The lining of forgetting : internal & external memory in art 9781890949112, 1890949116

Citation preview

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LINING. OF

Fons ETTING

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trying to understand

the function of |remembering,

which is not the opposite

of forgetting,

but rather its lining.

We do not remember,

we rewrite memory

r) Chris Marker's

Pablo Helguera

Deborah Aschheim

Edgar Arceneaux

John Coplans

Janice Caswell

Scott Lyall

David Rokeby

Kerry Tribe

Louise Bourgeois

Dinh Q. Lé

Emma

THE LINING OF FORGETTING

Kay

Internal & External Memory in Art Mungo Thomson

Cody Trepte

Curated by Xandra Eden With essays by John Roberts and Sarah Cook

Rachel Whiteread

Weatherspoon Art Museum

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Published to accompany the traveling exhibition The Lining of Forgetting, organized and circulated by the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Educational programming for The Lining of Forgetting is supported by the North Carolina Arts Council with funding from the state of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves

great art. Weatherspoon Art Museum The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC February 10-May 25, 2008 Austin Museum of Art Austin, TX May 30-August 9, 2009

© 2008 Weatherspoon Art Museum The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Spring Garden and Tate Streets P.O. Box 26170 Greensboro, North Carolina 27402-6170 336.334.5770 weatherspoon.uncg.edu

Library of Congress Control Number:

© 2008 Xandra Eden, John Roberts, and

Front & back cover: Chris Marker, La Jetée,

Sarah Cook. All artworks © the artists.

1962, film still (detail). © New Yorker Films.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior permission in writing from the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Photo credits: p. 37: Dirk Pauwels, courtesy of Poeziezomers vzw, Watou, Belgium.

Weather: oon artimuseum (J

THE UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA

GREENSBORO

2007942479 ISBN: 978-1-890949-11-2

Copy Editor: Gerald Zeigerman Design: Volume Inc. Printed in Hong Kong by Regal Printing Limited, The Printcess/Celeste McMullin

p. 45-47, 81-83, 89-91, and 93-95: Dan

Smith/UNCG. p- 59-61: Christopher Burke. p- 117, 121: David Rogers.

14 DIRECTOR'S FOREWORD Nancy Doll

18 THE LINING OF FORGETTING Xandra Eden

34

MEDIA IS THE MEMORY

56

CONTENTS

UNE

MEMOIRE INVOLUNTAIRE

116

28 MEMORIES, HISTORY, MNEMOTECHNICS

NETWORKED MEMORY: “ALWAYS LIVE AND YET ALWAYS AN ARCHIVE"

John Roberts

Sarah Cook

130

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

132

BIOGRAPHIES

WE MAKE NOTES SO WE WON'T FORGET. We ask others to help us remember. We rely on all kinds of systems to retain data we need and want. We live in an ironic time: The more information our technological world readily makes available to us, the more we need those same technologies to store and retrieve it, to even prompt us at times to remember that it’s there. Together, memory and the loss of memory comprise one of the seminal issues of our world today. The list of related topics seems to expand daily: the aging of the baby boomers; new discoveries about the way the brain works; new technology-aided neurosurgical procedures; the rise of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease; the exponential increase of available information; the growing use of memory surrogates. As challenging as these issues may be, other aspects of memory persist relatively unchanged: our fondness for certain memories and the converse—how we wish we could forget some things; memoty as a subject and metaphor in art and literature; the way we form mental pictures. From the photo album and Facebook to Marcel Proust and Memento, it seems fair to say that, as humans, we are obsessed with memory. We record, document, represent, and depict—all so that

we don’t forget. This catalogue will serve as the instrument by which the exhibition The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art essentially will be remembered. The Lining of Forgetting is an ambitious and forward-reaching project that traverses the sphere of memory and its loss. The Weatherspoon’s curator of exhibitions, Xandra Eden, is to be congratulated for intelligently and beautifully realizing a project of such breadth and complexity. She joins me in wholeheartedly thanking the artists for their willing participation: Edgar Arceneaux, Deborah Aschheim, Louise Bourgeois, Janice Caswell, John Coplans, Pablo Helguera, Emma Kay, Dinh Q. Lé, Scott Lyall, David Rokeby, Mungo Thomson, Cody Trepte, Kerry Tribe, and Rachel Whiteread. Their galleries have been most helpful in the project’s organization. We especially wish to thank Susanne Vielmetter and Gosia Wojas, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Wendy Williams, Louise Bourgeois Studio; Amanda Means, The John Coplans

DIRECTOR'S

FOREWORD

Trust; Jamie Stearns, P-P-O-W, New York; Miguel Abreu and Carly Busta, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Alexis Johnson, 1301PE, Los Angeles; Grégoire Maisonneuve and Séverine Quantin, Galerie Maisonneuve, Paris; and Lawrence Luhring, Roland Augustine, Alexandra Rice, and Lisa Varghese, Luhring Augustine, New York. Thank you also to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and those private collectors who generously lent examples of the artists’ work, and to Dana Friis-Hansen, executive director, and Eva Buttacavoli, director of exhibitions and education, Austin Museum of Art, for their support of the traveling exhibition. John Roberts and Sarah Cook have provided fascinating essays on the subject of memory from their perspectives as, respectively, cultural critic and new media curator and researcher. We heartily thank all for their invaluable contributions.

16

No exhibition, particularly one such as The Lining of Forgetting, would be possible without the concerted efforts of a dedicated staff and the help of colleagues. Curator of education Ann Grimaldi, with the generous support of the North Carolina Arts Council, has assembled a fascinating roster of educational and interpretive programs. Registrars Maggie Gregory and Heather Moore attentively managed the logistical side of loans and shipping, preparators Jack Stratton and Susan Taaffe expertly saw to every detail in installing the exhibition, and curatorial interns Georgia Kennedy, Natasha Llorens, and Laura Poole provided invaluable administrative assistance. Special thanks to Kelly Queener for her assistance on Janice Caswell’s installation. We are very pleased to have worked with Volume Inc., San Francisco, and thank them for their dynamic publication design that so well interprets the exhibition theme. My thanks also to Gerald Zeigerman for his expert copy editing of the catalogue essays and ancillary material.

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Xandra Eden

PbpGETTING

id expansion in external memory offered by technology. Today, we not only record and extract information via books, audio recordings, photographs, TV, and film but computer hard drives, memory cards, PDAs, and the Internet. We can carry the equivalent of a

one-thousand-book library onaone-gigabyte USB flash drive the size of a pack of gum. Yet, even with this amped-up memory capacity, our ability to understand

and utilize our internal (personal) memory is no better than at the introduction of the printing press more than a half millennium ago. Although a handheld Blackberry can remind us where we need to be and what we need to do each moment of the day, its promised residual benefit of extra internal brain power, to contemplate more complex things, seems to elude us. We still forget, like we always have, and there is no evidence of any improvement in our cognitive skills compared to the generations

before us. Much to the contrary, a slew of cultural critics, from Jane Jacobs to Clive James, tell us that, for all our efforts at memory enhancement, we exhibit a troubling propensity for cultural and historical amnesia. It appears that technology has only served to “separate and externalize the memory function from its human host.”!

THE

LINING

OF

FORGETTING

We often imagine our brain as a large filing system or computer database (if a slightly malfunctioning one), but the human mind is nothing so aseptic. In 1983, French filmmaker Chris Marker pronounced, as his alter ego Sandor Krasna, in Sans Soleil: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite offorgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

This concept of memory as a process that is, first, mostly about forgetting, and, second, forever in editing mode, is central to the exhibition The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art. The

artists—Edgar Arceneaux, Deborah Aschheim, Louise Bourgeois, Janice Caswell, John Coplans, Pablo Helguera, Emma Kay, Dinh Q. Lé, Scott Lyall, David Rokeby, Mungo Thomson, Cody Trepte, Kerry Tribe, and Rachel Whiteread—address not only these issues but more through such diverse media as sculpture, video, book works, photography, installation, and computer-generated works. Organized around three thematic headings—Media Is the Memory, Une Mémoire Involuntaire, and The Work of

Memory—the

exhibition encourages an examination of the mutable

Xandra

Eden

nature of memory and the complex interconnections between both the internal and external variety. The categories are by no means watertight; many of the works move across thematics. Long-term, declarative memory, rather than short-term memory or procedural memory, predominates in these works, with most pertaining to episodic memory (the recollection of a particular occasion or event) or semantic memory (memory of knowledge, often accrued over time), although there are several works that deal with implicit memory (memory that comes into play without conscious awareness). Most important, the artists highlight memory as a creative endeavor that involves as much fact as fiction. Memory is built and destroyed, reformed and

blocked, obsessed over and forgotten in much the same way that Marker’s

eye describes the world for us on the screen. His consideration of the role that technology plays within the realm of memory, both in Sans Soleil and his earlier film La Jetée (1962), provides a compelling platform from which to rethink how our notion of memory, its applications and potential, may be evolving. Marker’s work exhibits a nonlinear structure that juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images and moments in time, and encourages subsequent reinterpretation with each viewing. Internal memory is no system KERRY TRIBE Episode 2006, stills from “Report on Memory” sequence: DW-TV Archives Capture, Berlin.

of tidy, organized compartments; rather, it is a messy thing, mostly out of our control, as “unrecoverable as it is inescapable.” It is always in the process of being rewritten, even from a biological standpoint, for today’s neuroscientists are confirming that every time we remember something, that memory is permanently altered; the brain reencodes our recollections in relation to the circumstances and time in which they occur.’

MEDIA IS THE MEMORY

This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. — Chris Marker, La Jetée

If the images of the present do not change, change the images of the past. — Marker, Sans Soleil

We ingest mass media in various forms, some22

times as information, other times as entertainment. In the brain, these

widely distributed images often become dominant reference points in recollection, forming a collective image bank that resides in our unconscious. Mungo Thomson and Dinh Q. Lé tap into this phenomenon with their respective works, The American Desert (for Chuck Jones) (2002) and From Vietnam to Hollywood (2003). Thomson shows us the much-beloved Road Runner cartoons, but with central characters Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner erased, a tactic that shifts our attention to the familiarity of these cartoon landscapes. Lé takes on Hollywood's position as the dominant storyteller of the Vietnam War by literally weaving together archival docu-

mentation with fictional depictions from such popular films as Apocalypse Now (1979). Both artists elucidate how personal memory can fuse with the artificial memories produced by mass media. Thomson’s work suggests that, in the midst of recall, fictitious versions of the desert may be more readily called forth to represent the Southwest in our mind’s eye than any actual photograph or experience of the desert. In Lé’s work, the mountains of documentation and black-and-white photographs that record and tell the story of Vietnam through the eyes of individuals and families are

shown to fade slowly into the background as Hollywood’s seductive, fullcolor narratives predominate thanks to TV screenings and movie rentals. We begin to wonder how much of internal memory is influenced by the way events are portrayed by the entertainment industry, or, for that mat-

ter, by the news industry and some historians. Where, exactly, does true memory lie? Deborah Aschheim and Cody Trepte use media

from the past in their work, but they focus on how photographs and videos of our personal lives serve as repositories for memory. For June 10 (2007), Aschheim used 8mm films shot by her father in the late 1960s and early “70s as retrieval cues to recover her long-forgotten memories of her first, fifth, and sixth year birthday parties. The resulting sculptures and drawings resemble the neural nodes and connecting synapses in the human brain, and allow us to imagine the tangential way our memories are linked to the ways they are represented externally. Aschheim’s interest in memory

is partly

inspired by her family’s history of Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, she was fMRI scans of Deborah Aschheim’s brain, created in collaboration with GregJ. Siegle, Ph.D., associate professor, department of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

23

able to make studies of her own brain, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, that included fMRI scans. This process inspired her to trace her own memory in her work, something she had not done before. The result: June 10. Luckily, Aschheim’s brain scans showed no evidence of Alzheimer’s, but she continues to work with individuals suffering from

the disease, which is expected to affect 107 million people, or one out of eighty-five, worldwide by the year 2050.* The degeneration of memory can dramatically limit a person’s ability to do the kind of everyday things we all take for granted. Recent advances in neuroscience, especially through brain-imaging technology, are bringing us closer to understanding the disease, but the growing numbers of aged suffering from it, members of the massive Baby Boomer generation, will eventually impact upon us all because of the necessity for so many to be in managed health care. Aschheim’s work is a pertinent examination of the potential tools we might utilize to hold onto our memories and reinvigorate those of our loved ones. Trepte explores the current use of digital technology to record our personal lives. Stored on computer hard drives, DVDs, and flash memory cards, some of which have an expected life cycle of no more than five years, digital snapshots often are never printed out

24

in material form. For Photo Album (2006-7), Trepte depicts his family photographs in the impersonal and abstract 0s and 1s of the binary code from which they are composed. In the twentieth century, we philosophized about the meaning to be found in society’s material detritus—today, though, it is the very illegibility and immateriality of the vast databases of information amassed daily that may be most relevant to understanding ourselves. How will our diminishing habit of preserving material evidence of our past affect us in the future? Pablo Helguera’s Twilight (2008) utilizes old photographs that his grandfather took as a tourist in Europe just after WWII. The dusty color slides, showing various locations in France, Spain, and Italy, are devoid of human presence. The four accompanying audio narrations for the work interpret the images in vastly different ways: the first

is derived from Giordano Bruno’s mnemonic memory system; the second is based on Jan-Werner Muller’s Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2002); the third is the artist’s personal story of his grandfather, Ignacio; and the fourth conflates the three narratives into an overlapping collage. This work, and Helguera’s performance piece Orizaba, investigates the endless process of translation and interpretation in recollecting externally recorded images.

UNE MEMOIRE INVOLUNTAIRE Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave. — Marker, La Jetée

I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend. — Marker, Sans Soleil

How many moments do we forget in a lifetime? Some memories remain lodged in our mind, others seem lost to oblivion, still others resurface unexpectedly. Our sense of sound, smell, and taste are known to have a great capacity to pull us, without warning, into the recesses of memory. Marcel Proust, famous for his shock of reminiscence culled from the taste of a small, cakelike Madeleine cookie, argued that sight does not have this potential: For me voluntary memory, which is, above all, memory of the intellect

and the eyes, give us only the appearance, not the reality of the past. But when a smell or taste, rediscovered in totally different circumstances, reveals the past for us, in spite of ourselves, we feel how different this past is from what we thought we remembered, and what our voluntary memory painted for us, like bad painters who have their colors, but no truth.°

25

Works by Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, and John Coplans show that involuntary recollection through sight can indeed transport us, even for a moment, to a latent “truth” of our past. Bourgeois’s Ode a L’Oubli (2004) is based on fragments of old household linens and clothing she has collected since the 1920s. The ability for the pattern of an everyday fabric to bring forth a highly charged sensory memory is familiar to us all. In viewing the graphics and colors in Bourgeois’s work, we can see how memories survive and resurface involuntarily. This phenomenon is not based in nostalgia but on triggers set off involuntarily within our unconscious. Similarly, Whiteread’s Surface and WAIT, both from 2005, investigate the sensory memories that lay dormant within us, until an encounter with some exterior object or circumstance brings them to life. Her plaster sculptures, cast from old cardboard boxes used for storage and moving, remind us how a banal and anonymous object has the power to evoke irrepressible emotions and memories. Coplans reveals the involuntary perceptual ties the human body may encompass. His black-and-white self-portraits invite us to consider how our bodies serve as physical records of history through posture and action. The works move us beyond a reading of the human form in correspondence to an individual life lived, instead asking us to contemplate somatic memory across time.

26

In Episode (2007), Kerry Tribe homes in on a long-forgotten memory that she recovers from her past and attempts to form anew within a collective group. In the video, we witness the transformation of individual memory into collective memory, as the artist and her two friends, together for the first time in fifteen years, exchange their differing, subjective memories of a long-past incident on a road trip. Tribe’s use of the format of a TV talk show encourages the feeling that a unified narrative will be achieved. That the studio is based in Berlin, a city steeped in controversies about the politics of collective memory, serves as a potent counterbalance to the lightness of the tale.

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CHRIS MARKER Sans Soleil 1983, film still.

© Janus Films and Argos Films.

THE WORK OF MEMORY The only hope for survival lay in time. - Marker, La Jetée

The new bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly, just to know it existed. — Marker, Sans Soleil

Personal memory 28

is a vast, mysterious

ter-

ritory, and our efforts at consistency in recollection are often thwarted. The slow buildup of knowledge and history involves a great amount of loss; although this dissolution is sometimes intentional, other times it is because of the particular aspects we choose to focus upon and the manner in which we attempt to string ideas together. That one could forget, or refuse to acknowledge, an accepted truth, seems sinful in the face of so much access to external memory. But forgetting involves labor equal to that of remembering, and personal memory plays an active role in sorting through the plethora of external memory available to us. We see an examination of the process in the work of Janice Caswell, Emma Kay, and KERRY TRIBE Episode 2006, stills from “Report on Memory” sequence: DW-TV Archives Capture, Berlin.

David Rokeby, while the project of conceptualizing the legacy of knowledge in concrete form takes center stage in the work of Scott Lyall and Edgar Arceneaux. In all cases, the accumulation of information is shown to be highly valued in our culture; the question is, how do we fit the pieces together? Arceneaux and Lyall explore the ways that knowledge can both shape and limit our perception of the world through methods of visualizing its storage and use. An encounter with Lyall’s

work is similar to the experience of Internet browsing. The random and nonlinear processes at work in the little contemporaries (2007) suggest narra-

tive, but viewers must make their own associations to the field of information provided and create an individual pathway through it. Arceneaux uses more simplistic imagery to invite us to balance upon a similar threshold

of incomprehensibility. In Blocking Out the Sun, alternating images of idealistic sunsets are blocked and unblocked by the artist’s thumb, suggesting that by indulging in the known or familiar we may limit our potential to achieve greater knowledge. Relying solely on her own memory—without recourse

to books, films, or other research aids—Kay wrote out as

29

much as she could recall of Shakespeare’s plays. Her work, Shakespeare from Memory (1998), encourages us to examine our own memory of the Shakespeare canon, and also the way his works have reappeared throughout our lives. Kay’s work challenges the perception of authority particular to these as well as other texts entrenched in Western culture. Is reciting by rote still considered a noble task, or is it an outdated skill of the mind, since any lapse in memory can easily be remedied by pulling up the script online? Generally, we are unaware

of the sheer vol-

ume of forgetting that we experience, unless we misplace our car keys or miss an important birthday. But all day long, our brain absorbs information at the same time that it is working to rid itself of as many unimportant details as it can. Rokeby and Caswell examine the “spiral of time” that swallows so many of the details of life, even in an age when we can systematically track each moment. For Machine for Taking Time (Boul. SaintLaurent) (2006-7), Rokeby used two cameras to record a full year’s worth of surveillance of a small area in downtown Montreal. His computergenerated work randomly assembles, second by second, various seasons and times of day into slow-moving camera pans of the city. Transforming itself at every moment, the work situates us in a suspended state between an amalgam of fleeting instants and the perception, and expectation, of a continuum. Caswell, on the other hand, organizes and creates visual 30

representations of her personal memory of a significant event that she participated in, that we were also privy to: Barack Obama’s run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In her wall installation, Making History (2008), we see evidence of the conflict between the subjective processes of the mind in translation and recall and society’s tools to attempt to capture and quantify information. Her representation of Obama’s campaign, created only days before Super Tuesday, appears as a kind of infographic of her memory in relation to the way it was represented by others via such external memory sources as television and the Internet.

Recent scientific studies have shown that an event that produces a large amount of adrenaline will become particularly prominent in an individual’s memory. These types of memories are often traumatic—inescapable visions relived again and again by the victims of atrocities of war, violent abuse, and other tragic experiences. On a 2007 broadcast of CBS’s 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl reported on Propranolol, a new “pill to forget” that is being developed to help soldiers’ of war suffering

from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).° The new drug blunts the link between the memory and the adrenaline it produces, thereby decreasing its stressful and disruptive effects. The bioethics community is concerned that once Propranolol finds its way into the market, its “forgetting” properties will be exploited and marketed to consumers for everything from

professional career failures to bad romantic breakups. These fears of corporate misuse bear uncanny similarities to the dubious memory erasure services of Lacuna, Inc., a fictional company featured in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). In the film, Joel Barish (played by Jim Carrey) seeks treatment from Lacuna to help him recover from a broken heart, but, during the process, he changes his mind and desperately attempts to KERRY TRIBE Episode 2006, stills from “Report on Memory” sequence: DW-TV Archives Capture, Berlin.

31

hold onto the memory of Clementine, hiding her away in unrelated and obscure parts of his past. But no memory is so buried as to evade the dispassionate erasure services of Lacuna. All of us, whether young or old, have been frusmemory, or have wished we had the ability to of inadequacies by trated forget selectively. In The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel L. Schacter proposes that while we may feel guilt or embarrassment over our memory’s fallibility, these mishaps are simply part of the necessary adaptive process of the brain.’ But responsibility to personal memory, in relation to ourselves and others, is similar to the responsibility we feel to help build an accurate collective memory. We are deeply concerned with the methods by which we store memory today, as well as with the subsequent writing and rewriting of history over time. As has been shown, however, memory will always be a selective reshaping of the past, not only because it requires another medium to be articulated but because it is forever dependent upon our perception of the present and the future.

NOTES 1. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 190. 2. Russell J. A. Kilbourn, “Architecture and Cinema: The Represention of Memory in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz,” in W. G. Sebald: A Critical 32

Companion, J. J.Long and Anne Whitehead, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 140.

3. Edward L. Wilding and Helen Sharp, “Episodic Memory Encoding and Retrieval: Recent Insights from Event-Related Potentials,” in The Cognitive Electrophysiology of the Mind and Brain, Alberto Zani and Alice Proverbio, eds. (New York: Elsevier, 2003), 169-96. 4. Estimate is from a study at Johns Hopkins University: Ron Brookmeyer, Elizabeth Johnson, Kathryn Ziegler-Graham, and H. Michael Arrighi, “Forecasting the Global Burden of Alzheimer’s Disease” (January 2007). For more information on Alzheimer’s, please visit www.actionalz.org. 5. Marcel Proust, in an interview with Elie-Joseph Bois for Le Temps (vol. 88): 289. As cited by Mary Warnock, in Memory (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1987), 92.

6. 60 Minutes, June 14, 2007. 7. See Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001).

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The American Desert

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Images disseminated through popular media, such as television and film, often become part of a collective image bank, much of which resides in our unconscious. Thomson taps into this phenomenon with The American Desert (for Chuck Jones). For this video work, he spliced together portrayals of the desert in the Road Runner cartoons created by Warner Brothers animation director Chuck Jones. Thomson digitally eliminated all evidence of the antics of central characters Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, the most obvious means for identifying these images, shifting our attention instead to the context within which these cartoon icons are presented—the vast, desolate landscapes of the Southwest and the highways that slice through them. Although no longer punctuated by the “beep-beep” of Road Runner or the delivery of supplies from Acme Corporation, the scenes still evoke a strong sense of familiarity for most of us. Thomson’s rumination upon these fictional landscapes serves both as a memorial to Jones, who died in 2002, and a revelation of the impact of these images upon not only Western popular culture but also our personal psyche.

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Untitled (From Vietnam to Hollywood) 2003

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Lé offers a sobering perspective on our susceptibility to transform the imagery and narratives that are produced and disseminated by popular culture into dominant sources of recollection. His large-scale woven photographs literally intertwine archival images documenting the Vietnam War with stills from such popular Hollywood films as Apocalypse Now. He creates large printouts of these different photographic images, cuts them into strips, and then, using the tradition of grass-mat weaving that he learned from his aunt in Vietnam, weaves them together. Lé’s family escaped the Khmer Rouge and immigrated to Los Angeles in 1979. The works from his series From Vietnam to Hollywood elucidate how personal memory can fuse with the fictional memories created by mass media. The stark contrast between the black-and-white documentary photographs and Hollywood’s lush, full-color representation of the American perspective is emblematic of the power of popular media to mold collective memory, and reveals contemporary Western culture’s tendency to allow the reality of traumatic events to be subsumed by highly mediated narratives.

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Aschheim has produced a significant body of work that integrates the clinical studies of laboratory research on the brain with the more mutable personal and emotional content of memory. A large part of her practice has involved working with neurobiologists; after making fMRI scans of her own brain, she was inspired to serve as both scientist and subject by mapping the dense memory matrix of her first, fifth, and sixth year birthday parties. Every time one remembers something, it is newly encoded by the brain, and this process permanently alters that memory in accordance with the recalled context. To recover her long-forgotten memories, Aschheim used 8mm films shot by her father as retrieval cues. The final work, June 10, consists of three large-scale suspended sculptures, each with its own central pod, showing a video of a birthday in progress, surrounded by a field of outlying nodes that resemble brain neurons and their interconnecting synapses. The proximity of each node to the main video pod and the LED light emitting from them indicates the strength of the memory Aschheim experienced as she watched the videos as an adult. A more descriptive account of the people, colors, shapes, and ideas that each node represents to Aschheim is featured in accompanying drawings.

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Twilight 2008

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A Dictionary of Foreign Time 2007

Helguera has long been interested in the relationship between cognitive memory and image-making processes. A number of his works are inspired by such early artificial memory systems as Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater and Mateo Ricci’s Memory Palace. In his new video work, Twilight, Helguera creates a visual architecture of his own, based upon photographs his grandfather took of the village of Helguera, Spain, just after WWII. The piece is accompanied by four audio tracks that explore the potential for multiple histories associated with this location, and that reveal the endless process of translation and interpretation through recollection. Orizaba, Helguera’s performance on opening night of the exhibition, is the name of the street on which the family’s house in Mexico City was located, where both the artist and his grandfather were born. After the family moved out in 1975, no one inhabited the house again; it was demolished thirty years later. In Helguera’s performance, the story of this house again links his grandfather’s past to his own, and becomes a metaphor of the complex relationship between physical space and personal memory. Helguera’s text-based mural, A Dictionary of Foreign Time, includes portions of two famous literary quotes, one from the French poet Paul Valéry, the other from British novelist L. P. Hartley. Each phonetically spelled quote presents an alternate concept by which to perceive our relationship to time. The work investigates the mutable nature of memory and identity in relationship to the past and future.

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Trepte’s work explores the way that computers have come to serve as the external memory for even the most personal correspondence and family photographs. He demonstrates that, today, little of this information is actually printed out in physi-

cal form—it lies dormant on various computer hard drives or CDs, materials at risk of deteriorating or becoming quickly outdated by subsequent technology. For Photo Album, Trepte produced seventy-five bound books between 2006 and 2007. A text plate on the exterior of each book describes a family photograph, but, upon opening the book, we see the image only in terms of data. For, unlike film-based photography, most of our computer-generated memories exist in the impersonal and abstract Os and 1s of computer code. They are indecipherable without the aid of external media, such as that offered by computers and software applications. Trepte encourages us to consider whether someday we will lament our diminishing habit of printing out and preserving evidence of our past.

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Ode a L'Oubili 2004

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Ode a L’Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness) is based on fragments of old household linens and clothing that the artist collected since the 1920s. The thirty-six buttonholebound pages of this book (each page has been individually framed for the purposes of exhibition) include many of Bourgeois’s signature shapes, forming a catalogue of triggers to her past. There are only two pages that include text—the rest is largely abstract imagery. Bourgeois has long used memoty as a springboard to examine issues of gender, sexuality, and unconscious desire. Her work from the 1960s onward consistently references childhood memories that have been indelibly imprinted upon her psyche. Her use of everyday fabrics in this work suggests how the colors and graphics of familiar patterns can transport one to another time and place. Ode a L’Oubli creates an eloquent statement about the emotional space of domestic life and the highly charged sensory experiences that can survive and resurface involuntarily through memory.

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