Text and Image

Art and the Performance of Memory

Richard Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412804851
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351486545
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: World History

Expanding upon longstanding concerns in cultural history about the relation of text and image, this book explores how ideas move across and between expressive forms. The contributions draw from art and architectural history, film, theater, performance studies, and social and cultural history to identify and dissect the role that the visual and performing arts can play in the experience and understanding of the past.The essays highlight the role of oral history in the documentation of the visual and performing arts. They share a common set of questions as they explore, firmly grounded in their distinctive disciplinary standpoints, the circuit of word, gesture, object in the formation and reproduction of knowledge, identity, and community. Blending theory and case study, they cover subjects such as the response of artists to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; violence in Columbia and Mexico and the Balkan Wars; the circuit of sexual desire in contemporary art and photography; and sites of collective and personal memory, including the Internet, the urban landscape, family photographs, and hip hop.Stressing the relationship of media to the formation of collective memory, the volume explores how media intertextuality creates overlapping repertoires for understanding the past and the present. Scholars of art history, media and cultural studies, literature, and performance studies will all find this work a valuable resource.

1
Introduction Performing the archive

Richard Cándida Smith

It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind"¹

We are concerned here with nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages issuing from matter; here we should recall the material community of things in their communication.

Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"²

During an interview I conducted with the noted African American artist John Outterbridge, I noticed that John, in recalling his childhood in North Carolina, accompanied his vivid recollections of his mother making soap with a flurry of alternately subdued and expansive mime movements. As he spoke, his fingers paced out the dimensions of the kitchen and porch where she worked, carefully locating the stove, the counters where she placed her vats, and the storage area where she put the long, freshly prepared slats of soap to cool before cutting them into bars. For a few seconds, his fingers traced her steps in the old house where they had lived, then they merged back into his upper torso as his arms and shoulders expanded to imitate his mother's body going from task to task in a long and arduous process. The gestures became even broader as he described the smells and the emotions they stirred within him. A counterpoint emerged. His words centered on himself, once again in his mind's eye, a small boy watching, occasionally lending a hand when asked, but his body continued to recall the diligent craft of his mother. Intermittently, he evoked the aromatic experience with deep inhalations that relocated the boy into the body of a 57-year-old man. Words flowed as one part of a complex dance, another expression of which was a series of elegant, translucent sculptures inspired by the same memories.³

By making assemblages, tableaux, and sculpture, John Outterbridge had found the most effective way for him to express a continuing relation to the past. The memory that inspired him was dispersed however across a number of expressive forms, each of which provided their own variations on a theme. We conducted the oral history interview in order to extract from him a verbal account of his life and concerns that might make it easier for others who knew nothing about him or his life to read his art. As objects, powerfully affective as they are, they nonetheless stand silent and therefore elusive. The words he and I recorded were to provide a set of clues for understanding their historical and personal context. My interview with John is one of thousands that scholars and journalists have conducted with artists. Interviews have become a primary, perhaps obligatory resource on the visual and performing arts.

Yet there is a conundrum that every interpreter of oral sources in the arts faces sooner or later. Visual and performing artists work in expressive forms and media that resist language. Interviews involve a translation from one level of experience to another. The process parallels what happens when a work first appears before the public. Words in the form of criticism, whether written or word of mouth, translate creative objects and gestures into a body of response that testifies to the impact a work has achieved. The need to throw immediate sensual experiences off into words underscores the ambiguous if necessary relation of word, gesture, and object in the consolidation of experience and memory.

The oral expressions that interviews document, however, contain more than words arranged into sentences arranged into narratives of varying lengths, an illusion that transcripts foster. Spoken expression is inseparable from emotion and gesture. A context of direct interaction with other people also suffused by emotions shapes what is said as well. Every interview occurs in a process of physical performance for an interlocutor. Body gestures provide wordless images that try to deepen a speaker's synthesis of a complex series of events into a readily comprehensible and expressible anecdote. Vocal gestures shape the delivery of words. Patterns of speaking, repetitions of words and phrases, variation in force, pitch, and tone contribute to an effort to convey meaning and not just information.

The mixture of interior and physical motion John Outterbridge displayed as he conjured himself into the mental space of his childhood forcefully reminded me of Frances Yates's descriptions in The Art of Memory of techniques that ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians devised to assist the recall of lengthy memorized texts. One of the earliest writers on the subject, Simonides of Ceos, advised that memory training might best start by an adept imagining himself inside a building. Visualizing movement through this space provided a sequence to recollection. Each of the rooms should arise clearly in the mind's eye, decorated in a manner appropriate to the subject under recall. The texts themselves were to be marked by striking icons, the contemplation of which stimulated the hidden words to flood into the speaker's body.⁴ The classic conception of memory relied upon a fusion of the senses. In and of itself, language was too slippery to hold onto with confidence. Vision provided, within this scheme, the most precise sensations, so words needed to be covered with forms that the eye could master. Images, however, did not appear unless the body first put itself in motion through space. A search for visual cues served as prelude to an effective performance making the recalled word present in every part of the body. Tongue, eye, feet, hands, hips, chest were all equally engaged in and equally necessary to the machinery of memory. As Plato suggested in one of his dialogs, the notation of words on paper had proved a useful tool for reminding people of things they had forgotten. For precisely that reason, however, writing invited amnesia as it disengaged humanity from a deep, embodied connection with past experience.⁵

Plato's well-known observation calls to mind a distinction that will be a running theme in the thirteen chapters constituting this new volume for Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative. Memory exists in an ongoing process of performance and response. Traces of the past otherwise slip into the archive, an ever-present but usually ignored repository filled with the random survivals of antecedent social relationships stored in buildings, landscapes, libraries, museums, store windows, the electronic media, as well as in the everyday lives of the countless unknown people whose paths cross ours. One person's memory is another person's archive. The songs our fellow citizens sing, the gestures they make in talking to each other, the decorations they hang on their homes, the snapshots they bring to work provide clues to the histories they have endured but only if we are willing to take as our own the memories they have endeavored to keep alive. The institutions surrounding the visual and performing arts orchestrate on a more formal level a retrieval from the historical archives upon which every society rests traces of a nation's past that the artists believe are necessary to confront if the public is to address present-day dilemmas and opportunities.

This volume considers the roles that the visual and performing arts have played in plucking fragments out of the historical archive and representing them to various publics as potential repertories for people to engage and perform as they confront the future. The contributors draw upon work based in art and architectural history, social and cultural history, and performance studies applied to topics drawn from North and South America, Europe, and Africa. The chapters share a common set of questions as they explore, firmly grounded in their distinctive disciplinary standpoints, the circuit of word, gesture, object in the formation and reproduction of knowledge, identity, and community. In engaging the relationship of verbal and physical expressive forms, the authors inquire in a variety of distinct historical and social contexts how verbal language conventions shape the reception of visual and performing art, while considering how performance of space, object, and/or gesture can upend the apparent content of verbal explanations.

What the authors consider is a process often taken for granted. What does a gesture, whether congealed in the movement of a hand, the rise in pitch of a voice, or in the shape of a fabricated object, contribute to meaning? The gesture itself lies beyond words, but without its presence, words stand devoid of context. Ludwig Wittgenstein maintained that every statement rested on unproven assumptions and illogical associations. Meaning arises from conditions external to though surrounding the statement. Only if a proposition generates a response that is capable of generating further responses, has one created a meaningful situation. Close analysis might likely reveal contradictions, but "to understand a proposition is to know what is the case, if it is true." The "case" meaning a sense of what one must do, for if there was nothing to do, there would be no meaning to a statement. Deficiencies in the formal expression of communication are overcome by reaching out to initiate an exchange process that he likened to a game. If players know the rules, they expect a range of possible responses and shape the statement accordingly. The rules of a language game provide prefigurative conceptions that allow configurations to be exchanged as if they were meaningful. Meaning does not lie in the text per se but in the relationship for which the text is one of many signs.⁶

Gestures are symbols of a reaction, that is to say, a response that affirms the factuality of a relation. Gestures, which would have no meaning if they did not invite respondents into a shared space, affirm an intersubjective experience which will also likely contain a verbal counterpart. An "I" speaks to a "you" about an "it" in order to get a reaction of one kind or another. This is true even if the intent is to repel or reject another person. During the moment that rejection is enunciated the speaker has invited another person into a connection that will be abruptly terminated as the other is forcibly excluded from shared space. Language in that case may often take the form of a special argot, understandable to those already initiated but confusing and threatening to everybody else. The gestural forms, both bodily and vocal, state unequivocally, "You cannot possibly understand me!"

For Merleau-Ponty, gesture emerged as a unifying effort that brought together impressions formed across the spectrum of the senses into a response. Gesture organized a system that included a subject-position by reaching back out to the sources of perception with a reaction. What he called the postural schema was the foundation of consciousness, for without it there was no sense of relationality. Consciousness and a sense of self emerged in intersubjective contact, which included as part of its arc, an interpretive performance of the other's actions.⁷ Expressive gestures had a univocal meaning in an immediate context, but their presence "announced the constitution of a symbolic system capable of redesigning an infinite number of situations."⁸

The magic of the artist is an ability to reproduce a sense of shared space outside of immediate face-to-face encounters. Creative power to stimulate reactions brings to the surface patterns of habituated responses articulating rules needed for the given communication to occur successfully. Our bodies must be inseparable from the rules governing communicative exchange, or artists would lack the power to make something absent feel as if it were present. Conversely, the always present rules normally feel as if they were not there until work with particular power collages concept into a sensible pattern of gesture extending physically from one mind to others.⁹ Words are gestures because they too are symbols of a reaction that continues in a chain of performances that art historian George Kubler once called "the shape of time."¹⁰

It is for these reasons that the expressive forms discussed in the following chapters – words, graphic and plastic objects, bodily and vocal gestures, spatial relationships –constitute a circuit through which enactive memory constantly circulates. There are "many ways for consciousness to be conscious," Merleau-Ponty observed, as many ways as there can be perceptions.¹¹ " To be accessible at all, art must be talked about, and thus verbal consciousness appears to be dominant. Criticism, whether published or word of mouth, is vital for public recognition of a work. On an everyday, personal level, spectators must talk about their reactions to an exhibition, a film, or a performance in order to organize a recollection of the experience worth retaining for the future. Nonetheless, no matter how much or in what contexts a work is discussed, its value in social exchange eludes all of its verbal approximations. A work finds and holds onto a public precisely because it offers an experience that slips away from words and the ready-to-hand categories they provide. We turn to the visual and performing arts because these modes of expression capture aspects of experience and feeling that elude words. Wittgenstein asserted, "What can be shown cannot be said."¹² But then we must use words to share processes that communicate on other levels. Verbal accounts act as currency, but they can be the whole story only in the archive.

So what do words add that are so important that the circuit disappears without their presence? On a Utopian level, Francis Ponge thought that the semantic thickness of words restored and replenished the material thickness of things by "increasing the quantity of our qualities."¹³ Every verbal account introduced new types of words that play against each other simultaneously as communities grasped to feel possibilities for connection. A verbal kaleidoscope revealed alternative modes of relating, some but not all incompatible. Gesture devolved into negotiation over preferred meanings and how unexpected responses might transform the nature of the contact. From this transfigured sense of connection would flow a future with room for broader ranges of difference. Ponge invokes a familiar, haunting dream of integration achieved through expressive gestures transcending the "here and now" with intimations of a previously unthinkable fullness of contact.

It is a dream that has motivated artists and poets for many generations, particularly those who want their work to support broader struggles for social justice. In a moving joint reflection, "Resonating Testimonies From/In the Space of Death: Performing Buenaventura's La maestra," Warren Linds, Alexandra Medellin, and Kadi Purru invite their readers to cross the proscenium arch and vicariously share their learning experience as theater professionals working on Enrique Buenaventura's dramatic expression of the violence afflicting his homeland, Colombia. Medellin, a Mexican stage director, Linds, a Canadian popular theater facilitator with a long history of support work for Latin American causes, and Purru, an Estonian theater critic and historian who moved to Colombia in 1987, where she had an opportunity to observe and participate in Buenaventura's theatermaking process, enact for each other the relationship of memory and archive. What has been personal experience for one was until their collaboration background information for the other two. They must integrate their perspectives if they are to succeed in conveying to audiences the full horror of what Buenaventura depicts or find hope in a sense of connection with the characters the play has allowed them to touch. Their performative and interactive text explores a mode of learning the authors call enactive knowledge. Their challenge was not to get lost in the play as a world in and of itself, but to use it to reconnect back to the contemporary world and understand more deeply the cruelty embedded in its structures. Enactive presentations, if successful, actualize a space where the situations of others, normally vanishing into the patter of the media, become substantial. A moral connection forms that adds new responsibilities to relationships that already existed as a result of a long history of political and economic acts but which are as a result of dramatic performance understood in a new way.

The activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established in South Africa with the triumph of majority rule enacted on a national scale a full accounting of the human rights violations of the apartheid regime, as well as those of the liberation struggle. Public testimony from victims and victimizers allowed for a national ritual through which all social groups could recognize and accept the horrors of their collective history, form a new national consciousness based on a determination no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: performing the archive
• 2 Resonating testimonies from/in the space of death: performing Buenaventura's La maestra
• 3 Truth and consequences: art in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• 4 Precarious boundaries: affect, mise-en-scène, and the senses in Theodorus Angelopoulos's Balkans epic
• 5 Stratum and resonance: displacement in the work of Renée Green
• 6 Cities memory voices collage
• 7 Eros in the studio
• 8 Muscle Memory: performing embodied knowledge
• 9 "Hope . . . teach, yaknowhati'msayin": freestylin knowledge through Detroit hiphop
• 10 Les gammes: making visible the representative modern man
• 11 Composite past: photography and family memories in Brazil (1850-1950)
• 12 Memories of mammy
• 13 Official art, official publics: public sculpture under the Federal Art-in-Architecture Program since 1972
• 14 Private reflections/public matters: public art in the city
• Index