THE ANTIQUE-MODERNE STYLE AND OUTLOOK:
Around the summer of 2008, I was living in the city of Montreal, collecting trinkets in a duplex I shared with about five Frenchmen and one American. I was completely out of my mind at the time, but not all my ideas were crazy. One night, as I looked at my collection of objects from the late-20th century, I dreamt something up. I was going to create The Museum of Modern Antiquity. This is how the aesthetic of Antique-Moderne was born.
Among the objects I had assembled: An old Fisher-Price tape recorder/player, and radio, several cassette players actually. Really to be honest at this point, in the feverish craze that I was in at that time, I can’t even remember what all the objects were. All I knew was that they were a) contemporary for all intents and purposes, from the 1980s and 1990s mostly, and b) there was this “sheen” about them, this abstract quality that I couldn’t quite pin down.
We all know about how fast things age these days. It’s been like that for a while. Media ecologists and other critical thinkers have written about it, historians too, amongst others. That “sheen” I just mentioned, though, that “abstract quality” the objects had? I realized that it was a form of patina. (See my Prolegomenon to Future Patina Studies.)
The thing is, these objects had aged well, they were still in good shape. They had, however, aged QUICKLY. An old, black Bakelite telephone from the 1970s already looked very OLD to me, in my teenage years in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, the Sony Walkman was already an anachronism. Now, the last version of the iPhone from a few months ago is an undesirable piece of garbage. The thing is, I’ve always found great beauty in garbage.
The love for antiques is age-old, as is the passion for vintage things, and vintage design is a huge industry. The historical precedent for all of this, in my view, is the love for History itself: archaeology, paleontology, etc. Excavations, unearthings, of ancient artifacts. I think some people go into those fields just because they love the look of a dusty skeleton or an old flute made from a baboon’s femur, sarcophagii, burial sites, pyramids, etc.
I think that humans have always been fascinated by the past. That stuff, though, is what I would call Antiquity. And The Museum of Modern Antiquity was a twist on the old museum with ancient things everyone is familiar with. It was going to be a museum with MODERN OBJECTS, from less than 40 years ago. I don’t even think that that’s considered vintage. I think the object has to be older than that.
In any case, others had either already done that, or have used the idea. I’m not saying I invented the patina that an old Fisher-Price toy has, from the 1980s. To millenials, it looks like a dinosaur. They are used to things being brand new all the time. The Antique-Moderne, though, is much more than just that. It’s a kind of pair of goggles you put on that makes everything around you look old and mysterious. You just have to look at it a certain way. It’s why I said Antique-Moderne STYLE and OUTLOOK. It’s a perceptual thing, it’s phenomenological at its base. It’s learning to look at things, at life, with the eyes of someone from the future. I also didn’t invent this.
This relates to Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura from his work, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, except it might better be called an anti-aura. Really, what this is about, is a new way of looking at the world. It’s about changing your perception and outlook. It’s about the Metaphysics of Art Movements. Look at this coffee cup, on a small wooden table. Both objects are not old. But a little magic and it looks like the following. It looks like what an alien civilization might find on a dead earth 25,000 years from now, except it was my morning coffee on the balcony:
The Cubist painters knew all about this. Many artists have known about this. There are techniques in painting to make something look older than it is. My Writing-Without-Writing Project was all about falsifying old documents, that is, making paintings that actually look like ancient papyrus scrolls or whatnot. It’s a trompe-l’oeil. Artists are quite good at this. That’s where I got the ‘moderne’ from in Antique-Moderne. It’s because the modernists were the first truly revolutionary avant-garde in history. There were always times of great change and great innovation in the arts, but the modernists, especially the Cubists in my opinion, really broke free from the confines of the old Arts & Culture Establishment.
I want to say more, but a pressing matter urges me to quit while I am ahead. As always, I will come back to this later. It all fits into an extremely complex conceptual system which I invented as support or substrate for my interdisciplinary art practice.
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