Memory Art in the Contemporary World

Introduction

The world-wide memory boom of the 1990s centered on traumatic pasts was accompanied by a new understanding of the way memory works.¹ No longer a safe archival container of the past, as it had often been idealized, memory was now understood as fluid, riddled with forgetting, subject to an increasing porosity between past and present. The emerging field of memory studies began to focus on how memory and forgetting are indissolubly linked to each other, how memory is but another form of forgetting, and forgetting a form of hidden, evaded or ignored memory. Apart from the notorious unreliability of individual memory, it was recognized that in light of changing present-day realities, even collective pasts would alter their complexion over time. Social changes in the present put pressure on the ways in which various pasts are coded, reinterpreted and preserved in order to serve different political outcomes. Rather than being fixed in time and space, some pasts might shrink, while others would expand and proliferate in the course of time.

Any understanding of the past now had to be seen as subject to narrative and visual strategies of representation. Rather than safeguarding some stable past, memory became a site of political battles, conflictual memories replacing what used to be vaguely called collective memory. Given differing temporal layerings, memory struggles in one country learned from strategies used in another where debates were already more advanced. Thus Truth Commissions in South Africa and Chile took cues from Argentina, which in turn had learned from Germany’s belated Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working through the past). Explicitly or not, the Holocaust, as the most researched and publicly discussed case of genocide, hovered in the background of all these memory debates.

The rise of memory art world-wide must be understood within this context. At stake was never only the historical past, but rather a living memory in the present that would prevent such political and racial violence in the future. Even if this hope has been disappointed time and again since the 1990s, it neither renders progressive memory politics useless nor their aesthetic expression pointless. This study explores how artistic practices in the visual arts and their supporting institutions helped generate critical insight and change perceptions of the past in public memory debates.² Beside artworks dealing with political violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide, there are memorials, monuments and museums problematizing social memories, all of which must be considered in an analysis of recent memory art and its political effects. Taken together, they have created a new venue for political art today. Much of this work was first generated around 20th-century catastrophes, primarily the Holocaust, with a focus on the limits of representation, but it soon spread to other historical events, where it raised complex issues of comparability and memory competitions.³

The new memory art emerged as part of an unprecedented concern with memory in the public sphere of a consumer culture involving far more than historical trauma. Slowly but surely, it spread across the world, resulting in the building of new museums, monuments and memorials, and affecting cultural production in many media at large. Retro, always at risk of nostalgia, became a key word in entertainment, fashions and architecture, replacing an earlier unconditional celebration of the new. In the decades after the 1990s, the internet and social media radically challenged traditional notions of temporality, experienced as linear sequence and based on the idea of progress. New forms of temporal and spatial perception emerged, transforming the status of the past in cultures of the present. As ever-more cultural materials from various pasts were sucked into a digital present by the force of algorithms and new media, the boundaries between past, present and future became increasingly porous. Accompanying the memory boom in the 1990s, the complaint took hold that contemporary consumer and media culture was simultaneously predicated on forgetting, fostering historical amnesia and political apathy. The dialectic of memory and forgetting took center stage. Obsessions with the past sit side by side with an increasingly flat present of the status quo – the great paradox of contemporary culture. Resistance to memory is ingrained in the structures of commodity culture, the internet and social media. Any Nietzschean celebration of forgetting is thus superfluous, if not insidious, at a time haunted by historical amnesia and a widespread illiteracy in matters of temporality and history. The abuse of memory by bad actors for political mythmaking must be confronted by more memory, not by forgetting.

Artists have used these confusions of temporality to create works that layer presences and absences, pasts and presents, the virtual and the real in subtle superimpositions and dissolves that require complex palimpsestic readings. Such aesthetic work, weaving a web of memories in the present with an opening to alternative futures, stands against an ever-growing tendency: the destruction of the human consciousness of being in time by the collective historical amnesia pervading the public spheres of our globalizing world.

Memory art is a vast field encompassing many different practices.⁴ Rather than trying to write a survey, including memory art from the countries of the Northern Transatlantic and the post-Soviet world, I focus on a small group of compelling artists from India, South Africa and Latin America whose work I have followed since the mid-1990s. The argument in this book proceeds by way of a series of constellations of artworks from the Global South, which illuminate each other across different political and historical contexts. It thus differs from a monographic approach that discusses an individual artist’s developments, guided by chronology and a conceptual frame.⁵ It also cuts against any nationalist focus that would lay claim to some authentically unique national legacies. The dialogue of memory works that emerges in these pages reveals aesthetic and political affinities as these artists negotiate their respective nations’ traumatic experiences in relation to a transnational context. Key aspects of memory art are distilled in the aesthetic forms and media that these artists have chosen in order to inscribe their localized memory clusters into a global concern with human rights violations and political violence. The South-to-South axis of these juxtapositions is crossed by a North-to-South axis manifest in the ways these artists have drawn on the archive of Northern modernisms and postmodernisms, appropriating and counter-appropriating aesthetic techniques and rearticulating them from the perspective of the postcolony.

The range of their experiments reaches beyond national borders and limited time frames as part of the transnational dialogue on memory politics that emerged after the end of the Cold War. When the utopian energies of the 20th century – communism, fascism, modernization – had dimmed and increasingly revealed their horrendous cost, the anticipation of brighter futures was replaced by an accounting for the past as warning to the future. The slogan NEVER AGAIN emerged after the Holocaust, but it could mean different things in different parts of the world. In the Global South, memory politics castigated not only state violence, but it also stood against the frequent Western support of autocratic regimes and their embrace of neoliberalism.⁶ Memory’s political contexts differed significantly: the end of military dictatorships in Latin America, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the resurging ethnic and religious violence in India, a legacy of the Partition. Increasingly, palimpsestic memory clusters emerged as societies trying to cope with their violent pasts learned from each other about truth commissions and trials, accountability and reconciliation. No wonder that artworks emerging from these different, yet comparable conditions reveal astonishing affinities that become visible in this book’s constellations.

I focus on memory art from the Global South in light of the fact that the Southern hemisphere has seen dozens of wars, murderous civil conflicts, regimes of state terror and apartheid during the decades of the Cold War and decolonization. While the US and France waged war in Southeast Asia, the French in North Africa, and Portugal in Angola and Mozambique, on its own territory the West enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace and the benefits of the post-World War II welfare state. In many cases, the violence is still much closer to home in the Global South today than it has ever been for most post-war European or North American citizens. This becomes clear as one looks at the multiple truth commissions in Latin America, Africa and South Asia, all of which are trying to find ways to remember and adjudicate violent pasts. While the political effectiveness of memory art is often put in doubt, it seems clear that it has more urgency in the Global South than it does in most Western societies. To be sure, with the renewed prominence of debates about slavery in the United States and colonialism in Europe, we have entered another stage of the memory debates. The Northern recognition of colonial violence marks another kind of choc en retour (backlash) than the one Aimé Césaire had in mind when he interpreted Nazism as the imposition of colonial practice on Europe itself. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project in the New York Times about the foundational nature of slavery for US history is as salient in this context as the recently contested debate about the relationship of the Holocaust to colonialism in Germany, or the European discussions of looted art. In the United States, the renewed debate about slavery is accompanied by a vibrant practice of African American memory art, for example in the work of Kara Walker or Mark Bradford. While this is clearly in tune with previous debates of political memory, it represents a radical expansion of the temporal and spatial frames of memory debates into a much deeper past, questioning the very foundations of Western civilization, its universalism, liberalism and democratic practices.

All the works analyzed in this book guard a certain autonomy and compel aesthetic experiences that transcend merely private consumption or immediate and transparent public address. Their politics are not those of an activist art that is geared to direct intervention in the street, on the stage or in the public sphere at large.⁷ These works have another temporality. They are activist, even avant-gardist, in a different sense as ‘acts of memory’, a term Doris Salcedo has used to describe her projects.⁸ Rather than locking us into a past, acts of memory are of the present with an eye to the future. The artists discussed here no longer see their internationalism guaranteed by moving to Paris, New York or Berlin. It is significant that their work first became known beyond their places of origin via an evolving network of new biennales in the non-Western world, such as those of Havana, Istanbul and Johannesburg. Though they have become successful on the Western art market itself, their studios remain in their home countries and their work is grounded there – in Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Bogotá, Delhi, Johannesburg. Their goal is not to assimilate to the metropolis, but to remain local and differentiated without becoming ‘national’ in a political identitarian sense. By focusing on difficult and often repressed memories in their national contexts, their work fundamentally points to the failures rather than the successes of memory, but it is guided by the hope of mobilizing historical memory through affect and aesthetic experience to help us think about alternative futures. Their aesthetic is no longer wedded to radical notions of the unrepresentability of trauma, but still mindful of the thresholds of the sayable and the unsayable in representation.⁹ The dual commitment to memories critical of national pasts and to a transnational memory politics is deeply inscribed in all of their works.

Memory art is in sync with the multidirectional and palimpsestic nature of memory in our world. In its movement beyond artistic and geographic borders, it is itself mindful of the disappearance and reappearance of borders and walls in an ever more connected world.¹⁰ The works discussed ultimately refer the viewer to a postcolonial perspective on both Western and non-Western legacies. Creative engagement with aesthetic practices in the countries of the Northern Transatlantic, far from pointing to merely derivative imitation, yield an oppositional stance vis-à-vis the confining forces of respective local traditions deemed authentic. The critical appropriation of Northern artistic practices in the memory art of the Global South should thus not be seen as a break with modernism, but as its radical transformation in the context of contemporary memory and human rights politics. This development could build on the fact that various politically inflected modernisms had already blended with aesthetic traditions specific to postcolonial societies in Latin America, South Africa and India.

The temporal dimension of the contemporary in memory art is not just the flat present without historical depth, the nightmare of an eternal consumerist now, as it is in much of the fare traded on the Western art markets. It is rather a contemporaneity seen and experienced in the conjuncture of two memory trajectories: that of creatively appropriated and transfigured elements of Northern art movements (expressionism, Soviet and Weimar avant-gardism, minimalism, installation art) and that of painful national and local memories of colonial oppression and postcolonial state terror and violence. Far from reducing art to the representation of past events, this memory-oriented work, whether consciously intended or not, is challenging its audiences to develop transnational solidarity and an imagination of alternative futures. Fully aware of its limited political effects, it is avant-gardist without the historical avant-garde’s dream about changing the world through art, a dream that has lost the anticipatory power it had in the 1920s. But it does feed into national and transnational struggles for human rights in the face of a rising tide of 21st-century fascisms facilitated by finance capitalism’s neo-liberal policies of dispossession and its ruinous effects on social cohesion. It operates with a notion of aesthetic autonomy different from that attacked by the historical avant-garde and by postmodernism. The autonomy of the artwork, indispensable to distinguish art from non-art, is now seen as always dialectical, embedded in processes of affective and cognitive exchange between the work and its spectators. This is what gives new meaning to a key argument in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970), a work situated at the cusp of classical Western modernism and what came after.

My readings of individual works are guided by the conviction that historical political content and aesthetic form are constitutively linked