The Living Museum of the Golden Age

An exploration of the perils of nostalgia with an unreliable guide

WORK BY FRIESE UNDINE

Opening Reception Saturday, October 11th, 6-8PM | On View October 11th - November 4th, Tue - Sat

Thomas VanDyke Gallery is thrilled to present The Living Museum of the Golden Age, a solo exhibition by Friese Undine with an opening reception being held Saturday, October 11th from 6-8PM. This will be Undine’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and the first time these works will be exhibited.

The exhibition takes the form of a museum devoted to memory: a museum without walls, without borders, and without clear allegiance to any single time or place. It is a celebration of the “golden age” that never was, a place where the discomforts of history are suspended, distorted, and stripped of their realities, and reimagined with vim and vigor.

Undine's work nimbly maneuvers along the razor's edge between sardonic scrutiny and whimsical admiration. He admittedly wears his heart, his curious mind, his love and fear, proudly yet humbly on his sleeve. A true artist, in constant inventive pursuit, Undine is at once at ease with his accomplishments, and in turmoil over those yet to complete. He's relaxed and obsessive. Soldiers eternally lose the same battles, craftspeople reforge obsolete tools, believers revive forgotten rites. It is at once familiar and unsettling, charming and cruel.

Utilizing a technique developed entirely on his own Undine covers metal sheets with a light dusting of dried spray paint, then painstakingly etches, carves and scores surgically precise lines creating exceptionally detailed and expressive images. Women in Viking helmets enjoying a beer at their local pub. Men in primitive dress checking their reflections in the bathroom mirror. A father and son in full Samurai regalia while on a camping trip in their RV. What emerges is a commentary on our tendencies as humans, to transform our past realities into heroic feats of performance.

The Living Museum of the Golden Age is presented without apology, as if its mission were self-evident: to conserve nostalgia itself. Its voice, calm and authoritative, insists on the therapeutic necessity of reenactment, of ritual, of the comforts of predictability. The viewer is left to admire, to participate, or to recoil.

Human history is a record of people perceiving their particular moment as a culturally degraded end state of corruption and social complexity. The longing for a previous era of noble human virtues in a providentially blessed and abundant earth has been the default psychology of each historical period. Nostalgia can seem like a comforting state of mind where one can imaginatively bask in heartwarming scenarios of a better time. But nostalgia’s darker tendencies are evident everywhere: it can foster political reaction, cultural exclusion, and even violence when the imagined past is used to justify purges, revanchist wars, or authoritarian restorations. In the advanced stage of any case of nostalgia is the euphoria-inducing ideal of a time and place which is in fact defined by what or whom it excludes. Fond remembrances of family life often lead to aggravating thoughts of the alien cultural forces which threaten it. Even the artifacts of a period of nostalgic focus easily transform into fetish objects and shibboleths of chauvinism.

THE LIVING MUSEUM OF THE GOLDEN AGE

OUR MISSION

The Museum of the Golden Age does not have a particular location nor does it address a single time period. The Living Museum of the Golden Age or the L.M.G.A. is not in fact a single institution, but a franchise of entities around the world, which addresses and resolves psycho-spiritual problems of contemporary social complexity. While there are a tremendous variety of methods among the groups, our mission is to facilitate cognitive balance within individuals and a deeply proscribed national/ethnic identity among groups. Through the re-living of certain moments in a given history, our subjects, or “Protagonists”, gain great opportunities to master their internal conflicts by external enactments. There is no role for the conventional psychologist as the historical event itself serves as therapist and contains its own schema of treatment parameters.

THE REAR-VIEW HORIZON OF EXPECTATION

“Looking with a dazed eye for the absent palms of the superb Africa”

- Charles Baudelaire

Human beings are strongly dependent on social support for a sense of safety, meaning, power, and control. This applies equally to cases when the Protagonist is a serf, slave or dying soldier. But of course, people also need a secure base of defined temporal conventions away from otherwise unpredictable theater of contemporaneity. The combination of period and location creates the “extra-cellular matrix” which binds all Protagonists into a functioning body. This might be realized through antiquated religious practices, observing forgotten superstitions as well as participation in lost regional festivals. The topos of these acts and other associated practices can be seen as expressions of the essential national or ethnic self. Necessarily narrow in scope, it is this set of actions that we refer to as the “schema”.

As our various reenactment organizations mature, they develop an ever-enlarging repertoire of period authenticity: clothing, traditional crafts and the language use of the period. This property aggregation may include fashioning bronze tools or contracting scurvy. An individual Protagonist as he achieves a deeper material and psychological authenticity will inevitably become more and more averse to “outsiders”, those agnostics who drift powerlessly through subsequent experience. This consuming aversion actually provides individuals with the fortitude necessary to, for example, revive the Roman religion, fight in the English civil war or make ritual sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl. A fundamentalist rapport with the embodied historical actor, the process we call “role assumption”, will be followed by states of massive autonomic arousal, the symptom of nostalgia once called “brain inflammation”, now generally referred to as “Ecstatic Philopatridomania” or “Ungleichzeitigkeit”.

Once a schema is established, it is the particular event or epoch itself that orchestrates the therapeutic process. It is precisely the finitude of the schema in question, which establishes a safe and trusting atmosphere. For example, the Russians lost to Napoleon in the battle of Austerlitz and they must always lose in that battle. The Protagonist needs only to proceed through the necessary acts self-contained within the schema because one can of course, anticipate the past. The rapport which Protagonists and auxiliary Protagonists experience is drawn from their complete faith in each other’s intentions as the schema coerces all actions equally. They become a communal super-organism of reciprocated preferences called “The Continuum”.

The spontaneity and creativity which agnostics agonize over are merely derivatives of libido or socioeconomic forces. The L.M.G.A. liberates individuals from these awful pressures by giving them “primitive autonomy”.

CONQUERING “FANTOM MEMORY SYNDROME”

“I am content to be in Fortune’s Grip”

- Michel de Montaigne, 1588

For those outside of the L.M.G.A. movements the sensation of a severed psychic entity is common. They can be haunted by daily interruptions of vague, unbidden memories of an unknown but formative event. Unassimilated traumatic events act as foci for temporal bewilderments such as selective memory losses, nightmares or even physical numbness. The Protagonist can look backward toward a revitalized sense of wholeness as his historic victimization is restaged. In fact, Camp Masada in Long Island, New York is one of the most attended summer events in the United States. There continues to be a vigorous debate as to whether nostophilic encampments such as Gettysburg are not in fact unconscious inevitabilities. The urge to realize and relive a loss in perfectly appointed retrospect can be irresistible. The personal transformation that occurs when a schema is engaged is experienced as metaphysical de-splitting.

PRECIDENTS

“All is said, and one comes too late after more than seven thousand years of men thinking.”

- Jean de La Bruyere, 1688

The efforts of the L.M.G.A. are in no way new, in fact at every point in history the great thinkers were mobilized by their longing for a previous age. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries when nostalgia was diagnosed as a mental disorder, the popular yearning for the social cohesion of antique norms grew. One need only remember the great battles that were restaged in the circuses of the ancient Mediterranean to understand that our methods are age-old and have no recorded first occurrence. The desire to escape from environmental stressors is as old as history itself. This desire is indeed so great that many battles are not merely restaged but actually re-fought as in the Battle of Marathon, The Storming of the Winter Palace or the Battle of Kosovo.

In the 4th century dissatisfaction with modernity had become unbearable to the great Roman emperor Julianus Augustus (Julian the Apostate) leading him to abandon Christianity and return to the pure Roman religion. But 1,000 years before Julian, the Israelite king Manasseh also found his faith dissatisfying and embraced the rich pantheon of the Assyrians.

Seven hundred and fifty years before the Common Era, the Greek city of Crete was consumed with a longing for the Mycenaean Age, a simpler, nobler time before the vicissitudes of the Dorian invasion.

When confronted with the disharmonious forces of the European world-view, Chinese scholars of the early Manchu Dynasty returned to ancient learning with fervor. In a very similar manner the cultural leaders in Russia, Japan and Mongolia staved off western contamination with vigilant adherence their own cultural inheritances.

One forefather of the L.M.G.A. is the Indian sage Mahavira. He established jungle retreats as sanctuaries for his followers who were fleeing the increasingly complex urban societies of the 6th century BCE.

ASSUMING A SCHEMATIC EGO

“What is the worth of human life, unless is woven into the life of our ancestors?”

- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BCE – 43 BCE

The physio-epistemology, which defines the initial yearning that draws most people to the L.M.G.A., is “that which is known but not yet thought” (Christopher Bollas, 1987). It is the visceral imperative to disassociate and master the trauma of the “moeurs de ce siecle”. Only through physical action can this be achieved, not as historiography, but to embody an age. It is a re-manifestation of a lost home of unconditional rules that govern cognition and behavior. Indeed, we shouldn’t even think of the role assumption as a “choice” at all, but a natural dissociative segue.

For many African Americans in the vicinity of Detroit, Michigan, the segue was easy. In an effort to express fidelity to the real community values of Africa a full scale Egyptian pyramid is being built on the site of a former General Motors plant. Begun in 1973 and using only period technology, the base if the pyramid measures over 230 meters in width and is now over 9 meters tall!

The “Koishisa” or “Homesick Ones” of Japan are achieving great theraputic results by revitalizing the Shogonate. With their elaborate “Natsukashisa” ceremonies the Koishisa honor the Immortal Spirit of Emperor Kanmu. The Koishisa Protagonists carry with them “mikoshi” or “portable shrines” containing the essence of Kanmu and receive tribute from samurai, representatives of the feudal government and common people.

Miercinga Rice is one of many groups dedicated to the revival of the culture of Anglo-Saxon heathenry. Odinist and Valhallist organizations abound and can be found from Seattle, Washington to Kiev, Ukraine. The Schwarmerei, based in Hannover, Pennsylvania are a Germanic tribe devoted to reliving Arminus’ victory over the Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

The Battle of Kosovo was first fought in 1389 and then re-staged in 1448 but in recent years we’ve seen a vigorous renewal of so-called “Lazarist” groups in Serbia (Lazar Hrebeljanović 1329 – 1389, Serbian nobleman). Enthusiasm for reenacting, or as we say, “revitalizing”, the Battle of Kosovo has perhaps never been stronger.

But not everyone can become an Inuit whale hunter. As you can see, established ethnic and regional identities often determine ego selection and the direction which primitive autonomy takes, but for many of us with mixed ethnic backgrounds or from thoroughly cosmopolitan cities the desire for a eusocial schema is no less intense. As Charles DeGaulle asked, “How can you govern a country with 246 types of cheese?” Obviously, it’s impossible for anyone to adapt to the unknown, to what lies ahead.

In such cases without an arching ethno-meta-narrative the choice becomes more challenging and requires more base intuition on the part of the proto-Protagonist. Core inclinations can still be identified which can guide that person to the correct schema organization. There are elective groups such as the Ned Ludd Brigades in Leicester, England, the crews of the various Captain Cook vessels in the South Seas or the non-Latin Nova Roma in Wells, Maine. But at no point should an individual ask himself maladaptive questions such as, “what does this choice say about me?” The L.M.G.A. is a set of anti-heuristic strategies against this sort of disordered agency.

Friese Undine, 2013