How Did We Get so Nostalgic for Modernism?

How did we get to such a point of nostalgia for Modernism? Müller plays a key role here. As far as I can make out, he was one of the first contemporary artists to address Le Corbusier, back in 1992, and he does so in a tone that is entirely out of sync with what follows. The early nineties was the tail end of cultural postmodernism, prior to contemporary art’s globalization, and Müller’s work reflects this assertively critical moment. His installation Forgotten Futures (1992) traces the connections between several unrealized late modern utopias: the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World Expo in Brussels (in which Le Corbusier collaborated with composers Iannis Xenakis and Edgar Varèse), Nicolas Schöffer’s book The Cybernetic City (1969), and Veit Harlan’s film Different from you and me (1957), which explores the then taboo subject of homosexuality. Müller’s installation comprises a model of the pavilion, a reconstruction of the ‘miniscule bureau’ from Le Corbusier’s studio in Paris, a black box in which Varèse’s eight minute composition plays, a display of his scores alongside Le Corbusier’s original Modular drawings, an information panel about Schöffer’s vision for a cybernetic city, a vitrine with more original documents from Le Corbusier’s archives, and a cinematic showcase of Harlan’s Different from You and Me. If you’re exhausted by this list, then don’t worry; I was too. Not only does this work auger the contemporary obsession with modernism, but it’s a prime example of what is now called ‘research-based art’: vitrine heavy installations, less interested in form than in connections.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Forgotten Futures is the certainty of Müller’s own critical position vis-à-vis Le Corbusier. The installation strives to foreground the limitations of Le Corbusier’s idealism, focusing on what it represses. Like much of Müller’s subsequent work, it comprises an investigation of how Modernism’s pristine spaces don’t allow for any of life’s contingencies: in his words, ‘personal conflicts, sexuality, affects, the unforeseen, the irrational and alternative histories’. He continues: ‘I was interested in the backside of Modernism which I began to mistrust in terms of its universal claims’. In many respects, then, Müller continues the critique of Modernism that had been begun by US theorists in the 1970s and early 1980s, but now geared towards a rejection of Le Corbusier’s totalitarian thinking rather than to a rejection of Greenberg’s authoritarian claims. He picks up on many of the tropes of this critique—especially its attention to the exclusion of sexual difference—and translates them into a European context. Forgotten Futures has a clear position, but its methods and installation remain somewhat didactic. I’m lingering on Müller because his installation about Le Corbusier seems so strikingly different in mood from subsequent art addressing Modernism. More typical—but equally early, dating to 1990—is Le Corbusier Chair and Le Corbusier Sofa by the Cuban artist Jorge Pardo. It’s a refabrication of Corb’s classic chair and loveseat using industrial copper tubing, rather than the polished steel tubes that form the core of the original. Pardo leaves his copper pipes unpolished, unstraightened and without upholstering, turning the furniture into a bare skeleton or sculpture. A further version of these Corbusier seats, now with brightly coloured cushions, is titled Me and My Mum (1991). The title seems to draw attention to the way in which these chairs have great cachet amongst the upwardly mobile, Wallpaper*-reading creative classes, but hold no such appeal to the artist’s immigrant mother. Rather than criticizing Modernist values, then, Pardo seems to show how cultural contexts and conventions affect meaning and value judgments. But at the same time, his work is made with a knowing wink and is function as an in-joke. You don’t get the sculpture unless you recognize Le Corbusier’s chairs and their reputation. In a similar spirit, and around the same time, German artist Tobias Rehberger spent two weeks in Yaoundé, Cameroon, at the invitation of the Goethe Institut. He took with him perspective drawings of chairs by Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Gerrit Rietveld, amongst others. With the help of Cameroonian artist Pascal Martine Tayou, he found craftsmen who each made a chair from the drawings (which were neither drawn to scale, nor exact in detail). These chairs (Untitled, 1994) were then exhibited in Yaoundé, while the drawings were shown in Cologne. Like Pardo, Rehberger works at the interface of art and design; these early works seem to take subversive pleasure in de-skilling the classics of design history. But they also function as a code to those in the know: the point of having Rietveld chairs made by Camerounian craftsmen is precisely to generate a frisson between a sought-after (ie expensive) example of European modernism and a (presumably inexpensive) knock-off using local traditions. Since the early 1990s, the number of works referring to Le Corbusier seems to have diminished; he’s been replaced by a cast of less mainstream Modernist heroes like Eileen Gray, Jože Plečnik, Zofia Stryjeńska or Mathias Goeritz. What all of this work has in common is firstly, that it sees Modernism as a thing of the past, and secondly, that it’s invariably more admiring than critical. The tone is always respectful, and the appearance is always highly aestheticized. Why is this?