In this postmodern nominalism, however, the name must also express the new, and fashion: what is worn-out, old-fashioned, is only useful as a cultural marker: ‘empty chrome stools of the soda-fountain spin-around kind, but very low, fronting on an equally low bar’, where it is the ‘low’, the ‘very low’ that connotes Japan. And in Moscow the table ‘flanked by two enormous, empty wingback armchairs’ only stands for backwardness. This is probably why Gibson’s Russian episode is less interesting: he brings a residual Cold War mentality to this built space, ‘as though everything was designed by someone who’d been looking at a picture of a Western hotel room from the eighties, but without ever having seen even one example of the original’. Current Soviet and Central European nostalgia art (Ostalgie in German) is far more vibrant and exciting than this, reflecting on an alternate universe in which a complete set of mass-produced industrial products, from toilet seats to window panes, from shower heads to automobiles, had been invented from scratch, altogether different from the actually existing Western inventory. It is as though the Aztecs had beaten Cortéz and survived to invent their own Aztec radio and television, power-vehicles, film genres and popular culture.

jameson