Maria
Jones
Academic
Advisor Laurel Sparks
1
April 2013
Memory and Culture: A Brief Look at Renée
Green and Dinh Q. Lê
The
paths we travel in life affect the people we become. As artists, where we are
born, political climate, and traumatic events shape our opinions. Many artists
today create art that deals with these memories and historic events. Their
personal experiences influence the way the work develops and creates deeper
meaning for those with shared experience. The body of work I am currently
developing deals with this personal influence and memory; specifically, how the
military has changed and shaped my perception as a woman. We are living in a
time when military history is being made, and I want my work to pay homage and
embody the historic relevance of women in the military receiving equal
treatment. Renée Green, an African American artist, and Dinh Q. Lê, a
Vietnam-born American artist, work with the concept of memory and how culture
affects what we create. Both artists work with memory, but each artist picks
from their cultural experiences, making their work unique and intriguing.
The
art of Renée Green creates a glimpse of the space between memories as well as
movement between place and said memory. Green was born in Cleveland, Ohio in
1959, and attended the Parson’s School of Design, Harvard and Wesleyan
University. Her artistic work gained recognition in 1989 when she began
creating large-scale installations of dislocated objects. Influenced by
historical events from the 1970s and artists, historians, and theorists like
Robert Smithson, Marcel Broadthaers, Bruce Nauman, Walter Benjamin, and Michael
Foucault, Green’s work is multilayered and recreates memories for the viewer
(Diederichsen 21). Green’s art is heavily influenced by Western culture, and
viewers with similar cultural upbringings most keenly understand the memories
she recreates.
Green’s
work directly deals with the overwhelming mass of information that hinders
memory retention and the usefulness of working in an archival manner to retain
memories. The artist places the viewers in the creating process to develop
their own memories. Green displaces archival elements to create reactions in
the viewer.
My
idea was that the process of actually physically piecing things together would
lead people
to act out, even in an unconscious way, certain ideas having to do with power, movement,
and they way places and positions are designed (Zabunyan).
Green
composes her work from readings, teachings, writings, photography, film, and
travel. The research process she follows to create her pieces is archival in
nature in that she researches traces of buried memories from the past. Her
artistic archives create the in-between memories that would otherwise be absent
or holes in the past. She demonstrates this concept in Buried in Three Parts (1996, 1997, 1998) (Figure 1) which is an
artistic archive of Robert Smithson’s installation from 1970, Partially Buried Woodshed, that survives
as a single photograph.
Fig. 1 Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996-1997. Secession, Vienna
Green
rebuilds the experiences of the Kent State University protest starting from
Robert Smithson’s photograph and building on it with historical videos,
writings, interviews, and her own memories from that day (Green). She expands
upon the fragmented archive this project produced by simultaneously creating a
complementing journal article with images.
Green
later created a work that directly addressed the fragmentation and loss of
memory in art in her work Between and
Including 1999 (Figure 2). She
created a labyrinthine structure providing spaces for memories to be made but
also to overload the viewer’s senses, causing loss of memory.
Fig. 2 Between and Including, 1999. Secession, Vienna
This
loss of memory is retained through her archival process, which is made to keep
memory alive.
In
the process it becomes so dense that it also reflects an inability to remember,
or to hold on
to everything at once, and in that sense we become lost. I’m suggesting that
this loss is connection
to the notion of oblivion, which reflects an incapacity to hold on to
everything at
once. Memories emerge and face and are triggered (Zabunyan 91).
Green
uses a historian’s approach to her research in the spirit of Marcel Broadthaers,
a conceptual artist who worked mainly with found objects, and her use of past
memories, events, recordings, and objects will keep it alive in the future. Her
installations recreate a past through memories individual to each viewer.
Dinh
Q. Lê follows a more linear path than Renée Green. Born in Vietnam in 1962,
Dinh Q. Lê’s family immigrated to the United States when he was eleven, just as
the Vietnam War was breaking out. Lê studied at the University of California at
Santa Barbara in 1989 where he began creating his photographic tapestries.
Through his study at the University of California he was exposed to Western
cultural views, which led him to return to Vietnam in his adulthood to seek out
the cultural and historical views of his ethnicity. He was interested in learning
the Vietnamese perspective during the Vietnam War, but found Western culture
dominated any historical documentation and clouded the memory of the true
struggle for the Vietnamese people. His work is a metaphorical weaving of his
conflicted cultural memory as a Vietnamese child growing up in the United
States. Lê negotiates his conflicted individual memories and the collective
memories of the Vietnam War through the craft of weaving (Catalani 12).
Much
like the work of artist Hans Haacke, whose work developed around World War II,
Lê’s work must be viewed in the cultural struggle of his time. His work is a
weaving of his memories within Hollywood film stills from Vietnam War movies of
the 1970s. In Immolation in Color
(Figure 3) Lê weaves together images
from the movies Apocalypse Now, Heaven
and Earth, Platoon, and Indochine.
Immolation is generally defined by suicide as protest in the form of a burning
priest, but in this piece Lê shows the burning of Vietnam by Americans in a
ceaselessly ritualistic manner (23).
In
doing this, Lê evokes memories from a Vietnamese standpoint while using
American images. His experience of the past directly affected the art he made.
…[T]his
experience did lead me to want to know more about the war. The more research I
did, the more I realized that the Vietnamese have no voice in the writing and
rewriting of the story of the Vietnam War (Catalina).
Lê’s
tapestries break through the histories written of the Vietnam War to create a
new story. Persistence of Memory was
his first series of woven photographic work. The work contests the memories
made for American’s through cinematic modes and offers a new memory. Lê
prepares for each series through journaling, photography, sketching,
interviews, and the study of artifacts, ultimately creating an archive for his
works. This archival nature of his work generates a process of memory, which
adds immeasurable depth. His manipulation of already perceived memories creates
a different set of “data” that recreates new history about the Vietnam War
taught in Western Culture. His use of weaving creates “fogginess” to the images
that touches on the concept of memory in a new innovative way.
Like
the work of Renée Green, Dinh Q. Lê pulls from images and memories of the past
to create new memories with deeper meaning. Green creates art that fills gaps
in memory by combining past artistic styles and historical events normally not
pieced together. Conversely, the work of Dinh Q. Lê leaves the memory
fragmentation open for interpretation by providing a new perspective through
images from the past. Both artists deal with the cultural and political
conflicts in their past. Dinh Q. Lê’s work discusses the battle between Western
cultural history and Vietnamese history, and creates new understanding and
memories from the Vietnam War era. Green’s work is subtler, by using other’s
contributions as well as her own she deals with filling in the memory gaps
created by the artistic process of past artists and historical events. Both Renée Green and Dinh Q. Lê create
art that deals with memory in deep, multifaceted layers.
I
have found through research and experiences I want my art to embrace memories
from my own cultural experience. The works of these two artists stir memories
for the viewer that is directed, but also leave room for individual
interpretation. My process of creating may not be an installation or recreation
of the past, but I do want to stir memories for the viewers that are individual
and triggered by my contribution to the event. The military has its own
subculture with many different rules that sometimes affect the way history is
remembered. Through the use of craft and cultural influences, like the
military, my work develops an identity and defines memories. Presently, I take
influence from artists like Renée Green and Dinh Q. Lê to create works that are
meaningful within Western and military cultures. My art will change over time
and my memories will shift, but I will always have been sculpted from a
military culture.
Works Cited
Catalani,
Stefano, et. al. A Tapestry of Memories:
The Art of Dinh Q. Lê. Bellevue: Bellevue Arts Museum:
2007. Print.
Diederichsen,
Diedrich, Renée Green, Gloria Sutton. Renée
Green: Ongoing Becomings 1980- 2009.
JRP: 2009. Print.
Green,
Renée. “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae.” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether.
London, England: Whitechapel Gallery, 2006. 49-55. Print.
Lê,
Dinh Q. Dinh Q. Lê: 100 Notes, 100
thoughts: Documenta Series 073. Denmark: Hatje Cantz:
2012.
Print.
Miles,
Chris. Dinh Q. Lê, Mara Roth. Dinh Q. Lê:
From Vietnam to Hollywood. Seattle: Marquand
Books, Inc: 2003. Print.
Spieker,
Sven. The Big Archive: Art from
Bureaucracy. Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press. 2008. 219.
Print.
Zabunyan,
Elvan. “Stratum and Resonance: Displacement in the Work of Renée Green.” Art and the
Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection. Ed. Richard
Cándida Smith.
London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 85-101. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment