FRONT PAGE / POSTS
Rebooting
by Joshua Glenn| Boston, USA
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
tags: americas, brand worlds, consumer culture, contributions from, culture, disciplines, emergence, header navigation, making sense
In recent years, I've stumbled frequently upon a fascinating, somewhat difficult-to-read trope in US pop culture and edgier communications. It's an expression of a peculiar attitude vis-à-vis bygone social and cultural forms and norms, trends and fashions, movements and pop culture franchises — one which was far less common 20 or even 10 years ago.
This perspective on past forms and norms isn't nostalgic — i.e., though it admires the past, it doesn't do so earnestly. Underpinning expressions of this trope we do not find the notion that we're living in the aftermath of a lost Golden Age; the present, it seems, can hold its own against the past. Nor is this perspective or trope ironic — i.e., the past isn't celebrated with an edge of mockery or wink-wink knowingness; the present isn't valued more highly than the past. Neither earnest nor ironic, this mode of grappling with and making use of the past is best described as serious-yet-playful, playful-yet-serious.
Call this perspective or trope rebooting. Unlike nostalgia, which puts past forms and norms on a pedestal, and unlike retro, which reanimates an antiquated trend or style and forces its spiritless corpse to shuffle about pathetically (the technical term for which is kitsch), rebooting revives the spirit of past forms and norms, trends and styles — taking them seriously enough to make them relevant and contemporary… while playfully deconstructing, recontextualizing, and misappropriating them. I've mused aloud about the philosophical implications of rebooting elsewhere; here, I'll just point to a few examples of what I mean.
1. Rebooted pop-culture franchises like Batman Begins, Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek. These recent movies aren't nostalgic, nor are they ironic. They are serious-yet-playful, playful-yet-serious. They celebrate the spirit of their originals, without succumbing to the anxiety of influence or seeking to establish a (mocking) protective distance. (Note that DC Comics is about to relaunch every single one of its titles — each beginning with issue #1.)
2. The artwork of Shepard Fairey, from his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" viral sticker campaign to the Obama "Hope" poster, appropriates the style of 20th-century political agitprop in way that is neither earnest nor ironic. [See images at top of post.] "I don't want to demean anyone's struggles through casual appropriation of something powerful — that's not my intention," Fairey has explained. His serious-yet-playful, playful-yet-serious approach is deeply unsettling; he has many critics. Like a more engaged Warhol, Fairey rejects the unspoken assumption that an artist must be original.
3. This Ben Sherman ad, which playfully references the suspenders-wearing style of the 1980s ska fad, without mocking that trend or earnestly glorifying it.
15 June 2011 at 3:44 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
Jeremy — I strongly agree that it’s not new, rebooting. However, in the ’80s and ’90s rebooting gave way to various ironic – camp – queer- punk modes of appropriating bygone cultural franchises (think of Tim Burton’s Batman movies vs. the current crop), and now irony’s moment of glory seems to be over. Not that it’s entirely gone, but for the moment it’s no longer the dominant mode in youth and pop culture in the US.
13 June 2011 at 11:38 pm
Jeremy says:
There’s no denying this is a popular activity these days, but art history is full of reboots. Roman mythology can be described as a reboot of Greek mythology, for example. More recently Ezra Pound demanded that modernists ‘Make It New,’ which is a self-important way of saying ‘reboot it.’ James Joyce even rebooted Ulysses, in a sense. Perhaps pop culture is just catching up.