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Chapter
2: Context and Interpretation
The interrelation of
objects and memory, and of memory and self have been the subject
of enquiry in this body of work. In the process of making the
work and developing my ideas I made reference to both personal
narratives and archaeological, more collective ideas of memory
as the context for my practice. For the purposes of this commentary
I have focused on the work of two artists, Susan Hiller and Christian
Boltanski, whose practice reflects on these themes, and also the
interplay between an image (which is also a relic) and memory,
in the essay Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes (Barthes, 1984).
The “object” of memory and longing in Barthes’
'Camera Lucida' is his mother who, at the time of its writing,
had recently died. The “object” on which these emotions
are focused is a photograph of her, not as he remembers her visually
(because the photograph shows her as a child), but as conveying
an essential quality of her character which, though it cannot
be brought back to life he desperately wishes to recall in some
physical, visible, tangible form.
The unease and anxiety associated with Barthes’ search recalls
the early stages of my work with the keepsakes. It relates both
to the increasing certainty that the clear, almost solid memory
desired will remain elusive and the drive to pursue it will grow
proportionately with the impossibility of its resolution, and
to the recognition that it is an attempt to reverse and deny time
and death. Barthes writes of his impulse to enlarge this photograph
in an attempt to see more clearly the tantalising glimmer of what
he remembers of his mother, only to discover that it reveals nothing
more of her, nor even of the image, but only the grain of the
paper. My own work with the keepsakes began with a similar struggle
to make them communicate the past. By putting them through a set
of processes which threatened to damage or alter them physically,
in however small a way, I felt that I was trying to force their
secret out of them, only to find that memory stayed where it was.
But through these processes I constructed a new set of objects
which themselves contained a trace or memory of these keepsakes
that I suppose to hold traces and memories of the past. A fuller
account of my analysis of Camera Lucida and its relevance to my
practice is given in an appendix to this commentary. In November
2004, a conversation between Christian Boltanski and Marina Warner
was presented at the Hayward Gallery, where Boltanski had works
in the exhibition 'Eyes, Lies and Illusions'. These works were
shadow plays using images symbolic of death with a simplicity
reminiscent of folk or children’s art. In their conversation
the parallel was drawn between shadows and photographs; either
is evidence of a presence, but an insubstantial and unreliable
indicator of its nature.
Boltanski’s own use of photographs explores similar territory
to Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the uncomfortably close relation
between photography and death. The way in which memory and photography
interact becomes one of confusion, unintentional substitution;
as Boltanski stated: 'When someone you know dies, after a time
you can’t remember their face, only their photograph' -
in Barthes’ words: 'One day some friends were talking about
their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had
just been looking at my old photographs, had none left' (Barthes,
1984, p.91).
Boltanski drew a distinction between “small memory”
and “big memory”, valuing the former equally; the
knowledge of a particular place (“where there is a good
café in this town” for example), or of a person or
a familiar object. “Small Utopias” are infinitely
preferable to the dangerous idea of “big Utopias”.
This makes reference to the kind of ideology that led to the Holocaust,
a subject which arises in Boltanski’s work but in an ambiguous,
layered way. While the sight of thousands of pieces of clothing
covering a vast area of floor space, or folded in shelving around
a room, seems inevitably to conjure up the idea of mass death,
Boltanski is at pains to point out that these are contemporary
clothes; they did not belong to people who died in concentration
camps. While he sees these installations on one level as “post-holocaust
memorials” they also, for Boltanski, refer to the daily
life and death of all of us. He deliberately uses the banal, the
discarded, the not grand in his work, including the little, toy-like
cut-outs from which he makes his shadow-play pieces. Of these,
he says youcan fill a whole room with shadows from something that
fits into your pocket.
The personal, and how when it loses its personal connection it
“dies”, is a repeated theme for Boltanski. As Barthes
anticipates a loss of life and love when the photograph of his
mother is finally destroyed or discarded after his own death,
so Boltanski recognises these qualities in those things which
belong to people, which they use, are familiar with, and love.
He says of the lost property with which he makes his clothing
installations that they “look dead” because they are
no longer owned and cared for. The found photographs which he
uses also have this look of death, although they represent someone
who was alive when the photograph was taken, (and in some cases
it is not to be assumed that their subject is even now literally
dead). Life is conferred on objects by their use and necessity,
their connection with people. In this way, his pipe is “different
from a pipe you see in a shop”, because he owns it. This
life of objects is essential to him, and is one way in which his
practice provides a context for mine. It is with this insistence
on the “small” and personal that he addresses the
large theme that confronts every individual, death; and with it,
the nature of life.
Also fundamental to Boltanski’s work are ideas of play and
trickery, deception and belief. There is an element of deception
in his use of photographs and lighting, his conjuring up of an
emotional charge in which we almost believe we are looking at
the images or belongings of the victims of the Holocaust, and
then saying, in effect, “but that is not actually what it
is, and I never said so – (but I do also want to commemorate
that event)”. However, Boltanski is not ultimately mocking
the beliefs and emotions his viewers bring to the work, or trivialising
the event he seems to evoke. He spoke of the way in which Proust
“writes about himself, but he is also writing about everyone
who reads him”, and in a similar way, “everyone seeing
the same film in a cinema sees a different film – they see
it with their own background”. In work portraying himself
as a child, in which he uses the photographs of other children
and the details of another child’s life, he says “it
is both my story and universal; it was my village but it is also
your village”. To the common experience of being alive we
bring our own story, making it both shared and unique.
For children, Boltanski says, pretence creates reality: when you
play a role in a children’s game, you are that thing or
person. He speaks of the closeness between a child playing and
an artist making work, both “playing with reality”.
The more you create, the less you are alive. The more you invent,
the more you become your stories (Boltanski, 2004). In these statements
Boltanski seems to signal the ambiguity and ambivalence at work
in his practice. It seems to sound a warning that the search to
identify image and reality, to find the “real” at
the heart of appearance or sensory experience is dangerous ground.All
Hiller’s artistic practice is crossed and penetrated by
memory and nostalgia; representations of images that are distant,
lost or denied, which emerge from oblivion. Like the historical
example of the Surrealists, the concept of mourning in Hiller’s
work affirms itself almost as an intrinsic quality of the language
of art itself (Lingwood, ed., 2004, p.120).
The images which appear in the casts and skins I have made, the
photograms, cyanotypes, and cast shadows (see fig.
1), are described for me in this account of Susan Hiller’s
practice: “distant, lost or denied” they “emerge
from oblivion”. I also recognise “the concept of mourning”
in this work, as well as a highly familiar sense of ambivalence,
of hovering at the edge and the elusiveness of the thing which
I try to grasp in the work I make. In Anamorphosis of the Gaze,
the essay from which this extract is taken, Stella Santacatterina
describes the quality of ambivalence as essential to Hiller’s
work, and memory as fundamental to “the language of art”.
Of her installation at the Freud Museum in 1994, when collections
of a variety of disparate objects were displayed in vitrines,
with accompanying fragments of text, map or chart, Hiller writes:
'My starting points were artless, worthless artefacts and materials…which
seemed to carry an aura of memory and to hint at meaning something'
(Hiller, 2000, Afterword).
The meanings which viewers find in this work, Hiller says, are
found in the “gaps”, the spaces between the boxes,
as meaning is created between the separate frames of a film. The
connections are not supplied, yet they are in one way the most
important part of the work: the part which is missing but is created
between the object and the mind.
I have also unearthed and displayed a collection of objects which
spark memory. A difference, and perhaps a crucial one, is that
these objects are connected to my personal history and memories.
However, as Hiller says of her Freud Museum installation, the
piece works on a rather poetic level for many people since everybody
saves odds and ends, quite often sorts them, puts things in boxes,
puts them away… (Rawson 2003). She goes on to say that many
people have written to her of the memories brought back for them
by seeing particular objects in the collections which were identical
to things they had owned or known in the past. I have had similar
comments made to me about some of the objects in my pieces, showing
that my aim to connect to other people’s inner world of
memories and stories is beginning to work at this level.
It is this creation of meaning between the object and the person
looking at it, the necessity that the combined force of the object
and the way it is presented should catch, hold and engage the
viewer in a dialogue, and the indefinable way in which that happens,
which appears to fascinate Hiller. I think this elusive element
of communication, in fact the element of elusiveness and the uncertainty
that there will be communication, is the point on which I feel
my work is balancing as I try to write about it, and also the
point that pricks me to keep making the work. It is for her concentrated
focus on this place of recognition and understanding that I find
Hiller’s work and what she says about it sheds light on
my own practice.
The initial fascination for me in my own objects was the mystery
of their stories, and of what they suggest and hide of stories
in my own past. I have done minor violence to them in order to
try to extract their secrets, never with any clear expectation
as to what this would reveal. At the same time I have both replicated
and altered them in order to render them somehow empty of and
separate from their histories. I have tried to show them as both
something of myself, and as something that could be anybody’s,
anywhere. When stripped of their surface decoration that made
them specifically mine, they suggested to me generic, almost archetypal
figures such as are seen represented throughout history and in
many cultures: animals with social or cultural significance, human
and dwarfish figurines which I can associate equally with luck
charms and grave goods, folk and fairy tales, architectural carvings,
toys and modern ornaments or souvenirs. My wish has been partly
to take these suggestive figures out of my mind and put them in
the world. As personal treasures they were hidden, inactive and
uncommunicative. To show them is the first move: the difficult
part is to explain what it is they communicate. I think these
motives connect to the insight expressed by Boltanski that “the
more you create the less you are alive; the more you invent the
more you become your stories”, and also “it was my
childhood and it was your childhood; it was my village and it
was your village”. I set these images from everywhere and
all times in a museum setting to point out their universality.
In 'From the Freud Museum' Hiller takes unconnected objects from
many places – genuinely world-wide artefacts; and she creates
and suggests ways in which they may be linked by a process of
mind, with the limitless freedom this allows. Connections are
made not only by her act of placing the objects and signs together
in chosen ways, but by their viewers’ perceptions of the
displays and understanding of the spaces between. There are no
explanatory texts, and although the framing is carefully elaborate
there’s no continuity, no way of tying the fragments into
an existing circuit or historical trajectory, leaving the beholder
to be drawn into an encounter, to ask “what is it doing
here, with me?” – an unknowing encounter with their
‘secret self’. In a world lost to ritual, it’s
a gentle trick, a sleight of hand by the artist, playing out the
infinite impressions – those points of contact -- that make
up Hiller’s, and perhaps all of our archives (Lingwood,
ed., 2004, p.100).
I have used objects imbued with personal stories and memory –
my own – to try to arrive at a similar point, that people
looking at the work may ask themselves about the connections and
meanings which the pieces suggest to them. I have done this partly
because I cannot use them to answer many questions about my own
life, to look more closely into my own memory. Meanings seem to
cluster around them, but they are not “in” the objects,
but in the gap between the object and me, the work and the viewer.
To make his childhood self-portrayal universal, Boltanski used
images of other children as though they were of himself. In his
Holocaust memorials he used found photographs and lost property
clothing – another “sleight of hand by the artist”
whereby he does not make a spectacle of people whose fate is seen
as both so well-known and so “other”, so out of normality
that it cannot belong to us, but uses the normal and everyday
to present it as a shared and common event; to make us, almost,
able to recognise it.
The shared and common meaning of the life which for each one of
us, in most circumstances and for most people is experienced as
an internal and subjective consciousness, is where my project
finds a place; and in the desire to communicate that the meanings
we find are in the gap between ourselves and a work, between ourselves
and the world. Stella Santacatterina describes Hiller’s
work as occupying “the space between the mind and itself”.
Part of the reason why I have, unlike Hiller or Boltanski, used
personal objects to communicate is that everyone has personal
objects and memories. The personal does not preclude the common
and shared: it is one approach to it. I find my work occupies
similar ground to Hiller’s in that it deals with our relationship
to things, objects; and the way in which I am using things to
enquire about subjective meaning. I have placed my objects and
artefacts into a museum and a museum-like box, and in places out
in the world both to emphasise the universal nature of subjective
experience, and also, (where I think I differ from her) to make
that claim for myself and my experience, and assert that they
exist in the world. How to show what’s out of sight or invisible
is the dilemma of most contemporary art and all museums (Hiller,
2004, Afterword).
Committed as she is to her material, Hiller’s subject is
not ultimately the objects or the stories but subjectivity itself.
Combining intellect and intuition, Hiller’s work constitutes
an ongoing enquiry into the shifting topography of the self, the
fluid forms and elusive edges of identity (Lingwood, ed., 2004,
p11). All her work is “work in progress”, a circular
interrogation which oscillates between the presence of the question
and the absence of the answer (Lingwood, ed., 2004, p119). |
