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