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siting futurity
In condensing twentieth-century Eastern Europe history into a
twee narrative, Grand Budapest Hotel enacts a double disavowal
of the plight Pyzik depicts, first of the fact that “economically
the contemporary West has never had so much in common with
the East as it does now” (ibid., 9), something that does not bode
well for great swaths of both, and second of the role that Ameri-
can cultural and political imperialism has played in contribut-
ing to this condition.
The success of The Grand Budapest Hotel should give us
pause. As Geoff Dyer has observed, “[r]uins do not encourage
the viewer to dwell on what they were like in their heyday. The
Coliseum in Rome or the amphitheater at Leptis Magna has nev-
er been anything but ruins. They are eternal ruins. […] Rather
than make you think of the past, ruins direct you towards the
future. The effect is almost prophetic” (Dyer, cited in Schalliol
2018, 106). In depicting a Cold War world in ruins, Anderson’s
film enjoyed great success with precisely this message: “[t]his
is what the future will end up like. This is what the future has
always ended up looking like” (ibid., 106). With Trump in the
White House doing his best to realize a Cold War vision of the
world in ruins and Detroit becoming “America’s great comeback
story,” one is tempted to fall into despair.
Yet that would be to disregard the works of artists and schol-
ars that push back against the unidirectional narratives of ruin-
porn decline and phoenix-like rebirth. Just as Rebecca Kinney
reminds us that the great America comeback story hinges on
“the white possessive” concomitant privileging of whiteness and
property (Kinney 2018, 777), Kaston Tange spells out for us how
these “national narratives of an invigorated city rising from the
ashes of its former self” can be just as detrimental as those of
ruin porn:
For the phoenix rising builds a mythology of a fully
formed — though perhaps smaller, more nimble — entity
emerging whole and functional from the flames. As surely
as the narrative arc of inevitable decay implies that processes
of decline, through their very inevitability, are beyond hu-
Siting Futurity
The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Titel
- Siting Futurity
- Untertitel
- The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Autor
- Susan Ingram
- Verlag
- punctumbooks
- Ort
- New York
- Datum
- 2021
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-953035-48-6
- Abmessungen
- 12.6 x 20.2 cm
- Seiten
- 224
- Schlagwörter
- activism, Austria, contemporary art, contemporary theater, protest culture, radicalism, social protest, Vienna
- Kategorie
- Geographie, Land und Leute
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Preface 11
- Introduction 19
- 1. (Re)Forming Vienna’s Culture of Resistance: The Proletenpassions @ #Arena 39
- 2. Converting Kebab and Currency into Community on Planet #Ottakring 57
- 3. Lazarus’s Necropolitical Afterlife at Vienna’s #Volkstheater 81
- 4. Hardly Homemad(e): #Schlingensief’s Container 101
- 5. From Grand Hotels to Tiny Treasures: Wes Anderson and the Ruin Porn Worlds of Yesterday 119
- 6. Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and #Vanlife: The Alpine Edukation of Hans Weingarter 143
- 7. #Hallstatt: Welcome to Jurassic World 161
- Bibliography 189
- Filmography 215