Memory Fragments

Marita Bullock

Description

Taking as its starting point four contemporary visual artists whose work utilizes the conventions of museum display and collecting practices, Memory Fragments examines how these artists have reconfigured dominant representations of Australian history and identity, including viewpoints often marginalized by gender and race. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s reflections on history and time, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars working in the arts as well as modern and postmodern cultural studies.

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• General
• Engineering
• Technology
• General officer
• Sciences et techniques
• Power Resources

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841506739
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Memory Fragments
Memory Fragments
Visualising Difference in Australian History
Marita Bullock
First published in the UK in 2012 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Cover image: Donna Marcus, Sunroom, 2006, DETAIL, Corrigan
Collection, Image courtesy of the artist and Diane Tanzer Gallery
Copy-editor: Macmillan
Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-553-4
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Collecting Junk/Collecting Memory
Chapter 1: The Trash of History: The Timeliness of Benjamin s Dialectical Images
Chapter 2: Fossilising the Commodity: Ricky Swallow s Art of Crafting Time in Postmodern Culture
Chapter 3: China China : Autoethnography as Literal Translation in Ah Xian s Porcelain Forms
Chapter 4: Melancholy Debris: Black Humour and Colonial Memory in Work by Julie Gough
Chapter 5: Australian Modernity: The Metaphorics of Mining in Donna Marcus Compositions
After-Images: Visualising Difference
Works Cited
Acknowledgements
M any thanks to those who have helped me develop this book. Thanks to Brigitta Olubas and Elizabeth McMahon for their insightful and extensive feedback in the early stages of this project. Thanks to Therese Davis, Nicole Moore and Ian Buchanan for their ideas and criticisms. Thanks to Nils Crompton and Emily Bullock for their suggestions and many thanks to Joan-Maree Hargreaves for her assistance and unflagging support. Thanks to the artists - Donna Marcus, Julie Gough, Ah Xian and Ricky Swallow for their generosity in allowing me to reproduce images of their works. Thanks also to the galleries who represent them: Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, Stuart Shave/ Modern Art, London, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington (Ricky Swallow); Bett Gallery, Hobart, Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, and Turner Galleries, Perth (Julie Gough) and Diane Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne (Donna Marcus). Above all else, thanks to dear friends and family for their many forms of understanding.
Earlier drafts of some book chapters appeared differently and in truncated versions in various journals. Full reference details are supplied in the Works Cited list.
Introduction: Collecting Junk/Collecting Memory
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
M emory Fragments examines a group of contemporary Australian artists who visualise difference in Australian history and identity. It investigates a series of works by four artists who have teased open a diverse range of unresolved memories within Australia s collective consciousness via their collections of discarded objects. The book contends that these artists illuminate the forgotten recesses within Australian history and memory by collecting and framing material forms that fall outside of the parameters of conventional history. It regards derelict objects, general waste, redundant forms and obsolete commodities as vital clues for renewing our understanding of the past. This project therefore offers a supplement to existing historical accounts of Australia s past that often narrate one aspect of Australia s past in exhaustive detail. It offers a reminder of the presence of those fragments that exceed historical accounts based around singularity, cohesion and narrative closure, aiming to be deconstructive in its approach to history and narrative rather than constructive. The artists fragments are viewed as disturbing to official versions of Australian history and nationhood, prompting an open-ended view of Australia s past and encouraging us to see history in new ways.
The artists appropriation of memory fragments participates within the bourgeoning interest in cultural memory that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, and during the 1990s most intensely. 1 Historians, cultural theorists, literary critics, social scientists, artists and writers turned to the topic of memory with such vigour during the 1990s that the era became identified with mnemonic obsession. 2 Jacques Derrida, for example, describes the widespread archive fever at the end of the millennium in his book of the same title (1996). Andreas Huyssen s Twilight Memories also traces the widespread memory boom in culture since the late 1980s, noting the new approach to remembering amongst literary critics and social scientists, exceeding conventional historicism s limitations (1995). 3 Despite the contention over the critical import of this recent memory boom (discussed later on), the interest in memory (and forgetting) is often regarded as a liberating shift away from historicism s closure, its purported objectivity and neutrality and its reliance upon concepts of progress and linearity. This shift is often theorised as a result of post-structuralism s thoroughgoing deconstruction of official or so-called objective histories and their professional/academic sites: the written record, the archive and the museum. 4
Cultural memory studies also facilitated a wider range of topics within its axes than traditional historicisms. Personal and oral recollections, amateur museums, private collections, memorials, rituals, commemorative ceremonies, tourism, material cultures and various aspects of popular culture (including television, music and film) were just some of the phenomena considered as mnemonic fodder within new studies of cultural memory. This broader approach to the representation of the past was understood as an overtly politicised engagement with the representation of history s alterity, its omissions and its numerous forgettings. It also offered a more thoroughgoing awareness of memory as a collective or public matter of national and cultural significance, rather than a personal or subjective matter. 5
These politicised approaches to cultural memory proliferated in diverse forms around the globe after the Second World War, 6 most notably in France, Britain, Israel, Germany, Italy, the former Soviet Union and the United States. Australia was slower to register the impact of these memory studies. 7 Such sustained examinations of cultural memory only reached their full potential in Australia during the 1990s, when scholars began to address the issue of representing Australia s Bicentennial celebrations of European settlement (1988). This event sparked intense debate about how history should be represented in the public sphere, particularly in relation to Australia s colonial history and its lasting impact on Indigenous people. 8 These debates were continued into the 1990s, as the politics of remembrance were debated with specific reference to Australia s widespread frontier violence known as the Black Wars and addressed under the rubric of the so-called History Wars. 9 These debates about the figuration of history were also articulated in relation to the Stolen Generations, which involved ways of representing the systematic removal of Indigenous children from their homes between the 1930s and 1970s in an attempt to assimilate them into white Australia. 10 Prior to these debates, the commemoration of the First World War, the Second World War and the Vietnam War were also closely related to vexed debates about Australia s national identity. 11
The title and focus of this book - Memory Fragments - contributes to this bourgeoning interest in cultural memory in Australian and international art and critical theory. It examines cultural memory beyond official narratives, focusing specifically on the way memory is mediated in and through objects that have been collected and composed by four contemporary Australian artists from the 1990s - Ricky Swallow, Ah Xian, Julie Gough and Donna Marcus. Each of the artists collects material fragments obscured from the official historical record, thus working towards a broader concept of Australian history and remembrance. They resuscitate the kitsch, obsolete, outmoded fragments and detritus dismissed as the trash of history - the objects discarded from official narratives about the past. Memory Fragments therefore contributes to the contemporary interest in cultural memory as a reconfiguration of history proper. It investigates some of the sites neglected from Australian history, whilst also examining how redundant objects question the very methodological basis of history. The project therefore appropriates fragmentation in both its literal and metaphorical dimensions. It not only examines how the fragment metaphorically prises open the narrative closure of conventional historical methodology, but it also focuses on the literal and tangible aspects of memory fragments. It tracks the way the literal presence of the fragment also plays a role in disturbing dominant historical narratives.
The memory fragments under examination are the objects that have been rendered Other to official historical discourse because they are too personal, too everyday, too familial or too ephemeral. Most of these discarded objects herald from forgotten or marginalised social, cultural and geographical sites from within Australia, including objects from domestic spaces (household objects, appliances, clothes, decorations and toys etc.), redundant commodity cultures (outdated technologies and fetishes), unfashionable forms of popular culture (songs, jokes, mass-marketed entertainments, films, television, books) and marginalised locations (op-shops in Tasmania and Queensland). The specific items collected by