Post-postmodernism and the archive: uncertain identities and "forgotten" legacies.

Nearly twenty-five years ago Suzi Gablik asked, "Has Modernism Failed?" She suggested that the possibilities for stylistic innovation had reached a limit and that artists had no choice but to return to the past in an effort to repair the fissure that Modernism had enacted between creativity and tradition (or history). Similarly, in "The Archival Impulse," Hal Foster wonders if archival art might "emerge out of a sense of a failure in cultural memory; of a default in productive tradition." (16) This "failure" seems too reductive, almost too boldly postmodern in its weary cynicism, as regards the O'Tower, Hayes, and McKenzie projects.

Paul Grainge, who writes on nostalgia, cultural remembering, and the popularity of "pastness" in contemporary culture, posits that the impulse to engage historical pastiche is not so much about "reeling from discontinuity and the experience of loss" but rather is indicative of our culture's ability "to transmit, store, retrieve, reconfigure and invoke the past in specific ways." (17) In other words, it is our archival aptitude that lends us not just the impulse but also the ability to return to (and even reinvent) the modes, mythologies, and methods of yester-year, or our fantasy thereof. Grainge draws heavily from Frederic Jameson's theory of the postmodern "nostalgia mode," whereby historicity, that is to say historical authenticity, is replaced by a visual culture and language where the past is realized through stylistic connotation. (18)

This nostalgic impulse provides a clue to locating the situation and circumstance of contemporary creative practice. First, there is the reality of the post-postmodern era whereby, at this point, we are responding to postmodernism as postmodernism responded to the modern era. Post-postmodernism, like Grainge's nostalgia, allows for the inventive, almost utopian, revival and remix of all the things that postmodernism critiqued and rejected. Also at work here is a post-digital sensibility marked by a nostalgia for tactility (19) and a knowledge that "truth" is not just suspect but completely fabricatable.

CONCLUSION

The O'Tower, Hayes, and McKenzie projects manifest this post-postmodern nostalgia in their dealing with pastness through contrivance. In some way, they epitomize this remix culture by drawing from various sources and effectively employing complex coded mediums of (assumed) truth-telling to create these reinvented narratives that reveal the collective fantasies of history. It is the grounding principle of the archive, along with the sophisticated manipulation of an art or culturally savvy audience, that propels these fictions from narrative to mythology, from fake to revealing.

To describe any of these projects as lies, hoaxes, or even fictions, is not really sufficient as it obfuscates what is central to the reading of these and similar works: the fact that in an age when there can be no originality and no unequivocal "truth," all we have to go on is our willingness to accept artifice and construct as a means to genuinely enter into the higher purposes of art.

SARA HINES writes on art and culture from the frontier of outer Brooklyn. She is pursuing an interdisciplinary Masters degree in humanities and social thought at New York University.

NOTES 1. Terry Towery, "Recently Uncovered Platinotypes and Stereoviews of the American West" (New York: Peer Gallery, 2006). 2. In an unpublished artist's statement, Terry Towery describes the development of the O'Tower project. 3. Ibid. 4. Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984). In Chaper Five, Gablik describes the failure of Modernism is its effective breach in historical tradition. She says, "Artists are finding that the only way to make something new is to borrow from the past. All this has led, in the last few years, to a disaffection with the terms and conditions of modernism--a repudiation of the ideology of progress and originality." 5. In an article on the Triple Candie exhibition, "Lester Hayes: 1962-1975" (New York Times, January 16, 2007), Holland Cotter discusses fictional artists and the role such projects may play in a larger critique of the art world and market. 6. Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe, "Forgotten Silver: A New Zealand Television Hoax and Its Audience," in F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 171-186. 7. Ibid. 8. The Atlas Group (Walid Road), excerpted from "Let's Be Honest, the Rain Helped: Excerpts from an Interview with the Atlas Group," Review of Photographic Memory, Jalal Toufic, ed. (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004), 44-5. Reprinted in The Archive, Charles Merewether, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 9. Charles Merewether, The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 10. 10. Wolfgang Ernst, "The Archive as Metaphor: From Archival Space to Archival Time," in Open 7: (No) Memory: Storing and recalling in contemporary art and culture, Jorinde Seijdel and Leisbeth Melis, eds. (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2004), 46-52. 11. Ibid., 49. 12. Edward Winkleman. "If a Sculpture Falls in an Empty Garden and Nobody Hears it ..." at http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com (accessed May 15, 2007). 13. Ibid. 14. Alexandra Juhasz, "Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary" in F is for Phony, 1-35. 15. Ibid. 16. Hal Foster excerpted from "An Archival Impulse," October, No. 110 (Fall 2004); reprinted in The Archive. 17. Paul Grainge, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002). 18. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1991). 19. It is worth mentioning that Towery has spent the past fifteen years teaching and utilizing digital technologies in creative production, thus the O'Tower project was, for him, a real return to the tactile. Similarly, Jackson and Botes made Forgotten Silver at nearly the same time that they began production on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It might be assumed that this was their "last ditch" effort in lo-fi production knowing they would spend the next six years staring at green screens and computer monitors.