Technologies of Romance - Moving and Still Images, Death and Looking Back

In this paper for the 2024 AICA International Congress, I aim to show how an apparently Quixotic strategy, of affirming anachronism, might succeed as a critical foil to a blindly emphatic technologisation of art and life. While at risk of being labelled a ‘luddite’ in the purported paradise of Silicon Valley, I will attempt to share some of the rewards of using history as a progressive tool.

My talk reflects, in some new depth and gravity, upon the meaning, purpose and value of my ‘Technologies of Romance’ project, which has produced a long-running seminar and two books. My talk is also influenced by my recently published book ‘History in Contemporary Art & Culture’ (Routledge, 2023) and synthesises all of this with an emerging interest in the relation between modernity, technology and still and moving images – including slow-motion, freeze-frame, tableaux vivant and more.

‘Technologies of Romance’ emerged while teaching Fine Art Critical Studies at University of the Arts London. There, students seemed spell-bound by the new technologies in their hands while unaware of previous technological revolutions and the impact they have had on art and artists. To historicise and thereby relativise the students’ experience we wound our timeline back from the contemporary, postmodern, and modern to include Romanticism. This opened us up to a richer, deeper engagement with histories. It also encouraged us to look away from our screens and back into the past. It showed that, for art and artists, technology, as well as providing a futural promise, is always a source of anxiety, while history can be a trove full of unexpected novelty, informed by a special sense of perspective and responsibility.

The talk will dwell upon a recently emerging interest in the relationship between Romanticism, modernity and changing representations of death. Influenced by Walter Benjamin, and particularly his writing on Surrealism, I will proffer ‘the outmoded’ as a potential site of 21st century resistance, tracing the rising and falling values of consumer objects in a capitalist society that might today seem increasingly nihilistic. I will ask whether some form of romance or Romanticism can still redeem or assist us in such a godless, hyper-rationalised scenario, where new technologies are promoted as ‘having all the answers’.

I will end my talk by referring to contemporary artists such as Tavares Strachan, Olivia Plender, Elizabeth Price, Sigrid Holmwood and Pablo Bronstein who demonstrate how a historical view of materials, processes, practices and ideas can lead us into a radical field of inventive history. These artists might invite us to escape a complicit and hypnotised present of dubiously dutiful ‘attention’ to our superficial life online and lead us to explore the past as: ‘another country’ (L.P. Hartley); an ‘undiscovered continent’ (Nicolas Bourriaud); or the ‘world of yesterday’ (Stefan Zweig).

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