ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS: Creating Memories in Early Modern and Modern Art and Literature (original) (raw)
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Creating Memories in Early Modern and Modern Art and Literature
Culture of remembrance is one of the central matters of our times, characterized by a wide range of memory-related phenomena, such as construction of artificial memories, mass media and production of mass memories or destruction of public memorials. Besides their obvious social and political importance, memories also pertain to the most intimate spheres of our individual lives and identities.
Creating_Memories_in_Early_Modern_and_Mo.pdf
Culture of remembrance is one of the central matters of our times, characterized by a wide range of memory-related phenomena, such as construction of artificial memories, mass media and production of mass memories or destruction of public memorials. Besides their obvious social and political importance, memories also pertain to the most intimate spheres of our individual lives and identities.
The Shapes of Memory. Selected Aspects of Contemporary Art
The Shapes of Memory. Selected Aspects of Contemporary Art , 2019
Eleonora Jedlińska, The Shapes of Memory. Selected Aspects of Contemporary Art, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego 2019. The Shapes of Memory. Selected Aspects of Contemporary Art consists of fourteen essays devoted to questions addressed in the art of selected artists hailing from Poland and other countries. The works discussed in the book, which have been chosen from the extensive oeuvres of the artists it presents, relate to the question of preserving, in memory, events of fundamental significance to anyone endeavouring to face up to the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The artistic attitudes and works of art considered here are an expression of a desire to understand and, perhaps, a warning to future generations in order to avoid a repetition of a tragedy which has forever cast a shadow over the present and the future. The accomplishments of the group of artists discussed in the book are linked by a common motif; they point to the significance of the role played by memory in the process of commemorating and adopting a stance toward that most tragic experience of modern history which was the horror of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. The fourteen essays were written over the course of recent years and published in dispersed and various ways, appearing in scholarly journals and post-conference publications and given as papers at Polish and international congresses. Together, they form a cohesive and coherent narrative and they constitute a consistent endeavour to encapsulate and analyse the artists' individual, in a sense 'reclusive', facing up to the extreme experience of the Holocaust and the memory bound up with it. One aspect of their work is presented here, namely, the question of remembrance and commemoration, the feeling of sorrow and pain and the sense of the constant instability, the ambiguity of the world's understanding in respect of a problem crucial to contemporary art; an ethical attitude toward the Holocaust; a problem in which every artist seeking allusions to the human condition in today's reality is entangled. Jacques le Goff wrote: The Greeks of the archaic age made Memory a goddess-Mnemosyne. She is the mother of the nine muses, whom she has [sic] conceived in the course of nine nights spent with Zeus. She reminds
Introduction: Early Modern Memory Cultures
A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
The early modern period both displayed clear elements of continuity with the classical and medieval tradition in theories and social practices of remembering and forgetting, and witnessed the tracing of new paths. It also marked a zenith: by the end of the seventeenth century the arts of memory appeared outmoded. While the humanist passion for Antiquity framed learned attitudes towards the past, memory practices performed numerous social roles: from the political realm, where the ancient practice of the erasing of the memory of adversaries was renewed; to the religious sphere, where the breaking up of Western Christianity into different Churches also implied diverging memory practices, for instance in the commemoration of the dead. In a period characterized by an increasing activity of autobiographical writing, the transmission of memory could exploit a variety of media, from oral to written (at the time of the printing revolution), to images and ritual practices.
MEMORY is a psychological faculty and an intellectual power that found its expression in the foundational and oft-repeated phrase of the Eucharistic celebration heard by all believers: " do this in remembrance of me ". Memory is projected onto ritual commemorations of the dead, funeral processions, anniversaries, liturgical celebrations and concerns all of the deceased, from the humblest to those who hold eminent institutional, religious or administrative positions, and, of course, the " special dead", namely, the saints. It is not restricted to commemorating the deceased, whose presence is invoked by naming them in obituaries and in the objects associated with them. The latter were movable (liturgical vessels, manuscripts, ritual vestments, portable altars, trophies, objects associated with reliquaries and artistic patrons) or the fixed furnishings of buildings (reredoses, mural paintings, stained-glass windows, heraldic sculpture and, in particular, epigraphs and funerary monuments). By extension, the term memory was used in reference to the buildings or altars (e. g. cella memoriae) that sheltered these objects of such high sacred value. MEMORY is at the heart of Augustinian epistemology, which believed that human reason is nourished by intelligence, love, and memory. In the secular domain, memory played a central role in underpinning laws and institutions whose legitimacy depended on established customs. To establish the legal foundation of the present and future, lawmakers had to express the past and the certainty of the past. THIS COLLOQUIUM intends to analyze social memory as the process that enables society to renew and reform its understanding of the past so that it can be incorporated into the present, thus establishing a historical analogy in the narrative of the passing of time. The social memory includes liturgical memory, historiography, genealogy, oral tradition and other forms of cultural production and reproduction. Therefore, the colloquium's aim in particular is to revisit the concept of cathedral memory, which includes all of those works, activities and uses of space that transmits over time the memory of important bishops, clerical dignitaries and laypeople and the origins and historical episodes in which they had played leading roles. HOWEVER, in each cathedral, the promotion of memory was incorporated into a communal setting in use over a long period of time and thus fostered diverse dynamics in terms of the interactions and intersections between the memory of the individual and/or the cooperative memory of social groups. Furthermore, mnemotechnic resources played a highly important role in adopting, storing, connecting, activating, modeling and reinventing the information and visual expressions received at a given moment in the past. MEMORY, as contemporary psychology shows, is a dynamic process that transforms the past to such an extent that it creates new pasts. In fact, operative and dynamic memory is an exercise not so much in recognizing the past as an immutable reality but rather in reorganizing that past to the point of imagining it. Remembering always means connecting new stimuli (images, logical sequences, references, stories, etc.) that awaken this recollection with earlier information that has already been taken on board but stored away. Without the analogous links that adapt memories, it is impossible to integrate new events into a historical sequence. How did such assumptions affect the way in which images functioned during the Middle Ages? Where and when were architectural spaces composed to promote the gestation or remodeling of individual or institutional memories? This colloquium will provide a forum for analysis and debate regarding these fundamental questions of visual culture and medieval art.
In the 12th century, the mosan region saw the reorganisation of the cult of the saints, that received more sanctity. Solemn ceremonies of elevatio took place ; translatio from older shrines to new ones often occurred. In this way ancient saints, martyrs, founders and local glories received new reliquaries. In the 13th c. some of these artworks were replaced by new pieces with a more up-to-date gothic style. With such succession and replacement of reliquaries, one can ask if, in one way or another, « souvenirs » of the ancient reliquaries, first containers of prestigious saints or founders relics, were preserved. The response is different from one case to another. Sometimes a part of the older reliquary has been integrated in the new one or has been kept apart with a new function. The reuse of fragments from ancient (medieval) objects on more recent ones, and the reuse of pieces from previous reliquaries on new ones, as material « souvenir », has already been noticed by art historians. But in general it is difficult to assert whether the reuse is practical and economical or « memorial », as a link with the prestigious past of the work. The use of old fragments also contradicts the desire to give reliquaries dignity by giving them a fashionable look and refusing out-of-date appearance. Some examples clearly show that workshops had old pieces in reserve, like enamels and engraved plaques, that could be used as « spare pieces » if necessary. Other pieces were kept just because they were beautiful. But in some cases it can be argued that fragments were reintegrated in an object as memorial material, in order to bring to memory the previous reliquary. This form of reuse can be linked to the practice of « pastiche » observable in different times, that is to say when an artwork that replaces an old one intentionally copies its typology and « spirit » as commemorative act. This communication will sound like a call to a more systematic study of reuse of medieval pieces. This question touches the value attached to reliquaries as sacred container of relics. How were the reused fragments of reliquaries used ? How, when and why were souvenirs of ancient artworks kept ?
İzlek Akademik Dergi
While reaching the end of twentieth century, contemporary understanding of space and time began to threaten history’s centralist, linear and causal structure. In the appearingly accelerating and tightening world, the individual feels the need for deceleration and adherence. The perspective offered by history and grand narratives can no longer be adequate for the individuum seeking a sense of identity and belonging. Therefore, the individual clings to his/her verity and thereby his/her memory. In the Turkish contemporary art scene in the late twentieth century, memory became a prevalent discourse as a result of its intersection and overlapping with the contemporary conception of time and space structurally, in their diverse, elusive, inconceivable, multi-dimesional, inter-textual, atemporal, nonlinear, ephemeral, equivocal and paradoxical characteristics. Furthermore, memory works as a language and a manner of expression that contemporary artists of the period put into practice in th...
Condemnation of memory is only one of the aspects of erasing people and events; the fact annihilation procedure took place many times with the help of supposedly scientific methods or ideological premises, without resorting to forgery, crime or violence. After all, it is no weapon that decides about the field of vision and exclusion, just simple stereotypes, unified and wrongful prejudices. The “politics of erasure” in the title does not link only with the ruthless power struggle hostile to any signs of resistance, it can also be a strategy aiming at widening our perception or negotiating what is visible and real. In this last case it does not reconcile itself to the terror of the visible and becomes a persevering attempt to expand the range of imagination and activate memory and intuition. Probably Georges Didi-Huberman was not wrong noticing two sides of the same coin in the tyranny of the Visible and the tyranny of the Idea. The ambivalence of erasure was excellently expressed by Robert Rauschenberg in his work Erased de Kooning (1953, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) that consisted in erasing and scratching out a drawing by an older fellow artist of his.The book – compiled after the international conference Politics of erasure. Memory, Representation, Tyranny and Ethos which hold place in the Insitute of Art History in Wrocław in October 17–18, 2012 – consists of 35 articles by researchers (mainly art historians, but also culture experts, archaeologists and sociologists) from Poland as well as from Israel, Greece, Romania, Great Britain and the United States.