constructivist theatre, or social Utopian architecture as refracted through the lens of late 1970s postpunk culture, is often close to being itself an expression of ‘austerity nostalgia’.
In the case of design, Hatherley cites London Transport’s recycling of its own war-era graphics from a year or two ago – with added Orwellian overtones – as being an early example of this ‘austerity nostalgia’. I would add to this the influential retro tendency in ‘mainstream-alternative’ pop culture and fashion.
Take, for instance, the band British Sea Power. Back in 2003, they were already making hay with World War I and II clothing, insignia and lyrical references, an aesthetic that placed their rather conventional indie-guitar-based music in a world of brave fighter pilots, doomed lovers, lovable amateur ornithologists and eccentrics; a mish-mash of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger films and childhood visits to dusty small-town museums. You could argue that, as with contemporary art’s own fascination with artists and designers of the pre-war era, British Sea Power’s aesthetic (also their football-terrace stadium anthems) seems to express a yearning for a more straightforward way of being in the world; of times when ideals were, for better or for worse, more cut-and-dried and when there was more of a sense of shared goals – be it as a military hero or as a vanguard Modernist. But then, maybe what they represented in 2003 was more to do with white guitar music turning its back on anything faintly contemporary such as hip-hop, 2-step/garage (which was to become dubstep) or minimal techno and reaching back beyond their Britpop precursors’ infatuations with all things 1960s and ’70s to an era still relatively unprocessed by pop’s necro-retro recyclings.
More recently, in London, shops such as Melrose and Morgan and Labour and Wait have styled themselves on an idealized version of 1950s grocery and hardware shops – the tote bag produced by Melrose and Morgan being this winter’s must-have austerity chic accessory. (‘Must-have austerity chic accessory’ – what an oxymoron!) It’s an approach that might well extend to other product areas what already happened to the humble brown paper bag; making something signify both austere simplicity (what, after all, is more plain and pseudo eco-friendly than a brown paper bag) and also sophistication (the brown paper bag also comes with faint hints of how Manhattanites buy their groceries in the movies, and seems to say ‘you are smart because you do not need a bag to signal to others the places where you shop.)
Indirectly, it links in to the obsession throughout 2007 and ’08 with all things post-punk – not so much the music, perhaps, but the look, which already originally had a somewhat austerity-era feel about it: trenchcoats, shirts and ties, preppy haircuts, ‘sensible’ brogue shoes – the grimness of late 1970s Britain. This in turn linked into high-street fashion’s interest last year in all things vintage: an admixture of 1950s rock’n‘roll-meets-burlesque with the more austere 1980s post-punk take on the 1940s, which makes, in a funny kind of way, ‘austerity nostalgia’ a form of early 1980s nostalgia too.
Over at Owen Hatherley’s blog, Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, is an interesting piece on ‘austerity nostalgia’, extracted from a recent lecture he gave at Chelsea College of Art.
Hatherley tracks the recent trend in British graphic and product design for images and objects that consciously hark back to the paternalist, institutional aesthetics of the 1940s and ’50s: posters and pamphlets simply typeset in GillSans, catchy slogans that exude an authoritative ‘everything’s going to be OK’ calm. This ‘austerity nostalgia’ could be read as a British take on the ‘New Deal’ era graphics that inspired some of the designers working in support of Barack Obama’s US presidential election campaign, yet here in Britain there’s little of the sense of political optimism that reinvigorated the US electorate late last year. We’re mistrustful of both New Labour and the Conservatives, unemployment is on the rise, businesses are falling like flies and the country grinds to a halt at the first hint of snow. The misplaced nostalgia for the ‘simpler’, ‘happier’ times of 1940s and ’50s Britain – when class barriers were fiercely rigid, when racism and sexism was socially more acceptable, when homosexuality was illegal, when rationing was still in force, when half our cities were still bomb-sites – seems markedly more fantasist than based on any feeling that something concrete can be done to affect change here in the UK. If anything, the newspapers of late have been far more retro-1980s than retro-1940s: industrial action, economic trouble, threats of ‘three-day weeks’ and power outages, old Thatcher cabinet member Kenneth Clarke back in the political front line, the escapist ‘Brideshead Revisited' revisited once again (as it often is in times of national anxiety).
Contemporary art’s penchant for borrowing from its early 20th century history would never be so bluntly described as ‘nostalgic’ or ‘retro’, but arguably in some cases, I suspect this is exactly what it is. Art’s referencing of prewar Modernist sculpture and painting, or Russian Constructivist theatre, or social Utopian architecture as refracted through the lens of late 1970s postpunk culture, is often close to being itself an expression of ‘austerity nostalgia’.
In the case of design, Hatherley cites London Transport’s recycling of its own war-era graphics from a year or two ago – with added Orwellian overtones – as being an early example of this ‘austerity nostalgia’. I would add to this the influential retro tendency in ‘mainstream-alternative’ pop culture and fashion.
Take, for instance, the band British Sea Power. Back in 2003, they were already making hay with World War I and II clothing, insignia and lyrical references, an aesthetic that placed their rather conventional indie-guitar-based music in a world of brave fighter pilots, doomed lovers, lovable amateur ornithologists and eccentrics; a mish-mash of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger films and childhood visits to dusty small-town museums. You could argue that, as with contemporary art’s own fascination with artists and designers of the pre-war era, British Sea Power’s aesthetic (also their football-terrace stadium anthems) seems to express a yearning for a more straightforward way of being in the world; of times when ideals were, for better or for worse, more cut-and-dried and when there was more of a sense of shared goals – be it as a military hero or as a vanguard Modernist. But then, maybe what they represented in 2003 was more to do with white guitar music turning its back on anything faintly contemporary such as hip-hop, 2-step/garage (which was to become dubstep) or minimal techno and reaching back beyond their Britpop precursors’ infatuations with all things 1960s and ’70s to an era still relatively unprocessed by pop’s necro-retro recyclings.
More recently, in London, shops such as Melrose and Morgan and Labour and Wait have styled themselves on an idealized version of 1950s grocery and hardware shops – the tote bag produced by Melrose and Morgan being this winter’s must-have austerity chic accessory. (‘Must-have austerity chic accessory’ – what an oxymoron!) It’s an approach that might well extend to other product areas what already happened to the humble brown paper bag; making something signify both austere simplicity (what, after all, is more plain and pseudo eco-friendly than a brown paper bag) and also sophistication (the brown paper bag also comes with faint hints of how Manhattanites buy their groceries in the movies, and seems to say ‘you are smart because you do not need a bag to signal to others the places where you shop.)
Indirectly, it links in to the obsession throughout 2007 and ’08 with all things post-punk – not so much the music, perhaps, but the look, which already originally had a somewhat austerity-era feel about it: trenchcoats, shirts and ties, preppy haircuts, ‘sensible’ brogue shoes – the grimness of late 1970s Britain. This in turn linked into high-street fashion’s interest last year in all things vintage: an admixture of 1950s rock’n‘roll-meets-burlesque with the more austere 1980s post-punk take on the 1940s, which makes, in a funny kind of way, ‘austerity nostalgia’ a form of early 1980s nostalgia too.
