Customer Reviews

Retro: The Culture of Revival (Reaktion Books - Focus on Contemporary Issues)

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Elizabeth Guffey begins <Retro: The Culture of Revival> with a useful tracing of the meanings of "retro" and the chronology of retro in popular culture. The introduction highlights Guffey's argument that retro recalls the recent past yet without nostalgia. Instead, retro ambivalently looks at the past and assigns its own contemporary meanings to past art and design. Retro, Guffey argues, counters the optimism imbued in Modernism, which posits the future to be progressively better than the present and certainly than the past. Retro brings Modernity's blind faith in progress back to reality with humor and irony. It is that impish reminder that the past is past, yet still present--however changed the associations might be--in the borrowings of current popular culture.

In the first of the four chapters, Guffey examines Art Nouveau. After establishing how Art Nouveau was initially conceived, and to whom it appealed, Guffey reveals how Art Nouveau's two sides--one wholesome, the other psychological and dark--later would appeal to both revivalists interested in pure recall as well as retro subversion. Guffey reveals why Art Nouveau would be in favor in the 1900s but out of style by the 1930s, until the retro movement of the 1950s that included Modernist design and anxiety of atomic devastation. Guffey traces how Art Nouveau's being read as "camp," designs and attitudes that seek to subvert power, helped establish its participation in the counter-culture of the mid-1960s.

Each chapter has five or six sub-themes, which outline Guffey's research and arguments. Retro: The Culture of Revival recounts retro movements and demonstrates why retro has recurring appeal to popular culture. Guffey's well-written and jargon-free text is a pleasure to read. Happily for academics whose interests are so often relegated to obscurity, Guffey demonstrates that academics can also triumph having hip and cool scholarship.

"That's so Retro..." Having grown up with that phrase, it was an absolute delight to read Elizabeth E. Guffey's analysis of our society's uses of the concept, "retro" in her book, Retro: The Culture of Revival. Her writing is as fun to read as I remember the word was to use as teenager--- proud as I was of my ironic attitude on the world. And Guffey easily, effortlessly encompasses a broad swath of culture: film, kitchen technology, clothing, music, painting, architecture etc. in her cogent, succinct arguments. This was very illuminating for me, perhaps especially as I am not an art historian. One example early on of this wide-ranging discussion is in her introduction to one of her fundamental arguments:
"...retro considers the recent past with an unsentimental nostalgia. It is unconcerned with the sanctity of tradition or reinforcing social values; indeed, it often insinuates a form of subversion while side-stepping historical accuracy. In 1966 the bikini-clad, all-female staff of the Samson and Delilah barbers in London gave a winking nod to a nineteenth-century world of erotic fantasy when they offered haircuts in a salon decorated with Beardsley-inspired murals. Retro quotes styles from the past, but applies them in anomalous settings; it regards the past from a bemused distance, its dark humour re-mixing popular mid-century drinks and serving them up as `atomic cocktails'. ...it gently nudges us away from older ideas of `Modernity' and towards an uncharted future. The culture of revival has changed." (12)
Lots of pictures throughout, such as one for above mentioned barbershop of Samson and Delilah, of course help bring her arguments "home" and are part of the pleasure of her book.