i.
The “first mark” of a dream, Freud observed, “is its independence of space and time.” In dreams we are magically here as well as there, now as well as then, escaping the dimensional limits of our waking lives. Through this experience of temporal-spatial weightlessness, we as modern subjects are released from what the West calls “history,” the unidirectional sequence of events that moves all matter, all objects situated in space, inexorably toward the future–and that heralds this movement as “progress.” The awake person knows another time, equally inescapable. It brings decay to the body, and ultimately, death. This is the body’s natural history, the experience of which is absolutely democratic, but not for that reason any easier to bear –particularly not for us as Western-acclimated, consumer-individuals who are the product of societies that call themselves democratic.

Consumerism is a kind of dreamworld. Whole industries–pharmaceutical, health, cosmetics, fitness, food, fashion–are based on keeping modern populations in denial of their natural history. At the same time such industries, while fueling the progress that propels history forward, do a good job of destroying nature. It is not known, and it is not in the interest of those who benefit for us to know, just how much of the sickness and death we now suffer, as workers and consumers, results from what is produced and how. But even the most minimal ecological evidence must make us aware that nature, repeatedly, encounters the progress of Western history as its own destruction. A constellation hovers over the last years of this century that traces a tragic logic: Whereas it has become dogma that modernization, defined as the industrial production of consumer goods, is the inevitable and unavoidable engine of history, this same progress harms the natural world (and our own bodies as nature) catastrophically.

So long as people building industrial civilizations, throughout the globe, shared an optimism regarding history’s course, the sacrifice of present time and present nature for future happiness made sense. But we, hurtling into the twenty-first century, gaze backward upon the past as a field of ruins, war and destruction, where there is no longer the promise of historical redemption. To experience the full force of this awareness, to recognize the hopelessness of our position at the forefront of a historical trajectory that harms masses of people who were supposed to benefit, to register consciously the futility of earlier sacrifices, the squandering of nature, human cultures and human beings that have brought us to this point, may be as intolerable as death itself.

The way we are given to think about these problems presents a double-bind. Global development leads to global poverty by increasing the gap between rich and poor–for which there is no way out, we are told, except to speed up the economic growth and global interdependency that was a source of the problem in the first place. As for the technological destruction of nature, we are encouraged to have blind faith that the development of more technology will fix it. If life-saving drugs and technological procedures are in short supply, we are told to let the market work its reasons, even though common sense tells us that those in most need will not be those who have the most ability to pay. If AIDS spreads rampantly among lovers, we are told that lovers ought to love each other less. They are to adopt the self-preservation strategies of all rational actors, putting their own lives first, thus relying on the same self-centeredness that allows the disease to spread.

No wonder we prefer to be distracted. Better to avert our gaze, to focus only on the present. Without historical memory, the experience of nature’s transiency morphs into the merely transitory, blurring into a series of momentary diversions. What’s new?

Take me shopping. Transport me to the misty dreamworlds of consumption. Let me see my reflection in the just-arrived commodity (sent from God knows where and manufactured God knows how). Bury me in the total-sensory cocoon of some virtual reality where the horror of history’s destructiveness cannot touch me. In these present-time capsules the greatest temporal risk comes from a different source. It is boredom, the temporal fatigue produced by fashion, the constantly repeated experience of the new. Boredom buffers the senses, reducing the horror of natural catastrophes and human suffering to a mere irritation. The antidote is a simple motor response: change the channel.

ii.
The image-culture that insulates us from time, distracting us with its repetitive stimulations, is not the only possible outcome of visual technologies. What impressed the earliest theorists of photography was the fact that by freezing a present moment and fixing material objects within it, photographs allowed viewers to keep seeing a mortal past that was threatened with total disappearance as their own time fell away from it. As for cinema, it provided the experience of temporal duration separate from historical time, making it possible for viewers to take a critical distance from the apparent inevitability of history’s course. But the culture industries into which these technologies developed have had little interest in enhancing critical awareness. Rather, their goal is to sell a multitude of goods, and for this, the assurance that nothing in the past can be lost to us is a more profitable approach. The day that Frank Sinatra died, his image and voice orbited the globe and flooded the personal sensory space of millions of potential buyers. It signalled his entry into the eternal afterlife of techno-heaven, the contemporary version of Christ rising from the tomb. Sinatra lived. Sinatra lives. Sinatra will live. His presence is limitless. His immortality is guaranteed–as are the profits to be made from his return to walk among us, embodied in the electronic flesh of cultural commodities.

As alternative cultural practices, art and academic writing have much in common. Artists are invited to participate in shows by curators, who commission works specifically for the occasion. Intellectuals are invited to participate in conferences by organizers, who publish their presentations as thematically-linked anthologies. There are times when the artworld and the academic world reinforce each other directly. Academics are invited, if not to the art exhibition itself, then at least to contribute “theoretical” pieces to the exhibition catalog. This is true of the present case, the catalog you are reading right now. It brings together two institutions, art and the university, that define themselves in opposition to the culture industry. The difference is one of degree, however. Artists and intellectuals both do piecework–not 1,000 pieces a hour or even a hundred a year, but perhaps three a year for an artist, or one every year for a teaching academic (far less if the product is a single-authored book), rates of production considered prolific enough for one-of-a-kind creations. Yet artists and intellectuals, not unlike mass-culture producers, develop advertising and marketing strategies. Their professional curriculum vitae are documents of self-promotion. Like their commercial cousins, they too give live performances, go on tour, prepare press releases, worry about reviews.

Both the artworld and the academic world have traditionally been privileged niches in the economy, granted protection from the more brutal forces of the market. This freedom is cherished, and rightly so. It is the precondition for any critical cultural work that, rather than going along with the tide of history, attempts to stand against it. But the danger is that both art world and academic world, as production enclaves, will squander their critical power by turning it inward on themselves. This danger of self-isolation is no less true when the enclave’s geographic scope is global.

Academics and artists are part of airport culture. Academics circle the globe attending international conferences in their special fields; artists are brought in on “site-seeing” tours, install their works and then move on, migrating from one international biennial to another without stop. Such nomadic existences offer them little chance of forming organic connections to place or context. Local promoters promise escape from the insulated worlds of privileged cultural production. There is talk of public art, and public intellectuals. Culture is sold to urban developers as being good for the economy. At the same time, critical culture attacks the given institutions and power arrangements, biting the hand that feeds it by questioning the conditions of its own possibility: “Art, like civilization, is a dead issue,” declares the artist, who survives on the public’s necrophilia.

Artists are the heroes of our time, not so much for their creative genius as was once the case but, rather, for their Herculean efforts to counter the numbing effects of technology’s barrage of images and sensory stimulations, and to provide us with cultural experiences that arrest the flow of the history sweeping us forward. It is a case of David against Goliath. It is the theme of this catalog, Ruins in Reverse, and the CEPA Gallery exhibition at the Market Arcade, Buffalo, on which it is based.

iii.
These artworks disturb the consumer surface of our culture. They are excavations into the unconscious, the artist’s own and a collective one. They dislodge fragments of the past as memory-images that do not remain in situ but rush at us–not as linear history, but as surprise. The artworks represented here take up a position, insinuating themselves into the viewer’s daily life (shopping, riding the bus). Rummaging into the past, they retrieve images that challenge our easy expectations, using multiple strategies to allow us to see what the global images deny. The goal, often in understated gestures, is to disrupt time if only for a moment. To project onto the visual field of the present photographic traces of the victims of history. To excavate not buildings but past experience, including those lost moments of resistance that have been buried under a mudslide of historical events and commercial information. To exhibit the smog-produced traces of that development which has the bad faith to call itself progress. To disrupt the memory of an arcadian, idealized nature that never did exist. To reveal the present day in Gothic images as already ruined and decayed.

Only multiple pasts allow for an open future. The cultural critic’s task is not to make sense out of what has happened but to ask why other possible histories were closed off. It suggests a kind of Darwinianism in reverse, a search for those small utopian moments that were lost because their creators were less barbaric than those who defeated them. Such human experiences lacked violence, not viability. They come back to us with effort, rescued not only from forgetfulness, but from the way they have been remembered by history’s victors.

The dead are really dead. It is not melancholy that is called for at this point. The melancholic’s futile nostalgia for the past is the other side of the boredom that kills time by turning its spleen against the present. Rather, the images of failed futures, of individuals who died too soon, of cultures subsumed because they could not stomach “development,” are weapons–small stones–in the hands of those in the present generation who learn from them how long their own misery has been prepared.

Is modernity shattered? Whose modernity? For millions of its victims, modern history has meant a Dark Age of social existence–slavery, poverty, cultural and physical extermination. Those who survive may find solace in the strategy of the cannibal who consumes the body of the enemy, feeding themselves on modernity’s fragments and taking in its strength. Cultural creativity finds nourishment in history’s decay.