Location, Memory and the Visual Research Group
Symposium Three - Wednesday 17 March 2004
Whitworth Art Gallery Lecture Theatre, Oxford Road, Manchester
- Paul Grainge, University of Nottingham
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A Taste for Black and White: Visual Memory and the Anxieties of the Global
Exploring the acceleration of memory discourses in Europe and the United States since the late 1970s, Andreas Huyssen suggests that: ‘the turn towards memory is subliminally energized by the desire to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by an increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space.’ This paper asks how a desire for continuity and cultural moorings - a need that Huyssen equates with the resurgence of memory - has been expressed in visual terms. Specifically it examines the popularity and discursive bearing of the black and white image as it emerged in American visual culture during the 1990s. Focusing on the black and white city images that have developed cachet in the international poster industry - in particular, those of vintage New York - the paper explores how nostalgia has become a significant mode in the popular visualization of urban life and culture.
Black and white is a nonrepresentational effect with an aura (and artistry) of pastness. As such, it can appear to transcend its production and circulation in contemporary image culture. With its visual associations of authenticity and time, black and white has acquired significance in the figuration of particular representational subjects. New York is a pointed example, especially in the aftermath of September 11th. As a way of visually anchoring forms of city identity and nationalism - and potentially disarticulating social and political transitions that have come to effect these formations of identity - black and white nostalgia has been taken up as a visual discourse in the negotiation of change. If monochrome has any relation to what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘anxieties of the global,’ it is in the capacity to mark time, and suggest continuity, in a period where transnational flows of people, capital, technology and politics are exerting pressure on traditional ideologies of reality and belonging.
Dr Paul Grainge is lecturer in film studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Praeger, 2002), the editor of Memory and Popular Film (Manchester UP, 2003), and a general editor of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies. His work on media memory has appeared in journals including Cultural Studies, American Studies, Screen, The Journal of American Studies and The International Journal of Cultural Studies. He is currently researching a book entitled Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age.
- Shelley Hornstein, York University, Canada
Greetings from Here: Architectural Voyages through Postcards
Where is our memory of architectonic space located? When we receive a picture postcard of an architectural place, we are looking at a photograph that has been “captured” by the photographer and transported from the site where the architecture is located to an architecture of the imagination. The specificity of the postcard is that a visual and textual message on card-stock allows architecture, but moreover the sender’s experience of that place, to exist elsewhere, removed from the site that was before the camera’s lens. The experientiality of the person who penned the card of the place where the postcard was purchased is lifted from the place to a location in our memory (and in our heart) for both the sender and receiver. The “here” in the photograph and text of a postcard is a questionable place that can be “there” as much as “here.” Picture postcards document, categorize, and inventory places. But they do so by transporting the image and message and sending it elsewhere (always away from the site). Because of the inseparability of text and photo, postcards are moment-markers that record places visited and testify to a past experience while pushing that moment to a virtual and non-material site.
I want to argue that postcards, by virtue of their voyage through the mail channels, transport a place from one geographic site experienced by the sender to a virtual and memory place for the receiver. This is a result of the author and sender selecting a site in a photograph, composing a message, and then sending it (either from that location or usually in that city or locality (but not always). In this way, we can see how architecture exists not only in its geographic location but exists also and perhaps always in our virtual reconstruction of space in our minds and hearts, in a second site that is not material. Built sites are only one place where we understand architecture. Imagining places is as important as being in situ; that architecture and places exist as much in our hearts as in the constructed architectural environment is an everyday event underscored by the postcard and its journey. By yoking image and text, photo and script, a place is wrapped up in its identity or placement, as it were. The architecture has journeyed; it has been displaced. Something is here and now or is there and then, something here standing in for something there for reader and writer alike. Building on the disappearance of one experience, this ruin of the postcard, this photo and text conjoined, serves as the base for reconstructing a new object and a new experience of place.
Professor Hornstein's research focuses on the examination of concepts of place and spatial politics in architectural and urban sites. She is widely published on modern and contemporary art and architecture including medicalized geographies in 19th century Montreal, leisure sites and workers' housing for a chocolate baron in Anticosti and France, and how architecture captures memory in cities. With Professors Carol Zemel and Reesa Greenberg, she is co-creator of Project Mosaica, the first online contemporary Cultural Space devoted to Jewish culture.
Dr. Hornstein is co-editor of Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-University Press, 2000); Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003). She is currently preparing a book titled Losing Site: The Resonance of Architecture and Place. Professor Hornstein taught in York University's Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies from 1985 to 2002, when she joined the Faculty of Fine Arts. She is a member of York's graduate programs in Art History, Visual Arts, Culture and Communications, Women's Studies, and Social and Political Thought, and has served as associate dean, co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research, and Chair and coordinator of the program in Visual Arts.