Contested Memory by Michaela Crimmin

2014

It is through returning to past histories that pulls the past into the present
and begins a new conversation.

In looking at the work produced for Sites of Collective Memory, Jimmie
Durhams http://www.sprovieri.com/artists/jimmie-durham/biography)
Humanity is not a completed project
(http://www.studiolucderycke.be/projects/view/311), produced in 2006, came
immediately to mind. Employing the simplest of means, the words hand
written for an exhibition poster and with a hand-drawn barcode beneath
them, the artist comments on a past that begs a better future. Confronting
and rethinking the complexity of the contexts and issues of former events is
at the heart of work by Gustav Metzger, Willie Doherty, Rabih Mrou, Steve
McQueen, Emily Jacir and Krzystozof Wodicsko among so many artists.
Joined now by this new work, there is an extraordinary and steadily growing
canon of art that is, as Durham says of his own approach, primarily
investigative in intent. Artists addressing the unfinished business of how
histories are formed, distorted, retold, amended, disturbed, and constantly
re-presented afresh.

2014, marked by the swathe of World War 1 commemorative events and
projects, proceeds against the background of the constant drumbeat of
current wars, from the Central African Republic to the battles in Syria and
Iraq; the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict; the situation in Egypt,
Afghanistan and Palestine, each of which could tip in any direction; the
killings and persecution in South Sudan, Waziristan and Ukraine. It is
therefore not surprising that the subject of collective memory should be
infused by the artists in Sites of Collective Memory with such a significant
focus on conflict, and a refusal to let certain events and injustices be
airbrushed from history or told from a hegemonic perspective. In the
presentation of new commentaries on the humanity and the inhumanity that
inevitably feature in the responses to a traumatic event, or the treatment of a
marginalised culture, each artist presents fresh takes on the subject of
remembrance, using the extraordinary richness not only of film, but the reach
that technology enables.

Historically events, including conflicts, have been memorialised in bronze or
stone, such as Maya Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington
(http://www.vvmf.org/memorial) and Charles Sargeant Jaggers Royal
Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner
(http://www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/warmonuments/5.html). Given that
memory is almost always contested, these are exceedingly fine and
incredibly well known examples of remembrance that eschew a single
viewpoint, a hero or a victory, but instead portray conflict as imbued with
something of the lost, rather than the gained or trumpeted over. There is no
sentimentality in the work, and most importantly there is no preaching.
Remember the famous sentence of Harold Pinters, written in praise of
Samuel Beckett: I dont want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways
out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. Such is the quality
of the best of art, that it ducks the easy response, leaving moralising and
answers to others. The films in Sites of Collective Memory present no finite
solutions. Yet they are moving, revealing, tantalising, and an open-ended
prompt for discussion, with the ambiguity that despots, bigots and the
people who see the world in black and white find so profoundly irritating.

It is through returning to past histories the use of the atom bomb, the
effects of a terrorist attack, slavery, the designation of a group of people as
inferior to ourselves that pulls the past into the present and begins a new
conversation. So it is that when Willie Doherty
(http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/doherty/home.php), who has lived in
Derry for his entire life, produces work about the Troubles, or Larissa
Sansour (http://www.larissasansour.com) as a Palestinian, references the
Settlements, there is a new perspective. Dohertys empty roads and bridges
trigger an unsettling confusion of emotion. He wrong foots a viewers
preconceptions and undermines any lazy stereotyping. Sansours satirical
imaginings of the Occupied State of Palestine reduced to a single building in
her film Nation Estate, almost unawares has us reconsidering the injustice of
their situation, yet without sinking into a maudlin helplessness.

Even with John Bergers caution in his seminal book Ways of Seeing, the
heavy cloud of anesthesia can too easily be enveloping in the daily
confrontation of the countless images of ruins, crying children, limbless
bodies, victims the spectacle of conflict and persecution fed through by
the media. Art has the capacity to closes the gap between these so-remote
individuals and places, and more secure lives led. It is a tough call to
encourage people to ponder the personal and collective devastation wrought
by the bomb on Hiroshima; or the genocide of the Roma of Southern Poland
and their ongoing maltreatment; or the trauma of the 7/7 London bombings.
Yet art is an enticement and in these four films you suddenly realise you have
been pulled into other worlds and other lives, and that although the events
portrayed are appalling, their impact on the individuals portrayed
devastating, yet there is so much that is unexpectedly positive. Of course
Project Humanity will never be completed. There is no chance that Jimmie
Durham and John Bergers wisdom will become redundant. And yet art never
leaves you wallowing. There is the sheer pleasure of possibility.

Author

Michaela Crimmin is co-director of Culture+Conflict; a tutor and research
associate at the Royal College of Art; and an independent curator.

http://www.cultureandconflict.org.uk/about


Links

Sites of Collective Memory -
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/group_commissions/sites_o
f_collective_memory


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