Memory, History, and Storytelling
Memory and History
The relationship between history, memory, and storytelling is complex.
Memory is subjective and fallible, while history is often considered objective.
History relies on known reality but is often told in a way that glorifies the powerful.
Memory can be a means of remembering the past when official documentation is lacking or stories are suppressed.
Memory can take various forms, such as fiber work, family photo albums, diaries, or oral traditions.
Memory recognizes the human qualities of historical work and acknowledges that history is never neutral; it's part of a struggle for posterity and power.
Memorials and Collective Memory
Our ability to remember collective history depends on documents and artifacts.
Memorials can take literal and heroic forms.
Traditional memorials: These are often made of white marble, neoclassical in style, grand in scale, and honor solitary white men.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial:
Designed by Maya Lin as an alternative to traditional memorials.
It is a black wall of polished granite that rises and tapers, creating a scar in the landscape.
Inscribed with the names of American service members who died or went missing in action during the Vietnam War.
Serves as a pilgrimage site for those who lost loved ones, allowing them to find names, leave offerings, and commune with the lost.
It encourages active participation and interaction.
It's important to consider those for whom there is no memorial site.
Forgotten Memories and Disappearance
When thinking about memory, we must also consider what has been forgotten or made invisible.
Some governmental regimes actively make people disappear.
Doris Salcedo
Colombian artist who explores violence, murder, and disappearances in Colombia during the 1970s-1990s (and ongoing issues).
Her sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of marginalized individuals and the disempowered.
Her works are not memorials but concretize absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and the powerful.
"Unland" series: Comprises three distinct works: "Unland: the orphan's tunic," "Irreversible Witness," and "Audible in the Mouth."
Made in response to interviews with orphaned children who witnessed the murder of their parents.
Each work joins two different tables, spliced together with human hair and raw silk.
The tables are fractured and dismembered, alluding to interrupted families and precarious lives.
Salcedo collects witness statements from victims of the conflict in Colombia between various factions.
Her work centers on the memories of others, experiences that she lacks personally.
She was inspired by Joseph Beuys and his integration of sociopolitical meaning into sculpture.
Untitled (1995):
A bureau and chairs filled with cement, creating a sense of violation.
The contrast of wood grain, gray cement, and rebar creates a disquieting juxtaposition of the familiar and the impersonal.
The chairs stacked on top of the wardrobe evoke a vacated house.
Stan Douglas: Abbott and Cordova, August 7, 1971
Meticulously recreated a riot that occurred in Vancouver in 1971.
Explores the history of Vancouver.
The 1971 Gastown riot: A peaceful smoke-in against the city's use of undercover agents and in favor of cannabis legalization erupted into conflict with the police, fueled by anger over gentrification.
The photograph was staged and is a composite of 50 digitally stitched images.
Douglas conducted extensive research, consulting archival photographs and interviewing witnesses.
The work was initially displayed as a billboard near the site of the riot and is now presented as a large-scale photograph in museums.
Carrie Mae Weems: The Louisiana Project
Commissioned by the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University in response to the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase.
The Louisiana Purchase: Added over 800,000 square miles to the U.S. but resulted in the deaths of Native Americans, destruction of indigenous culture, and the extension of enslavement.
Weems identified architecture as a critical component in shaping African American cultural identity.
The artist uses her own figure to bear witness to the cultural history of colonization and its impact on Black communities.
The project comprises over 70 photographs, screen prints, a video, and a live performance.
Mardi Gras: The project starts with Mardi Gras and the exclusive, all-white crews of Comus, Momus, and Rex.
The project juxtaposes the secrecy of the Rex ball with the sexual liaisons between white men from elite families and African American women.
The artist often stands with her back to the camera in front of architectural structures, wearing period clothing.
The spectral figure suggests the force of cultural haunting.
History and memory exist in architectural forms and in the bodies of living human beings who inherited the legacies of settler colonialism.
Rene Beauregard House: A neoclassical antebellum mansion named for a high court judge and son of a Confederate army officer, P.G.T. Beauregard.
Enslaved people toiled in households and fields to maintain the elite's social status.
Weems gives voice to an unheard woman: "I was not amongst the gentle crowd of ragged Negroes gathered together in the evening to stand under the old oak tree and sing sad spirituals while the gentlemen of the house and his guests reflected with glee the naturalness of their privilege. No. I was the chambermaid, the whore, and the witness."
The project juxtaposes pristine antebellum buildings with industrial spaces and mass-produced housing for impoverished African American residents.
Weems transforms our way of seeing by inserting her own body as a witness figure.
Her photographs channel architectural photography conventions.
Her gaze critiques long-standing structures of racism.
Posing with her back to the audience implicates the viewer.
Fred Wilson
Invited by the Maryland Historical Society to curate an exhibit from their collection of 300 historical artifacts.
Wilson put together objects to tell a story, challenging the typically conservative nature of museums.
Metalwork (1793-1880): Wilson placed ornate silver goblets and pitchers around dull, battered iron slave shackles.
The burnished silver represents the white masters who relied on slave labor.
The shackles represent a prostrate and bound slave.
The adjacent museum tabs state: "silver vessels in Baltimore repousse style 1830 to 1850" and "slave shackles, maker unknown, made in Baltimore circa 1793 to 1864"
Cabinet Making (1820-1960): Four fancy parlor chairs gathered facing a cruciform wooden whipping post from a Maryland jail.
Modes of Transport (1770-1910): A vintage KKK hood tucked into an antique baby buggy displayed next to other prams and carriages.
Highlights how racism is passed down generationally, a taught manner of thinking.
Kara Walker
Concerned with how the history of the Civil War-era South is distorted in romantic works like "Gone with the Wind."
Her work often takes the form of cut-out black paper silhouettes, a craft associated with portraits and genre scenes.
She mounts her works directly on gallery and museum walls, undermining the genteel nature of cut paper profiles.
The vignettes evoke antebellum stories and rely on racialized stereotypes.
Characters engage in sadomasochistic activities, and black silhouettes merge to create uncomfortable juxtapositions.
Her intention is to exaggerate stereotypes to the point of disintegration into the ridiculous and kitsch.
Dario Robleto
Incorporates memory and intentional materials in his artworks.
His pieces are often elegiac and meditate on mourning, loss, and the passage of time.
The materials used in his artworks are significant and prompt their own form of memory work.
The Common Denominator of Existence Is Loss:
Materials include 50,000-year-old extinct bear claw paws, human hand bones, stretched audio tape of the earliest recording of time, and 19th-century mourning ribbon.
The bones hold a circular braided chain made of stretched audio tape inside a glass table.
The glass table catches light and throws a shadow onto the bones and braid.
The artifacts join and stretch time, mourning the shared experience of loss.
Influenced by remix culture, blending various songs and objects from different times.
Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His Daughter Down the Wedding Isle (2004):
Includes a cast of a hand-carved wooden and iron leg made by a wounded Civil War soldier.
The cast is made from melted vinyl records of the Shirelles' song "Soldier Boy" and femur bone dust.
It is fitted inside a pair of World War I military cavalry boots made from Skeeter Davis' song "The End of the World," with melted vinyl records forming the amber-colored boots.
An oil can filled with a homemade tincture made of gun oil, rose oil, bacteria cultured from Negro prison songs, wormwood, goldenrod, aloe juice, resurrection plant, and bumbleweed.
The base is made of ballistic gelatin, white rose petals, and white rice.
Brings together memories of the Civil War, the pop music of the 1960s, and the Vietnam War.
Skeeter Davis' song, ostensibly a cheesy tune about teenage heartbreak, takes on different valences.
Describes how time seems to stop and the world seems to end with violent death, amputation, or disappearance.