Nostalgia for a Future that Never Happened: The Work of Bruce McCall

Bruce McCall says in this hilar­i­ous and very inter­est­ing TED pre­sen­ta­tion that Nos­tal­gia is the most utterly use­less human emo­tion. I don’t totally agree but I see the point. Nos­tal­gia if taken to extreme becomes a mild case of depres­sion and self-deception. The past is never as great or as bad as it seems and nor will the future be as won­der­ful or as ter­ri­ble as we can imag­ine. Set­ting that aside, please check out this amaz­ing lec­ture, McCall is a very witty and gifted artist.

I am fas­ci­nated by McCall’s style of art, it touches on many of my pas­sions, sci­ence fic­tion, mid-century design and art that doesn’t take itself too seri­ously. It’s a mix­ture of the low-brow art move­ment with a dash of Nor­man Rock­wel­lesque technique.

Here are the descrip­tions of his made-up but won­der­ful terms, these are things that design­ers and sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers can and should use when it is appro­pri­ate to their work:

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  Tomor­row­land Retro-Futurism: from Wikipedia

  Retro-futurism: Look­ing back to see how yes­ter­day saw tomor­row… and they are always hilar­i­ously wrong. Peeked in the 1930’s. Auto­mo­tive retro-futurism is a big com­po­nent of his work, the way the past saw cars look­ing in the future… fins galore!

• Techno-Archaeology: Dig­ging back and find­ing past mir­a­cles that never hap­pened, usu­ally for good rea­son, that is they wouldn’t have worked or been a dis­as­ter… fly­ing cars.
• Faux-Nostalgia: Achingly sen­ti­men­tal yearn­ing for a time that never happened.
• Hyper­bolic Overkill: A way of tak­ing exag­ger­a­tion to the absolute ulti­mate limit just for the fun of it.
• Shame­lessly Cheap: A joke that has no mean­ing but is strangely funny in and of itself.
• Urban-Absurdism: Mak­ing life in New York (and city life in gen­eral) even weirder than it is.

The most impor­tant thing that McCall said about this style of art (and lit­er­a­ture I assume) is that authen­tic­ity adds immea­sur­ably to seri­ous non­sense. That is the world pre­sented in Faux-Nostalgia has to look and feel real. The machin­ery, char­ac­ters, gen­eral look and world have to breathe. In this vein Alan Moore and the many artists he works with do this bet­ter than any one else, to see what I mean check out The League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men (though please skip the film). Other things that fall in to this same gen­eral category:

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  The world of Bruce McCall

  Check out McCall’s great work, All Meat Looks Like South Amer­ica Link

• The “new” Tom­morow­land at the Dis­ney theme parks. Link
• The once defunct and highly under appre­ci­ated RPG from Game Designer’s Work­shop: Space: 1889 Link
• Bruce McCall’s Web­site Link