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Green The Memory Effect Anachronism, Time and Motion
Green The Memory Effect Anachronism, Time and Motion
Green The Memory Effect Anachronism, Time and Motion
Charles Green
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INTRODUCTION
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2008)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820802652391
682
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Doug Aitken, Interiors, 2002, still from DVD 3 projection video installation with sound, four sequences, 6 minutes 55
seconds duration, dimensions variable. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
pp 671–90. Neither author Atlas, a methodology that fascinates many contemporary artists, as the
mentions Warburg, though last three Documentas have illustrated.
Krauss draws crucially
upon Walter Benjamin; her
choice of artist as subject in
this essay might seem ANACHRONISM
initially perplexing
(Kentridge’s messy,
passionate figurative, Behind opera singers, musicians and a cast of skeletal, adult-sized
expressionist idiom puppets manipulated by sombre, professorial-looking puppeteers, audi-
intertwined with politics;
his decades-long ences see a video projection of charcoal-drawn animations interspersed
connection with alternative with medical and scientific footage. No simple adaptation, South African
theatre) but follows the artist William Kentridge’s multimedia version (2002) of Monteverdi’s
trajectory established in
her essay on Irish artist 1640 opera, The Return of Ulysses (Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria), though
James Coleman and her a concert production, subsumes the early opera’s different elements
meditations in two essays
on reinvented (and
inside the architecture of video installation.2 The Return of Ulysses
cinematic) media; see exemplifies the continuity of figuration in art and the dramatic and
Rosalind Krauss, ‘…And synthetic ambition of contemporary video installation.
Then Turn Away? An
Essay on James Coleman’,
At the intersection of cinema and visual art, this art form has domi-
October, no 81, summer nated major surveys of contemporary art since the early 1990s, but
1997; Rosalind Krauss, largely awaits detailed art historical research. Influential commentators
683
Habberjam, University of helpful precedents go, this presents a problem because the intersection of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1989; Gilles memory and the imagining subject is relatively under-researched in art
Deleuze, Cinema 2: the theory and art history, especially compared with the proliferation of
time-image (1985), trans material on the subject in literary studies and, more recently, in cinema
Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, University studies. Worse, memory method is normally associated with literature
of Minnesota Press, that provokes the empathic identifications associated with Marcel
Minneapolis, 1989. See Proust’s almost too-familiar, involuntary memory trigger, the little
also Gilles Deleuze, Proust
and signs: the complete madeleine cake dipped in lime blossom tea. But as memory theorists
text (1964), trans Richard from antiquity onwards have recognised, the mind remembers images
Howard, University of
Minnesota Press,
better than words and, given this, they also understood that images
Minneapolis, 2000. For an cannot be reduced to words. In order to think about the way that artists
explanation of the concept and art theorists present memory as a cultural preoccupation, as an artis-
of world memory, see
Cinema 2, p 119.
tic and art theoretical problem (and as a source of potentially productive
disciplinary destabilisation), primary rather than secondary texts –
5 Kwame Anthony Appiah,
‘You must remember this’,
works of art rather than literature about works of art – are for the most
New York Review of part the unreliable sources of knowledge about the subject.
Books, 50:4, 13 March Different forms of archival exploration and, after that, exploratory,
2003, pp 35–7
aestheticising and exploitative archivism, have become established meth-
6 Neal Benezra and Olga M odologies in contemporary art, and archival forms are particularly asso-
Viso, Distemper: Dissonant
Themes in the Art of the ciated both with works of art lazily labelled neo-conceptual, or with the
1990s, exhibition supposed recovery of identity through cultural retrieval. Many exhibi-
catalogue, Smithsonian tions of contemporary art have assumed memory could be set to work as
Museum, Washington DC,
1996, p 12 an anchor against forgetting, attributing to improbably different artists
7 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and
the same unlikely generic effort ‘to suspend the twilight of memory’.6
the Archive’, October, no Allan Sekula’s pivotal 1986 essay on the archive and contemporary art,
39, winter 1986, pp 3–64 ‘The Body and the Archive’, stands near the beginning of contemporary
8 See Miwon Kwon, One art’s more rigorous reengagement with the archival, as do his extraordi-
Place after Another: Site- narily vast photographic projects.7 In her exemplary and well-known
Specific Art and Locational
Identity, MIT Press,
book, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,
Cambridge, MA, 2002. Miwon Kwon took curator Mary Jane Jacobs’s gargantuan site-specific
The conception that curatorial project ‘Sculpture Chicago’ (1993) to task for its sentimental
memory and authenticity
are linked is based on the presumption that memory, place and cultural authenticity are linked, for
range of assumptions its underlying assumption that to create a memorial (to memorialise) is
regarding site specificity the same as to remember.8 Too often, archive-based contemporary art,
that Kwon analyses in her
chapter on ‘Sculpture including works by highly political artist collectives, has been incoherent
Chicago’. by comparison with explanatory essays. Wherever artists have assumed
684
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Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, p 18, 1927–1929, black and white photograph, page dimensions variable. Courtesy
Warburg Institute, London
685
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Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, p 19, 1927–1929, black and white photograph, page dimensions variable. Courtesy
Warburg Institute, London
686
9 See Martin Jay, Downcast that the status of art endows the archive with a voice, then the result has
Eyes: The Denigration of
Vision in Twentieth-
been enfeebled, oblique and boring.
Century French Thought, A Memory Effect must be understood, therefore, at a crucial but late
University of California moment, against the backdrop of a longstanding, understandable and
Press, Berkeley, 1993; a
famous article by French extensively theorised distrust of the image, and in particular of the image
film director Claude in relation to memory. This distrust has been voiced both through the
Lanzmann attacking deeply influential anti-visual strand of philosophy and critical theory and
Hollywood film director
Stephen Spielberg’s in demolitions of the claims of visual memory in relation to sentimental
popular Schindler’s List and over-familiar representations of evil and the Holocaust. The latter
was published in Le Monde takes the form of essays and films like those of Claude Lanzmann,
on 3 March 1994 and later
reprinted in English in The attacking the explanatory superficiality offered by director Steven
Guardian Weekly on 3 Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and similar films. Jean-Luc Godard, in
April 1994. For Lanzmann,
see Claude Lanzmann,
the second half of his late work, Eloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love,
Shoah, an oral history of 2001), mounts a similar attack on Spielbergian memory.9 Because of this,
the Holocaust: the it is particularly important to differentiate between increasingly discred-
complete text of the film,
ited claims for images and memory, and on the other hand an emerging
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intriguing anachronism was in part due to the relation between the spec-
ificity and ineffability of recollection. Across the Atlas’s panels, Warburg
traced morphological affinities and specific recurring gestural motifs by
juxtaposing chains of small photographs. His categorisations according
to allegories – Melancholy or Medea or the Death of Orpheus – were
governed, he postulated, by sublimations surviving from image to image
in frozen, intensely felt gestures. Explanations of these oscillate between
attributing to them something of the syntactical nature of a legible sign
language or something more of the nature of a wreckage. Warburg
assumed – wreckage or signing – that the collective mind is connected by
the sublimated image’s affect.
This is completely different from many iconographers’ conservative
assumption that Atlas showed how and where artistic and stylistic influ-
ence was transmitted. Kurt Forster has correctly pointed out that
Warburg was inventing the discipline of cultural studies, giving it a
domain far beyond the conventional art history of his time.13 Warburg
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Throwing away the Atlas’s mnemonic art historical utility and its
15 That Buchloh’s neo- utopian appropriation forces a turn to Atlas as indexical – as the result
Marxism is an
uncomfortable fit with
of a process that was sedimentary and entropic, rather than metonymic
Bal’s semiotics is irrelevant and modernist. Mnemosyne Atlas was not a method for writing art
here. In a nuanced history, but a method for re-making art histories into something else
examination of the
modernist context,
altogether, into something more akin to art practice.
Buchloh (like Didi- Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas was to a large degree founded on the
Huberman and Forster optimistic formal belief in the overriding indexicality or veracity – the
before) links Mnemosyne
Atlas to the early 1920s
transparency – of the photograph, but this belief became, quite simply,
Soviet debates about hard to sustain towards the end of the twentieth century. How had Atlas
photographic images and managed this tension? The process of re-photography and reproduction,
montage led by Rodchenko
and Brik, to Walter quite oddly, made Warburg’s panels convincing due to the suppression
Benjamin’s ‘Small History of the disparate original authors’ handiworks. At the same time, photo-
of Photography’ (1931) graphy rendered his sources – Warburg’s selected paintings and sculp-
and finally to Siegfried
Kracauer’s deeply tures – retroactively ghostly and suddenly transparent. He combined,
pessimistic, cryptic essay, through a relatively seamless but already both technologically and
‘Photography’ (1927). See conceptually anachronistic montage method (for multiple negative print-
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small
History of Photography’ ing on one photograph was already possible), different modes of repre-
(1931), in One Way Street, sentation. He merged these onto a single panel and, second, translated
trans Edmund Jephcott,
New Left Books, London,
and unified the result through the apparently intrinsic properties of
1979, pp 240–57; see photographic transparency gained by the subordination of collaged
Siegfried Kracauer, sources underneath a single, shiny photographic paper surface.
‘Photography’ (1927), in
The Mass Ornament:
So although Warburg’s conception of cultural memory transmitted
Weimar Essays, ed and through the affective traces of ancient pagan trauma in a kind of time
trans Thomas H Levin, travel was, first, a textual mode of seeing, it was also, second, a way of
Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp
virtual seeing in which we were asked to examine works of art as if they
47–63. Buchloh aligned were strata, snapshots and excerpts from something bigger. The question
Richter’s Atlas with is: what larger entity were these strata or snapshots indexical of? This is
Kracauer’s pessimistic
analysis, in direct contrast a crucial question. Warburg was attempting something more compli-
to Roland Barthes’s efforts cated than an abbreviated description of the canonical artistic archive.
to reinvest bodily memory His theory of pathos formula – of the effect of movement encoded in a
and phenomenological
authenticity within the dynamogram – was a theory of formulae or effects that triggered
photograph of his mother memory, but were not memory itself.
in Camera Lucida; see But at the same time, it is clear that not all images wish to be included
Buchloh, ‘Gerhard
Richter’s Atlas: The in Atlas. Copyright and moral rights restrictions surround the circula-
Anomic Archive’, p 141. tion of particular images by indigenous and First Nations artists. If
690
particular images have special status, given the role of images in indige-
nous culture as emblems of literal ownership to culture and land, then
it is important to be fully aware of the controversies surrounding
European art history’s (and White Australia’s) unauthorised and autho-
rised uses of indigenous images.16
Warburg’s legacy may be a key to understanding contemporary art
as a transdisciplinary field, but its limited comprehension of cross-
cultural ethical constraint, as Claire Farago has convincingly shown,
also illuminates the globalisation that art and art history must now
negotiate, whether willingly or not.17 Warburg’s vision of the survival of
the classical tradition is commensurable with contemporary art. But his
vision, Farago argued, was oblivious to its own imperial politics, mask-
ing his deep dissatisfaction with the present and his inability to see
Western art history’s evolutionary perspective as always culturally
contained. Unconstrained himself by the corporate- and consumer-
driven copyright laws that now seek to regulate contemporary culture,
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it back, and revealing the inner workings of a single moment.’19 The arti-
cle now explores these workings.
The French actress heroine and the Japanese architect hero of Alain
Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) spend a large part of the movie
experiencing different levels of the past as if they were no longer
connected to them. Resnais’s French actress (played by Emmanuelle Riva
who reappeared in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993) at
the end of her career, three decades later, as an old woman sick with
dementia and bereft of memories, the exact and deliberate, I am sure,
opposite pathology of her earlier role), adrift in Hiroshima for a film
shoot, is beset by flashbacks, but her memories remain of ambiguous
provenance and status.
In the opening scenes of Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais provides
a model of consciousness and recollection in the process of a recitation
of facts about Hiroshima as the camera moves restlessly around.
Hiroshima is constituted as an archive composed of collectively remem-
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Doug Aitken, Electric Earth, 1999, still from 8 laserdisc projection with sound, dimensions variable. Courtesy 303 Gallery,
New York
693
like signs. With their startling physiques and hyperactive jumpy move-
ments or stillness, they acknowledge that they are driven or possessed.
Aitken’s Giggy Johnson declares exactly this at the start of Electric Earth
and, as an expert dancer in real life, he moves with the perfect coordina-
tion of a jangling marionette puppet and motions as if signing in a
precise language. His precursor is Resnais’s walking Frenchwoman
possessed by the memory of her dead German lover (talking to him
throughout the film; it takes a while to realise this) and by her provincial
home, the small city of Nevers. Just as Giggy Johnson looks backwards
to Emmanuelle Riva, so she herself is inhabited by a succession of
isolated flâneurs from both cinema and art, not least the wandering
heroine-murderer of Louis Malle’s slightly earlier first feature, Ascenseur
pour l’Echafaud (1957) and Agnès Varda’s slightly later first feature,
Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961). Half the actresses in Paris seem to have been
pounding the nocturnal purgatory of Parisian streets. More important
still, both Johnson and Riva are graphic presences, like Muybridge’s
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The structure of this work will be, strictly speaking, rhapsodic, ie (etymo-
logically) sewn; moreover, this is a Proustian metaphor: the work is
31 Aitken, ‘Doug Aitken talks produced like a gown; the rhapsodic text implies an original art, like that
about Electric Earth’, op of the couturière: pieces, fragments are subject to certain correspon-
cit, p 161 dences, arrangements, reappearances.32
32 Roland Barthes,
‘Longtemps, je me suis Mieke Bal framed the same observation slightly differently: she
couché de bonne heure’, in
The Rustle of Language,
explained that Proust’s innovation was his montage and his cinemato-
trans Richard Howard, graphic focus. She noted his serialisation, ‘by means of a progressive
Hill & Wang, New York, adjustment of the same image, also functions syntagmatically in the
1986, p 281. For a famous
example of Proust’s
production of consecutive images, each of which announces the next’.33
metaphor of stitching, see Aitken’s serialisation and repetition – the choppy, rhythmic editing of
Marcel Proust, Time Interiors and the migration of characters from screen to screen – implied
Regained (1927), trans
Andreas Mayor, Chatto & something quite different from the speed that this might have implied:
Windus, London, 1970, p progressive adjustments, continual disclosure, a flatness reminiscent of
454, where he writes: Godard’s insistence on flat characters, and a disinterest in personal reve-
‘These “paperies”, as
Françoise called the pages lation in favour of an ethnography of types and gestures.
of my writing, it was my The integrity of all academic ‘disciplines’ in the humanities has been
habit to stick together with imperilled rather than empowered until now by interdisciplinarity – that
paste, and sometimes in
this process they became is, until the digitised present in which the concept of the archive splinters
torn. But Françoise then into forms undistinguished by recent art theorists – for artists and film-
would be able to come to
my help, by consolidating
makers have been to a remarkable extent quarantined by the protocols
them just as she stitched and conventions of their respective industries and the particular
patches onto the worn demands of their media. At the same time, they work in very eclectic
parts of her dresses or as,
on the kitchen window,
ways, boasting that they are disrespectful of boundaries and endorsing
while waiting for the the popularised (Kantian) view that artists are uniquely responsive to
glazier as I was waiting for inward disposition and feeling, and are indicators of cultural change.
the printer, she used to
paste a piece of newspaper
But, not surprisingly, there has been a long history of crossover between
where the glass had been art and cinema, and the incidence has dramatically increased over the
broken.’ past fifteen years. Art and cinema long for the effects of sensation, imme-
33 Mieke Bal, The Mottled diacy and even bodily transcendence that each medium itself has not
Screen: Reading Proust independently achieved. This article has shown the mutual plundering of
Visually, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, visual treasures that this longing for a Memory Effect, an organisation of
CA, 1997, p 213 recollection, prompts.