Research for this project has been funded by a grant from the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. Thanks to Profs. Dennis Jones, Marissa McClure, and Kate Palmer Albers. All content copyright Lawrence Gipe 2009.
I’ve always understood that viewers react “nostalgically” to my paintings. Nostalgia, I knew early on, was a useful visual strategy for engagement and seduction in painting.
Recently, I was asked to prepare a lecture about my work, and the issues surrounding it, at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden and thought that “nostalgia” would make a fresh starting point. Before I began research on this topic, I assumed that to be “nostalgic” about something had negative connotations – wasn’t it a two-dimensional emotion like patriotism (weaned as I’ve been on texts like Barthes’ Mythologies I’m trained to locate ideological abuse in any potential form of mythic speech)? In my mind, the idea of “nostalgia” was insidious at worst, sentimental and backward looking at its most benign. I was surprised to find that nostalgia is generally regarded as “positive-oriented”. It is often treated as poetic: “indefinable”, “transcendent” and innocent. There isn’t, according to some authors, “negative-nostalgia” or even antonyms for the word. Apparently, nostalgia, at its neurologic origin, stems from a wistful place, as indefinable as it is inevitable.
In my view, nostalgia is a “portal” emotion. It isn’t a reaction, like “pride” or “jealousy”; rather, it opens up a door to a string of reactive emotions. Even if we accept that the initial portal is generally pleasurable, there isn’t any guarantee that the subsequent emotion stream will be harmonious (more about this in page 2). The farther this portal strays from the personal, the easier it is to manipulate. The natural tendency of humans to feel nostalgia is exploited by media and governments to influence us. From advertising to political branding, nostalgia has and continues to accelerate as a convenient frame to place around any issue or product that needs selling. Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher from the May 1968 generation, described nostalgia as a “essentializing, narcissistic and metaphysical conception of history that reifies and monumentalizes the past as an image; it is an imaginary past”. In the end, I think my work addresses this reification. Through my images I intend to embellish and re-enact how power structures classify and exploit this positive-oriented emotion.
“Nostalgia” began as a clinical term, identified in the 17th century as a melancholic disorder that was considered a symptom leading to deep depression and suicide (its cures included opium, leeches and a trip to the Alps) The aspects we currently associate with the notion, like homesickness and a yearning for the past, were elements of this original definition.
Johannes Hofer (1669-1752), a Swiss physician, first used the term and described nostalgia tantalizingly in 1688 as a “disorder of the imagination”. Janelle Wilson, in her book “Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning” comments about this original definition: “Those suffering from it fantasized about home, leaving no psychological space for thoughts about the present world”. This aspect has certainly persisted; the suppression of the present is an essential component of nostalgia when it is deployed by the forces of propaganda and advertising.
By the late 19th century it was dismissed as pathology and re-assigned as a mild, often pensive reflection on one’s own past. In Svetlana Boym’s “The Future of Nostalgia”(2001), the author classified nostalgia as “restorative” and “reflective” – the former defined as a cultural apparatus dictated by authority and the latter as a more personal, emotional response. (“’Restorative’ nostalgia puts emphasis on the first part of the word’s root - nostos - and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up memory gaps. “Reflective” nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. The first category of nostalgics…believe that their project is about truth”). Studies related to advertising have also broken the term down into two similar groups; one paper by a Texas-based marketing team Havlena and Holak called "The good old days: observations on nostalgia and its role in consumer behaviour" in the ominously-named Advances in Consumer Research, proposes that “nostalgic thoughts may be generated from either a personally remembered past (personal nostalgia) or from a time in history before one was born (historical/communal nostalgia).
The Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology claims nostalgia “soothes the self from existential pangs”; could our knowledge of the inevitability of death be suspended – if only momentarily – by the assuaging caress of nostalgia? If nostalgic episodes suspend mortality – inviting you to travel back to a past moment when the world seemed clear and bright ahead, wouldn’t the next step be projection? Transported back, freed into the warm gauze of nostalgia, the mind could project forward, re-configuring life, righting wrongs, erasing regrets.
One critic called this enormous mural painting “the hyper-realized attic of a twelve-year old boy’s brain”. I’m not sure what he meant – but clearly nostalgia acted as a window for the writer to access the piece.
As an introduction to my work and for the sake of this lecture, I break the term into my own, more faceted, classifications. Beginning on a micro-scale (the more “reflective” or “personal” type), I’ll fan outwards to a more cultural view which addresses how various power structures use nostalgia as a persuasive tool (or what I call a “mitigated frame”), and, lastly, how the deconstruction of these frames generates the basis for my work.