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The backward glance - nostalgia in art
Art Journal, Summer, 1996 by Michael Flanagan
Imagine a nineteenth-century pathway crossing (and shaping) the landscape, a railway line connecting unknown places near and far, intersected by a network of branch lines and junctions. Does Time operate in the same linear way, connecting us with distant events? I was born in 1943, which doesn't seem that long ago, yet I can remember being in a room with my great grandmother, who once breathed the same air as Abraham Lincoln. "Gramma" was already a girl of sixteen when Lincoln was shot. Her eyes, which once looked into mine, saw the train that passed through Buffalo carrying the president's body. Why do I hold onto this image? Can the distance between "then" and "now" even be measured, as if they were stations on a map? If the Present is nothing but a point of erosion, then everything belongs equally to the Past, including five minutes ago (when I sat down to write), lost now and beyond recall as surely as Lincoln's funeral train.
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In the postmodern world we seem to be pretty well defended against the habit of seeking meaning in history. Artists who locate their work in linear time risk being dismissed as "merely" nostalgic. Where critical theory claims its exclusive territory in the Present (characterized by "the impossibility of representation, waning of affect, depthlessness, time as a fragmentary series of presents," etc.), there is no place for the backward glance, except as a form of irony. But what is the perceived danger, after all? "Nostalgia" suggests sentimentality, or a history that never was. My 1936 Funk & Wagnall's dictionary defines nostalgia as a pathological term, a form of homesickness deriving from the Greek words for "pain" and "return." Anyhow, there is nothing necessarily "mere" about nostalgia. How is it possible not to be looking backward at whatever we know? What other viewpoint is available? The "nostalgia problem" is about understanding that since we are condemned to the backward glance, we must accept the longing which that position entails (echoing the Buddha's saying that to live is to suffer). How can the Past ever be anything but a mystery, huge and unfathomable? We see life as if from the end car of a speeding train, watching through the rear window as the tracks slip away beneath us, converging in the distance. The space between the rails is uniform, the crossties are spaced evenly like our days, helping to measure time, the telephone poles like months or weeks or years, set at regular intervals, but passing, everything passing, receding, disappearing into a point on the horizon.
Railroads drove the Industrial Revolution, which shaped the nineteenth century. But the "century" itself was a dislocated era; in one sense it was not fully born until the 1830s, when railways invaded the countryside, marking and defining the terrain with industrial corridors that changed the landscape forever. On railroads all over America the sulfurous breath of the nineteenth century lingered into the 1950s in the exhalations of smoke and cinders from steam locomotives. I was living in northern Ohio then, one block from the main line of the B&O Railroad. Those were modern times (rockets in outer space!), yet we were visited day and night by dinosaurs lumbering through town. Lying awake in the dark I used to listen for the steam whistle, and I could feel the bed tremble whenever a freight train pounded down the tracks, heading east toward Buffalo. Finally diesel engines took over the rails, and by 1960 steam locomotives had become extinct. That marked the end of the Mechanical Age. There were no funeral trains, so far as I know.
COPYRIGHT 1996 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
