Unbearably Beautiful: Why I Love the Photographs of Rachel Fleminger Hudson

An untitled photo by Rachel Fleminger Hudson 

rachelflemingerhudson.com

 

 

I.

 

As someone who grew up in the 1970s and remains amorously fascinated with the period - the music, the TV, the fashion, the football, the girls (not necessarily in that order) - of course I'm excited by the work of British photographer and filmmaker Rachel Fleminger Hudson ... 

 

 

II.

 

An ultra-talented graduate of Central Saint Martins and winner of the 2022 Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, Fleminger Hudson's highly-stylised images recreate the aesthetics of the period within a contemporary cultural context, thereby loosening the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [1].

 

Although often playful, her images are meticulously researched, carefully staged with authentic objects and outfits, and invested with ideas drawn from her intellectual background in cultural studies and critical theory; we can tell this by the fact that, when interviewed, she prefers to speak of hauntology rather than mere nostalgia [2], although, clearly, Fleminger Hudson is yearing for something in her work; if not for the past or for home as such, then perhaps for the intimacy of touch in a digital age. 

 

III.

 

People of a certain age - like me - might remember the '70s and even publish posts on their glam-punk childhood: click here, for example.

 

But nobody reimagines the decade better than Fleminger Hudson and it's this creative reimagining rather than a straightforward recollection that somehow best captures the spirit of the times and, more importantly perhaps, projects elements of the past into the future, so that we might live yesterday tomorrow - as Malcolm would say - rekindling sparks of forgotten joy [3].    

 

Although she's not a fashion photographer per se, it's the fashions of the 1970s that most excite Fleminger Hudson's interest; a true philosopher on the catwalk, she clearly believes that clothes maketh the period and express not only the individuality of the wearer, but embody the socio-cultural conditions of the time [4].

 

Why Fleminger Hudson has a particular penchant for the 1970s, I don't know. Arguably, she might have tied her project to an earlier decade, or even the 1980s [5].

 

Perhaps because the 1970s were a uniquely transitional time; one that was marked "by a change in values and lifestyles" as "modern society and its cult of authenticity gave way to a postmodernism based on reproduction and simulacra" [6]. 

 

 

IV.

 

Whether we think of Fleminger Hudson's work as a form of theoretically-informed fantasy, or as magically-enhanced realism, doesn't really matter. Because either way, her images are fabulous, relaying a narrative that is truer than truth [7] and revealing more about the past than historical facts alone.  

 

  

Portrait of the artist 

Rachel Fleminger Hudson

 

 

Notes

 

[1] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix.  

 

[2] See, for example, the interview with Gem Fletcher on wetransfer.com (8 July 2024), in which Fleminger Hudson says: "I think about the work as anti-nostalgic. Nostalgia, for me, is about being homesick for a distant past. I'm not homesick for the past because I exist in the material world of the 70s now through my relationship with objects."

 

[3] See the post on retrofuturism dated 10 June 2024 entitled 'I Wanna Live Yesterday Tomorrow': click here. 

 

[4] On her website, Fleminger Hudson says that clothing is "an often overlooked symbolic language" and that one of her aims is "to engage with our psychological entanglement with our garments". Click here.

 

[5] Fleminger Hudson recognises this in the interview with Gem Fletcher on wetransfer.com (8 July 2024): "My work isn't a glorification of the 1970s. [...] In truth, I could be using any era."

 

[6] I'm quoting from a text on the Maison Européenne de la Photographie website showcasing some of Fleminger Hudson's work. She had her first solo exhibition at the MEP in 2023, curated by Victoria Aresheva, bringing together pictures from several different series of works. Click here.  

 

[7] The Jewish proverb that suggests that stories (fables) are truer than the truth is one I first heard being spoken by the South American writer Isabel Allende in a TED talk (March 2007): click here. 

 

Notes on SIG News Issue 3: From Girlypop to Reconceptualising the Skateboard Graphic

SIG News Issue 3

(September 1st, 2024)

 

 

I.

 

For those who don't know, SIG is an acronym for the Subcultures Interest Group; an informal collective operating out of the University of the Arts London (UAL) concerned with what we might briefly describe as the politics of style.

 

They have conveniently published a ten-point manifesto, which, amongst other things, declares the group's resistance to temporal colonisation, that is to say, the imposition of a perpetual present in which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a future (or remember a past) that is radically different.

 

Via a number of disruptive techniques, including the reversal of old ideas and subcultural practices into the future, members of SIG attempt to live yesterday tomorrow and loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [1]. 

 

It's more a form of retrofuturism than nostalgia: "The pull of the future informs our drawing from the passed to provide the necessary soil and toil of the present" [2], as point 3 of the SIG Manifesto puts it.

 

Anyway, the third issue of SIG News (cover dated 1 September 2024) is out now and I thought it might be fun to take a look ...

 

 

II.    

 

The issue opens with a piece by Ross Schartel on developments in the world of girlypop following the social media phenomenon of #barbiecore. 

 

Now, I have to admit, I'm not really up to speed with these microtrends driven by TikTok; nor had I ever heard of Chappell Roan. 

 

Nevertheless, I was interested to learn of attempts to reclaim the hyperfeminine, even if Chappell Roan is clearly a pop persona heavily influenced by drag performance and rooted in queer cynicism rather than anything affirmative of the fact that girls at their most phenomenal and inhuman are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. 

 

In other words, girls are defined not by their girlyness or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

 

 

III.

 

Moving on, there's a nice piece on the British rockabilly revival of the late 1970s and early '80s by Jake Hawkes. 

 

I'm not sure, however, about the truth value of his claim that rockabilly was "the most forward-thinking subculture" of the period and when he writes that it feels "closer to the zeitgeist today" [3] one can't help asking the very same question that Mencius Moldbug once put to Richard Dawkins: What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing?

 

There's also an easy read article by Paul Tornbohm on London's easy listening scene in the 1990s, something I missed but would very much have enjoyed being part of had I only known about it, loving as I do TV theme tunes and the delights of Gallic pop, for example.

 

I wasn't quite sure what to make of Nael Ali's piece - 'The Goats of War Metal' - though I smiled when he conceded that the theme of gender politics in relation to his area of research "might be a topic" [4] worthy of future discussion - I would say so!

 

I would also suggest that Ali read the following by D. H. Lawrence:

 

Firstly, the poem 'He-Goat', in which Lawrence explores the wilful egotism of a male goat and the destructive aspects of libidinous desire [5]; and secondly, a letter written to Aldous Huxley [28 Oct 1928] in which Lawrence dismisses art which tries desperately to be transgressive as romantic and fascistic; a pornographic mix of the sentimental and the sensational. 

 

He writes: "if you only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape in their various degrees [...] it becomes a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia [...] and final atrophy of the feelings" [6], which will of course result in war.  

 

IV.

 

Sadly, I just missed the skateboard craze of the 1980s: when I was a nipper, we used to make do with a book and skate to race down Daventry Road. 

 

Nevertheless, I did appreciate Joel Lardner's argument in his article on skateboard graphics that "visual interruption and glitch work call forth the distinct performative model in which these graphics are received, reflecting the inevitable accident, an ever-present aspect of skateboard practice" [7] - that's a clever insight. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix.  

[2] The SIG Manifesto can be found on the back cover of SIG News 3 (1 Sept 2024). Those who wish for more information on the Subcultures Interest Group can contact k.quinn@fashion.arts.ac.uk or r.bestley@lcc.ac.uk 

[3] Jake Hawkes, SIG News 3 (UAL, 1 September 2024), p. 5. 

 

[4] Nael Ali, SIG News 3 (UAL, 1 September 2024), p. 9.  

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'He-Goat', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 334-336. The poem can also be found on allpoetry.com: click here.  

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600.

[7] Joel Lardner, SIG News 3 (UAL, 1 September 2024), p.10.

 

 

This post continues in part two: click here. 

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.