Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture

Liedeke Plate, Anneke Smelik, Liedeke Plate, Anneke Smelik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135090661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

This volume pursues a new line of research in cultural memory studies by understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture. The authors take their cue from the observation that art and popular culture enact memory and generate processes of memory. They do memory, and in this doing of memory new questions about the cultural dimensions of memory arise: How do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in the present? What is their relationship to the archive? Does the past speak in the performed past (or do we speak to it)? To what purpose do objects "recall"? And for whom do they recollect?

Hereauthors combine a methodological focus on memory as performance with a theoretical focus on art and popular culture as practices of remembrance. The essays in the book thus analyze what is at stake in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis, that make up cultural memory.

1 Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture

An Introduction

Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

Memory projects itself toward the future, and it constitutes the presence of the present.

(Derrida, 1986, p. 57)

Memory remains a future act: not yet recalled, if also never yet forgotten.

(Schneider, 2011, p. 22)

‘REMEMBERING REMEMBERING’

Imagine the everyday experience of compiling a shopping list. Cottage cheese is on the list. And smoked salmon, six bottles of wine, three pairs of socks—fifteen items in total. Usually, we write them down on a piece of paper, checking while we walk down the aisles of the local supermarket. But what if we want to train our memory and remember the list by heart? That is what Joshua Foer learns in Moonwalking with Einstein (2011). He uses the loci method of the ars memoria that was already recommended by Cicero in ancient Rome and described by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (1966): translate information into images and situate them in an inner space, the ‘memory palace’. Foer creates his memory palace by taking a space in mind that he knows well, the house he grew up in, and puts a vivid image of each item in a room. He conjures up the image of cottage cheese as a full bath with model Claudia Schiffer splashing around in the white stuff. The salmon is figured as a huge fish across the keyboard of the piano, and the three pairs of luxurious cotton socks hang from the lamp, brushing softly against his forehead. He then imagines walking through the house, retrieving the cottage cheese with the supermodel in the bath, the fish on the piano, the socks hanging from the lamp, thus flawlessly remembering all fifteen items on the list. Foer gets hooked by the loci method, starts training his memorial capacities, and a year later he is the winner of the yearly USA Memory Championship in New York.

Foer's subtitle, The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, betrays a deeply rooted desire in Western culture: to remember everything and forget nothing. Or, as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger so expressively puts it: ‘Humans yearn to remember, although they mostly forget’ (2009, p. 92). This desire takes on a particularly pressing, indeed existential, form in the case of disabled people like the late historian Tony Judt. Diagnosed with ALS in 2008, Judt soon was trapped in an immobile body. To recollect the stories he found himself mentally composing during long, lonely and sleepless nights, he similarly resorted to the age-old mnemotechnic device, referring himself to a ‘memory chalet’ (for he ‘had no desire to construct palaces in [his] head’ [2010, p. 6]) as a means to ‘create, store, and recall’ (p. 10):

Each night, for days, weeks, months, and now well over a year, I have returned to that chalet. I have passed through its familiar corridors with their worn steps and settled into one or two or perhaps three armchairs—conveniently unoccupied by others. And thence, … I have conjured up, sorted out, and ordered a story or an argument or an example that I plan to use in something I shall write the following day. (p. 7)

The scenes from Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein and Judt's The Memory Chalet encapsulate a few of the themes that we wish to explore in our book Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. They show, first of all, that memory is a performance. Memory is work—creative work—doing or carrying out the act, ‘the embodiment of retrieval’ (Dudai, 2002, p. 190). Second, whereas memory is embodied performance, it is fully mediated. Memory does not function in a vacuum but needs a medium to be trained, shared and transmitted. Third, these contemporary recaptures of ars memoria demonstrate how memory is connected to spatiality, because the loci method visualises striking memories by locating them in the space of a house, palace or chalet, or theatre. The orientation of imagined objects within space points to a veritable ‘theatre of memory’, to recall the title of Raphael Samuel's volume on retro culture (1994). These three elements of memory—performance, mediation and spatiality—are brought together in this introduction.

Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture looks through the prism of performance at the much-debated notion of cultural memory by analysing how cultural practices such as art, literature and media perform the past in the present. In our previous book, Technologies of Memory in the Arts (2009), we defined cultural memory as the things and the ways in which a culture remembers. Here, too, we focus on the cultural dimension of memory, taken as both the what and the how that a culture remembers. This time, however, we wish to explore the ways in which art and popular culture constitute performative acts of memory generating an experience of the past in the present. Memory needs to be understood as an effect of a variety of institutionalised discourses and cultural practices. As Maurice Halbwachs points out, ‘It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’ (1992, p. 38). Yet, if memory is social and cultural, it is also performative, making the past present in ways that can be experienced, generating a knowledge of the relationship between past and present that is oftentimes troubling, other times comforting. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture therefore engages with memory as an embodied act grounded in the here and now, generating memory in the act of performing it. In her introduction to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (1999, p. vii), Mieke Bal defines cultural memory as the process of linking the past to the present and the future, thus identifying practices as crucial to understanding how memory works. The focus of our book is on the ‘act’ of memory, not its ‘theatre’ or ‘palace’, inquiring into the processes of making, constructing, enacting, transforming, expressing, transmitting cultural memory through art and popular culture. As Diana Taylor reminds us, ‘to perform’ is a verb (2003, p. 14). It is ‘to do something, e.g. a piece of work’, as the dictionary states. The notion of ‘performing memory’ thus presupposes agency.

Agency is perhaps not what we usually relate to memory, as personal memories seem to happen or even befall us, much like Marcel Proust was overcome by memories of his youth when the sweet smell of the madeleine cake dipped in the hot tea reached his nostrils and the pastry melted in his mouth. This kind of mémoire involontaire, as Proust called it, could not be further removed from the ars memoriae of ancient times or from Joshua Foer's memory training in recent years. And yet, as Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu testifies, even involuntary memory, once it has been conjured up, becomes subject to recall, reworking and representation. Proust's involuntary memory set into motion a process and production of active memory that resulted in the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu. His novel shows that memory is hard work. Performing memory can thus be understood as an act of memorialisation. The focus on agency and on the act of remembering helps us to understand memory—or its representation in art and popular culture—as fundamentally processual and dynamic.

Contemporary studies of cultural memory indeed emphasise that memory ‘require[s] the active agency of individuals and publics’, in the words of Michael Rothberg. He continues: ‘Such agency entails recognizing and revealing the production of memory as an ongoing process involving inscription and reinscription, coding and recoding’ (2010, pp. 8–9). Memory, then, involves agency. Perhaps memory is even an act of identity formation that serves to narrate and produce the self, as Paul John Eakin suggests in his wonderfully evocative book Living Autobiographically (2008). Memory bridges the gap between the lived past and the imagined future. Eakin points out that we do not remember the past as such, but it is the self performing the act of recall (2008, p. 163; our emphasis). He learns from André Aciman that such a performance of memory not only grounds the present in the past but also helps to orient us towards the future. Individual memory is understood as an act of the self to retrieve its traces in the past in order to anticipate the future. While memory may start as an involuntary event, it can turn into an act of active remembrance, even into a practice of remembering the act of memory itself. Eakin quotes Aciman: ‘he was not just remembering. He was remembering remembering’ (p. 163). Aciman actually refers to the poet William Wordsworth, but he could equally have been referring to Marcel Proust; they are both writers whose work embodies the agency of a practice of individual memory. The point here is that memory practices are intimately connected with making, with narrating, telling and writing—in short, with the act of creation. As Gilles Deleuze put it in his book on Proust: ‘It is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to remember—but rather, to remember is to create, …’ (2000, p. 111).

Of course, in a book on cultural memory we do not dwell on the interiorised experience of involuntary memory but rather explore the traces of the past as they are actualised in the present through practices of commemoration and remembrance in art and popular culture. In this book, then, we take our cue from the observation that art and popular culture enact memory and generate processes of memory. We thus move beyond the traditional psychoanalytical distinction between ‘two contrasting ways of bringing the past into the present: acting out and remembering’ (Connerton, 1989, p. 25), seeing them instead as a continuum. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney observe that memory is performative rather than reproductive: ‘It is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories’ (2009, p. 2). Similarly, Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter state: ‘remembrance is performative. It is an activity, something that happens in time and place, and that on every occasion when we come together to do the work of remembrance, the story we fashion is different from those that have come before’ (2010, p. 7). By understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture, we want to explore cultural practices and traditions that have hitherto not yet been studied as meaningfully related to each other. As acts of creation, memories (what the Germans call Erinnerung) are not static, to be deliberately retrieved or inadvertently recalled. Instead, they are dynamic and changeable, the result of an active process of memory as the act of remembrance (the German Erinnern) or as the capacity to remember (the German Gedächtnis) (cf. Erll, 2005, p. 7; the English language unfortunately does not make the distinctions that Germanic languages do between memory as process and memory as product). As such, art and popular culture ‘do’ memory, and in this doing of memory new questions about the cultural dimensions of memory arise: how do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in the present? What is their relationship to the archive? Does the past speak in the performed past (or do we speak to it)? To what purpose do objects ‘re-call’? And for whom do they ‘re-collect’?

By addressing such questions, the authors in this book take remembrance in art and popular culture as a practice that negotiates memories for the social field. As we saw earlier, Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory functions within a social context and is therefore framed by it. Jan Assmann (1992; 1995) has elaborated that cultural memory has normative and formative powers, since it serves to actively construct the identity of social groups from families to nations, which in turn ‘socially mediate’ (1995, p. 127) individual memory. Memories are thus shaped by their social, generational and cultural context. As many have pointed out, they are also informed by their medial and technological frameworks (see, for example, Huyssen, 2003b; Rigney, 2005; Plate and Smelik, 2009; Erll, 2011; Garde-Hansen, 2011; Neiger et al., 2011). This can be illustrated by the family photo album, a technology or cultural form that is rapidly becoming obsolete but that, in the twentieth century, mediated personal and cultural memory in very specific ways (Hirsch, 1997; Humm, 2003; van Dijck, 2007). Or by the knot in the handkerchief: not so long ago, before disposable tissues became the preferred device for blowing one's nose, people would make a knot in their handkerchief to remind themselves that there was something they needed to recall—not what they needed to remember but that there was something they should not forget (see also Terdiman, 1993, p. 16). The knot in the handkerchief functioned as an aide-mémoire: it helped ‘remembering remembering’. And with the advent of mobile cell phones with ‘memory’ capacity, people have stopped remembering their friends' phone numbers. What all these examples make clear is that it is imperative that we understand memory historically, as an effect of a variety of institutionalised discourses, cultural practices and technological artefacts.

At the cultural level, art and artistic practices most explicitly engage memory as re-presentation. In Present Past (1993), Richard Terdiman forcefully makes the case for memory as representation, explaining memory's activity as follows: ‘A content of some sort is registered, with whatever fidelity the registering system can manage. Time passes. A representation appears, responsive to the content previously registered. What has happened is memory. Whenever anything is conserved and reappears in a representation, we are in the presence of a memory effect’ (p. 8). Such an understanding of memory as registration, as the meaningful, interpretable trace or inscription of an absent because bygone referent, has long dominated cultural analyses of memories as interpretations of the past. It zooms in on the text, image or sign that is the object of analysis yet leaves out of focus the specific agents, institutions and contextualised processes of remembrance that make the memory happen. Instead, in this volume we seek to understand memory as an embodied and localised practice. Such a move is part and parcel of a broader paradigm shift in cultural memory studies, from a linguistic to a performative turn. The difference is not only one of focus, shifting attention from the memory trace to its act—the event of memory, its happening. It also implies an epistemological, even ontological shift, from memory as the trace of what once was to memory as the past's present moment.

Memory is always re-call and re-collection (the terms are frequently used as synonyms), and, consequently, it implies re-turn, re-vision, re-enactment, re-presentation: making experiences from the past present again in the form of narratives, images, sensations, performances. Foregrounding the work of memory, the active labour of remembering and of forgetting, brings the focus on its creative aspect and functions theoretically to push representation beyond its borders as just representing meaning. After all, we may recall, the word ‘représentation’ in French means performance as well as representing or being represented. In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, we therefore wish to link this productive understanding of memory to the multilayered notion of performance.

PERFORMING MEMORY

In the wake of Paul Connerton's pioneering work on bodily practices as performative memory in How Societies Remember (1989), in which he ‘argue[s] for the importance of performances, and in particular habitual performances, in conveying and sustaining memory’ (p. 104), cultural memory studies have embraced the notion of performance. The title of our book echoes Freddie Rokem's intentionally ambiguous title from 2000, Performing History, referring to the historical events as they were performed in the past, to the historical event as a form of performing like some kind of ‘drama’ and to the theatre performances of historical events (2000, pp. 5–6). It also resonates with Tilmans, van Vree and Winter's Performing the Past (2010). The multilayered understanding of ‘performing’ points to the time lag between the now of the performance and the then of the historical events (Rokem, 2000, p. 6). Performance, in the sense of a theatrical or artistic live show, partakes in its very live-ness of the here and now, with the physical presence of actors or performers displaying their skills before an audience (see Carlson, 2004). We will come back to the pivotal dialectics between the time and space of the events ‘then’ and the time and space of the performance ‘now’ that is implicit in the hybrid notion of performing memory, but first we want to briefly sketch the history of the concept of performance.

The concept of performance, and of performance studies, is notoriously riddled with complexities, sometimes to the point of irritation. As an interdisciplinary field—involving terrains as diverse as anthropology, philosophy and linguistics, theatre studies, and even business and management discourse—its categories are leaky, its borders porous and its terms constantly slipping away (cf. Carlson, 2004, pp. 205–6). Not only did a new cultural practice of performance art polemically break onto the stage, but there was also a veritable ‘theory explosion’, as Jon McKenzie calls it (2001, p. 38), providing new methodologies and critical theories following the activism of the 1960s. In a recent article, José Medina claims that ‘the performative turn’ has been more groundbreaking than the linguistic turn, ‘calling for interdisciplinary collaborations that reach beyond the boundaries of philosophy’ (2010, p. 275). Marvin Carlson writes in the conclusion to the second edition of his Performance. A Critical Introduction: ‘Performance by its nature resists conclusions just as it resists the sort of definitions, boundaries, and limits so useful to traditional academic writing and academic structures’ (2004, p. 206). He then proceeds to write an ‘anti-conclusion’ to this book on an ‘anti-discipline’. Yet, he lists some clear characteristics of performance. First, performance entails a display of skills demonstrated to an audience by a trained or skilled human being (2004, p. 3). Second, the display of skills involves patterned behaviour—someone pretending to be someone other than oneself, which brings consciousness to the performance (p. 3). This is what Richard Schechner has famously called ‘restored behavior’ (1985, p. 35), which is the ‘as if’ factor of ‘showing doing’ (Schechner, 2006, p. 28). A third way of understanding performance is the notion of achievement, to successfully act up to one's potential. Jon McKenzie (2001) has further explored this normative aspect of performance in the three paradigms he distinguishes: organisational, cultural and technological performance.

As we work in this book with the concept of ‘performing memory’, we want to take from anthropology the notion that humans, either collectively or individually, have the agency to shape themselves in their behaviours and beliefs. People, we believe, are—at least to some extent—agents in their own drama (Taylor, 2003, p. 7). They narrate and perform their selves (Eakin, 2008, p. 84) and are, in Zygmunt Bauman's words, ‘artists of life’ (Bauman, 2008). In chapter 10, Louise Wolthers's discussion of the genre of history painting underscores the importance of art for such identity performances. She analyses contemporary art that embodies collective and politically affective visions of the past while critically addressing ideas of imagined communities.

The anthropological idea that humans create and construct their own reality is, of cou...