I want to end on this image from the 2007 Skulpture Projekte Muenster, in which Gonzalez-Foerster rendered the project’s illustrious historical works in comic miniature, as if it were a mini-golf place – which I think you call putt-putt golf? This work seems especially important because it dramatises what it must be like to live in Muenster, which the art world descends upon every 10 years, and then for the rest of the time the city has to live among these works we experience as temporary – and of course, this is a metaphor for our image-saturated culture. In his 1929 essay ‘Photography’ the German theorist Siegfried Kracauer predicted that we would be living in a ‘blizzard’ of photographs. Instead of, for example, the indexical memory of the photograph that Barthes posited, Kracauer takes a much more pessimistic view of a photography-saturated world, in which photographs of the past would lose their significance, and so too would the past lose its significance: in thinking that we are overcoming death, he writes, we in fact succumb to it. He has an example of a diva dressed in period style, who, when a photograph of her is later discovered, is seen as laughable: her hair style, her clothes, her bearing is comic. Rather than being treated as a precious subject, she has been degraded to a laughable object.

This is where I think failure comes into play: in the same way that we are surrounded by images of the past, we are also surrounded by images and the ideology of Modernism – which is now, like Kracauer’s diva, no longer relevant, but still present. Failure provides a way of negotiating out of this laughability; it enables us to respond to the present-ness of the past while still keeping it past, while venerating it as a failed project – it’s a way of restoring significance to something that is newly in danger of losing it. In effect, I think the concern with Modernism is less about the period of Modernism itself than about art’s still unresolved engagement with technologically reproducible images – which is why this show, which takes film as its very medium and subject, seems to address the problem so well.