The nightmare of having little or no memory is told in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, released in 2000. The severely amnesic main character has messages tattooed into his own flesh in order to conserve basic clues about himself and his history and he has to record even the most recent events by Polaroid if he is to retain them. Apart from providing the pretext for an effective thriller, the extremes of amnesia represented in the film underscore the fact that memory is one of the most vital of our faculties, the apparatus that allows for recognition (re-cognition) without which the powers of cognition itself remain transient and unframed. However, memory is never just a straightforward process of recording lest we forget and, even in the best equipped of minds, it can be a slippery mechanism. It can be both elusive and intrusive and we can rarely be completely sure of its fidelity to the events or facts that it recalls. Given such mutability, it is not so much the reliability or fallibility of memory that is at stake today but the way that memory is harnessed and deployed in the negotiations of life, from the ‘little’ moments and events of the private and the everyday to those ‘grander’ moments and events of formalised and public occasions. The claims that are made and the stories that are told in the name of memory can alter people’s understanding of the world and, of course, alter the ways in which they act in or upon that world. With all of this in mind, I want to address the ways in which memory is valued and used today by examining it as it is deployed and represented in the context of contemporary art. What is also worth bearing in mind is that contemporary art has harnessed memory in such a wide variety of

ways that it can readily be taken as representative of the range of attitudes towards and uses of memory in the culture as a whole. My claim is that such an exploration will contribute to a far more general understanding of both contemporary art and contemporary memory.

A change in attitude towards memory and its importance began to take hold in the seventeenth century, when, for instance, British Empiricist philosophers laid stress not so much on memory as a vehicle of knowledge but as a type or form of knowledge rooted in experience.

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Even so, memory was still often characterised in visual terms, with philosophers such as John Locke claiming that the knowledge that is recalled is frequently reproduced through images or sense impressions. Because of this emphasis on imaging or the formation of impressions, memory became closely related to the imagination. Two things emerge from this shift in thinking about memory that are significant for the understanding of memory today. The first is that the veracity of memory began to be questioned by some of Locke’s contemporaries on the grounds that images and sense impressions are exactly that, never the real thing, making it difficult to distinguish memory images from those produced by the imagination. The second is that memory began to be actively co-opted as an agent for the imagination – the opposite of its traditional function as a means of accurate recall.5 This use of memory for more fanciful purposes is evident, as Mary Warnock has amply demonstrated, in late eighteenth early nineteenth-century Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, who frequently invoked memory as a means of access to the innocence of childhood and a means of access to the child’s more authentic view of and participation in the world (Nature).6 The legacy of this understanding of memory as both a form of knowledge and an agent of the imagination is to be found early in the twentieth century in the work of Proust, who has become famously associated with memory through his extensive seven- volume novel In Search of Lost Time (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 1908–1922). In his quest for authentic personal knowledge, Proust, like Wordsworth and Coleridge before him, treated memory as something that has an emotional rather than an intellectually organised base – as an important constituent of a person’s inner self.7 Moreover, Proust was to recognise and comment on the important role that memory has as a creative power in bridging the gap between past and present in a way that connects personal truths to a wider audience or readership.8 In developing this relationship between private understanding and its public expression, Proust’s deployment of memory in literature is well in advance of and perhaps fundamental to many of the practices of contemporary artists.

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This rejection of traditional mimetic forms by Symbolists such as Paul Gauguin or proto-Expressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh in the late nineteenth century opened up the floodgates to the plurality of approaches developed by the early twentieth- century avant-gardes, and most certainly paved the way for the plurality of practices that characterise contemporary art and that make much of it conducive to the evocation of involuntary memory. As will be seen, most of the works discussed in this book are not literal renderings of memory but are often allusive and suggestive of the past, tapping into our reservoir of emotions as much as into our store of cognitive knowledge. The way that memory is valued, then, has shifted enormously from the idea of it being a storehouse of data which, given the right techniques, is recoverable in an ordered manner to the notion that it is a key to our emotional understanding of ourselves and the world. The present superfluousness of the old techniques of the art of memory is due in part to the existence of some vastly sophisticated systems that are literally artificial and exist outside the mind itself.

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Arguing along these lines, Andreas Huyssen, for example, clearly points to a relationship Between the reordering of the notion of memory and the breakdown in the coherency of modernism’s utopian narratives (the idea of the redemptive powers of technology, for example was severely tested by the carnage of the two world wars of the last century). Further to this, Huyssen argues that our current obsession with memory derives from a crisis in the belief in a rational structure of temporality, signalled in the early twentieth century in the works of Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin (who represent an underside to the universalising tendencies of modernism, prefiguring postmodernism).16

In a nutshell, the subjective, or even the fictionalised, aspects of memory now seem to take precedence over trained and disciplined memory and its equivalent in history in the negotiations of the world. This is not to say that memory is no longer a vital agent of knowledge, without which our experience of the world would be ever transient and ever instantaneous; it is simply to say that the contingency of the knowledge that is held by memory is now widely understood, and that this has occasioned changes in its status and in the roles that it is given as a tool for understanding and navigating the world. The fact that memory is as vital as ever for knowledge of the self and for knowledge of the world is fundamental to the assertions I want to make concerning art and memory, in particular that art has become one of the most important agencies for the sort of ‘memory-work’ that is required by contemporary life and culture.14 This returns to the key question of the ways in which memory is both necessary to and deployed in contemporary culture. Here, it is opportune to note that an increased preoccupation with memory in Western culture has already been signalled by a number of contemporary theorists, resulting in a growing body of scholarly works that have addressed the shifting significance of memory. In a move that recalls the shift towards subjective memory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries described above, this newer theoretical perspective has tended to explain the current understanding of and preoccupation with memory as a consequence of the shift from the more objectifying and universalising impulse of modernism to the more subjective, relativist ethos of postmodernism.