Critically comparing the curatorial approaches of ‘the Auteur’ and ‘the Editor’

I don’t want to see any topics on curating more openly discussed. I don’t see the point in talking about curating as curating. Because curating should be discussing art not itself, curating. Not curating curating.

This is a quote by Adrian Notz taken from the first issue of a digital publication called On-Curating.org. (2008)  I mention this in the opening of my discussion to highlight one of the many significant aspects of the discourse in the field of curating today. Whatever opinion you have upon the relevance of discussing topics within curating and then that relationship to art, such outcomes inevitably affect the production and consumption of exhibitions, biennials, art fairs, and the work of artists. Recent discourse in the art world has focused on the evident shift in the growing significance of the role that curators play. There has been a momentous increase in the number of university programmes offered in curatorial studies while some have highlighted the lack of research and writing on curation as a concern that needs to be rectified. Artists have also positioned themselves in curatorial roles, leading to the blurring of distinctions between the two fields. Interaction between artists and curators has evolved to the point where the two (at one time separate disciplines) are merging resulting in collaboration and new methodologies. There was once upon a time only one definition of the curator as the historical keeper and recorder of things, the person who set the context and provided the space in which art could be viewed and engaged with. But today the simple initiate of display and engage has been affected by alternative concepts about the nature of exhibition making itself.

‘Curating is normally associated with the task of giving form to exhibitions containing artworks. But today we see an expansion of the curatorial field, as the term now also seems to apply to processual and discursive projects, containing no objects at all.’ (Richter, p.1, 2008)

Other factors to bear in mind are globalising market forces, the politics of institutional critique, and viewing art in alternative ways (through the internet and art fairs to name a few). These emerging influences have demanded an alternative response to the task of arranging and inventing artworks for public engagement. The success of a show seems as much to lie in the hands of a curator as much as in the work of an artist. As Andreas Huyssen has signified, there is even acceleration within the curator’s job on a grammatical level, ‘to curate is now a verb and it is precisely not limited to the traditional functions of the “keeper of collections”, to curate these days means to mobilise collections, to set them in motion within the walls of the museum as well as in the heads of spectators.’ (Huyssen, 1995, p.21) These are a few issues to bear in mind while I access the contrary methods that some curators have adopted as a necessary response to evolving developments within exhibition-making. I will limit my discussion to the diverse curatorial styles of Jens Hoffman and Matthew Higgs, highlighting their conflicted strategies to exhibition making. Hoffman, styled with a preformative approach to exhibition making is ‘much more interested in the idea of staging exhibitions as an overall creative and artistic environment that the audience can immerse themselves in on a number of levels.’ (Hoffman, 2008, pp32-33) Higgs on the other hand is interested in ‘quite conventional approaches to exhibition making of interesting [consisting of] art displayed in a fairly traditional, straight-forward manner. Ultimately [his] interest is in the art, not in the structure or framework of the exhibition.’ (Higgs 2006) While both curators first and foremost are occupied with presenting art in an appealing fashion, challenges present themselves with respect to the way in which these approaches affect both artist and audience. It raises questions as to which is more important; the way in which a work of art is presented and contextualised or what the artwork itself is trying to convey?

Matthew Higgs

Jens Hoffmann

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jens Hoffman are examples of the type of curators who look beyond the exhibition model, often involving elements of institutional critique within their practice. This process is one that reflects on the nature of curating. They recognize their approach as influenced by the work of the late Harald Szeemann, who is accredited as inventing the grand exhibition where the work is tied to a central theme and arranged in unusual relationships with one another. Hoffman often works in collaboration with artists in developing new systems of display, new artworks, and exhibitions which evolve over time. His preoccupation with the format of the exhibition reflects a new awareness emerging in contemporary art in the process of how artworks and exhibitions are produced. Maria Lind (2002) states that art practices are often ‘more concerned with the activity of production and manufacturing than with the autonomous artefact.’ The process involved in the research and development of an artwork becomes much more appealing. Hoffman’s inventiveness is reflected by challenging the way art is displayed, accounting for the innovation which art- making has adopted over the past twenty years. Despite these developments, the same (modernist white cube) systems of display are used. This curatorial decision actively contributes to the generation and production of creative ideas and projects through collaborations with artists. The outcome of such actions can be seen in the successful collaborative effort that produced the publication The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By an Artist. Within this publication Hoffman openly acknowledges the shift in the focus of some curators towards producing themselves and asked various artists to offer their suggestions and opinions on the curatorial process if a Documenta was to be organized by an artist instead of a curator.

Those that have taken issue with Hoffman’s style believe that he takes a very authorial and creative position in the creation of exhibitions and in this process the work by the artists he includes takes a back seat in the appropriation of his vision. Hoffman denies such accusations stating that  

[None of us] has ever done anything to a work of art that was not appropriate or forced artists into a context they did not want to participate in. Criticism usually comes from the outside—never from the artists we collaborate with... (Hoffmann, 2008 pp.32-33)

While the artists involved might not object to Hoffman’s style there is the matter of exactly who Hoffman is creating and aiming his shows for. If he is seeking the engagement of audiences on all levels, the example of his joint project with Maurizio Cattelan of the 6^th Caribbean Biennial in 1999 might prove somewhat contrary to this assertion. While the ‘biennial’ was seemingly a critique on how biennials are more about the personalities involved and less about the works of art, it was a very expensive point to make. Further, it completely ostracised audiences outside of art networks who were not in on the joke. And as Jenny Liu (2000) points out it was quite a cynical gesture. The locale were excluded, there were no Caribbean artists approached, no art, and no attempt was made to engage with the local community, ‘it was a portable piece of art that could have as easily been performed in Liverpool, Sydney or Kwangju, its critiques and failings intact.’  

On the other side of the practice are those curators who feel that it is the artists who should be given the complete freedom to make their vision known and to perform critiques. Figures such as Matthew Higgs and Kasper Konig prefer a simpler approach to staging exhibitions. They fall into the realm of those who believe that if you do your work well as a curator you will disappear behind the work. Fred Wilson’s 1992 Mining the Museum show at the Maryland Historical Society is a great example of curator as editor.  As a result of a simple reshuffling and placement of objects alongside others that produced a paradoxal narrative, visitors were lead to regard the omission of certain unsavoury histories from the local community. Higgs disinterest in the way Hoffman organises exhibitions is because such projects are simply ‘too self-referential, too self-reflexive, too tautological, too academic, and perhaps are ultimately somewhat alienating: a kind of endgame, with increasingly diminishing returns.’(Higgs 2006) Not only is there a danger of the curator’s vision overshadowing the work but Higgs suggest that their innovative approaches are nothing more than the adopting of strategies invented by artists themselves. (Higgs 2006) This is supported by the artist and e-flux editor Anton Vidokle (2010) when he says that the inevitability of going beyond exhibition making ‘should not become a justification for the work of curators to supersede the work of artists.’ The role of the curator could not exist without the production of artists. Perhaps institutional critique should be left in the hands of artists like Hans Haacke or Joseph Kosuth who engage audiences directly when challenging the paradigms of artistic displays and do not need curators as a go-between.

While this point is valuable, Higgs’ editorial/traditional approach to curation has been criticised in the past. His show Protest and Survive at The Whitechapel Gallery took a collection of works from the nineteen-sixties onwards to explore ‘the possibility of identifying a radical community of artists, in searching for the political voice that is forever glossed over.’  The exhibition was seen by one critic as ‘dated’ and ‘backward looking.’ (Sladen 2001) The curatorial choice to include some artists were deemed questionable and an attempt to contemporise the political messages of the numerous works was reduced to an over arching nostalgia for an activism long past. So perhaps a traditional straight forward way of display is not always productive in trying to convey meaning and context behind the work. Protest and Survive was criticized because it was too fragmented and incoherent, displaying too many differing types of protest ranging from feminist critiques of pharmaceutical companies to Marxism. Frequently, it is not enough to present the work in simple conditions. The context is always different when viewing an artwork in isolation so a curator’s main responsibility to the artwork and the audience is to provide the context within which to interpret the significance of the work. As previously mentioned the practice of making art has radically changed over the past twenty years, practices have expanded beyond the boundaries of the production of objects incorporating new media which requires innovative methods of articulation. The curator needs to focus upon how best to engage and make deeper an audiences experience of art, and it is through the process of display that this happens thus,

[The exhibition should be]  understood not merely in terms of its ‘surface’ or design but as part of a complex of media in which all elements contribute consciously or unconsciously to the production of meaning (Richter 2008)

In assessing the characteristics of the auteur (Hoffman) versus editor, (Higgs) it is difficult to determine which approach is the most positive and supportive to the art and its audience. Hoffman’s approach can be interpreted as leaning towards a sort of curator-centrism, a manipulation of the meaning of works of art which could suggest that there is little faith displayed in the ability of the work to critique/teach and the artist’s vision. If enacted unaccordingly, in the end the auteur approach will limit the interpretations of the work and will alienate audiences, cutting away at a commonly held belief that art is for everybody. There is always room for experimentation and it is indeed necessary to engage with and understand contemporary art which is being produced today. But there needs to be a balance maintained where the overarching narrative or aims of the curator do not eclipse the work involved. In defence of the auteur, it is not enough to just arrange works of art loosely connected to an overarching concept and hope for the public to garner their understanding from this alone. While some spectators are more than capable of doing this, the curator should act as wingman to the artist in helping communicate meaning. Ultimately the goal of curation should be for the reinvention of our ways of seeing, to create exhibitions that enable people to be surprised and concerned with what they are viewing. The aim is to start dialogues and what Ralph Rugoff deems the most important component of the game, exhibitions that enable people to be

[Caught] off guard by what they’re seeing... [To] re-imagining the conceptual context in which art is encountered by viewers. [To invoke] strategies that create a psychological space for the critical first phase of our encounter with art works, which occurs on an emotional and experiential level.  (Rugoff, 1999)

Bibliography

·         Higgs, M.,(2006)  ‘In Conversation with Paul O’Neill’, in  NDP no.3 Available at <www.northdrivepress.com/interviews/ [accessed on 11 January 2012]

·         Hoffman, J. and Aranda, J (2008) ‘Art as Curating, Curating as Art’ in ART LIES issue 59 Fall http://www.artlies.org/index.php?issue=59&s=0 [accessed 12 January 2012

·         Hoffman, J. (ed) (2004) The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By an Artist. Frankfurt:: Revolver, Archiv für aktuelle Kunst ;New York :E-flux

·         Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge

·         Lind, M. and Schlieben, K (2002) Curating Per-Form. Reflections on the Concept of thePerformative http://www.kunstvereinmuenchen.de/?dir=03_ueberlegungen_considerations&strShowFile=en_performative_curating.kvm  [accessed 11 October 2011]

·          Liu. J., (2000) ‘Trouble in Paradise’ in Frieze Magazine Issue 51 March/April http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/trouble_in_paradise/ [accessed 12 January 2012]

·         Richter, D. (2008) Thirty - One Positions on Curating in On-Curating.org issue 1 http://www.on-curating.org/ [accessed 13 November 2011]

·         Rugoff, R. (1999) ‘Rules of the Game’ in Frieze Magazine, Issue 44 January/Febuary http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/rules_of_the_game/ [accessed on 12  January, 2012]

·         Sladen, M. (2001) ‘Protest and Survive’ in Frieze Magazine, Issue 57 March http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/protest_and_survive/   [accessed 13 January 2012]

·         Vidokle, A.,(2010) ‘Art Without Artists’ in e-flux  journal 16  May http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists/ [accessed  13 January 2012]

Urban Interventions

Urban Interventions is an Interdisciplinary module between NCAD,  Art in the Contemporary World Masters students and UCD 4th Year Architecture Students, undertaken in collaboration with Dublin City Council Public Art Programme and the Grafton Street Quarter Improvement Project. It culminates in a series of interventions around the Grafton Street area that are created by teams of MA ACW and 4th year architecture students. The majority of these will take place tomorrow (Thursday 3rd of May).

The focus is on the Grafton St. area of Dublin City centre and the students have been asked to consider this as their site of investigation and intervention. The term ‘Intervention’ here is used to indicate any temporary manifestation of creative work within a public space: taking the form of a sculptural project, a live performance event, a protest, a public reading, a presentation of research documents, or any number of other possible articulations of research in the context of the everyday urban environment.

Among the projects are Susan Connolly's Visible/Invisible: The Monument’s Day Off, which will involve wrapping the Molly Malone and Countess Markievicz statues in gold woven nylon and rope.Pause, Stop, Reflect by Matthew Nevin, Sean Lynch, Kristina Zsombor, Donal Crowe and Damian Milton, will cover bollards, bins and sections of paving with mirrored film. Donn Holohan, Avril Dowling, Jude Duffy, Edwin Jebb, Emmet McKenna, Gabriella Keisz (The Grafton Street Game) are installing a series of posters that encourage the public to engage in an exploration of different landmarks around the area. The La Senza Installation (Grainne Finn, Dawn Parke) involves projecting images related to Irish women’s labour movements on the windows of the former La Senza shop. Kathleen Kelly and Caoimhe Merrick’s project is called Grafton Street Memories and consists of spray painted text and business cards distributed around the street.

A final intervention, Orchestral Osmosis, will take place on Thursday of next week (10th May). It happens at the DIT School of Music on Clarendon Row at 12PM and involves amplification out on to the street of the sounds of rehearsals taking place within the building. The artists involved are Laura Smith and Niamh O' Doherty.

The Passionate Transitory

‘The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge… It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility needed for our journey. In this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.’

- John O’Donohue[1]

An excited curiosity and exploration of imaginative play runs through John O Donohue’s meditations on the imagination and its relationship to form in a work of art. This is a fervent, giddy intoxication with the malleability of everyday phenomena when they are filtered through the fecund landscape of the mind, the imagination, the half-glimpsed wide-eyed wonder of the artistic eye. Dublin artist Rory Morris (b.1981) is an artist who glimpses this invisible quality in the essential and constant materials of commonplace objects. He seems to scratch at an intriguing aesthetic, grappling towards a beauty hidden within objects usually viewed purely through the prism of their functional merits.

Currently in his final year art course at Whitehall College of Further Education in Dublin City, Morris was interested in art from an early age, finding satisfaction in fine pen and ink illustrations. Comic books were the motivation for what was often laborious and detailed work. Having started a career as a graphic designer, Morris withheld from applying to an Art college out of apprehension.  The loss of two family members fixed with a new engagement with the finite quality of life, led Morris to finally leave his job to pursue a career as a full-time artist. A self-styled explorer and reactor, Morris work seeks to retrieve and (re)present the aesthetic of the everyday, documenting and responding to transient, commonplace (and often perceived as inconsequential) materials. He does not work within one specific medium or specific genre; instead he remains open to the potentiality of a diverse ever-evolving practice. Currently his worked is based in a combination of mixed media and print, but he also works in paint and sculpture.

            What attracts him to print is the uncontrollable quality of the medium, those marks made by the plate and ink that cannot be anticipated. While there is an element of control, chance also has a significant role in producing the final form of the work. Within mixed media there is an engagement with those things that are self-descriptive of their function through the familiarity of their physical forms. So, feathers by their weight and texture are useful in implying softness; rocks, by their nature, hardness; and so, these qualities lend themselves well to graphic descriptions. His work finds inspiration in found objects; intrigued by their possible antiquity and unique composition, an idea for the canvas often finds its genesis in the arbitrary. As Morris says, ‘You can find aesthetics in a pile of rubbish, a crack in the pavement (…) or even in a mortgage receipt’. It is through these found objects that the artist’s personality and narrative surfaces. Having discovered a box of the aforementioned mortgage receipts in his parent’s attic, Morris hopes to use these found papers in a future work.  An old mortgage receipt, fragile in its physicality but valuable in its representation of toil and achievement, serve as reference points from which Morris draws upon the power and ubiquity of that which we find in everyday ephemera, while at the same time exploring and touching his own uniquely personal family histories. He points to the antiquity, memorial and physical aspects of the material, and explains that in using these old crumpled papers it presents a rawness and viscerality that no paint can imitate.

While he reassures me that the motives and ideas underlying all of his work stem from an organic place of memory and experience, the end result of his engagement with objects often ends up appearing like a conceptual or abstract meditation. His experiments with various materials often pair distinct and unlikely phenomena; he then documents their dialogue through photography, investigating the fluctuating tension and permutations through which the materials push against one another and evolve. The end results of such experiments are often unknown to Morris, but he is also strict with their completion if they deviate too far from his perceived end result. He is thus both controlled and lenient enough in the working process to allow for the unpredictably of the materials to work themselves into pattern.

 His ongoing series involving chairs is the best example of this process of contrast and control, the dialogue between the natural and the ready-made. Having frozen a black chair in a block of ice, Morris charts the disruption of the object, the violent snapping of the wood as a result of expansion and melting. He documents the corrosion of man-made functional objects by elemental forces beyond our control, an introduction of the elemental to the functional, capturing the unpredictable and mutating forms which emerge. In this particular piece of work, the crude form of the ice slowly gives way to a beautiful contrast of black, arching lines set against white billowing forms. The photographs display an accumulation of soft and hard, tough and momentarily unrecognisable forms, forms which are fragmenting, unravelling, splintering, erupting, disintegrating, wilting and fracturing around one another, a visual poem of mutability and elegant destruction.

One might ask, “Why chairs?” Morris explains, ‘I often substitute people, memories and feelings for objects.’ And like the uniqueness of an individual’s personality, the chosen material often dictates its own path to completion. Chairs, those ever present, intrinsically utilitarian items, are consummate human objects.  When chairs are visible they represent the presence of people, indicative of the way objects are imbued with meaning and history required through everyday use. The Colombian born artist Doris Salcedo works in a similar fashion, taking objects imbued with history and politicising it or using it to dismantle or reignite memories of a forgotten event. The friction between control and chance, between abstract and firm meanings, is a tension that Morris explores throughout the working process. The object belongs in a simplified plane, as the catalyst for where the journey begins and ends. Morris is intrigued by Chance Art and the intangibility of the works of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, whose art is susceptible to temporal change. Goldsworthy uses materials from nature such as twigs, leaves, and snow, through which the finished work is often absorbed back into that from which it came.

Common Interest

An element of ambiguity and the unanticipated lingers over the work and character of Morris’ objects and photographs. But there remains something perpetually inviting about the work. There is a salute to the melting away of time embedded in the photographs of the chairs whose dense matter eventually succumbs to the pressures of their icy grip. There is an ethereal quality to his work with mechanical cogs which have succumbed to some vapour-like, hazy orbit in space. The solidity of his chosen objects, chairs, cogs and wood, always seemingly dark and sharp edged, coupled with elemental energies, encourages the viewer to reconfigure their binary perceptions of the natural and man-made, hard and soft, light and dark. The everyday, concrete material is re-imagined as an abstract mausoleum of fragility when exposed to the various workings of the elements. The liveliness and space surrounding the familiar material become as important as the liveliness and space occupied within.  Our   journey starts with tangible objects and personal experiences which, taken into the care of the artist, travels between the space of transmutation and out the other side, into a realm of disfigured and eloquent elements. This process cannot detract from the gracefulness of a considered intervention in the dialogue between Morris’ carefully chosen materials. The care of craft and the detail afforded the framing and positioning of the piece is of the utmost importance to the artist. It is this dance between the material and the ephemeral, the controlled and the unpredictable, the predestined and the chance encounter, the mundane and the sublime, the unnoticed quotidian and the eternal unknown, which characterises life, art, imagination, creation, and the fascinating work of Rory Morris.

You can view Rory Morris’ work at the end of year exhibition in Aras Chluain Tarbh (GAA Club) Clontarf on June 22-24

Rory will be attending NCAD in the autumn of 2012

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[1] O’Donohue, J. The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature, (London: Transworld Ireland, 2010)

NCAD/UCD Architecture and Dublin City Council Collaboration

“Thinking is just advanced pattern matching. Human beings are memory-prediction machines.”
Jeff Hawkins


As part of my Masters, I have been involved in a collaboration with University College Dublin Architecture students and Dublin City Council in a proposal to stage an intervention in the Grafton Street Area.

The main focus of the project within which there are three other groups of students running concurrent events on a proposed day in the future (soon to be announced) is to get people to engage in the Grafton street area in an alternative fashion. Grafton street does not have to be viewed as a solely commercial area, rather the groups have proposed some very alternative approaches to engaging the physical/architectural/social civic space.

Without more precise knowledge, I will not try to explain what the other collaborators are up to but I will explain a little about our idea.
We have invented the Grafton Street Game.
For further Information on the theory underlying what we are challenging participants to engage in please check out the blog http://graftonstreetgame.blogspot.com

Method:
The treasure hunt:
The game Consists of 7 posters a clue written on each and introduced by a brief description of the rules there is also a number of stickers mimicking the first poster with its initial clue that acts as treasure. These stickers allow the participants to share their experience with others. The game firstly encourages people to experience Grafton street in detail to learn something of its history and current condition. Upon agreeing to the rules the gamers become complicit – they agree to explore Grafton street abiding by the rules. Upon finding the treasure they are presented with a means to expand the game to shift is dynamics or to let it end. They are now collaborators the fact that they now become authors of the game means that they must consider the games development as a whole. They must understand the game as a simulation and must consider neccesairly the games purpose. They must ask themsemslves the benefit of the games maintenance. It is a simulation...

Of course we want people to have fun as well, a sort of reclaiming the civic space of Grafton Street. We encourage people to engage in play in a space that is not necessarily designed physically and consciously as a space for festive activity

As soon as a date is announced for the projects to go ahead I will alert the blogosphere. (Cant believe I just used the term blogosphere)

April Showers

As you might be able to guess, these are some of my favourite photographs Ive taken involving rain and its aftermath

These two above and below were taken during a sun shower at Body and Soul festifal 2011. Best festival ever

The last four  were taken in one of my favourite places to take  photographs in Dublin. Being obsessed with urban landscape photography, this area opposite an alleyway on Cathal Brugha Street contains a really grimy scape but the colours and textures of the buildings never cease to excite my eye

The desire to remember: Collecting memory in the work of W. G. Sebald and Tacita Dean

 ‘Memory is similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.’

Alain de Botton 

The representation of individual and collective memory is a subject that has held my fascination for a number of years. The German professor Andreas Huyssen, in his book Twilight Memories, writes about contemporary culture’s obsession with cataloguing memory. He states that ‘[The] past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory.’(Huyssen, 1995, p.3) It is through increasing technological means that modern western societies articulate and maintain individual memories and collective histories. Photographical documentation is often used as an account of human memory, yet an anxiety exists in the relationship of photography to organic memory. Memory and history cannot be accurately reduced to a system of signifiers, partly due to the subjective nature of how we remember events and the influence of established collective agencies. As Roland Barthes says, photographs supplant rather than supplement: ‘The photograph [is] never in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes counter –memory’ (Barthes, 2000, p.91) With particular attention paid to this medium as a process of recollection, I seek to explore the ambiguities presented to individual and collective memory in the work of George Winifred Sebald and Tacita Dean. In exploring their articulation of memory, I want to draw attention to how both artists tease out and question the correlations and practices inherent in the retrieval, and ownership, of memory.

Western culture’s current relationship towards memory was born out of modernity. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs developed a sharp distinction between historical and autobiographical memory. The first is reached through written records and maintained through other types of record, such as photography and festive and commemoration activities where people gather to remember. A person does not directly remember events from a time before they were born and so the memories of past are maintained and controlled by social institutions. Autobiographical memories, on the other hand, are those memories that we have personally created. These memories are in danger of fading unless reinforced by those around us who have shared these past experiences; its relevance is rooted in others. Memories are thus sustained by collective social forces. (Coser, 1992, pp.23-34) Following on from this foundation, Andreas Huyssen  notes that while human memory might be an anthropological given, it is ‘closely tied (...) to the ways a culture constructs and lives its temporality, the forms memory will take are invariably contingent and subject to change’ (Huyssen, 1997, p.2). He sees contemporary culture’s obsession with memory as problematic. Generational memory is on the decline due to the increasing modernization and technological advancements which allow us to take memory for granted. The engagement and cataloguing of historical memory is constructed from and largely given over to reproductive technologies, film, video, photography, audio, while private memory has largely been incorporated into public spectacle. He is struck by the popularity of museums, monuments and memorials as aesthetic and historical expressions, as ways that our culture mark time within the present.

In relation to the work of W.G Sebald I want to explore ways in which memory is collected and catalogued. Sebald’s text The Rings of Saturn acts as a meditation on memory and trauma. The narrator, while on a pilgrimage around Suffolk, crosses time and space, collecting and retelling stories of bygone eras, some that dwell on the rhythmic nature of human death and imposed destruction. For Sebald, a German-born academic post 1945, the issue of collective national guilt and incomprehension regarding the realities of the Third Reich permeates a substantial quantity of his writing.  But I wish to focus on the ways in which he questions how we interpret memory and information, and the mediums they are presented in. Quite a number of Sebald’s novels are juxtaposed with photographs which strengthen or contrast the text’s narrative. These images invite us to consider the implications of particular ways of perceiving and remembering the world.  Themes of time, history, and memory permeate all of Sebald’s work, but I will only reference their inclusion in his celebrated novel The Rings of Saturn, which alludes to the repetitive nature of how memories are preserved and re-enacted.

On Dean’s part, her work seeks to investigate, connect and interpret memories of historical facts or circumstances while she remains at a safe distance. With particular attention to the way she accumulates memoirs of a specific action or time, I will address the series of works which reference the memory of disgraced Golden Globe competitor Donald Crowhurst. She illustrates that there is always an alternative way to remember an event and that details are often overlooked - in this instance, for example, we can choose to regard Crowhurst’s tale primarily as the personal tragedy of an inexperienced voyager lost at sea or as a duplicitous man who, in the face of mounting personal debts, chose to misrepresent his progress in the competition. Her approach to collecting information through film, text and photography is emblematic of our culture’s method of cataloguing and maintaining various overlapping systems of representation and history.

Both author and artist challenge a passive relationship to time and memory when signified through an attachment to photographs, museums, films, and catalogues as a means of recollection.

Sebald is equally intrigued by the sites where memories of memories are collected and packaged for consumption. Throughout the pilgrimage in Rings of Saturn our narrator continually visits museums, old buildings, and sites of remembrance such the Maritime museum, Somerleyton Hall and the memorial site of Waterloo, all which lead him to remember the ghosts of destruction past. The museum like Somerleyton Hall serves as a place where memory is gathered and categorised to the point where ‘one can never say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist.’ (Sebald, 2002, p. 36) Upon viewing the panoramic installation of the Battle of Waterloo, our journey man further comments, ‘[This] is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and we still do not know how it was.’(Sebald, 2002, p.125)  Photographic images in Sebald’s texts are a central feature of his study of the relations between memory and representation. The juxtaposition of the novel with numerous documentary-style photographs serves to tease out the reader’s assumptions regarding the reliability of mutually supportive media.

 Sebald had a clear understanding of the power and manipulative qualities of photography as documentation, noting that the ‘written word is not a true document after all [and] people let themselves be convinced by a photograph.’ (Sebald, 1997, p.106) There is something quite ambiguous about the nature of the photographs within The Rings of Saturn. Photographs from various origins are non-descript landscapes containing no real landmarks, people, or details, and we rarely seek confirmation that it is the true representation of the landscape. The ambiguity of these images refutes any attempt at authenticity. With other images, such as the painting of the Battle of Sole Bay, the narrator remarks how the piece ‘fails[s] to convey any true impression of how it must have been...’ adding to the belief that images fail to accurately portray the past. (Sebald, 2002, p.77) Though they fail to truthfully reveal the past, we confidently surrender to technology the task of remembering. The problem arises, then, how do we accurately represent history? We cannot. The actual is always in some way permeated by individual and collective imaginings retrospectively. Perhaps instead we must pay attention to the details and seek out the coincidences and connections between facts and inventions as Tacita Dean does. When speaking about place (but easily related to the process of memory) she says ‘[it] can only ever be personal...always connected to somewhere in our autobiographies- future and past. The description of the place will always reside in the detail’ (Lerm-Hayes 2007, p.420)

Sebald had a collection of shoeboxes filled with photographs and postcards to fuel his patchwork tapestry of the past. This obsessive collecting is manifested in the life and work of Dean also: accumulating and archiving has consistently been a system within her work. Her collections comprise elements of the ephemeral, whether the clover collection from her youth or the lost details and borrowed memories of a time and place. Her written style closely resembles Sebald’s text and photo assemblages and Sebald’s themes of history and memory also feature strongly in her film, text, and photographic work. While Sebald’s work gently queries the institutional means of storing memory and the authority of photographic evidence, Dean’s approach to memorial is presented on a smaller, more personal scale, stating ‘everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time’ (Newman 2003, p.1) Dean engaged in an experimental investigation to take on the tale of Donald Crowhurst’s disastrous voyage at sea. As part of a larger meditation on the sea as representing the time and space of the unconsciousness, she sought to dismantle and heal the cultural memory of Crowhurst held by the collective public as a man who cheated and lied when disclosing the coordinates positioning him as frontrunner in the Golden Globe boat race. ‘For many Donald Crowhurst is just a cheat who abused the sacred unwrittens of good sportsmanship but for some it is more complicated than this, and he is seen as much as a victim of the Golden Globe as the pursuer of it’ (Dean, 1997, p.19) Crowhurst, an inexperienced sailor in an untrustworthy trimaran ran into difficulties while at sea. A fear of failure and financial ruin led to the subsequent forgeries of his position. Trying to maintain logs of his actual position versus his forged co ordinates eventually led him to madness. The solitude of space and time at sea reduced reality and the present to an illusion, and he committed suicide by jumping overboard. The search that that the artist performs, the recovery of something lost, of a vanished boat, and ultimately the ghost of a lost sailor, can only be recovered in memory alone.

 The past is past. Its presence is ruined and is available to memory only on the understanding that the memory itself constantly collapses into an immemorial from which nothing returns, ever. The past is not present in the present as if it were ‘recalled’ in the sense of revived (Nancy, 2003, p1)

Using the commemorative functions of photography, film, and essays Dean was further inspired to produce a number of further works, including the photograph Teignmouth Electron 1999 , and the film works  Disappearance at Sea 1996 and Disappearance at Sea II. Deans does not so much suppose to illustrate a specific  historical memory but rather highlights the nature of time within the infinite space of consciousness (represented by the sea) where memory functions. The fate of Donald Crowhurst is an instance where an extended time spent without the distinguishing features of a landscape or the support of other individuals to locate ones temporality results in the loss of any coherent concept of chronological narrative and memory.

The wreak of Teignmouth Electron

Donald Crowhurst

Both Sebald and Dean play with the ideas of memory spread across time, an intricate texture of personal memories and collective history. Both artist and author employ the technological achievements of the twentieth century, film and photography, to map the various complexities of representation and memory. The media of photography and film provide an opportunity not only for what can be shown but also to give evidence of that which can no longer be seen. Sebald’s mundane landscapes and Dean’s lingering shots of a moored, rusting vessel penetrate the disappearance of the past, and a desire to recapture the true representation of past. Their artefacts are connected to the absence of any remembered or represented narrative within. Sebald’s purposeful contesting of image and text reminds us to question the production of these shared images and their evidential claims to supply accurate information. Huyssen reminds us that the way in which our culture thinks about time is far from natural, even though we may experience it as such (Huyssen, 2005, p.8). The plurality of perspectives provided via social media like Twitter and camera phones cannot contribute to a coherent narrative of say, the realities of the Arab Spring revolts. Such media can only serve to feed the expanding contemporary development of spectacle. The indeterminate features of the ways we gather and process memory is in danger of becoming increasingly mediated and abstract.  This progression leads to the erosion of subjective authentic experience. Sebald had an acute awareness of how memory predetermines how we engage with our present. In a newspaper article fittingly entitled The Last Word Sebald sums up the importance of our relationship to memory

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered - not from yesterday but from a long time ago. (Sebald, 2001, [82 lines])

Bibliography

·         Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucida, London: Vintage Books

·         Botton, A, (2001) The Art of Travel, New York: Pantheon

·         Coser, L, (ed), (1992) Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

·         Dean, T. (2003) Seven Books, Germany: Steidl Publishers.

·         Huyssen, A, (2005) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York: Routledge.

·         Jaggi, M , (2001) ‘The Last Word’ in, The Guardian,  London:Guardian News and Media Limited. Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.highereducation [accessed 30 January 2012]

·         Lerm-Hayes, C, (2007) ‘Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W. G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys, and Tacita Dean’ in, Patt, L (ed), (2007)  Searching for  Sebald, Los Angeles: The Institute for Cultural Inquiry

·         Nancy, J, (2003) ‘The Taciturn Eternal Return’ in Dean, T, (2003) Essays, Germany: Steidl Press

·         Newman, M, (2003) ‘Salvage’ in Dean, T, (2003) Essays Germany: Steidl Publishers

·         Scholz, C, (1997) ‘But the Written Word is Not a True Document’. A Conversation with W.G. Sebald on Literature and Photography in Patt, L (ed), (2007) Searching For Sebald, Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

·         Sebald, W.G, (2002) The Rings of Saturn, London: Vintage Books