to say you will remember is to say you will not forget. (Ricoeur 2004, 87)
The departure point for this book is the phenomenal rise of the moving image in contemporary art since the early 1990s. Featuring moving image installations by Chantal Ackerman, Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Jaki Irvine and others, it considers the role of memory in their work, a preoccupation which is a defining characteristic of the twentieth-century fin-de-siècle. The moving image is at the centre of contemporary art practices that mobilize memory in relation to contested histories and the disjunctive temporalities of globalized capitalism. What is at stake in these practices is the balance between remembering and forgetting and the innovative ways in which artists tackle the politics of memory. The selected artists are of a generation who have lived through the transition from analogue to digital and the increased mediatization of memory in media technologies. The emergent intermedial aesthetics of their artworks foreground the memory of analogue media in digital media. While artists’ moving image has been largely theorized in relation to cinema, this study situates it in the context of digitalization meaning digital technologies and their infrastructures such as the increased availability of personal computers, software, the World Wide Web and the internet from the 1990s onwards.1 This consideration of moving image art against a background of technological change is not undertaken in a spirit of techno-determinism but with the aim of analyzing how artists have drawn on the techno-aesthetics of moving image media to express memory. The emphasis here is on work featuring an intermedial aesthetics of film, analogue video and digital media, rather than the exclusive cultivation of film by artists of whom Tacita Dean would be the leading example. While film undoubtedly possesses its own unique texture and relationship to both recorded indexical time and cinema, analogue video and digital media equally bring other temporalities such as instantaneity, televisual networks and modular asynchronicity into play. The technical and cultural interrelationships between media are the ground from which the selected moving image artworks harness the force of memory. The hybrid, constantly evolving intermediality of contemporary artists’ moving image underscores the fact that their mnemonic preoccupations are not reductive exercises in retrospective nostalgia or cinephilia but active repositionings of the past in relation to the present and future as memory intersects with history and personal experience meets collective experience.
Organized around five overlapping modes of ‘critical nostalgia’, ‘database narrative’, the ‘echo-chamber’, ‘documentary fiction’ and ‘mediatized memories’, which correlate to the individual artists’ practices, this study aims to show how the selected works bring viewers into encounters with the agency of memory. My discussion draws on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the ‘time-image’ in exploring the capacity of the moving image to disclose the potential of memory as a circuit between the actual present and the virtual past and future (Deleuze 2005). Each mode highlights different ways in which memory is mediated in moving image media and how these technologies of time modulate our understanding of time and memory. The first mode of ‘critical nostalgia’ featuring work by Chantal Akerman and Stan Douglas deals with the conundrum of memory as an injunction not to forget but also raising the question of how to live with the ghosts of the past. Their very different artworks were each made in response to the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the breakup of the Eastern Bloc. These historical upheavals alongside the rapid development of computerized information technology contribute to the phenomenon of the ‘memory boom’ in the 1980s and 1990s and an attendant anxiety in relation to memory, forgetting and the temporalities of postmodernity as post-communist discourse proclaims a vaunted ‘end of history’. Ackerman’s and Douglas’s installations along with the other artworks presented in this book participate in the significance of memory as a subjective practice that recalls the past through temporal overlaps and reverberances in the present. These temporal overlaps are constituted in intermedial combinations where digital formats intersect with older media, such as Douglas’s recombinant ‘database narratives’ and the documentary fictions of Pierre Huyghe and others. The last mode ‘mediatized memories’ looks at moving image works by Leckey, Irvine, James Richards and Elizabeth Price in relation to changing models of memory in a digital era. As artists engage with the mediatization of memory, they also contribute to memory culture, the object of the burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of memory studies.
Memory Culture
The notion of memory culture originates in Maurice Halbwachs’s prewar study of social frameworks where individuals absorb history in school and from information passed down by older generations, gradually participating in what he calls a ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1992). Memory culture can thus be understood in terms of three dimensions, the material, the social and the mental, in which different aspects of memory intersect and constitute ‘cultural memory’ (Erll 2011, 102). However, the Second World War and the Holocaust challenge the stability of Halbwachs’s social frameworks and shared memory, affecting memory culture across the nation states of postwar Europe and contributing to the formation of a ‘global memory’. Memory studies have expanded in conjunction with what Andreas Huyssen describes as a cultural ‘obsession with memory’ and a ‘crisis of temporality’ (Huyssen 1995, 6). Writing in the mid 1990s, Huyssen finds a ‘mnemonic culture’ that is symptomatic of the need for new forms of temporal orientation in the face of accelerated computer technology, and the instant availability of information. He perceives a cultural fear of amnesia that paradoxically arises alongside the ‘waning of history and historical consciousness’ and the expansion of data storage (Huyssen 1995, 9). In Germany, as Huyssen notes, the process of reunification brought up diverse views on the historical past and reactions to the unstable effects of socio-economic change just as the generational memory of Nazism and the Second World War began to fade away in the 1990s.
The French historian Pierre Nora also identifies a shift in the relationship between collective memory and history, contributing to what, in his view, has become a culture of commemoration that reduces history to a series of heritage sites. In a major study conducted between 1984 and 1992, Nora differentiated the emergence of ‘les lieux de mémoire’ (places of memory), such as sites, material objects and concepts in which traces of memory reside, from ‘milieux de mémoire’ (environments of memory) rooted in rural traditions and social structures of school, church and family (Nora 1989). Stating that: ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’, Nora finds that the traditional cohesive relationship between past and future has been displaced into ‘indirect’ memory in the form of accumulated archival material (Nora 1989, 7, 13). Yet Nora’s pessimism is countered by Huyssen who finds new paradigms of memory in the aftermath of technological and historical upheavals. Despite the ‘synchronicity’ of networked technological systems, he asserts that the actual experience of change is ‘non-synchronous’:
rather than moving together, if at different paces, into the future, we have accumulated so many non-synchronicities in our present that a very hybrid structure of temporality seems to be emerging, one that has clearly moved beyond the parameters of two or more centuries of European-American modernity. (Huyssen 1995, 8)
In these circumstances, Huyssen emphasizes that the act of memory is a creative forging of the past constituted in relation to the present in contradistinction to the traditional function of the archive as a repository for storage and retrieval (Huyssen 1995, 3).
Replacing what Jean-François Lyotard styles as the ‘grand narratives’ of history, the ‘memory boom’ inaugurates a multiplicity of ‘little narratives’ in which memory is privileged as a different way of narrating t...