Post 107: Memory of Me

Post 106: Purpose?

"I follow the Oscar Wilde theory here, that the artist has no obligation to any social cause. The artist has an obligation only to art. This business of reading artists the riot act is what the Nazis did and what the Stalinists did. You’re asking art to serve a propagandistic purpose. Art is not a branch of sociology. It’s not a branch of social improvement. Not a branch of the health sciences."

Dr. Camille Paglia

Post 105: The Struggle

I struggle, but I think that is the plan. Constant evaluation and philosophical discussions keep us sharp (or confused). There is never anything definitive. It is the ultimate in “The Butterfly Effect”. Everything that you think, affects everything else that you think in one way or another. It is very easy to get turned around and contradict yourself without even realizing it. These constant contradictions keep me thinking and contemplating and trying to organize my thoughts and ideas. I’m constantly making the translation from how I view things in a moving image format, to the still image that I use in my photographic process. This can seem to be a contradiction right from the start, attempting to translate a moving image to a still one, similar to trying to translate an entire paragraph of a story into a single, understandable word. As I ponder this phenomenon, I find that much of what resonated with me in the current readings were items that seemed to deal with the moving picture as a base.

“What I am interested in is a third, less obvious practice, namely that of artists working as archive thinkers. The works that fall into this category are not principally engaged in the construction of new archives or of the conducting of research into existing ones. And while they might do both of these things, they are above all engaged in deconstructing the notion of the archive itself. They reflect on the archive as something which is never fixed in meaning or material, but is nevertheless here, largely invisible yet at the same time monumental, constantly about to appear and disappear; latent.”¹

However flawed, failing, and fluid it may be, I understand my memory to be an archive of my individual existence. This archive of experiential data cannot be created without my passive assistance, but going about my daily business, new entries are added, some destroyed, some renovated, and some decayed. The volume of entries included is ever fluctuating, varying in quantity, intensity, and meaning. It is an archive with fluctuating degrees of permanence. Materials and meanings may change, but the archive is always there.

Through the course of a lifetime, the erasure and recommitment of events to memory takes place every time that you recall that particular event. This leaves the resulting product variable, although similar to, and referential to the original. How these scenes are altered is the puzzle. What causes details to be added or removed?

“Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a film we have not actually seen.”²

It is in this same way that we construct memories of events that never occurred, or at least were vastly different from what anyone can tell you the actual event was. Who do you believe at this point? What becomes authentic? Barring a video or photographic recording of a particular event, where is the truth to be found? Even in the event of visual documentation, those recordings were made with contextual decisions being made by the recorder and cannot be truly trusted as accurate.

In attempting to reconcile these ideas, this particular passage from Marcel Proust helped to ease the anxiety that I was creating:

“What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us at the same time (a relationship that is destroyed by a bare cinematographic presentation, which gets further away from the truth the more closely it claims to adhere to it) the only true relationship, which the writer must recapture so that he may forever link together in his phrase two distinct elements…”³

This directs me towards an easing of the mind, creating “reality” based on the current interpretation of events. Much like when we “re-remember” an existing memory, coloring it based upon our current experiences and feelings, we are creating a new reality that is easier for us to understand and interpret. Can you imagine being a fifty year old man attempting to understand the interpretation of events remembered by a three year old boy? This would seem to lead to a life of anxiety, attempting to circumvent the newness of the vision of a child. Maybe what is important is how those events are processed by you as you are now. Proust backs me up again with this line:

“In comparable fashion the interval between our mental eyepieces in time, the interval between the juxtaposed impressions, must also be in scale to human life if they are to assume temporal depth.”⁴

I think back to my education in photography as a California Romantic and studying the work of Ansel Adams; viewing his prints, made from the same negative at differing times in his life. Looking at a print of Moonrise: Hernandez printed in 1941 versus looking at a print from the same negative in 1975 reveal a different interpretation of Adams memory of the scene based on the experiences that he had incurred since the original making of the photograph.

As Adams memory and interpretation of what he saw that November afternoon in 1941 changed, so did the resulting image that was printed. All of them are different, and all of them are authentic and based in the reality of Adams mind as he understood the scene at the time that each was printed. This doesn’t make any of them “less accurate” than the others; on the contrary, it makes each of them equally accurate at the time they were made.

This reconciles the idea that memories can change and still be accurate, but what about the memory of an event that never happened in the first place? I think that it is here that I find solace in the words of Andre Breton:

“Surrealist collages are “slits in time” that produce “illusions of true recognition” where former lives, actual lives, and future lives melt together into one life.”⁵

This answers many questions for me, or at least offers a beam of light into the darkness. In a paper written in a previous semester, I profiled the work of collage artist Hannah Hoch, and while unable to make a tactile connection to her work at the time, Breton immediately brought her work back to mind. While working as a Dadaist as opposed to a Surrealist, I believe that some of this description might still ring true for me in the way that I related to her work. Continuing with my theory of each of us being an artificial construct made up from our faulty memories, I cling to this idea of artist Roni Horn who was describing her experience in attempting to photograph actress Isabelle Huppert as a “self-impersonation”.⁶ Lauren Sedofsky elaborates on this idea that it “conveys the imitation and imposture, the self-alienation or no-ownership approach to personal properties, which lie at the very basis of personation, while at the same time it reminds us that for each of the personae, no original exists.”⁷

1 - Orlow, Uriel. "Latent Archives, Roving Lens, 2006." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 204. Print.

2 - Farr, Ian. "Not Quite How I Remember It." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 17. Print.

3 – Shattuck, Roger. "Proust’s Binoculars." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 36. Print.

4 – Shattuck, Roger. "Proust’s Binoculars." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 38. Print.

5 – Foster, Hal. "Outmoded Spaces." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 56. Print.

6 – Sedofsky, Lauren. "Portrait of an Image: A Portfolio by Roni Horn, 2005." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 119. Print.

7 – Sedofsky, Lauren. "Portrait of an Image: A Portfolio by Roni Horn, 2005." Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Ian Farr. London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012. Page 119. Print. 

Post 104: Here We Go...

Uriel Orlow: Latent Archives, Roving Lens//2006

          "Responding to and stimulated by this, there has been a marked increase in contemporary arts practice concerned with memory. Two sub-trends immediately come to mind: on one hand, works which in one way or another simulate memory process and create fictional archives by way of collecting and classifying things or through the use of a narrative. On the other hand, a group of works can be identified which reject the imaginary or symbolic archive in favour of the real archive, making use of documentary sources or found footage., be it to address historical themes or to subvert given interpretations of events. The role of the artist in the former group of works could be described as that of an archive maker whereas the artists in the latter group work as archive users.
          What I am interested in here is a third, less obvious practice; namely that of artists working as archive thinkers. The works that fall into this category are not principally engaged in the construction of new archives or in the conducting of research into existing ones. And while they might do both of these things, they are above all engaged in deconstruction the notion of the archive itself. They reflect on the archive as something which is never fixed in meaning or material, but is nevertheless here, largely invisible yet at the same time monumental, constantly about to appear and disappear; latent."

(emphasis by me)