Photos from Phil Collins, Marxism Today, (2010-)

Stealing the show at the New Museum’s exhibition Ostalgia, which I visited this past weekend, is Phil Collins’ recent film project Marxism Today. The exhibition takes its title from the German word ostalgie (a combination of ost, east, and nostalgie, nostalgia) that emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall “to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc,” as the exhibition text reads. Collins ongoing, multi-film project is based on interviews with former teachers of Marxism-Leninism whose jobs disappeared along with the dissolution of GDR, and they had to choose either to be retrained or to find a new means of livelihood. Shown at the BFI Gallery, London, and the Berlin Biennale, Marxism Today has received some press coverage, and in this summer’s issue of Afterall, Michèle Faguet wrote a great article (“Sympathy Is a Bridge for Ideology: Phil Collins’s Adventures in Marxism,” Summer 2011). Collins’s project fits almost too perfectly in the exhibition’s aim to consider art production since/on account of/from the break up of the eastern bloc.

I am most interested by the relationship between the social body of socialism and the social body as constituted through the interview. Faguet writes, “The social body found itself transformed: its beliefs discredited; its rituals and self-representation abruptly banished to the repository of historical mistakes.” Collins’s participants reflect on their lives that changed so rapidly as walls came down and democracy, capitalism, and neo-liberalism swept in, and nostalgia’s particular blend of remembering and imagining emerge through their everyday tales. While the older women and men discuss a real and fictive social body, which appears especially cohesive through the lens of memory, I could not help but think of the unfolding interview as itself a social tactic. Connecting through the process of questioning and exchange, the interview assembles a social matrix between Collins, those in the room, and us in the gallery. I am reminded of Bruno Latour’s masterful book Reassembling the Social, in which he describes the social as not what is behind other events or subjects (the context) but rather as the movement to trace new connections. And, thus, this meditation on a lost social body is its own motor to animate a social body not as fixed and representable but as process and in flux.