MEMORY
FARR, IAN
Memory is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
This anthology investigates the turn in art not only towards archives and histories, the relics of modernities past, but toward the phenomena, in themselves, of haunting and the activation of memory. It looks at a wide array of artistic relationships to memory association, repetition and reappearance, as well as forms of active forgetting. Its discussions encompass artworks from the late 1940s onward, ranging from reperformances such as Marina Abramovics Seven Easy Pieces (embodied resurrections of decades-removed performance pieces by her contemporaries) to the inanimate trace of memory Robert Morris assigns to his free-form felt pieces, which forget in their present configurations their previous slides and falls.
Contextualizing memorys role in visual theory and aesthetic politics from Marcel Prousts optics to Bernard Stieglers analysis of memorys industrialization this collection also surveys the diversity of situations and registers in which contemporary artists explore memory. Art that engages with memory embodied in material and spatial conditions is examined beside works that reflect upon memorys effects through time, and yet others that enlist the agency of remembrance or forgetting to work through aspects of the numerous pasts by which the present is always haunted.
