An aesthetic of memory?

I am becoming ever more concerned with the artist and their choices in a work, which is odd considering that my presence here has meant that I have ceased producing sculpture altogether and forsaken it for theory.
Coming from a studio background I find it odd and interesting how little we question the formal decisions in the artworks cited in class. This became clear discussing Past Lives by Lorie Novak [below].

Now, I am not going to engage in a crit of Novak's work in a blog piece - I have too much respect for both Novak and the practice of critique - but think it is interesting how hard I find it to engage people in questioning the choices an artist makes. I think Novak's work, especially her Interior Projections  collection exemplify an aesthetic of memory - layering, projection, transparency - that has today become a bit of a cliche. 

For this I sacrifice my own work at the alter of making a point. Below are two film stills from a film piece I made in 2011 about the American West and the problems of westward expansion as a signifier of progress (something I have only been able to articulate as a result of this course).  

Untitled, 2011 Copyright.

Untitled, 2011 Copyright.

The film wasn't my best work (I'm much better with an extra dimension to play with) and I only bring it up here to demonstrate that there is an aesthetic that has become a shorthand for memory, and that it is rife among student artists in academy studios around the world. 

I would attribute the proliferation of this aesthetic to its success at succinctly conveying the message, but that said in art 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' never really caught on as a philosophy.What this aesthetic means in the digital age is also worth questioning; now that overlaying, transparency and projection can all be done in a flash using photoshop, the physicality of working with the artefacts of memory is lost, as is the time invested in creating a piece like Novak's. 

While I don't think theorists are here to write poison letters of critique, I do believe that examining the decisions in a piece of work are fair, even if speculating on the reasons for those decisions may not be. An art work is about the curation of decisions, often agonised over, undone and then repeated. Not to acknowledge that and to exclude it from the dicussion also excludes the artist from the conversation. In the words of Hans Haacke:

The assumption that artists are humanitarians is a beautiful but dangerous myth. Experience tells that artists are not better than other people. As landlords, they exploit their tenants as much as others. They rip off things and ideas as much as others; they are certainly not less, maybe even more concerned about their careers than others; and when there is a choice between monetary gain and truth to professed ideas, the proportion of artists opting for the bank-account is also not considerably different from other people's. The idea of the artist as a priest or saint is a cherished holdover from 19th-century romanticism. It creates an atmosphere that makes it a sacrilege to analyze the artist's economic and ideological position and the role he actually plays in society's superstructure. (The Role of the Artist in Today's Society, Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, John Perreault and Cindy Nemser, Source: Art Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1975), pp. 327-331Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775915 Accessed: 17/03/2013 13:13)

The Rubberbandits

When it occured to me that The Rubberbandits [videos below for your viewing pleasure] could be interesting examples of multidirectional memory I thought I might be going mad, or that I was just really misunderstanding Michael Rothberg. And while I still wouldn't bet my house on it, I think there is possibly an argument to be made. So I am going to try and make it here...

Of all the models of cultural memory that we have looked at I keep coming back to Rothberg and I think its because it is an extremely valuable model for the creative. As I understand him, he is advocating for writers, artists, anyone who contributes to conversations around cultural memory to do it by looking through another culture, not in comparison, but in such a way that a new line of sight is drawn. In my opinion this is what The Rubberbandits do. 

Brian Logan wrote of them in The Guardian:

Their act came about partly in response to Limerick's reputation as a poverty-stricken place (it's where Frank McCourt's misery memoir Angela's Ashes is set), riven with gangs, drugs and crime (it's also Ireland's murder capital). "The media portray Limerick as like Compton in LA," says Chambers. "We're taking the piss out of that." 

I think that last statement is a case of misdirection - they're success is based on not being taken too seriously, so its not in their interests to be examined too closely. I think what they goes beyond parody, through a mixing of gansta rap and Irish social commentary they genuinely do draw new lines of sight on difficult cultural memory in Ireland, such as emigration [see Buddies in Boston below] or assimilation [see Black Man].

Whether they do create multidirectional spaces of memory or not, I am ultimately not sure enough to shout about it. But it does raise in my mind how artists can apply Rothberg's model and confirms the potential of the multidirectional space he advocates.

The Rubberbandits - Horse Outside

The Rubberbandits - Black Man

The Rubberbandits - Buddies in Boston

Insidious streets

I'm a big fan of the This American Life podcasts. Usually its just an entertaining way to put in my Monday commute but every so often they present a show that really stops me in my tracks, makes me forget where I am, and really listen. 

They have done this twice in the last few weeks, with a two part podcast on Harper High School in Chicago. (I cannot recommend it highly enough - listen for yourself: Part one / Part two.) What the podcasts detail is a year in the life on an inner-city Chicago school and the reality for the students and staff of living with gang violence. In Act One of the first show reporter Linda Lutton sets the scene:

Maybe you think you have an idea of how street gangs operate. Crips and Bloods, People and Folks, controlling huge swaths of a city, shooting it out over drug territory. A single gang leader controlling thousands of members. A strictly enforced hierarchy branching out underneath him, with gang colors and hats tilted to the right or left. 

For this hour, forget all that. The gangs in the Englewood neighborhood today are not those gangs. There's no central leader, no hierarchy, no colors. The fights aren't over drug territory. In fact, lots of these gangs aren't even selling drugs. They're different gangs, with different rules. These rules apply absolutely to boys. Girls get slightly more leeway. 

Rule number one, look at a map. When I ask kids what their parents don't understand about gangs these days, they say it's this. Their parents tell them not to join a gang, as if there's some initiation to go through, some way to sign up. Today, whether or not you want to be in a gang, you're in one. If you live on pretty much any block near Harper High School, you have been assigned a gang. Your mother bought a house on 72nd and Hermitage? You're S Dub. You live across the street from the school? That's D-Ville. 

When you ask kids or cops or school staff how it got like this, they'll tell you that at one point, this whole area was controlled pretty much by a single gang, The Gangster Disciples. But, and this is how most people tell this part of the story, Chicago police have been so effective locking up the big gang leaders that the hierarchy of those gangs has crumbled. And that's left a lot of room for newcomers.  

Your gang might control nothing more than the block you live on. In Harper's attendance area alone, which is a couple square miles, there are more than 15 gangs, also known as cliques, sets, factions, or crews. Some don't have anyone in charge, but they do have guns. That's what every kid has told me. Otherwise, why would you call yourself a gang, they say.

These 2 hours of radio have implanted themselves firmly in my head, as you might expect of something that brings you to tears on the platform of a train station. This week it came racing back to me in the discussion of insidious trauma in Kali Tal's essay Remembering Difference: working against Eurocentric bias in Contemporary Scholarship on Trauma and Memory. She quotes the trauma therapist Laura Brown who notes that the insidious threat of sexual abuse experienced by women in their everyday lives is often not understood because it is not an event outside the range of human experience, as the DSM-IV frames it. She writes::

The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class; white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other...Public events, visible to all, rarely themselves harbingers of stigma for their victims, things that can and do happen to men—all of these constitute trauma in the official lexicon. Their victims are rarely blamed for these events; (Brown, 1995:101-102)

For kids stuck in inner city gangs violence and threat of death is constant and yet it is unaddressed, because they do not belong to the same group as those who define the range of human experience. In a way this was something i have always known but painfully quotidian nature of the violence and the survival tactics was completely new to me. I have included some more of the transcript below but I urge you to listen and experience the ache that comes from hearing it in their own voices:

Aaron Washington is a police officer assigned to Harper. He's there seven hours a day, seems to know every kid in the school. He says that for protection, for survival, kids walk to school with the kids in their clique, often through enemy territory. So I ask him, what if I'm a kid and I really don't want any part of this gang stuff? How can I avoid it?

             Officer Washington:You can't. It's not going to happen.

Linda Lutton: He says it used to be possible to be neutral-- what they called a "neutron."

Officer Washington: There is no neutrons anymore. It used to be if you play sports, or you were academically better than the average kid, they didn't bother you. Now it's different. It doesn't matter. If you live here, you're part of them. You live on that block, or you live in that area, you're one of them. The way they get to school, they have to come to school with one of these factions, one of these gangs. They're going to come to school with them. They don't have a choice. 

Linda Lutton: I can hardly believe that a Chicago police officer is telling me this, admitting that kids don't have a choice about being gang affiliated. I've never heard police talk like this. Later, I ask Officer Washington if he'll get in trouble for saying this. I mean, aren't cops supposed to just tell kids, hey, don't join a gang? 

Officer Washington: I'll put it like this. I'm not saying it's OK to be in a gang. And I'm not saying I approve of it, I agree with it. If I could take them all and say, "hey, look here, ain't no gangs," I'd do that. But this ain't a fairy tale. 

Linda Lutton: And this is the point. Gangs aren't the bad kids in the corner here. They're the defining social structure in the school. It's who you sit with at lunch, the kids you say hi to in the hallway. It's the water everybody swims in. 

Assistant principal Adams guesses that fewer than 10% of Harper students are actually gangbanging. That is, active on the block, involved in crime. He thinks all the rest of the kids in the school are just caught up by where they live. OK. So rule number one is know your geography. 

Rule number two, never walk by yourself. One day at dismissal, I thought I saw a freshman walking home alone. 

Linda Lutton: I stopped you because you're walking by yourself. 

But I was wrong. 

Student: We're walking with them. 

Linda Lutton:Arnel pointed over his shoulder at a couple of girls about 15 feet back. 

Linda Lutton:So you're actually walking with the girls back there? 

Student: Yeah. I always walk with people home. 

Linda Lutton: What's the advantage? 

Student: It's not trying to get jumped on and shot. Because there be fighting and shooting up here almost every day. Because won't nobody mess with somebody in a group, walking in a group. 

Linda Lutton: And that's true. But it's complicated because of rule number three.
Rule number three, never walk with someone else. See, walking into a group can send its own message. If you're with a group of boys in Englewood-- on your porch, walking home from school-- you're highlighting your affiliation, which makes you more of a target. It's a huge catch-22 for kids in this neighborhood. If you walk alone, you risk being jumped. If you walk with someone else, you risk being labeled as a gang member and being shot. 

Rule number four, don't use the sidewalk. Every day at dismissal, kids drift out of Harper High School and walk along Wood Street-- actually, right down the middle of Wood Street. It's a strange scene. Cars drive slowly, waiting for students to move out of the way. One teacher told me that when she first arrived at Harper, she thought this was just plain hooliganism. The teenagers taking over. One afternoon, a girl named Alex explained, that's not it at all. 

Alex: We feel safer like this. For some reason, we just feel safe like that. we never like to walk past trees and stuff, there's too much stuff going on. 

Linda Lutton: "Too much stuff going on" is shorthand here for the shootings, the fights, the craziness. It's better to walk down the middle of the street, where you can keep a broad view of things, and where you have a few more seconds to run if you need to. 

Rule number five, if they shoot, don't run. 12th grader Antoryio was on the Harper High School football team. In fact, he's one of the best running backs in the entire city of Chicago. On the field, he zips around linemen like they're not even there, cutting and weaving and then racing for the end zone. Those are skills he purposefully ignores when shot at. 

Antoryio: I fall to the ground. 

Linda Lutton: That's your strategy? 

Antoryio: Yeah. Because if you run, you'll probably get shot in the back or something like that. So I just fall to the ground. Most people shoot from-- say if we in front of my house-- will shoot from the corner. Or do a drive-by in a car. So I just fall to the ground. 

Linda Lutton: OK. By now, you may be wondering, if these gangs aren't fighting over drug territory, what are the shootings about? That brings us to rule number six. 

Rule number six, you can be shot for reasons big and small. If you ask the police or school officials or kids what the shootings are about, they'll mention girls, money owed. There was a paintball incident that led to real guns going off. Petty stuff, like losing a fist fight. He-said she-said arguments. Often, they'll tell you a shooting is over nothing. 

Retaliation for earlier shootings is a big reason for getting shot. Shootings can ping pong back and forth between rival gangs for years. Of course, you can also be shot for walking off your block. 

And finally, rule number seven, never go outside. When I asked kids for advice about staying alive in this neighborhood, they told me the best advice was to stay away from your block as long as possible, every day. Get involved in something at school so you can stay as late as they let you. When you do go home, don't leave the house. Don't even go on the porch. 

If you want to see the lengths you have to go to not be part of the gang, you should meet a senior named Deonte. Being anti-gang is Deonte's entire identity. He's an outspoken Christian. He holds Bible study in his living room. Other kids come to him for advice, a role he wholly embraces. He's poised to be the valedictorian. When you talk to Deonte, you get a sense of what it takes to stay away from the gangs. 

Linda Lutton: Do you ever go out, just around the neighborhood? 

Deonte: Oh, no. No, not at all. And in a way, that can be bad as well. Because that's when depression is easy to set in. That took a hold of me, because I've been in the house for about three years. I've been staying in the house a lot. 

Linda Lutton: Do you feel lonely? 

Deonte: At times. At times I feel lonely. A times, I would want to have some friends. Because I'm not really friends with anybody. 

Linda Lutton: If you think about high school, how important friends are during that time, imagine going through that with your whole goal being to avoid your school's social structure. Completely, for four years. It's an incredibly high price to steer clear the violence. It's a price most teenagers anywhere would find almost impossible to pay.

Screening Suffering

We have been talking a lot about the portrayal of suffering in art over the last few weeks, focusing often on films. The weird thing is I am having trouble relating to the conversation, despite the fact that I write about films a lot in my work, and consider them to be a very important part of visual culture.

The genesis of my trouble is that I go out of my way to avoid seeing anything explicit in films, which means that I often cannot bring to mind film examples of trauma or suffering. The one film I have been able to talk about is Schindler's List , but even this is hazy and I can only recall the end (I think - its an image of people walking in a long line. It is possible that there has been an amalgamation of the tonal qualities of Schindler's List and the Sound of Music in my head.)

I have avoided explicit films since I was about 12, when I found that the images of 12-certificate horror films would implant themselves into my head and then reappear in my dreams or situations when my fears needed faces. It is a weird appropriation of 'art' (using the term exceptionally loosely here) as memory, and as I don't believe that this is an experience to me I wonder how it affects the world.

An excerpt from Marina Warner's Reith lecture in 1994 has popped back into my head at this point which sums up my concern. One of the results she notes about the portrayal of masculinity in film and gaming culture she states that the:

Fear of men has grown alongside belief that aggression - including sexual violence -
inevitably defines the character of the young male. Another myth shadows the
contemporary concept of male nature: that intruder could be a rapist. Alongside the
warrior, the figure of the sex criminal has dug deep roots in the cultural formation of
masculinity.(Warner, 1994)

While I agree with the sentiments of Adorno and Benjamin, and the idea of an ethics of memory, at the same time I wonder what the effect of our striving to acknowledge suffering in art are on the audience we create for.

And as usual I find my self broaching a question for which I have no answers.

Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe

In Berlin this past weekend I visited the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. A few weeks prior we had discussed it in class through the essay Memory and Monument after 9/11 by James E. Young in the book The Future of Memory (Crownshaw and Rowland, 2010).  I want to revisit this text now in light of having experienced the monument in person. 

James E. Young writes of Peter Eisenman's design as:

...a waving field of stelae. Where the 'monumental' had traditionally used its size to humiliate or cow viewers into submission, this memorial in its humanly proportioned forms should put people on an evenfootmg with memory. Visitors and the roles they play as they wade knee-, or chest-, or shoulder-deep into this waving field of stones will not be diminished by the monumental but will be made integral parts of the memorial itself, now invited into a memorial dialogue of equals. Visitors will not be defeated by their memorial obligation here, nor dwarfed by the memory-forms themselves, but rather enjoined by them to come face to face with memory. Able to see over and around these pillars, visitors will have to find their way through this field of stones, even though they are never actually lost in or overcome by the memorial act. In effect, they will make and choose their own individual spaces for memory, even as they do so collectively. The implied sense of motion in the gently undulating field also formalizes a kind of memory that is neither frozen in time, nor static in space. The sense of such instability will help visitors resist an impulse towards closure in the memorial act and heighten one's own role in anchoring memory in oneself.

 My experience of the memorial on a crisp and cold January day echoes Young's words. I was not overcome or humbled by the physical size of the monument. Indeed I do not feel like this monument is designed to burden the visitor with the weight of Holocaust memory in its entirety but instead advocates a steady and personal working-through. As it stretched out before me I had an understanding that I could never gain a full personal experience of the entire monument at once, beyond the superficial. As my friends and I walked into the monument we instinctively chose different paths, reflecting our individual journeys through the memory, while as Young notes, also experiencing it collectively. As the path led through the undulations the city and other people would come and go around me, expressing memory as a dynamic and evolving process that constantly changes in relation to our understanding of the past and experiences in the present.

Below are some of the photos I took, though they do little to express the experience of being in that space of memory. The second to last picture in the series, which shows ice expanding out of a crack in the monument, has stuck in my head. It shows nature's slow erosion of the monument and occurs to me to be an apt (if admittedly cliche) illustration of the process of memory, both individual and cultural, itself. I am left wondering how (and if) our cultural memory of the holocaust will be eroded and changed by temporal distance and what the effects of this could be.

All photographs taken by Ruth Annett.

Practicing Ireland

This weekend I will visit Berlin for the first time and I can't wait! But I am also incredibly nervous as it marks the beginning of a project that I have been thinking about for a few months now, but am only just getting off the ground.

The project is called 'Practicing Ireland' and will be made up of filmed interviews with cultural producers either from Ireland and practicing abroad, non-Irish and practicing in Ireland or Irish practicing in Ireland. All must be actively engaging with Ireland or Irishness, though not necessarily in name, but through critical engagement with contemporary issues.

The first interview will be with the artist Mark Curran who works and lives between Dublin and Berlin. I hope to ask him what it is like practicing between the centre and the periphery, and how he understands his place as an artist in contemporary society.

The point of departure for this project is the desire to create a snapshot of the current moment through the voices of the people to whom we look to tell us about ourselves in this moment of crisis, the people responsible for re-mythologising post-crisis Ireland. I want to ask them what it is like to bear the expectations of a society that at the same time as it is cutting support for the arts. I want to know how they experience Ireland and Irishness in this post-national, transcultural, globalised world. I want to create a conversation that shows Ireland, not as a unique place of artistic genius, but a site of complex, global cultural entanglements, potential and hope.

Belfast's Flags Protests

I am in the midst of essay writing and therefore am going to keep it short this week. The essay I am writing discusses the flag protests that continue to rumble on in Belfast and whether they can be understood as cultural performance.

While researching the protests, mostly via on line articles I am struck by the images, in a way that I have not been before. Beyond a masking of identity the protesters have, through wearing the flags, turned themselves into living symbols, erasing their own individual identities. 

via BreakingNews.ie

Image via Belfast Telegraph

Protest outside the Alliance Party office in East Belfast belonging to Naomi Long, following the decision by Belfast City Council to stop flying the union flag every day. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Tuesday December 4, 2012. See PA story ULSTER Flag. Photo credit should read: Paul Faith/PA Wire via Belfast Telegraph

Loyalists demonstrators clash with police during rioting in Belfast during a protest about flag flying restrictions via Daily Mail 

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters via The Christian Science Monitor

The other thing which has really caught my eye is the images of life-as-usual against the images of violence. They really capture how 'normalised' disturbances form the backdrop to everyday lives. Simon Hoggart wrote in the Guardian:

I was fascinated to see that in Belfast some parents are taking their children, a few still in prams, to watch the riots over flying the union flag. It's as if the events are part of the great tapestry of their history. In the same way, people took their infants, now in their 60s, to see the last coronation, so they could in turn tell their grandchildren that they were there.

 It all underlines for me that protest is as much an expression of cultural identity in Northern Ireland as anything else and should be understood as such. While I would never expect politicians to condone such violence, I worry that very few of them have stopped to really ask why it is happening.

Union flag protests have been staged since December. Photograph: EPA via The Guardian

Violence sparks: A family walks past a burning hijacked car during rioting in east Belfast via The Daily Mail 

via the Baltic News Network