Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester

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Paolo Magagnoli

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Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester

Paolo Magagnoli

1. On this trend, see Mark Godfrey, The Artist as Historian, October, vol. 120, Spring 2007, pp. 14072; Frank van der Stok, Frits Gierstberg, and Flip Bool (eds), Questioning History: Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art (Nai Publisher: Rotterdam, 2008); Dieter Roelstrate, After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings, e-flux, vol. 6, May 2009, np., and The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art, e-flux, vol. 4, March 2009, np.; see also the special issue on history of Texte Zur Kunst, vol. 76, December 2009. 2. On obsolescence in contemporary art, see October, vol. 100, Spring 2002. As with the motif of the ruin, the literature on the subject has been increasingly growing in recent years. See for example Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Duke University Press: Durham, London, 2010); Michel Makarius, Ruins (Flammarion: Paris, 2004); Michael Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities: Los Angeles, CA, 1997). 3. Roelstraete, After the Historiographic Turn (2009), np. 4. Roelstraete, After the Historiographic Turn (2009), np. 5. Hal Foster, Blind Spots: The Art of Joachim Koester, Artforum, vol. 44, no. 8, April 2006, pp. 2127. 6. Websters New Twentieth Century Dictionary (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1983), p. 1123.

Nostalgia, Pathological, and Critical

Since the late 1990s a growing interest in historical representation has emerged in contemporary art, a phenomenon about which much has already been written.1 A significant strand of the current historical turn is characterised by works that display an overt fascination with architectural ruins, obsolete technologies, discarded films, and past works of art.2 Tacita Dean is perhaps the artist whose work is most emblematic of this tendency. Yet, the examples can be multiplied many times: one could look at the works of the American Zoe Leonard, with her photographic installations of closing-down stores, worn out dolls, and old travel postcards. Or one could also look at the Dutch artist Fiona Tan, the Scot Gerard Byrne, the Lithuanian Deimantas Narkevicius, or the Canadian Stan Douglas as other examples of the nostalgic impulse at work in contemporary art today. This impulse has been harshly dismissed by critics and historians. For some, the current tendency of many artists to dig up lost pasts is a telling symptom of a pathological escapist fantasy, of an incapacity to look at the present [and] to think and even imagine the future.3 In this paper, I contend that, given nostalgias protean nature, a fair assessment of its critical significance can be formulated only after each individual artistic practice in which this impulse can be traced has been carefully examined. More precisely, it is only by attending to the specificities of each work that it is possible to evaluate whether nostalgia is progressive or reactionary, critical or ideological, generative or sterile. For this reason, I would like to look at the practice of the Danish artist Joachim Koester in order to explore a model of critical nostalgia. With his fascination with architectural ruins and the appropriation of conceptual art, Koesters certainly represents one of those artistic practices most emblematic of the nostalgic impulse at work among many contemporary artist-historians today. Having begun his practice in the early 1990s, he has been hailed as a pioneer of the historiographic turn.4 More importantly, I would argue that his work manifests a nuanced and progressive use of nostalgia; one that does not sentimentally celebrate the past but which, instead, recognises in it a potential critique of the present. This important aspect of Koesters aesthetic has not been sufficiently explored so far. Critics who have written about the artist such as Hal Foster have focused exclusively on his typical representational strategies.5 Yet, none of the critics has stressed enough the critical dimension of Koesters nostalgia. This article attempts to articulate and unravel this significant dimension. However, before turning to the artists singular works, I think that it is important to review the main reasons for the critical dismissal of nostalgia. Ultimately, the criticism of nostalgia is rooted in the history of the term itself. Nostalgia means literally a longing for something far away or long ago.6 The word has two Greek roots: nostos, meaning return home, and
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Paolo Magagnoli

algia, meaning longing. It was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer (1669 1752), a Swiss student of medicine at the University of Basil, who introduced the term in his medical dissertation. For Hofer, nostalgia was the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to ones native land, and, according to him, its often-fatal symptoms were continued sadness, meditation only on the Fatherland, disturbed sleep either wakeful or continuous, hunger, thirst, senses diminished, and cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.7 In the late eighteenth century, nostalgia came to indicate a sentimental longing for the past, and although now the original pathological meaning has been lost, the term still connotes negative associations, and within the fields of cultural history and sociology is often referred to metaphorically as a disease.8 This denigration of nostalgia occurs for several reasons. First, this sentiment contradicts modern philosophies of history, which read time according to narratives of progress and emancipation. For Kant and Hegel, history was a continuous movement towards greater freedom and reason and, consequently, nostalgia could not be anything but an irrational and mystifying impulse. Likewise, for Marx, the past corresponded to a more oppressive form of the organisation of society and therefore nostalgia was a conservative political move that hindered the pursuit of the proletarian cause. The social revolution of the nineteenth century, he wrote, cannot draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future.9 Thus, within Marx, Hegel, and Kants philosophies, the affective investment in the past which distinguishes nostalgia is fundamentally an aberration, a politically reprehensible and empirically untenable act.10 Secondly, nostalgia is frequently defined as the opposite of history, or what is considered an objective and well-documented account of the past. Whereas history entails critical distance, nostalgia is seen as an ideological distortion, a shaping of history according to subjective interests and desires. Nostalgia tells it like it wasnt, writes geographer David Lowenthal.11 For John Tosh, the problem with nostalgia is that it is a very lopsided view of history. If the past is redesigned as comfortable refuge, all its negative features must be removed.12 Likewise, Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw argue that nostalgia sets a false dichotomy between a past constructed as a time of integrated consciousness and a present constructed as a world of social fragmentation and anomie. They warn the reader to resist the lure of nostalgic histories as the syntax and structure of these ideas makes them superficially attractive but this appeal is no warrant for their veracity.13 For others, nostalgia is not only bad history, but also an adulterated form of memory. For Timothy Bewes, nostalgia is a stereotypical and ultimately second-rate kind of memory that leads to passivity. Nostalgia is a sentiment that entails no practice, Bewes argues, a one-way relationship to the world, its typical effect is to reify the past into a frieze of cliches, incapable of releasing inventive action in the present.14 Nostalgia does not fare well even in post-structuralist criticism, where it is often excoriated for being a dangerous deceptive fantasy. Susan Stewart, for example, claims that nostalgia is a social disease that expresses an impossible desire for authenticity, transcendence, and pure origins.15 Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological, Stewart explains, the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.16 Moreover, in Stewarts view, nostalgia reflects the negative essentialism of western metaphysics for it claims the possibility of absolute presence and transcendence. Nostalgia is then associated by Stewart with
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7. Johannes Hofer, Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia (1688), Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 2, 1934, pp. 381 and 86. 8. For a history of nostalgia, see Jean Starobinsky, The Idea of Nostalgia, Diogenes, vol. 14, no. 54, 1966, pp. 81103; Georg Rosen, Nostalgia: A Forgotten Psychological Disorder, Clio Medica, vol. 10., no. 1, April 1975, pp. 29 51; Edward S. Casey, The World of Nostalgia, Man and World, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, pp. 36184; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books: New York, 2001). For a discussion of nostalgia in contemporary Anglophone literature, see John Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005); for a discussion of nostalgia in cinema history, see Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Routledge: London, 2004). 9. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The MarxEngels Reader (Norton: New York), 1978, p. 597. 10. For a discussion of the role of nostalgia in modern philosophies of histories, see Marcos Piason Natali, History and the Politics of Nostalgia, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, 2006, pp. 1025. For a history of nostalgia within Leftwing radicalism, see Alastair Bonnet, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (Continuum: London, 2010). 11. David Lowenthal, Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasnt, in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (eds), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1989), pp. 1832. 12. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in The Study of Modern History (Longman: Harlow, 2006), p. 18. 13. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, The Dimensions of Nostalgia, in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (eds), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester University Press: Manchester , 1989), p. 8. 14. Timothy Bewes, An Anatomy of Nostalgia, New Left Review, no. 14, March 2002, p. 172. 15. Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press: London, 1993). 16. Stewart, On Longing (1993), p. 23.

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Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester

17. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (Hogarth Press: London, 1964), xiv, pp. 243 58. 18. For a critique of the rise of the heritage industry in Britain and its political implications, see Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Verso: London, 1985); Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuen: London, 1987). For an historical examination of the heritage film, a nostalgic film genre that emerged in the Thatcher era, see John Hill, The Heritage Film: Issues and Debates, in John Hill, British Cinema of the 80s: Issues and Themes (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1999); Andrew Higson, Re-presenting the National Past. Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Films, in Lester Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (UCL Press: London, 1993), pp. 10929. On the culture industry, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (eds), Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2001), pp. 94 136. 19. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern (Verso: London, New York, 1998), pp. 910. 20. For an investigation into Ronald Reagans political use of nostalgia, see James Combs, The Reagan Range: The Nostalgic Myth of American Politics (Bowling Green State University Popular Press: Bowling Green, 1993). 21. Lowenthal, Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasnt (1989), p. 30. 22. Linda Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, available online at http:// www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/ hutchinp.html, last modified on 19 January 1998. For a more recent feminist perspective on nostalgia, see Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (Routledge: New York, 2007). 23. Benjamin Buchloh, Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting, October, vol. 16, Spring 1981, p. 60. 24. Buchloh, Figures of Authority (1981), p. 68. 25. Stuart Tannock, Nostalgia Critique, Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 1995, p. 459. For a critical re-evaluation of nostalgia in the field of sociology, see Michael Pickering and Emily

melancholia, that sterile and unproductive fixation with loss discussed by Freud in his celebrated 1915 article.17 Thus, in post-structuralist discourse, nostalgia is also often given pathological connotations. The most vehement dismissal of nostalgia occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s, a time when Western countries witnessed an unprecedented boom in the development of the heritage industries, museums, and archives, and when period films became a fashionable and much exploited genre, in what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have famously termed the culture industry.18 It was indeed the popularity of historical films such as Chinatown (1974) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) that prompted Fredric Jamesons celebrated critique of post-modernism. For Jameson, these historical films were nostalgia films; they appealed to the spectators infantile desires for regression and reduced the past to a fashion plate or a glossy image. More importantly, nostalgia films expressed the incapacity of the subject in late capitalism to grasp its present as part of a broader historical process. For Jameson, under post-modernity the subject has lost its capacity to organize its past and future into coherent experience and nostalgia is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself or, at the very least, an alarming pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.19 In the 1980s the dominance of neo-conservative politics did little to improve the reputation of nostalgia. In fact, both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used nostalgic appeals to the glorious pasts of their nations in their political propaganda.20 Victorian values serve Mrs Thatcher as an imprimatur for scuttling the Welfare State, claimed Lowenthal, but (her nostalgia) is primitive capitalism masquerading as Whig History.21 The privatisation and expansion of the heritage industry fostered by both the administrations of Reagan and Thatcher further reinforced the conflation of nostalgia with tradition, kitsch, and reactionary politics. Feminist critics were no less harsh than Marxists in their repudiation of nostalgia. In the mid-1990s, Linda Hutcheon claimed that feminism has no tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in the present and that nostalgia was indeed a defensive male response to the changes in culture brought about by the rise of feminism.22 Likewise, in art history, the return to obsolete conventions, mediums, and motifs that characterised certain artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s was interpreted as the symptom of the desire for authority and legitimation. For example, in 1981 Benjamin Buchloh dismissed the works of German Neo-expressionist artists such as Georg Baselitz for their nostalgic imitation of motifs and pictorial techniques drawn from German expressionism. The aesthetic attraction of these eclectic painting practices, wrote Buchloh, originates in a nostalgia for that moment in the past when the painting modes to which they refer had historical authenticity.23 Buchloh then categorically concluded that the works of these artists served the politics of a rigid conservativism through cultural legitimation.24 Yet, the widespread denigration of nostalgia in cultural history and criticism which persists today overlooks the complexity and heterogeneity of this impulse. Nostalgia is not always the expression of a conservative impulse but may in fact be seen to respond to a diversity of desires and political needs: in other words, along with a conservative, reactionary nostalgia, there can be a critical and progressive one, which can be a resource and strategy central to the struggles of all subaltern cultural and social groups.25 More precisely, in some instances, the past can provide positive models of resistance to the status quo and show utopian possibilities which are still valid in the present.
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Although Jameson, Stewart, and Buchlohs critiques are not to be utterly ignored, nostalgia is not always nor necessarily a reactionary impulse and, contrary to the above critiques, it can be mobilised in a variety of ways with different, and competing, political inflections. An example of the critical and progressive potential of nostalgia is Koesters practice. In the following pages, I shall attempt to show how Koesters nostalgia is not the expression of a desire for a more hierarchical and ordered society, but on the contrary a strategy to defamiliarise the present and to open up a space for utopian imagination.
Introducing Joachim Koester

Keightley, Modalities of Nostalgia, Current Sociology, vol. 54, no. 6, 2006, pp. 919 41. 26. Koester quoted in Hal Foster, Blind Spots: The Art of Joachim Koester (2006), p. 213. 27. Other cinematic references that have appeared in Koesters work are Alfred Hitchcock and George Romero. See for example Koester, Gentofte Bibliotek/The Birds (1994) and Rocent/ Dawn of The Dead (1994).

Over the last twenty years Koester has produced a large body of work in photography, video, and film that delves into a broad variety of historical subjects. He has explored the history of failed utopian communities in his hometown Copenhagen (Day for Night Christiania, 1996; Sandra of the Tulip House or How To Live in A Free State, 2001, co-authored with Matthew Buckingham) and in other places (Row Housing, 1999; The New Land(s) and the Tale of Captain Mission, 2004); the history of American conceptual art (histories, 2003 05; Occupied Plot, Abandoned Futures, 2007); the history of expeditions to the Arctic Circle and the North Pole (Nordenskiold and the Ice Cap, 2000; Message From Andree, 2005); the history of occultism and magic (The Magic Mirror of John Dee, 2006; Morning of The Magicians, 2005; Tarantism, 2007; To navigate, in a genuine way, in the unknown necessitates an attitude of daring, but not one of recklessness, 2009); the history of Kaliningrad and its famous citizen Immanuel Kant (The Kant Walks, 2005); the history of Transylvania (From The Travel of Jonathan Harker, 2003); the cultural history of hashish, opium, and mescaline (The Hashish Club, 2009; Time of The Assassins, 2009, Tracing Opium in Calcutta, 2006; My Frontier is An Endless Wall of Point, 2007). Koester has defined his practice as a form of ghost hunting.26 In fact several of his works appear as attempts at reanimating forgotten histories through the representation of ruins, abandoned spaces, discarded documents, and other objects. Consequently, a sense of re-enchantment pervades Koesters film and photographic projects, making him one of the precursors of the current nostalgic tendency in contemporary art. Overall, three main formal devices and motifs have emerged throughout Koesters practice. As we will see, these devices have often been associated with nostalgia. The first device is the imitation of past works of art. Koester often remakes previous films or photographs or directly appropriates them. The cinema of Jean-Luc Godard is quoted in early projects such as Weekend (1993) and Anna Karina (2001) while seminal works of photoconceptualism are remade in histories (2003 05) and Occupied Plot, Abandoned Futures (2007).27 Importantly, Koesters appropriation strategies differ from those of post-modern photographers such as Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine. More than articulating a critique of representation, authenticity, or authorship, Koesters imitation functions as a strategy to conjure up the past and to fictionalise the present. A second device frequently deployed by Koester is re-enactment. Through actors and dancers, Koester has re-enacted old folkloristic practices from the south of Italy and Central America (Tarantism, 2007 and the more recent To navigate, in a genuine way, in the unknown necessitates an attitude of daring, but not one of the recklessness, 2009). I would also consider as a special sort of
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Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester

re-enactment those films in which the artist has resurrected various documentary and indexical materials such as drawings and photographs by turning them into short and abstract animation films (as in Message From Andree, 2005, and My Frontier is An Endless Wall of Point, 2007). Again, these re-enactments do not have a parodic intent but should be viewed as ritualistic performances through which the past is conjured up. A third recurring motif in Koesters work is the representation of architectural ruins. For example, Koester has photographed deteriorated modern condominiums in Kaliningrad, Russia (The Kant Walks, 2005), abandoned developments from the communist era in Romania (From the Travel of Jonathan Harker, 2003), and the run-down barracks of the free city of Christiania in the outskirts of Copenhagen (Day for Night Christiania, 1996). Importantly, Koester depicts these ruins in a way that often enhances their ghost-like quality. He films or photographs them in the absence of people, or deploys lighting and colour effects that evoke a dreamy, uncanny atmosphere. For instance, in his Christiania project, Koester used the cinematic day for night effect, a filter used by Hollywood filmmakers in the 1960s to turn daytime scenes into nocturnal ones. This effect significantly re-enchants the drab space of the Danish hippy community. These three devices imitation, re-enactment, and the representation of ruins are crucial elements of Koesters language and point to the undercurrent of nostalgia that distinguishes his works. In turning now to some specific works, it is possible to see how these devices play out and, more importantly, how the author deploys them to articulate a model of critical nostalgia that eschews the empty sentimentality and regressive quality traditionally attributed to this approach.

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Fig. 1. Joachim Koester, Occupied Plots, Abandoned Futures. Twelve (Former) Real Estate Opportunities, 2007, gelatin-silver print, 28 35 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

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Imitating American Photoconceptualism

Occupied Plots and histories are two black-and-white photographic series which show what became of the buildings that appear in canonical works of conceptual photography. The two works are formally similar. In Occupied Plots, Koester has re-photographed the unsold Los Angeles lots depicted by Ed Ruscha in his 1970 book Real Estate Opportunities as they appear today (Fig. 1). Likewise, in histories, the artist shows what remains of the urban and industrial sites photographed by conceptual artists such as Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1960s and 1970s (Fig. 2). These famous precedents are explicitly quoted by Koester either in the captions and texts that accompany the series or by juxtaposition. In histories, the artist juxtaposes his recent photographs of the sites with a reproduction of the conceptualist work that provided his inspiration. Importantly, in both projects not only does Koester overtly quote photoconceptualism, he also slavishly imitates its style. Given the similarities between the two works, here I will focus only on histories. histories is structured as a series of six diptychs. The left-side photograph in the diptych is a reproduction of a seminal work of photoconceptualism. More specifically, these works are the following: Smithsons picture of a theatre and diner in Passaic, New Jersey (1967); Robert Adams photograph Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado (1969); Ed Ruschas picture of a Los Angeles apartment from the photo-book of the same name; Bernd and Hilla Beckers photograph of an abandoned industrial plant in Pennsylvania in 1975; Gordon Matta-Clarks snapshot of a street curb in Jamaica Queens from his project Fake Estates (1973); Haackes picture of a Manhattan tenement from his celebrated series Shapolski et all. Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971). The right side of the diptych is a photograph of these urban sites as they appear today. Some of the suburban landscapes have dramatically changed. For example, the theatre and the mom-and-pops diner in Smithsons photographs have been replaced by a gigantic McDonalds outlet. The New York low-rent tenements of Haackes pictures are also barely recognisable in Koesters photograph, which

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Fig. 2. Joachim Koester, histories, 2003 05, two gelatin-silver prints, 17.7 21.2 cm each. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

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28. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso: London, 1991), p. 19. 29. On the use of photoconceptualist references in the works of many contemporary photographers, see Alex Klein, Remembering and Forgetting Conceptual Art, in Alex Klein (ed.), Words Without Pictures (Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Los Angeles, 2009), pp. 11429. 30. For the notion of mise en abyme, see Craig Owens, Photography en Abyme, October, vol. 5, Summer 1978, pp. 73 8. On the allegorical impulse in postmodernism, see Owens, An Allegorical Impulse. Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, October, vol. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 6786, and An Allegorical Impulse. Toward a Theory of Postmodernism. Part Two, October, vol. 13, Summer 1980, pp. 5880.

shows instead newly renovated apartment buildings. However, other landscapes have not much changed since the 1970s. For example, the stretch of curb in Queens, New York, photographed by Matta-Clark looks almost identical in Koesters photograph. Importantly, Koester photographed these urban subjects with the same lighting, the same monotonous range of greys, and the same camera angle as the earlier photographers. Thus, imitation is a significant feature of histories. As Jameson has pointed out, imitation is an important trait of nostalgia, being a basic principle that governs the nostalgia film, a genre particularly popular in the 1970s and 1980s which Jameson considers to be the most typical cultural manifestation of post-modernism. The nostalgia film, writes Jameson, approached the past through stylistic connotation, conveying pastness by the glossy qualities of the image, and [. . .] by the attributes of fashion.28 More precisely, for Jameson, imitation in the nostalgia film is equivalent to pastiche, a sterile assemblage of quotations. He sets it against parody which, according to him, appropriates the past not in order to simply celebrate it, as pastiche does, but in order to critique it. Having said that, is Koesters histories just another instance of post-modern pastiche? By imitating photoconceptualism, is Koester self-indulgently investing his work with the critical authority and legitimacy of 1960s art?29 I would say not. In histories, imitation functions less as a nostalgic pastiche of the 1960s than as a distancing and reflexive device through which the artist calls attention to the mediated quality of his nostalgia. In Koesters project, imitation figures as a process of mise en abyme of photography, that is, as a reflexive process of duplication and redoubling of the image. Smithsons picture of the New Jersey diner appears as a reproduction of the American artists photograph within the pages of a book (Fig. 3). Ditto for the other photographs of conceptual artists: they all appear as photographs of photographs, that is to say as reproductions. Furthermore, by photographing the same subjects from the same camera angle, Koester suggests that his own images are in turn just other copies of the original images of 1960s. More importantly, this allegorical process of mise en abyme demonstrates that the past for which Koester is nostalgic for in this case the 1960s is clearly a mediated, inauthentic reality.30 This process suggests that Koesters nostalgia is not an escapist fantasy that exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. Rather, the artists nostalgia is aware of the impossibility of an authentic return to the past. In histories, the past emerges as already a reconstruction, a fiction based on previous representations and images. The past appears as fiction, however, not in the sense of being a beautiful lie, a deception, but as

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Fig. 3. Joachim Koester, histories, 2003 05, two gelatin-silver prints, 17.7 21.2 cm each. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

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something which is constructed and imagined. In fact, the 1960s are an important historical reality for Koester. Nevertheless, by emphasising the mediated quality of his own photographs in histories, Koester recognises the impossibility to return to that epoch and thus avoids the accusation of escapism usually associated with nostalgia. Certainly, the Danish artist is not the only contemporary artist who has produced works that gaze back at the art of the 1960s. In fact, his practice can be viewed as belonging to a broader artistic trend that emerged in the 1990s characterised by the overt appropriation of motifs and strategies typical of artists such as Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, or Eva Hesse.31 James Meyer has written extensively on this trend and has warned against its too facile romanticisation of the 1960s. A nostalgic view of the 1960s comes most easily to those who were not present, he has declared.32 Nostalgia quickly sleeps into romanticization when the admired figure died tragically young, all too common during those years.33 While Koester certainly admires figures such as Smithson or Ruscha, his admiration avoids romanticising their lives and achievements. This is exemplified by the text he has produced as accompaniment to histories. Here, instead of celebrating Smithson or other conceptual artists as talented individuals, Koester discusses their works for what they can tell us about the present. For example, his comments on Haackes 1971 pictures of low-rent tenements in New York draw attention to the contemporary conditions of Manhattan Lower East Side (Fig. 4):
In 1971 Thomas Messer, Director of the Guggenheim Museum, stated that he had to fend off an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism. The substance referred to was Hans Haackes work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. Hans Haackes exhibition, uncovering real estate speculations, was cancelled. Walking through the Lower East Side on a summer day in 2005, I wondered whether the houses themselves were perhaps the alien substance. Only one of the low-rent tenement buildings that Haacke documented on Third and Fourth Street is still standing.34

31. See James Meyer, Nostalgia and Memory Legacies of the 1960s in Recent Work, in Scott Burton et al., Painting Object Film ConceptWork from the Herbig Collection (Christies: New York, 1998), pp. 2635. See also Meyer, What Happened to the Institutional Critique? (American Fine Arts: New York, 1993) and Impure Thoughts: The Art of Sam Durant, Artforum, vol. 38, no. 8, April 2000, pp. 11217. 32. Meyer, Nostalgia and Memory Legacies of the 1960s in Recent Work (1998), p. 32. 33. Meyer, Nostalgia and Memory Legacies of the 1960s in Recent Work (1998), pp. 323. 34. Koester, histories, in Anders Kreuger (ed.), Messages from the Unseen: Joachim Koester, (Veenman Publishers: Lund, 2006), pp. 62 3.

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In histories, Koester is far from celebrating heroic artistic gestures and individual greatness a fact that would make his work an example of a nostalgic conservative impulse. On the contrary, Koester interprets Haackes photograph and the cancellation of his 1971 exhibition as a prophetic event

Fig. 4. Joachim Koester, histories, 2003 05, two gelatin-silver prints, 17.7 21.2 cm each. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

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35. Personal communication with the artist, November 2010.

that prefigured the present gentrification of Manhattan. Thus, imitation fulfils also another function in the project, beside that of a distancing device; imitation functions as a documentary strategy that allows the artist to highlight the historical changes that have transformed the American landscape since the 1960s. These changes are not to be welcomed. Koesters photographs register a greater commodification and economic speculation. This is particularly visible in the diptychs devoted to Smithson and Haacke. Here, as we have seen, a McDonalds outlet and new luxury developments appear to have replaced the small shop economy and popular housing of the 1960s. Therefore, Koesters nostalgia for the 1960s is progressive in that it desires a time in which economic forces of commodification and standardisation were not as fully developed as they are today. It triggers a reflection on the pressures that, since the 1970s, have forced most Western governments to abandon welfare policies and to promote corporate capital development, and it does so by using the works of 1960s artists as signposts that indicate the rise of these destructive socio-economic forces. A less evident aspect of Koesters critical nostalgia refers to the particular selection of conceptual artists chosen by him. Significantly, none of them is Danish. This is explained by the fact that conceptualism in the specific cultural context of Denmark is still marginalised by the discipline of art history and by art institutions alike. In fact, today the language of conceptualism is not deemed a sign of artistic maturity in the country. As Koester has said, in Denmark, artists in their mid-career who want to be taken seriously are supposed to abandon conceptualism and take up more traditional mediums such as painting.35 Viewed then from the Danish local perspective, Koesters appropriation of 1960s conceptual art emerges less as a conservative strategy than as a desire to break with the boundaries and strictures of Danish culture. This points to the contextual quality of nostalgia, that is to the fact that the critical dimension of this approach to the past can sometimes be fully grasped only by looking at the relations between the work and the specific histories and traditions in which it is produced. Thus, if, in the Anglo-American context, appropriating 1960s photoconceptualism might look like an empty signifier of criticality, in other countries this appropriation might represent a real act of resistance against traditional artistic languages and values.

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Ruins of Failed Utopias

A significant number of Koesters works examine past failed utopias through the representation of ruined edifices. In Day For Night Christiania, for example, Koester has photographed the ramshackle barracks of the free town of Christiania a community of squatters founded in 1971 near Copenhagen and in Row Housing he has documented the remains of architect Ralph Erskines utopian city of Resolute, one of the Canadas northernmost communities and the site of another failed social experiment of the 1970s. In ` Morning of the Magicians, Koester travelled to Cefalu, Sicily, in order to explore Aleister Crowleys now decrepit Abbey of Thelema, a modest farmers house in the outskirts of the Sicilian town (Fig. 5). Founded in the 1920s, the Abbey was supposed to become the home of a new society of freed men, but a series of unfortunate events forced Crowley and his followers to abandon the project and leave the Abbey, which now appears in a state of abandon.
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Fig. 5. Joachim Koester, Morning of the Magicians, 2005, C-print, 47.5 60.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

` Crowley moved from London to Cefalu in 1920 to found the utopian community named Thelema after Francois Rabelaiss classic 1534 novel Gargantua. In the novel Rabelais describes Theleme (from the Greek, meaning will) as an ideal society free from rules and constraints.36 Once in ` Cefalu, which, in the 1920s, was a very small fishing town near Palermo, Crowley rented a one-storey house on the outskirts of the village with thick plaster walls and a tiled roof. The house was named the Abbey of Thelema and Crowley and his disciples redecorated the walls, the doors, and even the shutters of the house with pictures depicting unbridled sex scenes in a colourful style reminiscent of Paul Gauguin, an artist held by Crowley as a precursor-saint of Thelema.37 These fantastic paintings sustained and stimulated the trance-like experiences of Crowley and his followers, provoked by the heavy consumption of cocaine, heroin, and opium. According to filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who visited the Abbey in the 1950s to produce a film documentary, some of these images were deliberately obscene.38 In 1923, after the death from enteritis of one of the Crowleys followers which brought public attention to the commune, the London popular press published violently defamatory articles about him, denouncing Thelema as a site of human sacrifice and vice. Soon afterwards Crowleys community was forced to leave by order of the fascist government of Benito Mussolini and the Italian authorities carefully covered the frescos with a coat of whitewash. Koesters Morning of the Magicians is a series of ten photographs depicting the Abbeys interior, its garden, and its surroundings as they appear today. Some of the pictures are in black and white and some are in colour without any apparent motivation. This shift back and forth from black and white to colour unsettles the viewer and sets the representation in an uncertain temporality. Although the frescoes are barely discernable and the house appears in an absolute state of abandon, the interior walls still show some traces of Crowleys erotic
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36. Lawrence Sutin, Do What You Wilt: A Life of Alisteir Crowley (Godalming: New York, 2002). 37. Sutin, Do What You Wilt, p. 280. 38. Angers documentary was called Thelema Abbey (1955) and was produced for the television of the English illustrated magazine Picture Post. Unfortunately, according to Anger, the film was lost when the magazine had to close. See Kenneth Anger interviewed by Scott MacDonald in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press: Berkley, 1989), pp. 1654.

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39. Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2006), p. 17. 40. Urban, Magia Sexualis, p. 120. 41. Koester, Morning of the Magicians, in Anders Kreuger (ed.), Messages from The Unseen: Joachim Koester (Veenman Publishers: Lund, 2006), p. 185. 42. Koester, Morning of the Magicians (2006), p. 184. 43. Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces (Humanity Books: New York, 1990), p. 81. 44. Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, p. 81.

paintings. For example, Crowleys signature, a phallic symbol encased in a hexagram, is still clearly visible on the top of one of the rooms walls (Fig. 6); below, at almost floor level, a human figure, lying horizontally, looks to be engaged in a sexual act with a monstrous animal. In another photograph, a phrase belonging to Crowleys original paintings can still be read. Written in electric blue over an orange stripe horizontally crossing the wall, the phrase reads: Stab your demonic smile into my brain, soak me in cognac, cunt and cocaine (Fig. 7). As Koesters photographs show, sex played a crucial role in Crowleys theories of magic and mysticism. Drawing on syncretic combinations of Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Celtic mythologies, Crowley identified sex as the route to knowledge and liberation. Significantly, as cultural historian Hugh Urban has pointed out, for Crowley sexual magic was not simply a hedonistic practice but an act of transgressing social taboos which promoted a radical liberation of the self. Through explicit acts of transgression, homoerotic intercourse, and masturbation, Urban writes, Crowley sought a radical form of liberation on all levels sexual, social, and political alike.39 Born in 1875 into a Protestant family, Crowley deliberately set out to overturn what he saw as the oppressive, hypocritical attitudes of Victorian England.40 For his radical subversion of religious and sexual taboos, Crowley was later appropriated by countercultural movements of the 1950s and 1960s and today he survives in numerous newly published books, as well as in the myriad of websites that still circulate his writings and ideas. Koesters Morning of the Magicians could be viewed as a further example of such nostalgic revivalism. Yet, his work differs from this contemporary literature in that it does not romantically celebrate Crowleys persona, nor take his demonic mythology at face value. Rather, Koester shuns specific references to Crowleys decadent writings and rather emphasises all the contradictions that characterised his life and work. In the crucial text that accompanies his photographic installation, he notes that, instead of leading to a liberated self, the philosophy of absolute transgression promoted by Crowley left him and his disciples with a heroin habit as an unwanted souvenir.41 In addition, the artist mentions Crowleys despotic and patriarchal nature: With Crowley as a drugged, benevolent dictator at his best, writes Koester, and a gruesome, perverted manipulator at his worst, the days at the Abbey could be harsh.42 However, Koester is less interested in restoring the historical record about Crowley than in turning the Abbey into a symbolic space of transgression and resistance to power. At some point in his narration, Koester compares the ruin of Thelema with Smithsons earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), also a ruined edifice and a symbol of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. More precisely, Koesters nostalgia can be seen to situate the Abbey as a utopian space in the broad meaning of the term as defined by philosopher Louis Marin, for whom it represents absolute transgression.43 As Marin explains, utopia is the negativity of reality realized, or rather figured and represented, in fiction, the sole means of representing it.44 For Marin, utopia is not a historical reality but a fiction and, therefore, the question of utopias actual success or failure is irrelevant. Likewise, Koester intentionally constructs the Abbey as a fiction by employing a series of representational strategies which belong to the register of the fantastic. For example, the artist photographs the thicket of the garden in such a way that the house turns into a faint shadow, a marvellous apparition hiding behind the bushes (Fig. 8). Also, in Koesters work the windows of the house appear as either
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Fig. 6. Joachim Koester, Morning of the Magicians, 2005, gelatin-silver print, 47.5 60.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

overexposed or underexposed, a fact that increases the sense of mystery of the otherwise squalid and banal place. Koesters work redeploys certain key tropes of conceptual art. In particular, the artists representation of Thelema recalls Smithsons slide show Hotel Palenque (1972). In the slide lecture he gave about the collapsing Mexican hotel to architecture students at the University of Utah, Smithson described the construction as an irrational and fantastic place. Significantly, the artist repeatedly linked ancient Mayan mythology to the convoluted structure of the hotel. Palenque actually used to be called the city of the snake, Smithson said at the beginning of the lecture, there were people there who worshipped the snake and, in a sense, the hotel was built in a kind of intertwining snaking way.45 Smithson went on describing the Mexican hotel as an example of anti-architecture caught within entropic forces; his slides showed staircases which did not lead anywhere, dry swimming pools, incomplete walls, and floors whose functionality was utterly unclear. Likewise Koesters Thelema appears as a labyrinthine space with multiple facades and hallways. In Koesters photographs, the frescoed walls are never continuous, as doors and windows appear in the margins of the frame
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45. Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque, Parkett, no. 43, 1995, np. The Parkett insert is a transcription of Smithsons commentary and a reproduction of the slides from the lecture he gave at the University of Utah in 1972.

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Fig. 7. Joachim Koester, Morning of the Magicians, 2005, C-print, 47.5 60.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

46. Koester, Morning of the Magicians (2006), p. 187. 47. For Roberts, Smithsons approach to Yucatan involuntarily reiterated the same imperialist attitude of the American archaeologist John Loyd Stephen, criticised by Smithson, who in 1841 had journeyed to Yucatan. For all his inversions of Stephenss narrative, writes Roberts, Smithson perpetuates, even amplifies, Stephenss belief in Yucatecan amnesia, indifference, and myopia. Jennifer Roberts, Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatan, The Art Bulletin vol. 82, no. 3, September 2000, p. 563.

alluding to a space beyond. Also, just as Smithson conferred upon the contemporary Mexican ruin a mythical and archaic dimension, Koesters narrative often hints at an irrational presence embedded in the Abbey. Koester writes that once he entered the garden of the house, he felt as if the sediments, pieces of leftover narratives and ideas from the individuals that once passed through the Abbey had formed knots, as tangled as the bushes and trees that were now taking over, creating a kind of sleeping presence.46 That said, there is a significant difference between Smithsons and Koesters two projects. As Smithson scholar Jennifer Roberts has pointed out, Smithsons fictionalisation of the Mexican landscape ended up turning ruins such as the Hotel Palenque into a monument of eternal idleness and fatalism.47 Unlike Smithsons Palenque project, Koesters Morning of the Magicians historicises the place bringing the ruins of Crowleys house into the context of todays ` Cefalu. The artist photographs the ruin within the sprawling suburban landscape of the town as it appears today and thus demonstrates that Thelema is not an eternal, mythical utopia (Fig. 9). Rather, Thelema is a concrete and contemporary reality. More importantly, it looks threatened by
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Fig. 8. Joachim Koester, Morning of the Magicians, 2005, silver-gelatin print, 47.5 60.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

Fig. 9. Joachim Koester, Morning of the Magicians, 2005, gelatin-silver print, 47.5 60.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

` the claustrophobic uniformity of its surroundings. Once in Cefalu, the artist writes, I started to doubt whether the house still existed and instead of vacant lots I found my way blocked by the barrier of a gated community, or newly built condos with BMWs and Porsches crowding the parking lots.48
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48. Koester, Morning of the Magicians (2006), p. 186.

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49. Andreas Huyssen, Nostalgia for Ruins, Grey Room, no. 23, 2006, p. 6. 50. This supposed return [utopia], this hunger for the future, is in fact put to the test by immemorial and abundant Nature, the future is reactionary. Laurent Gerverau writes, Symbolic Collapse. Utopia Challenged by Its Representations, in From Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (NYPL: New York, 2001), p. 365. 51. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1992). 52. Koester discusses Walter Benjamins essay A Berlin Chronicle (1932) in Anders Kreuger, Lazy Clairvoyants and Future Audiences: Joachim Koester in Conversation with Anders Kreuger, Newspaper Jan Mot, no. 43/44, August 2005, np.

In Koesters photographs, Thelema appears to be overwhelmed by the suburban architecture of the Sicilian town: newly built housing, a gigantic empty stadium, and serpentine concrete roads obstruct the view of the house and we have to carefully scan this chaotic landscape in order to locate the Abbey. In another photograph, Koester depicts the ruin from a road above. With its caved-in ` roof, Thelema looks like a hole in the centre of Cefalu. As the negativity of reality realised, to invoke Marins key phrase once again, Thelemas invisibility across the Sicilian urban landscape points to the contemporary lack of utopian imagination. Rather than a reactionary return to the past, Morning of the Magicians provides viewers with a critical reflection on the limits of the present. As in histories Koester travels back in time not to escape the present but to reflect on its condition. Koesters nostalgia also responds to the desire for a sense of future. In Morning of the Magicians, the absence evoked by Thelemas ruin is also a sleeping presence waiting to be reawakened. It is the symbol for an opportunity which, although missed, is still valid in the present. As Andreas Huyssen observes, Nostalgic longing for a past is always a longing for another place. Nostalgia can be utopia in reverse.49 Yet, for Huyssen as well as for other critics of utopia and nostalgia this other place cannot actually be envisioned. When it is evoked through images or words, this utopian place is always mythical, that is regressive, and hides a desire for a more ordered society.50 Koester reacts against this pessimistic concept of utopia and of nostalgia as utopia in reverse. In Morning of the Magicians, Koester celebrates and reclaims the right to imagine alternative, freer societies; for Crowleys story in the end represents just that: the courage to produce alternative symbols and lifestyles. Thus, despite the dubious aspects of Crowleys utopia and its failure which Koester does not forget to mention the Englishman stands for anti-conformism, rather than for a desire for a more hierarchical society. A concept of critical nostalgia like that suggested by Koester calls for a revision of Hegelian-based philosophies that conceive history as an inevitable movement towards progress and freedom. Unlike these philosophies, Koesters nostalgia is based on the idea that modernity is not a monolithic process that entails only gains. On the contrary, modernity may involve significant losses and its political and social achievements are always contingent, subject to risks and dangers, advancement and retreats, changes not always for the better. In fact, Koesters practice often shows the catastrophic and destructive effects of recent historical change and the failure of modernist utopian experiments (see, for example, Row Housing and The Kant Walks). The failure of Crowleys Thelema is another example of the fragility of concrete efforts at realising utopic visions. Koesters ruins have a Janus-faced quality. On the one hand, they point at modernitys catastrophic effects, on the other hand at possible futures. Importantly, Koesters ruins avoid the ideological optimism of neo-conservative philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama who, in his famous book The End of History, sees modernity as having achieved its goal of universal freedom in the market-oriented liberal democracy of the USA.51 On the contrary, Koesters ruins remind us of the instability of every social order, including neo-liberal ones. Given Koesters critique of progress, it is unsurprising that Walter Benjamin is often mentioned by Koester.52 In Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin famously described progress as a figure of inexorable destruction, a destruction he found visually represented in Paul Klees Angelus Novus. In some of his writings Benjamin described the experience of modernity through the
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language of loss the loss of tradition, community and looked at the pre-modern as a time when a primal wholeness and happiness were still possible.53 Indeed, the retrieval of pre-modern archaic forms of knowledge is a central theme of several of the artists projects (see the discussion of Tarantism in the next section). Yet, perhaps, the philosophy of history and utopia of Ernst Bloch could more appropriately describe the meaning of Koesters nostalgia. Bloch conceived the present as the outcome of contradictory temporalities. According to him, modernity was a convoluted process where pre-modern archaic societies and values could coexist with anticipations of better futures (see Blochs notion of ungleichzeitig or nonsynchronism).54 Moreover, for Bloch, the collective aspiration for a more just society yet to come could have been found in imaginary forms such as fairy tales or mass cultural texts. Whatever their forms, Bloch argued, these utopian anticipations should not have been neglected since they could have energised contemporary society in its drive towards a better future. Likewise, Koesters ruins seem to prophesy the future. As he has often claimed, his photographs are both documents of the past and prophetic figurations of the not yet. He explains:
The photographs become material, and time becomes material. That is one way to approach history and time: as material. And perhaps time always points towards the future. What is there to predict about the future? It is sitting there with all these lines, all these traces coming from the past. Calling them lines makes them seem very linear. But I dont see them that way. They seem to have all kinds of inuences, they come together from all sides. You try to see where they lead and that is of course predicting the future.55

53. See Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History and The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov both collected in Benjamin, Illuminations (Fontana: London), 1992, pp. 24555 and 83 109. 54. See Ernst Bloch, Nonsynchronism and Dialectics, New German Critique, vol. 11, Spring 1977, pp. 22 38. For an introduction on Blochs notion of utopia, see Douglas Kellner, Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique, in Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (eds), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (Verso: London, 1997), pp. 8095. 55. See Anders Kreuger, Lazy Clairvoyants and Future Audiences: Joachim Koester in Conversation with Anders Kreuger, np. 56. Another reason for the artists fascination with the history of occultism is the often-indecipherable quality of its events and documents. Several of the figures of occultism are both mythical and historical figures, hovering between history and myth. Thus occultism provides Koester materials that enables him to experiment with the forms of documentary. For a discussion of Koesters hybrid documentary strategies, see Catsou Roberts, Between Documentation and Drama, in Art Press, no. 232, February 1998, pp. 44 8.

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Re-enacting a Bodily Unconscious

Koesters interest in Crowleys Thelema is one of the many examples of the artists fascination with unorthodox, pre-modern, and pre-scientific forms of knowledge. The search for irrational or primitive techniques, which has been marginalised by scientific systematic thought since the seventeenth century and the rise of the Enlightenment, is what ultimately characterises the works of the artist in which he explores the histories of occultism and drug experimentation. Unsurprisingly, figures such as Crowley, John Dee, Thomas De Quincey, Henri Michaux, and Carlos Castaneda recur incessantly in the artists filmic and photographic projects. Although Koesters fascination with these figures might be seen at first as a superficial attraction towards the bizarre, the unusual, and the eccentric, on a less superficial level his interest reflects a profound belief in the possibility of aesthetic and affective experiences to be generative and enlightening. For Koester, these figures deployed a variety of visual, acoustic, and corporeal means to extend our knowledge about the universe and the human mind in a way that scientific thought could not have provided. The Italian trance-like dance of tarantism is another historical example of the importance of pre-modern, aesthetic forms of knowledge and practice for the artist. Koester re-enacts this traditional dance in his 16 mm film Tarantism (Fig. 10).56 Originating in Salento, the south-eastern extremity of the Apulia region of Italy, tarantism was part of a ritual exorcism through dance, music, and colour symbolism that aimed to heal a disease supposedly produced by the bite of a tarantula. In the ritual, the victim was often surrounded by a band of musicians playing drums and violins and would move in convulsive and
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Fig. 10. Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, 16 mm black-and-white lm installation. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

57. Ernesto De Martino, The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (Free Association: London, 2005). In a personal conversation with the author Koester has cited De Martinos work as one of his main sources on Tarantism that he deployed during the preparation of his film. For more recent studies on tarantism and its history, see Karen Ludtke, Dances With Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy (Berghahn: New York, Oxford, 2009) and Jerri Daboo, Ritual, Rapture and Remorse (Berg: New York, 2010).

frenetic ways simulating possession by a spider. The victims, or tarantati, danced in response to particular melodies, often for days on end, to sweat the poison out of their bodies. The rite ended with the symbolic death of the spider and the healing of the victim. The historical origins of tarantism are still complex and obscure, as the ritual changed its relevance, form, and meanings across centuries. The residue of a pagan rite practised during Greek and Roman antiquity, tarantism was absorbed by the medieval Catholic church, which managed to link it to the cult of St Paul. In the sixteenth century, it was dismissed by Jesuit missionaries as a primitive superstition and in the eighteenth century by the Neapolitan Enlightenment, which branded it as a pathological mental disorder. In the mid-twentieth century, tarantism began to be recognised as a cultural and social phenomenon which deserved attention. It became the subject of a revolutionary study in 1959 by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino. Today, the ritual no longer exists as such. However, since the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in tarantism, in part fuelled by the number of researchers who have visited Salento. Produced in the late 1950s, De Martinos seminal study, The Land of Remorse, has acquired almost mythical status over the years and has become the main historical reference for those interested in tarantism.57 Importantly, De Martinos work linked the ritual practice with the extremely poor and patriarchal society of Salento. Historically, the region was one of the poorest and most backward regions of Italy. A vast rural area, it was far away from the wealthier and better-educated urban centres of Naples or Rome. De Martino, who supported the Socialists and later the Communist party, on the one hand warned against the denigration of tarantism by scientists and theologists and rejected the empirical reduction, prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the phenomenon to a medical dysfunction.
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He provided a detailed history of tarantism and of the attempts by the Catholic church and the Neapolitan medical school to eradicate the practice. Yet, on the other hand, De Martino also reinforced a radically pessimistic notion of the phenomenon: influenced by French existentialism and psychoanalysis, De Martino ultimately defined the ritual in negative terms. In the conclusion of his study, he describes tarantism as the horizon of an anguish which is the ciphered symptom of unfulfilled choices and conflicts operating in the unconscious.58 While Koester has drawn on the extensive documentation produced by De Martino, his film rehabilitates tarantism in that he views the dance as a way to relieve the victims, however momentarily, of their anxieties. Importantly, as we will see, Koesters film appropriates the dance as a technique of self-knowledge that could be used in the present. In other words, in Tarantism, the artist does not assume the authoritative voice of the anthropologist, the historian, or the scientist: in fact, the film is not a documentary about tarantisms past; rather, it is a performance staged in the present and choreographed by Koester with the help of professional dancers. Koesters work might be seen as part of the post-modern revival of this phenomenon. In the 1990s, tarantism was rediscovered, especially in the Salento region where it was born. As a consequence, a touristic, academic, and cultural industry revolving around the ritual and its history has boomed. Given its intrinsic spectacular nature, its overpowering music and trance-like dance, tarantism has become a favoured subject for contemporary filmmakers and photographers, as well as for writers and performers.59 This revival or neo-tarantism has been heavily criticised. For many, neo-tarantism is the expression of a conservative and deceptive nostalgia, which romanticises and cynically exploits a phenomenon associated with suffering and despair. Today tarantism, writes one Italian anthropologist, has been totally decontextualised, reified, and projected onto an ill-defined universal dimension.60 Koesters film is undoubtedly another manifestation of the recent rediscovery of tarantism. However, I think we should be careful in putting all cultural practices that appropriate the dance on the same level and

58. De Martino, The Land of Remorse, p. 248. In the preface to the English translation of the book, Vincent Crapanzano writes: Reflective no doubt of the period in which De Martino was writing as well as a certain depressive streak in him, his observations extend beyond the particular [of tarantism] to humanity existential conditions. Crapanzano, Introduction, in De Martino, The Land of Remorse, p. xiii). 59. Giovanni Pizza, Tarantism and the Politics of Tradition in Contemporary Salento, in Frances Pine, Deema Kaneff and Haldis Haukanes (eds), Memory, Politics and Religion. The Past Meets the Present in Europe (Lit Verlag: Munster, 2004), pp. 199224. 60. Giovanni Pizza, Tarantism and the Politics of Tradition in Contemporary Salento (2004), p. 205.

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Fig. 11. Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, 16 mm black-and-white lm installation. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

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61. For a critique of the use of reenactment in contemporary art and popular culture, see Sven Lutticken, Life Once More. Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art (Witte de With: Rotterdam, 2005).

we should distinguish between a neo-tarantism that surreptitiously distorts and trivialises the phenomenon, and a neo-tarantism like Koesters that disregards any pretence of authenticity and therefore avoids reifying it.61 Shot in a small theatre in Brussels, Koesters elegant black-and-white film deploys young professional dancers to re-enact the dance. During the six-minute-long film Koesters dancers rapidly swirl in front of the camera as if possessed by an irresistible force (Fig. 11). Some elements in Koesters mise ` en scene recall the traditional ritual. Two female dancers hold a white cloth similar to those used by the victims of tarantism, and occasionally the performers dance while the other performers stand still around them, an arrangement that recalls De Martinos photographs. Yet, these are the only direct references to the historical phenomenon of tarantism appearing in the film, which overall differs markedly from traditional representations of the dance. The dancers wear contemporary clothes and move in an overtly exaggerated way, and Koester often breaks the conceit, as when the camera shows the moments after the performers have finished dancing. Koester also avoids following the conventions that govern the filming of theatrical performances. Instead of providing wide shots of the dance as we are used to seeing in television recordings of the performing arts the camera focuses on marginal details such as the stage floor or the performers waists and feet (Figs 12 and 13). Moreover, the camera pans horizontally across the stage regardless of the actions of the dancers. It zooms in and out with no apparent motivation. The result is a sense of estranged detachment from the pro-filmic event, as if the camera followed a choreography independent of the actions depicted. Another noteworthy anti-mimetic strategy adopted by Koester is the lack of soundtrack. Koester avoids using tarantisms traditional music, called pizzica, which, with its overpowering drums and percussions, is one of the main causes for the commercial success of tarantisms recent revivals. The film is silent as we do not hear the noise of the dancers steps on the stage, which contributes to the creation of an oneiric atmosphere (the

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Fig. 12. Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, 16 mm black-and-white lm installation. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

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Fig. 13. Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, 16 mm black-and-white lm installation. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

dancers bodies seem almost weightless). In the gallery, the film is shown together with the loud and repetitive humming of the projector. As a consequence of all these representational strategies, the viewer is given an anti-naturalistic representation of tarantism. Koesters aim is not that of providing an image of what the ritual once was. The work deals playfully with its subject, and is not based on authentic loss of bodily control, he has declared.62 In fact, the film is what it is: the recording of a theatrical performance happening in the present. While the strategies adopted by Koester avoid spectacularising tarantism, we may still wonder about the purpose of his retrieval of the dance. What is the critical import of Koesters nostalgic recovery of tarantism? Furthermore, why tarantism and not any other traditional dances? Koesters fascination with tarantism lies in its therapeutic function. The dance, Koester has declared in an interview, was one of the few opportunities to challenge the prevailing order and test the boundaries of society. Tarantism became a line of flight for repressed women to display their sexuality and was a free space in which actions that were normally prohibited could have been enacted.63 Like Koester, several anthropologists and historians have recently pointed out the curative and empowering dimension of the ritual, questioning the pessimistic fatalism of De Martinos influential account.64 According to these studies, through its vivid colour symbolism, intense rhythmic dance, and excessive acting, tarantism actually relieved the condition of distress of its victims. Rather than a strategy to discipline the body, tarantism was a technique that empowered and liberated the subject, however momentarily.65 Therefore, if viewed as a method of self-exploration and empowerment, Koesters nostalgic re-enactment of the dance should be seen as a progressive move. The idea that a ritualistic form such as tarantism could be a vehicle for self-expression and liberation might seem paradoxical. The notion of ritual is often linked with the mechanics of institutionalised forms of power. A ritual is a form or structure, writes anthropologist Roy Rappaport, the
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62. Koester as cited by Anders Kreuger, The Slumber of Images in Luca Cerizza (ed.), Maps and Legends (JRP/Ringier: Zurich, 2007), p. 264. 63. Koester as cited in Anders Kreuger, The Slumber of Images, p. 264 and personal communication with the artist, May 2010. 64. Since the 1970s sociologists and ethnomusicologists have began to stress the therapeutic aspects of tarantism. See for example Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance (London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Georges Lapassade, La Transe (PUF: Paris, 1990) and Luisa Del Giudice, The Folk Music Revival and the Culture of Tarantismo in the Salento, in Luisa Del Giudice and Nancy Van Deusen (eds), Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean (Institute of Mediaeval Music: Ottawa, 2005), pp. 21766. 65. The kind of reenactment advocated for by Koester is then diametrically opposed to the notion of reenactment articulated by Sven Lutticken. The success of reenactment in contemporary culture, Lutticken argues, reflects and sustains capitalism tendency to regulate human behaviour. They are functional to produce a society of neoliberal performative subjects. Lutticken, An arena in which to reenact, in Lutticken, Life Once More. Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art (Witte de With: Rotterdam, 2005), p. 19.

Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester

66. Roy Rappaport, The Obvious Aspects of Ritual, in Roy Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (North Atlantic Books: Richmond, 1979), p. 175. 67. Personal conversation with the artist, May 2010. Likewise, Koester has defined his walks across the ruined edifices of Kaliningrad as sort of experiments or manuals, way[s] to engage a space, recipe[s] to follow but also to improvise with, allowing for drifting or losing oneself . Koester, The Kants Walks, in Kreuger, Message from the Unseen, (Veenman Publishers: Lund, 2006) p. 122. 68. For the notion of performative photography, see Margaret Iversen, Following Pieces. On Performative Photography, in James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory (Routledge: New York, 2006), pp. 91108 and Auto-Maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography, in Art History, vol. 32, no. 5, November 2009, pp. 83651. 69. See conversation between Joachim Koester and Catherine David at the Berlin Documentary Forum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin: 4 June 2010. 70. Linda Hutcheon, Ironys Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (Routledge: London, 1994) and The Politics of Postmodernism (Routledge: London, 2002); see also Hal Fosters preface to Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Bay Press: Seattle, 1983). Likewise, for Andreas Huyssen, the only possible nostalgia is that which shows the horrific and ideological face of progress since late capitalism occludes any possibility for a constructive nostalgia or utopia. Authentic ruins, he explains, as they still existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seem no longer to have a place in late capitalisms commodity and memory culture. Nostalgia, in other words, is not what it once used to be. Huyssen, Nostalgia for Ruins (2006), p. 10.

performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by the performers.66 However, for Koester, the ritualistic repetition of a pre-determined set of movements is only a way to open up the work to chance. Koester has spoken of his choreography in terms of a game plan, a loose framework within which the dancers were allowed to improvise and experiment. Thus tarantism is appropriated by Koester as a loose structure that can trigger unpredictable events. This is also exemplified by the way in which the artist has conceived the films camera movements. In the production of the film, Koester has said, my assistants and I conceived the camera positions as a sort of empty box or frame in which we could put anything.67 Improvisation, then, had a crucial role in the genesis of the work and points to the importance of chance in Koesters practice as a whole. This aspect links the artist with precise art historical legacies. I am here referring to the photoconceptualist notion of performative photography recently discussed by Margaret Iversen.68 It is also connected with the artists interest in experimental literature based on systems of rigorous formal constraints (significantly George Perecs Life: A Users Manual is mentioned by Koester as one of the literary works that most influenced him).69 More importantly, the importance of chance in Koesters re-enactments sheds light on the generative character of his nostalgia. For Koester, the repetition of a ritualistic form of knowledge is not a sterile, unproductive gesture, the sign of alienation, or even a pathological obsession. Rather, it is a technique through which to access unconscious, unexplored dimensions of the self, a productive way to estrange the subject from its habitual knowledge. Against Timothy Bewes definition of nostalgia as a sterile escapist approach, Koester demonstrates that the recovery of pre-modern forms of knowledge can enable the subject to release inventive and transformative actions in the present.
Critical Nostalgia and Its Limits

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The nostalgic impulse at work in Koesters practice calls for an expansion of the concept of nostalgia, one that would allow for the possibility of a critical and progressive reading of the concept alongside the conservative and regressive one. Both modernist and postmodernist thinkers have dismissed nostalgia as bad history and bad politics. In the modern philosophies of history formulated by Kant, Hegel, and Marx, since history represents a continuous movement towards progress and emancipation, clearly nostalgia cannot be understood as anything but a reactionary and irrational impulse. Likewise, whether taking its form as pastiche or glossy tableaux (Jameson), as a desire for authenticity and immediacy (Stewart and Hutcheon), or as a return to authority (Buchloh), nostalgia is, for numerous commentators on postmodernism, a regressive impulse which falsifies the past and hides a desire for a more ordered society. Post-modernity itself has been viewed as a deeply nostalgic period during which we have witnessed the fetishisation of retro-fashions, the heritage industry, and various historical revivals. Those critics who have attempted to salvage the post-modern eras return to history have resorted to concepts like irony (see Hutcheons notion of historical metafictions) and deconstruction (see Fosters postmodernism of resistance), instead of arguing in favour of the possibility of a critical and constructive nostalgia.70 Koesters practice challenges this dismissal of nostalgia in many respects. As I hope this paper has made clear, it demonstrates that there can be a progressive
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Paolo Magagnoli

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Fig. 14. Joachim Koester, The Barker Ranch, 2008, selenium toned silver gelatin print, 44 58.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

Fig. 15. Joachim Koester, Time of the Assassins, 2009, selenium toned silver gelatin print, 44 58.3 cm. (Courtesy Joachim Koester, Galleri Nicolai Wallner.)

nostalgia that springs from a desire to transform the present, perceived to be too conservative and oppressive. While admitting the possibility of a critical nostalgia helps us in avoiding monolithic notions of this approach, it is also important to remember its dangers and problems. That is, the nostalgic
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Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester

artist might sometimes end up glorifying pasts which are profoundly controversial and complex. The desire to re-enchant the ruins of the past may come at the expense of reducing historys complexities, especially when these ruins refer to geographical and historical contexts too unfamiliar. In Koesters case, this is particularly evident if one looks at his latest works. In Barker Ranch (2008) (Fig. 14), Koester depicts the last hide-out of Charles Manson in the Arizona desert and in Time of the Assassins (2009) (Fig. 15), he portrays the remains of the castle of the eleventh-century Muslim missionary Hassan-I Sabbah in Iran (legend has it that his ruthless followers committed numerous political killings under the influence of hashish). The artists beautiful black-and-white silver prints seem to glorify these ruins and with them the controversial pasts they evoke. Without delving too much into these works, it is clear that unsettled or too remote histories can be a dangerous terrain for artist-historians and that a critical nostalgia requires more than a hasty and superficial research. Yet, perhaps the key question that underpins any discussion about nostalgias critical value is the following: for whom and for what is nostalgia and the nostalgic for?

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