History
"Retrofuturism" is a word coined
by Lloyd Dunn in 1983, who did it partially for a laugh, but also because
he thought there was a resonant validity to it, given the kind of work
he was interested in at the time. Over the years Dunn has used "retrofuturism,"
"retrofuturist," and "retrofuturistic" in a variety
of ways. Early on it appeared on a poster advertising the pseudo-event
"Retrofuturist Manifesto: Reading and Brunch," attributed to
the pseudonyms "Smut Monkey and Warren Ong." More recently it
has surfaced as the title of this magazine. This (apparently) internally
contradictory word has shown itself to be surprisingly useful. Retrofuturism,
unlike the academically descriptive word "postmodern," is prescriptive.
It fails to define a specific type of art or artist. Instead what it does
is more valuable: it describes possible work, and it is then up to the
cultural worker to go out and make it. It is presciptive in that it provides
pathways to the production of interesting and meaningful work in a context
where the cachet of originality is excessively valued.
Retrofuturism might be defined as the
act or tendency of an artist to progress by moving backwards. This is a
beautiful and productive paradox. Retrofuturists claim that the current
context's love affair with the New forces it to reject ideas and forms
long before many of their valuable possibilities have been discerned or
explored. In valuing originality above all else, many useful expressions
are in effect disallowed. Furthermore, this steady stream of reflexive
rejections and shallow embraces offer clear evidence that today's art,
which finds its core value in its "timelessness," is little more
than fashion, timely in the same way as a hair style or a skirt length.
In any event, the notion that any cultural
work can somehow be seen as the "origin" of something is questionable
at best. Evolution and progressive development are processes which should
not be disemphasized or ignored. Things come out of other things, arrive
upon us by virtue of what came before them, and the tie between earlier
and later cannot be wished away to provide us with our latest trend.
Retrofuturism is an idiom in which expressions
are constructed, as in any natural language, out of pre-existing conventional
elements. The machine arts (photography, xerox, audiotape, video, etc.),
like the work of the contemporary language poets, coin new "words"
like no other media in history. Because they are mechanistically reproductive,
they also conventionalize and codify information. Conventionalized material,
like the cliché (a form of verbal shorthand which collapses entire
narratives, often into a few syllables) becomes the raw material for for
the construction of new metalogic expressions. Artworks are also complex,
like real words, which have an internal syntax all their own. Retrofuturist
artworks do them one better by being like sentences, recursive collections
of (themselves) recursive words; all parts of which exhibit syntactic structure
(and play with it) to express new thoughts (and old ones in novel juxtapositions).
Retrofuturism was a magazine (17 irregularly appearing issues, 1988-1993)
that focused on the productions and ideas of fringe culture and machine
art, such as xerox art, plagiarism in its various guises, detourned graphics,
non-art "art" trends, correspondence networks, audio art, and
much more. In looking at the edges, we hoped to shed light on the core.
We culled material from all over North America and Europe, and assembled
the best of this into a unified whole. Each issue is comprised of some
50 smartly designed pages of aggressive graphics, provocative texts, and
idiosyncratic critiques.
Click here for a price list of back issues
of RETROFUTURISM and how to obtain them.
