Location, Memory and the Visual Research Group
Symposium Four - Wednesday 12 May 2004
Imperial War Museum North
- Helen Rees Leahy
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Recollecting the canon: cultural memory at Manchester Art Gallery
An extensive research project during 2002 with visitors to the reopened Manchester Art Gallery (MAG)1 both revealed and also prompted numerous acts of cultural memorisation, particularly among those visitors who had visited the gallery for many years prior to its redevelopment. The direct stimulus for the activation and articulation of so many "narrative memories"2 was the expansion and redevelopment of the Gallery; in effect, a rupture with the past, which prompted the recapture and concretisation of elusive memories of past encounters with the canon of art displayed in the "old" Gallery. In some cases, acts of remembering also constituted acts of private resistance towards a wilful institutional amnesia that was perceived in its stress on innovation and modernity, at the expense of continuity and tradition.
The study also revealed cultural memory as a widespread and productive means of engagement with the Gallery itself as a cultural artefact, as well as with the works of art within it. Here the concept of cultural memory accounts for the ways in which visitors know works of art; not in the canonical sense in which curators know the history of art, but as part of a personal repertoire of familiarity, recollection and discrimination. As with curatorial knowledge, cultural memory is also dependent on the collection as a means of ordering fragments within a universe of possibilities, and of conferring the illusion of a finite project. It is, however, a way of knowing which is often marginalized by, or overlooked in, the didacticism of practice at MAG, which privileges textual learning and interactivity, at the expense of imagination and reverie.
This paper takes the personal experiences and subjective knowledges of visitors who took part in the research project at MAG, as a starting point for an investigation of the ways in which galleries produce and institutionalise cultural memory – at the same time as they seek to erase the significance of memories that are inconsistent with their current policies.
1 "Researching Learning at Manchester Art Gallery", May – December 2002, directed by the author
2 Mieke Bal (ed) (1999) Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover and London. p.viii
Dr Helen Rees Leahy is Director of the Centre for Museology and Lecturer in Art Gallery & Museum Studies. Prior to coming to Manchester, Helen worked as a curator in the museum field for over 12 years, and has organised numerous exhibitions of fine art and design. Helen has published on topics relating to heritage, art collecting, the art market and art criticism. Her current research interests are primarily focussed on practices of individual and institutional collecting and display, in both historical and contemporary contexts. She is a Trustee of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Chairman of Design Dimension Educational Trust and a member of the Advisory Board of the Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello Foundation, Perugia.
- Silke Arnold-de Simine
A Natural History of Destruction? The Imperial War Museum North and W.G. Sebald
The turn of the millennium and the impending loss of contemporary witnesses has induced a renewed interest in commemorating World War II. In 1999 W.G. Sebald published a volume entitled Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999, translated into English as On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003) which puts forward the controversial theory that the suffering of German civilians during the latter years of World War II, caused by the destruction of their home cities by allied bombers and their lives as refugees, never really entered the cultural memory and was never documented and convincingly dealt with in the literature of the years after the war.
One year after the publication of this collection of essays the Imperial War Museum North (Manchester) was opened to the public. Just like Sebald in his work, the innovative museum concept sees itself as an aesthetic media in that it performs memories and tries to involve the visitors emotionally in the remembrance of the past. The aim is not so much to historicise the events by looking at historical causes and consequences, but to give the visitors an impression of ‘what it was like’. This is achieved through the use of different media that complement the exhibits. The so-called Big Picture, for example, uses sound and photographs, which are projected onto the gallery surfaces and onto the visitors themselves, to create an immersive audio-visual performances on themes such as ‘Weapons and War’, and ‘Children and War’. These performances bring individual voices and experiences to the fore, aiming towards a more anti-hegemonic (re-)construction of history but also preventing any distancing on the side of the spectators.
Another integral part of the museum’s concept is its architecture. The structure of the building is based on the idea of a globe shattered by war and conflict. The architect Daniel Libeskind has taken three of these pieces to form the building, representing earth, air and water. One could say that this metaphor symbolises the optimistic outlook of renewing life out of ruins, but the fact that it also constitutes the system under which the permanent exhibition is organized could also prompt criticism: the attempt to classify wars according to the natural elements gives the impression that they are as inevitable as natural catastrophes.
In his essay collection Sebald had called for a “natural history of the destruction”, and although he does not give a conclusive answer to what he means by that, he focuses on first- hand accounts and documents such as photographs and letters, provoking strong empathy for the people involved. My paper sets out to compare the concepts of commemoration as they are displayed in W.G. Sebald work on the one hand and in new museums such as the Imperial War Museum North on the other. They try to deal with the traumatic effects of war on people’s lives and the indirect and fragmentary memory of the second and third generation whose main connection to the object is via creative processes and imaginative investment, trying to regain fragmentary visions and recollections that have not been integrated into (present) experience, but at the same time refusing to depict an all encompassing continual historical narrative.
Silke Arnold-de Simine is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Mannheim (Germany), where she teaches literature and film. She is the author of "Leichen im Keller: Zu Fragen des Gender in Angstinszenierungen der Schauer- und Kriminalliteratur, 1790-1830" (Skeletons in the Closet: Performances of Gender and Fear in Gothic and Crime Novels from 1790-1830, 2000), and is researching the organization of memory in the media of literature, film and the museum in relation to German reunification. Between 2001 and 2003, she was DAAD Lektorin at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She is currently preparing a volume of essays on German literature and national identity after 1989.
Coffee Break
- Richard Crownshaw
Photography and Memory in British and U.S. Holocaust Museums
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the recently opened Holocaust Exhibition of London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) have both been charged with subsuming the particularity of the majority of the Holocaust’s victims. The USHMM is the culmination of the nationalisation of Holocaust memory in the U.S. In its remembrance of history in order to construct (exhibit) an ideal, liberal, American national identity in contrast with a past, intolerant, aberrant nationalism, the memories and identities of Holocaust survivors are appropriated and obfuscated. Jews and other victims are exhibited only in death or through a total identification with the nation state that liberated, or provided (limited) refuge, for them. Only the cultural and social differences of the past (embodied by victims), and not the present, are displayed in this projection of a national identity as homogenised as the collective memory that informs it. Despite attempts to learn from the mistakes of its American counterpart and reparticularise those identities and memories otherwise subsumed, the IWM ultimately exhibits a similar nationalism.
Having established the grounds of such criticism, this paper will argue ways in which these Holocaust museums, retheorised and with particular attention paid to the function of photographic exhibits within them, can be rethought. As in Marianne Hirsch’s concept of "postmemory", the display of Jewish photographic portraiture by these museums provides artefacts that focus memory-work for generations which did not witness the Holocaust but feel its traumatic reverberations culturally. Such photographs focus what could be described as a vicarious form of witnessing, and trauma can be defined as that which disrupts its own witnessing, belated remembrance and attempted assimilation as historical knowledge. The affectiveness of these photographs leads to a more ambiguous form of memory-work than that intended by the museums that house them.
The trauma of "postmemory" is reflected by the complex temporality of these photographs. As Roland Barthes would have it, the photograph anticipates the historic death of its living subject, a death that has already happened by the time the photograph is observed in the future. The photograph is inscribed with a "micro-version" of the death to come (that has already happened) by the way in which it ostensibly conflates referent and representation without marking itself as a sign, thereby displacing its real subject. Despite the cultural context shared by the subject of the photograph and its observer (the "studium"), which makes the photograph meaningful, the massive historic death that awaits the subject but has already happened disrupts this cultural familiarity. This defamiliarisation is introduced by the idiosyncratic detail ("punctum") of these photographs, by which lives are individuated by the particularities of their performances before the lens. The punctum calls attention to life that will be (and already has been) lost, and, in so doing, wounds referentiality to the extent that representation can longer substitute for referent. In Barthes’ terms, the photograph presents an "anaesthetised" surface to its observer but, wounded and marked as a sign, the photograph’s belated affect is to disrupt the process of historical reference it provokes.
Jewish photographic portraiture opens up a space for memory-work not necessarily intended by the IWM and USHMM. Such photographs are no longer available as the point from which the visual degradation of the Jewish body can proceed on a narrative trajectory that ends with Auschwitz-Birkenau. Given their affectiveness and failure of reference, they cannot contribute to a conclusive narrative (effacement) of Jewish identity. Loosened from such a narrative, these photographs become available as props by which their observers can remember things otherwise forgotten by the museum. Their ostensible simulation of their referent- subjects and, therefore, historical pull, encourages an alternative memory-work, but their affectiveness also disrupts any over-identification on the observer’s part. They remain the images of an irreducible alterity and constitute space for the continuation of memory-work rather than its conclusion. Rethought in this way, the USHMM and the IWM can be appropriated as available cultural apparatus by which interventions in the predominant cultural memory can be made.
Richard Crownshaw is a lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University (U.K.), where his teaching includes C19th and C20th American literature and representations of the Holocaust. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London. His PhD was awarded in 2000, at the University of Sussex, and his doctorial thesis examined U.S. cultural memories of the Holocaust. His subsequent research has been on the theory and practice of Holocaust postmemory.