Retro: The Culture of Revival by Elizabeth Guffey 回潮：復古的文化

Retro: The Culture of Revival

Bell-bottoms are in. Bell-bottoms are out. Bell-bottoms are back in again. Fads constantly cycle and recycle through popular culture, each time in a slightly new incarnation. The term "retro" has become the buzzword for describing such trends, but what does it mean? Elizabeth Guffey explores here the ambiguous cultural meanings of the term and reveals why some trends just never seem to stay dead.

THE BOOK

Retro: The Culture of Revival reveals the surprising extent to which the past is embedded in the future.

It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book about how our view of the past has changed us. The catalyst to this change is a shift in our view of progress. Traditional historical revivals built on past successes, using the past as a foundation that could be improved. Retro has demythologized the past. It quotes past styles with an unsentimental nostalgia. And retro challenges positivist views of technology, industry, and, most of all, of progress itself. It gently nudges us away from older ideas of 'Modernity' and toward an uncharted future. The culture of revival has changed, but so have we.

THE TERM

'Retro' has crept into daily usage over the past thirty years. But there have yet been few attempts to define it. Half-ironic, half-longing 'retro' considers the recent past with an unsentimental nostalgia. It doesn't bother with tradition and doesn't try to reinforce social values. Instead, it often suggests a form of subversion while sidestepping historical accuracy.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Remembering When We Were Modern

• A Word with Many Meanings | The Deviant Revival | The New Revivalism: An Unsentimental Nostalgia | The Future That Never Was | The Retro-Garde

When Art Nouveau Became New Again

• The 1900 Style(s) | From 'Fantastic Malady' to 'Neo-Liberty' | Form and Reform | The Nouveau Market | Nouveau Frisco

Moderne Times

• Modern Meets Moderne | The New Art Nouveau | Pop Went the World's Fair | More Modern Than We Feel Now | History as a Hall of Mirrors | The Deco Echo in Popular Culture

Fabricated '50s

• Teddy Boys and Twiggy | 'Innocence' as a Commodity | Reinventing the Day Before Yesterday | 'Mode Rétro'| Fallout From the '50s

The Lure of Yesterday's Tomorrows

• Warming Up the Cold War | 'Jive Modernism' and the Women Who Saved New York | Retrofuturism

Epilogue

THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Guffey performing advance research for Retro: The Culture of Revival, c. 1967.

Elizabeth Guffey is Associate Professor of Art History at the State University of New York, Purchase. She is also the author of Drawing an Elusive Line: the Art and Career of Pierre Paul Prud'hon (University of Delaware, 2001).
Dr. Guffey has written scholarly articles and critical reviews for a variety of publications including Master Drawings, Apollo, Art on Paper and the Actes du Musée du Louvre. President of the Design Studies Forum, Dr. Guffey is developing publications related to the field of design history and criticism.
Elizabeth Guffey holds a PhD and MA from Stanford University and a BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was born in Illinois but moved to Los Angeles as a child. She currently lives just outside New York City with her husband Matt and their daughter Ellen.

EXCERPTS

REMEMBERING WHEN WE WERE MODERN

When the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened its summer 1966 exhibition season, it was little prepared for the rush and hype that surrounded its retrospective of an obscure nineteenth-century draftsman and illustrator. Yet in just four months more than 100,000 visitors thronged to a survey of the work of Aubrey Beardsley-more than for any exhibit of prints or drawings in living memory. The exhibition attracted viewers who were egged on by word of mouth and the scent of scandal: Charging obscene content, the Metropolitan police seized Beardsley prints from a shop near the museum soon after the show opened. Huge lines formed to view the museum's suddenly infamous collection of leering satyrs, wilting youths, and full-bodied giantesses who cavorted in unusual, often insinuating, poses. Writing in Art News, John Russell described a public 'stirred in many cases by reports of phallic enormities and fantastications [sic] of the anal orifice . . . and it must be said that they were not altogether disappointed'.1 The nearly antique Beardsley, who never had an exhibition during his lifetime, was hailed as 'the new hero in London'.2
Beardsley's posthumous exhibition offered harmless excitement and an intoxicating whiff of official disapproval, a sensibility that also pervaded Beatles concerts, the adoption of the miniskirt, and other popular trends of the period. Like Beatlemania, an 'Art Nouveau fever' infected popular culture in Western Europe and North America;3 in 1964 Time magazine airily declared that 'the revival of Art Nouveau' had arrived, its forms 'old and yet new'.4 The revival of interest in Art Nouveau that culminated in the '60s was evidenced in forms ranging from scholarly museum exhibitions to the mass-produced wallpaper. Moreover, as popular culture in the '60s began to change, the remnants of this musty, 80-year-old movement became the syntax of sexy, youthful rebellion. The older style was a boon to image-conscious graphic designers, spawning a wave of swaying, shimmying typography and illustration that enriched popular and artistic icons. The intertwining of this late-nineteenth-century art and design movement with the '60s counterculture led Time magazine in 1967 to rename San Francisco, a mecca for youthful chic, 'Nouveau Frisco'.
Superficially, this rediscovery appeared to echo the resurrection of other movements and styles in the history of art. However, the rehabilitation of Beardsley, as well as the Art Nouveau movement in general, was pervaded with a new sensibility that separates it from nineteenth-century revivalism. Beardsley and the Art Nouveau period lacked the aura of misty medievalism or the authority of antiquity that informed the Gothic and Classical Revivals of the previous century. The resurgence of interest in the art and design of the late nineteenth century suggests the beginning of a unique postwar tendency: a popular thirst for the recovery of earlier, and yet still modern periods at an ever-accelerating rate. But this tendency should not be dismissed as merely a series of reflexive stylistic gestures. Instead, it might be more usefully seen as representing a kind of subversion in which the artistic and cultural vanguard began looking backward in order to go forward. These groups, a kind of 'retro-garde', saw their approach toward the past spread quickly. And yet the extension of these ideas was also a sort of inoculation for the greater mainstream. Historian Fredric Jameson has suggested that as society has developed, it has found new ways to tell itself its own history.5 Retro allows us to come to terms with the modern past.

1. John Russell, 'London', Art News, LXV/52 (1966), p. 19.

2. ibid

3. Anthony D. Hippisley Coxe, 'Kinky Classics', Design, 188 (November 1964), p. 66.

4. 'New Look at Art Nouveau', Time, LXXXIV/52 (1964), p. 62.

5. Fredric Jameson, 'Nostalgia for the Present', Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: 1991), p. 283.

回潮：復古的文化
作　　者：	(美)伊麗莎白‧E‧古費
出版單位：	北京商務印書館
出版日期：	2010.11

內容簡介：
潮起潮落，備領風騷。 又見回潮迭起。 時髦在大眾文化中不斷循環，再循環，每次都有稍微更新的化身。 retro一詞已成為描述這種潮流的流行語，但它究竟是什麼意思呢?作者在本書中探索其含混的文化意義，揭示某些潮流似乎永不沉寂的原因。
作者引證豐富的原創研究成果和饒有趣味的軼聞材料，發掘了retr0一詞的根源，以時序陳述它在20世紀文化藝術中的表現。 從新藝術派在其量初的衰落之後近五十年的複歸，到裝飾藝術派融入波普藝術的俗麗，retr0的概念往往意味著風格和時尚的重現，這些風格和時尚能喚起對並 不遙遠的過去的記憶，比如迷幻藝術由毒品引發的超現實主義，以及20世紀70年代非洲黑人發式的政治表達。 廣告商、媒體通過強化藝術設計、時裝、音樂中的這種潮流，利用文化懷舊感的
力量來推銷數量驚人的產品。
本書圖文並茂，引人入勝． 揭示了過去嵌入將來、不斷回到我們身邊的情況。

---

圖書目錄：
導論回眸我們現代化之時
第一章新藝術派又翻新了
第二章現代派的時代
第三章再造的50年代
第四章昨天的明天的誘惑
跋
引文出處
閱讀書目和影評選
鳴謝
照片版權鳴謝

 Retro: the culture of revival -回潮︰復古的文化

 

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