in memory of modernism
TRANSCRIPT
In Memory of Modernism
About a month ago, my attention was drawn to a set of photos by the Dutch photographer Jan
Kempenaers. He'd gone around the former Yugoslavia with an old map to track down the
monuments commissioned by Josip Broz Tito to commemorate the nation's suffering in the
Second World War. Battlefields, concentration camps, and other sites of national import were
memorialized in one of those high-minded Communist projects that are so often forgotten. The
monuments were built as a material reminder of the victory of ordinary people over the fascist
armies that marauded Europe.
They're all rendered in this unearthly, brutalist style that, as Foucault says, "heroizes the
present."
Some look like the gears of abandoned spaceships:
Others like the skeletons of prehistoric sea monsters:
And others, like my favorite, near the Kosovo town of Mitrovica, seem to be nothing but a
profound and monolithic gravity:
Take away the graffiti and restore the concrete, and you can imagine the little socialist
automobiles gathered outside, the Yugos and Skodas and Trabants and Dacias. Neckerchiefed
Young Pioneers are gathered around, posing for photos, shielding their eyes from the Sun
while they salute.
The Yugoslavs put so much effort into memorializing the defeat of fascism. And think how
quickly after the fall of Communism the peoples of the old Yugoslavia slipped into a new
fascism. Tito combated the ethno-nationalist impulse with a vengeance, recognizing it
threatened the unity of the state and by extension his own power. 1989 saw the flowering of
Prague and Budapest, but further South it marked the dawn of a decade of religious
sectarianism and territorial revanchism.
Religious and ethnic wars slashed the Balkans to ribbons, and modern monuments crumbled in
the hills.
When I was off seeing the world, I passed through the little Cambodian town of Kep (during
the Indochine days, it was Kep-sur-Mer), some 10,000 people on a rocky shore a few hours
out of Phnom Penh.
In the '60s, this was the Cambodian Riviera. Squint at the old town, and you can almost see it.
Men in white suits strolling along the quay, lacing their Khmer conversation with French. Lon
Nol's cronies must have sipped Scotch at the nightclubs, where Ros Sereysothea and Sinn
Sisamouth sang.
The streets are quiet now. When the Khmer Rouge marched into Kep in 1975, they torched the
modernist seaside villas. Teenagers in black pajamas, faces covered with red-checked krama
scarves, must have gone through these buildings, ripping out velvet curtains and tossing
volumes of Victor Hugo and the Reamker into the Gulf.
The black hulks of the old villas loom over the seaside today. A number of them bear the bold
designs of Vann Molyvann, Le Corbusier's Cambodian disciple who imbued fused the
International style with design elements from classical Angkorian architecture.
Modernism is annihilated by another modernism. Two radical approaches are incommensurate:
the new architecture of Corbusier and the beyond-Maoism of the Democratic Kampuchea
dictat.
Today, the peasants hang their wash on lines strung from the concrete columns. The Khmers
are tough as nails. Everyone you see over 30 is a genocide survivor.
The government of Hun Sen, the one-eyed former Communist who has run Cambodia in some
capacity since 1985, has announced bold plans to sweep away the ruins and restore Kep as the
gem of the coast. Onward marches the new capitalism that dominates East Asia-- the Chinese
and Vietnamese and Cambodians have abandoned the anti-Western philippics and embraced the
shopping mall.
So much of me still wants to be a modernist, to believe that Schoenberg can save the world,
that a liberationist Marxist praxis will lead to a saner, less alienated society.
All I can be convinced of is that anything and everything is temporary and contingent. We
leave traces of our old desires around the landscape. The old clashes fade into memory. But in
Mitrovica and in Kep, the flowers are still blooming.
FROM: http://subjectslashobject.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-memory-of-modernism.html