The topic of architecture, Modernism and ruins is one that has been hanging in the air for some time – it circulates with ideas of memory, failure, and nostalgia – and it is a fascinating subject to me – not only because I tend to like the works that treat these concerns, but also because I’m interested in the nature of our fascination with them. Part of what I’m going to try to do today is address why and in what way we engage with the works of the ‘new monumentality’, and how this might differ from our engagement with what we might call, perhaps, the ‘old monumentality’. This confusion between ‘old’ and ‘new’, by the way, is something that runs through the practices of the artists on show, particularly that of Gerard Byrne, whose works serve to displace not only the claims of Modernism, but our very attempt to understand the past. And it’s this idea of ‘understanding the past’ – the past both as something that happened five years ago and the upper-case Past, the events that are now part of history – that I’m going to address. I realise that my title, which was intended to be punchy, might be a little misleading – I’m not going to list world leaders who are to blame for social failure. Rather I’m going to sketch a few ideas about works that quote Modernism, and will also look at the oft-repeated claim about the ‘failure of Modernism’, which is the ostensible subject of these films on show.

I should make it clear that in talking about work on failure I am not talking about bad art – or work that fails at being good – I am talking about work that takes the failure of modernism as its subject: often through using the iconography of that period, in an ironic, Brechtian or often simply distorted way. In 2003, for example, at Documenta 11, Gonzalez-Foerster made a park within the grounds of Documenta, in which she included a concrete Modernist pavilion. She kept the pavilion locked at all times, and it served ultimately as the screen for projections of High modern films such as Antonioni’s La Notte or Blow Up, which could only be discerned on the outside of the pavilion after dark. In 2006 she made another pavilion, for the Sao Paulo Bienal, in which she added cheap plywood columns to a pre-existing pavilion in a way that mimicked Modernist monuments. This cheap or degraded remaking of monumental sculptures or modernist paintings suggests, of course, reduction and loss: these pavilions become a style more than a set of ideals. For example, an artist like Paulina Olowska, from Poland, badly – and excessively – reproduces propaganda imagery, especially of women, skewering the pretensions and the claims to originality of the early avant-garde – as well as their hopes for equal rights, which as we know never came to fruition. This is an image of a recent work by the Austrian artist Florian Pumhosl, who took layouts from 1920s and 1930s typology, erased the text and left only the symbols that marked out different paragraphs. You see them here, divorced from their function. Finally, not only are quotations of iconic Modernist works often deliberately misjudged, there is also a concerted effort to show that the very ideals were distorted in the first place. In the film 10104 Angelo View Drive (2004), for example, Dorit Margreiter filmed John Lautner’s archetypal 1963 Californian dream home, which has been frequently used by Hollywood films as a setting for evil. In Margreiter’s film, members of the artist’s group Toxic Titties were asked to perform short sketches within the house – set-ups that enacted feminist critiques as well as institutional critique. You can also think of Paul Sietsema’s Empire in this respect.