Owen Hatherley writes on architecture, politics and culture for the Guardian, Dezeen, the London Review of Books, and New Humanist, among others. His books include Militant Modernism (2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain (2012).
Owen Hatherley on Scott King’s Welcome to Saxnot
20 January 2018
Critic and author Owen Hatherley responds to Scott King’s solo exhibition Welcome to Saxnot at Studio Voltaire. In Welcome to Saxnot, King conjured up a fantasy of Britain’s past, taking the holiday camp as a template for a model society: implanting the ethos, planning, regimentation and fun of 1970s Butlin’s and from it building a model for a New Britain. Hatherley discusses King’s exhibition in relation to his own work and research, including the recent publication The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016), a work which explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s. Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible.
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