Maria Jones
Academic Advisor Laurel
Sparks
1 May 2013
As
humans, we fear what is lost and forgotten. Once created, our experiences
become foggy, distant, and empty. To rectify this, we create objects imbued
with memories to prevent the fear and grief that comes with this loss. These
objects can be every–day items that are constantly handled, or specially
crafted works of art with the intent to trigger our memories. My art explores
my need to remember personally, as well as collectively, the contribution women
are making in the military through ribbons of merit. The type of memory my work
explores deals with the forgotten, the lost, and memorials. Through the
addition of service women’s first names in many of my pieces I am invoking a
response to the lose of the individual and the memories they created during
service, and providing a minimal trace for viewers to ponder and develop as
they see fit. Many factors affect the way memories are formed and retained
including nostalgia, social and cultural settings, learning, and environmental
change. Because of the ambiguous ephemeral nature of memory creation there are
many philosophies and avenues of discussion. Astrid Erill approaches the
cultural philosophy of memory and the importance of forgetting and cultural
influence on memory and art in her book Memory
in Culture. Conversely, in her book Making
Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art Lisa Saltzman
discusses how Contemporary Art deals with the creation of memories due to the
absence felt when memories fade.
Astrid
Erill’s book Memory in Culture
discusses the intertwining relationship between history, memory, and culture
from a sociological perspective. She states one does not exist without the
other, and remembering and forgetting are required for the creative process
called memory (Erill, 8). Erill focuses her discussion of memory and art on the
work of art historian Aby Warburg[1].
Warburg believed history was created through collective memory generated by
humans living within a society. He studied how societal experiences dictated
the way history was perceived by different cultures, and felt works of art were
object markers and records of human memory at a certain point in time (Forster,
172). Erill states we are living in a convergent time for memory concepts in
art, science, and literature, and this is evident in recent memory art by
artists like Anselm Kiefer, Mildred Howard, and Sigrid Sigurdsson (66). She
later discusses how art is considered artificial, spatially oriented memory
that is identity-creating through appropriation of past social history (68).
Art has a freedom of interpretation that spans factual history. Through the
artist, societies generate multiple depths of memory through individual
interpretation of events, which add to the collective memory and history. Erill
states that art draws from historical references and memories to create an
artificial memory, which Saltzman demonstrates in her book through the art of
Kara Walker, Walid Ra’ad, and Glenn Ligon. This memory creates a new dimension
focused on moral function; for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy is an artistic expression describing the different
levels of hell in a medieval art of artificial memory (Erill, 69). Dante
created a memory and a work of art in the Divine
Comedy that evoked a desire towards good moral behavior in the reader and
subsequently his society as a whole. Erill believes for cultures to thrive and
continue, memory must be transmitted through relatable social interaction and material
objects such as art:
Humans
are social creatures: Without other humans, an individual is denied access not only
to such obviously collective phenomena as language and customs, but also, according
to Halbwachs[2],
to his or her own memory (15).
Erill agrees with Jan
Assman’s[3]
concept that there is a difference in collective memory based on objects of
everyday life and collective memory that rests in rituals. Cultural memory
exists in material objects, while communicative memory exists in the stories
and historical experiences.
Lisa
Saltzman’s book Making Memory Matter:
Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art follows a more artist
approach to memory. She studies the works of artists using techniques and
technologies that are indexical like an archive. She begins with Pliny’s origin
of painting and bases the structure of the book projection, silhouettes, and
casting around this tale. (Saltzman, 15). She briefly describes the tale in her
book for context:
…[M]odeling
portraits from clay were first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth.
He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man: and she, when
he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown
by lamp
(2)…
Saltzman discusses the work
of Krzysztof Wodiczko, Anthony McCall, Tony Oursler, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker,
William Kentridge, Rachel Whiteread, and Cornelia Parker as representations of
cultural presence and the difficulty of dealing with memory in art[4].
Saltzman emphasizes the lost and forgotten that dictates the creation of
memories. For instance, the work of Rachel Whiteread does not display known
objects, but the inverted space between, the negative space. Her creations of
the absent space require the viewer to recreate a new memory of the object that
once surrounded her cast negatives (Saltzman, 90). Whiteread’s works are acts
of commemoration through the process of sacrifice and loss, and consequently an
act of memory making (97). Saltzman also delves into the work of Kara Walker’s
silhouettes, which creates stories by drawing on the viewer’s collective
cultural memory. Walker’s disfigured silhouettes allow the viewer to develop
characters based on cues utilized from American pre-civil war culture. The
absent/negative space her work creates tug at the cultural memories of the
viewer and create a new dimension of history and memory (69). The work of Kara
Walker, Rachel Whiteread, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Anthony McCall, Tony Oursler,
Glenn Ligon, William Kentridge, and Cornelia Parker all strive, similarly, to
fill the void created by the negative space of forgotten memories, and create
new ways of interpreting cultural history.
Both
books developed completely different approaches to memory with intriguing
similarities. Erill’s approach to memory is steeped in many memory concepts
from the arts to science, sociology, and psychology. Conversely, Saltzman’s
book emphasizes the contribution of Contemporary Art on the interpretation of
memory. Both writers agree that visual representation and the art object are
created as forms of ritual remembrance, and both cite Anselm Kiefer as a key
artist from German history, memory, and visual representation. Also, the
writers agreed that there is a complex intertwining relationship between memories
and forgetting, and you cannot have one without the other. Erill developed her
discussion based around sociological concepts and the necessity of cultural
rituals, objectivation, and interaction; while Saltzman based her discussion on
Contemporary Art based on memory developed in the 1990s focusing on negative
space and memories that are lost or forgotten. Saltzman’s book focuses on art
as a form of memory creation and memorializing events through the rediscovery
of lost information. Conversely, Erill’s book discusses the creation and
importance of memory through cultural sociological experience. Both books
discuss the concept of memory, but in different social realms.
As
an artist working in memory, I see the importance of understanding the concepts
of collective, cultural, and communicative memory. After reading Erill’s book,
I understand my work to be a contribution to history as a commemorative
collection, because of my work with the collective memory of women in the
military in the present as well as historically. My work focuses on shadow
boxes: a form of military display, meritorious awards: a form of recognition,
and the individual as a component of the greater military collective. I hand
craft tear shaped beads stained red to represent the sacrifices, providing a
sense of the home-made and precious. I create shadow boxes to house these
decorations in reminiscence of retired military shadow boxes and to create
silhouettes harkening experiences from the past, and I represent the women who
have served and the nature of that service through repetition, regimentation,
and minute individualities in each piece. Every step my work takes has the
potential to address the issues of loss and grief felt with the passing of
events. Having an understanding of the historical role the military and women
have in relation to each other in the culture in which I was raised provides me
insight into my inherited collective memory. Understanding the building blocks
Contemporary Artists have laid in regard to discussing memory, loss, the
indexical, and memorials can only enrich my work in memory as I move forward.
The art world presently calls this forgotten information the negative space,
and a new energy to explore what has been forgotten is surging through our culture.
This surge has led to an overwhelming amount of archiving, consequently leading
to an overwhelming collection of objects and insignificant artifacts. Through
my art, present day experiences are being recorded, and will provide a
different means of remembering in the future. The things that are lost and
forgotten through collective memory may have been lost for good reason, but the
intrigue of why makes them impossible to leave unexplored.
Works Cited
Erill, Astrid. Memory in Culture. London, England:
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies: 2011. Print.
Farr, Ian, ed. Memory. London, England: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. Print.
Forster, Kurt W. “Aby
Warburg’s History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of
Images.” Daedalus winter 1976: 8.
Print.
Saltzman, Lisa. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of
Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago,
Illinois: The University of Chicago, 2006. Print.
[1] Aby
Warburg is most well known for his epic creation the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemoysne started in
1927. The project was left incomplete upon his death in 1929.
[2] Maurice Halbwachs was a
French philosopher who invented the concept of collective memory. His book The Collective Memory published in 1950
is an important contribution to the field of sociology.
[3] Jan
Assmann is a German Egyptologist who developed an internationally accepted
theory with his wife Aleida Assmann on cultural and communicative memory.
[4] Each artist noted above is
discussed in great detail, but for the sake of length I will be focusing on
only two artists’ from Saltzman’s text.
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