Niels Werber
The other side of the art of memory[1]
“Cinema as a mnemonic aid” – this is how the Austrian
newspaper “Der Standard” titled the leading article of its culture section
of the issue from 20 March 2002. The article deals with the genre of documentary
film and describes, besides others, a work by Heddy Honigmann named Good husband, dear son (2001). Honigmann filmed “objects such
as pictures, apples or door jambs”, remnants of a “Bosnian village” in which
“80% of the male population were killed during the civil war”. These objects,
especially personal belongings and pictures in which the “presence of the
dead becomes manifest”, serve as “tools” of “remembrance” the same way as
the documentation of these objects itself is considered as a “mnemonic aid”.
Two characteristics of this essay seem to be significant for this lecture.
Firstly, it locates these works in a social memory and secondly it lays this
memory down to one specific function: i.e. remembrance. Especially technical
media such as film and photography seem to belong almost naturally to a social
memory which is meant to be understood only as a “tool” of “remembrance”.
I, however, wish to present the opinion that any form of the art of memory
always serves the act of forgetting as well.
In a first step I will try to describe the social
form of the memory in more detail. I want to start off with the simple observation
of some pictures/copies of contemporary art which, at first sight, only prove
a single idea, i.e. the fact that these works consist of two different parts
which, for the time being, can be characterised as the aesthetic and the
archivist dimension. I am going to explain this more precisely at a later
step. At this point, I am only interested in the separation of the works
into one part which can be perceived simultaneously and primarily in a visual
sense and another part that has to be read or even studied. The terminology
of this distinction is not very significant for now.
In the exhibition “Talk. Show. The Art of Communication”,
which was presented in the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal
in 1999,[2]
the artistic duo Clegg & Guttmann created a huge installation (Abb. 1:
Clegg & Guttmann, Vérité, 1994) which consisted of video
prints on the one hand, and some sort of archives on the other hand.
This work entitled “Vérité” (1994) uses film shots of the American TV-series
“Candid Camera” in order to choose, on the one hand, scenes and takes according
to aesthetic and formal criteria, and to blow them up, work them over, frame
and present them in a way that could be compared to the famous Film Stills by Cindy Sherman. On the other hand Clegg &
Guttmann embed these seemingly autonomous pictures in extensive “Archives”
guided by the rules of empirical social studies (p. 60).[3]
The three big shelves of the archives (200 x 250 x 75 cm) contain documents,
video tapes, video recorders, TV-sets and other materials. All shelves and
materials have signatures. At a simple working desk one can study the documents
and receive information on the order of the arrangement. “The installation
Vérité is meant to be used as an archive”,
it says in the catalogue. And as any archives also the “Candid Camera”-Archives
consist of two levels, a collection of data on the one hand and a catalogue
on the order of the facts on the other hand. One could call this internal
order the self-referential part of the archives, whereas the facts themselves
must be regarded rather as an external reference as they refer to the world
outside the archives, i.e. to the world of the “Candid Camera”, whilst catalogues,
inventories, signatures or registers put the data already collected together
in different constellations and thus produce an internal order which pre-structures
the access to the facts. At this very point memory comes into being.
In another project by the same artists we find a similar
division. “The Open Library” (Hamburg 1993)[4]
consists of three former switchboxes of the HEW (Hamburger Elektrizitätswerke/Hamburg
Electricity Company) in three districts of Hamburg which have been converted
into bookcases. The cases were filled with books, each passer-by could take
books out and donate new books to the “open library”. (Abb. 2 - 4: Clegg
& Guttmann, Die offene Bibliothek, Hamburg 1993). This currency of books
and the social structure of the persons participating were observed, evaluated
and converted into diagrams, statistics, curves and graphs according to the
visual methods of the empirical social studies. Only this general and commenting
work of data completes the whole work; it can now be presented in a form
which we have already got to know in the example above, i.e. in the form
of archives including particular photographic works. (Abb. 5 - 8: Clegg &
Guttmann, Die offene Bibliothek, Hamburg 1993).
With regard to what one might call “archivist art”
or “archive-art” I am interested in forms of “social forgetting” which come
into sight when one observes the genre for a while. In part I am going to
follow the ideas of the Italian sociologist and systems theorist Elena Esposito
who has only recently published her study on “Forms and Media of the Memory
of Society” entitled “Social Forgetting”.[5]
Considering the example of the “Open Public Library”
by Clegg & Guttmann one can distinguish already two different forms of
not remembering, i.e. memory loss and forgetting.[6]
A memory loss is given if the archives are damaged, be it that the catalogue
or register shows faults and that specific, actually existing objects get
lost without address, be it that the objects in the archives themselves are
damaged. In Hamburg-Kirchdorf (Abb. 9: Clegg & Guttmann, Die offene Bibliothek,
Hamburg 1993) one library case was destroyed and thus the capacity and social
reach of the archives were reduced. However, there was literally nothing forgotten.
According to Luhmann and Esposito one could only speak of forgetting
if specific parts of the archives are not considered in the social use of
the archives at all – in Hamburg for instance a specific percentage of books
was never taken out (Abb. 10: Clegg & Guttmann, Die offene Bibliothek,
Hamburg 1993). Whatever they might be about – it does not play any role in
the communicative construction of reality of those who work with the archives.
The communicative potentials of these books remain unused although their
material carriers still exist – this means that the texts, not the books,
have been forgotten. The information they convey is irrelevant for the communication
of those who use the archives.
In an exhibition of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hall
of Art), which bore the significant title “Inventory” (1991), one got an
idea of the works of Christian Boltanski’s. Here as well, one is immediately
confronted with the typically two-folded model of the memory of the archives.
The installation “The Missing House” (1990), which can still be visited in
Berlin, appears to be especially informative and revealing. It consists of
the rather aesthetic or at least visual dimension of a social sculpture,
a yawning gap (Abb. 11: Christian Boltanski, The Missing House, Berlin 1990),
and a primarily archivist and written part (Abb. 12: Christian Boltanski,
The Missing House, Berlin 1990). At the fire walls of houses surrounding
a piece of fallow land in Berlin Boltanski fixed signs with names and professions
of the tenants of the “missing house” Große Hamburger Straße 15/16 that was
destroyed in a bomb attack on 3 February 1945. For more detailed information
one could consult another part of the installation called “The Museum”, a
“collection of materials such as archive files, records of interviews with
contemporaries, personal documents, memorial objects and pictures” collected
by Boltanski’s colleagues. This collection consisted of about “one thousand
archive objects”[7]
and it was outdoors and open to the public, too.
Critics and reviews have placed this installation
into the context of an art of memory whose alleged task it was to stimulate
the memory of the Nazi-regime, the war and the Holocaust.[8]
Especially the combination of an exposed lack or gap with the rich materials
and comments of the archives seemed to fulfil the purpose of a warning memory
in an ideal way. Not only the outdoors archives of “The Museum”, which, significantly
enough[9],
were destroyed by vandalism only two weeks after the exhibition had been opened,
but also the Multiple La Maison Manquante (The Missing House),
a cardboard box with folders of facsimile documents, emphasise the function
of memory.[10]
A short text accompanying the Multiple ends with the claim: “La mémoire reste, et chaque lieu, chaque histoire, devient
exemplaire” (“The memory remains and every
place, every history, becomes exemplary”). Uwe M. Schneede[11]
considers Boltanski’s works, which have titles such as Archives,
Memorial, Museum or Depot,
only as “means of memory/remembrance”.[12]
The installation is placed completely into the context of a memorial culture,
and one could probably say: The process and forms of forgetting have been
forgotten.
Especially the art of the archives seems to promote
the presumption that a social memory only serves the act of remembering,
but not the act of forgetting. In contrast, Friedrich Kittler has already
claimed in an essay called “Forgetting” from 1979: “In order to produce memory
capacities for new books, new forms of knowledge, new programs, sets of information
must be deletable.”[13]
The fact that, for the reasons of capacity, any memory can only remember
if it forgets at the same time has been excluded in the debates around Boltanski.
To the contrary, the art historian Sabine Kampmann has emphasised in her
precise work on the “Missing House” that despite all the memorial objects
the installation does not only serve the act of remembrance but also the
act of forgetting as, unavoidably, “the things, which have not been collected
or exposed, will be forgotten the more”. This thesis corresponds with Boris
Groys’s distinction between those objects which get into the archives and
those which are not considered at all.[14]
Forgetting would thus be exclusion from the archives. This is certainly true
– but the statement disregards the fact that also the archives
themselves forget. This means that the archives forget by being used
– and not just by the fact that certain things have not entered the archives;
and they do not simply forget in the way that they remain unused and that
the showcases and memorial objects decay as shown in “The Museum”. Exclusion,
loss of memory and forgetting are not the same!
Already Michel Foucault’s term of the archives suggests
the presumption that it is not only impossible to say everything but also
to remember everything.[15]
The archives combine “tradition” and “forgetting”, redundancy and variety.
Also for Foucault it is a system that only exists in actu,
in the mode of operation, and each operation remembers and forgets at the
same time (p. 188). According to systems theory one could rephrase the same
idea in the following way: “What is described as memory is only existent
for an observer” who sees that and how a distinction is made.[16]
The memory itself, however, only remembers what it remembers and has forgotten
what it has forgotten. On the one hand these thoughts take on the perspective
of the observer who is able to define the memory because he observes how remembrance
and forgetting are distinguished; on the other hand they assume a social
memory themselves: and can only remember what they can remember and have forgotten
what they have forgotten without being able to make up a balance themselves
at this point. This falls into the hands of yet other observers.
The question for the “Missing House”, which will lead
us to the act of forgetting, is the question how observers operate with these
archives. My attempt for an answer makes it necessary to get rid of the idea
that the archives “contain” sets of information which have been put into
the archives in order to be used and taken out again.[17]
The archives rather consist of “materials” and a specific “order embodied
in a catalogue” (p. 338) which only gets informative if an observer distinguishes
between material and order (medium and form), i.e.: if he unlocks the archives
with the distinction of information and message, if communication takes place.
Only in the respective current acts of communication the archives are updated
– and every operation within these acts inevitably produces forms of remembrance
and forgetting at the same time. This has to do with the fact that communication
operates only in the present, it “has” no time. All that happens in society
takes place simultaneously, neither past nor future operations are available
for a communication system now. Thus the archives do not
simply save past time operations just in order to remember them whenever
they are required, either – as if one put in pictures or files and got them
out again later. This is not about the material stores regarded as the occasion
for communication but about the memory of communication itself. With regard
to pictures or files one could assume that in altering contexts of communication,
which refer to them, they would suggest different possibilities of connection.
In any way, the remembrance, which might be triggered off, takes place in
the moment when the pictures or files are consulted and used – it thus follows
the communicative constraints of this moment. However, the memory does not
lead back into the past when the pictures were taken or the files were made.
Archives do not give any kind of access to the past – past time is never available
in the present.[18]
It is rather a construction, a distinction with regard to the present – and
as such it has to prove itself.[19]
Each communicative operation, which updates the archives,
now makes a very specific selection which will show itself either able or
unable to connect. This capability of connection depends especially on the
social context in which one remembers or forgets: in systems of interaction,
in organisations or functional systems, and also on the question which kinds
of media are used. Having “forgotten” an important author in a specific field
that one should overview shows other consequences in a chat than in an exam
of an organisation, a written publication or a radio-feature. The German
sociologist Niklas Luhmann has always emphasised the significance of selection
in this process.[20]
In the act of communication something becomes a piece of information – and
something else not. If one regards the materials of the archives as medium
and the concrete use as form then one could say that each strong and stable
coupling of the loosely coupled elements of the medium always assumes an abundance
of possibilities – these possible, but actually not selected forms, however,
are not updated, they are not connected with and are thus forgotten.
In our context this mode of selection becomes especially
visible if people claim with regard to the “Missing House” that it exclusively
deals with “text boards of Jewish tenants whose lives ended in death at the
latest in 1945”,[21]
or if someone emphasises the claim that the dates of death of the former tenants
are shown on the boards.[22]
Both statements are wrong as there were also “German” tenants according to
the laws of Nuremberg and as the boards only show the dates during which
the tenants lived in the house, not their dates of life. In the German nationwide
newspaper “taz” one reads about the “Missing House” on the occasion of an
award for Boltanski the following description of his work: “The attempt of
the artist to reconstruct the people living in the house between 1930 and
1945 resembles a search for traces which mostly ends in death. The Jewish
tenants were deported and exterminated, those who moved into the confiscated
flats were buried under the bombs. Their history fits into a few thin folders.”[23]
The history of the Jews or the one of the victims of the bomb attacks? In
the perspective of the quoted critic, the answer is clear: Boltanski presents
a “struggle for forms of remembrance of the Shoah”.[24]
The memory of all the approximately 100 tenants living in the house between
1930 and 1945 thus becomes, let us say: strongly focussed.
The combination of Jewish tenants and alleged dates
of death in the discourse of the mnemonic culture has obviously led to the
fact that unspectacular dates as the ones of the piano teacher T. Gaworzweska,
who lived in the house between 1932 and 1934, have been forgotten in the
update of the archives although the dates and materials have been accurately
registered. We are obviously confronted with a form of social forgetting
which tells us something about the function of the memory of our society.
It forgets without any data files being destroyed or deleted. It does not
forget in spite of the immense capacities of storage but because of these
growing capacities – because the use of the archives can only update a very
small part of the possible options and those options, which are updated,
are not updated by chance but due to specific structural formations.
Boltanski has emphasised his art to be “memorial work”[25]
but he has notoriously been perceived as an “artist of remembrance”[26]
and his works as “projects of remembrance”[27].
Sometimes a memory might remember but the “main function of the memory” is
“to forget”, stresses Luhmann, because everything else would lead to a “self-blocking
of the system”.[28]
And Luhmann once again: “We should not talk about the memory in terms of
a possible return into the past and not in terms of a storage of data or
information, which can be used whenever needed, either. It is much more about
a steady but only currently used function which scrutinises all working operations
with regard to their consistency with what the system constructs as reality.”
(p. 578f.) In the reality construction of the system, which remembers with
the help of the archives of the “Missing House”, only very specific operations
do fit in – the potential and virtual richness of the possible meanings is
reduced to the ‘memory of the Shoah’.[29]
An update in the direction of civil German bomb victims of the allied troops
would probably not have passed the test of consistency of the system in the
early 1990s.
The affected system, which remembers and forgets in
this way, is the system of mass media. The “function of mass media” lies
in the generation of a memory “for the system of society” which ensures “that
in any sort of communication one can expect specific assumptions about reality
as known without having to introduce or explain them in the communication.”[30]
The assumption that the “Missing House” reminds us of the Holocaust belongs
to this set of assumptions about reality – which then allows to go on communicating
in this direction. For instance along the claim that memory is morally good
and forgetting morally bad. The observation that the tenants of the house
were very heterogeneous and that they partly died in a bomb attack, but that
most of them had simply moved out is found rather seldom. These unspectacular
stories are forgotten. In mass media the possible connections of this work
of archive-art have at any rate been limited to the direction of the Shoah.[31]
Mass media, says Luhmann, produce “prerequisites for further communication
[...] which do not have to be communicated themselves”. (p. 120) Everything,
that does not have to be communicated but can be taken for granted, is remembered
– the rest is forgotten.
Communication forgets. This does not necessarily have
consequences for the data stocks. It thus depends on the use of the archives
what is remembered and what is forgotten. In the discussions about the air
war, which has been excluded from the German literature,[32]
and in the current focus of media on the issues of expulsion and flight from
the East one can see that new forms of updating the data
files are actually possible. The medium is formed and the events are structured
in a new way – and the formulas of the ongoing “discrimination against forgetting
and remembering” are programmed anew.
In her autobiographic novel “Kindheitsmuster / patterns
of a childhood”, published 1977, Christa Wolf uses the metaphor of the “Krebsgang / the crayfish’s walk” to describe the function of the memory system.[33]
The same metaphor serves as title for Günter Grass’s latest novel. Wolf has
explained what was meant by a memory system walking like a crayfish: The
memory system, she is writing, is operating both with remembrance and forgetting
(p. 57). Later in her novel, the protagonist and alter ego of Wolf, while
examining a newspaper archive, a story about the German ship “Wilhelm Gustloff”
attract her attention. Günter Grass’s novel “Im Krebsgang” is telling the
story of this very vessel. Whereas the east German author in 1977 mentions
the launch of the ship in 1937 only, Grass in 2002 focuses on the sinking
in 1945. Grass is somehow remembering, what Wolf has forgotten. And when
the German weekly Spiegel shows a picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff entitled “The German Titanic” on its front-page
on the occasion of Günter Grass’s new novel, then again something is remembered
and forgotten at the same time. One remembers the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’
of two sunk ships whose passengers drowned in icy water; one forgets the
difference between an iceberg and a Russian submarine. This difference, to
be sure, can be observed and remembered[34]
– when it becomes informative, when it “makes a difference”, i.e. when communication
takes place. Whether this distinction proves itself to be capable of connection
or “connectability” within mass media and can thus be taken for granted is
eventually a problem of the evolution of the according memory.
I wish now to continue my observations along further
works of modern art which seem to deviate from the model of the archives
although they openly refer to it. The photographer Frank Müller shows in
one of his works entitled “Daisy Opel” (1998) pictures of clothes, kitchen
utensils, postcards, holiday pictures, letters of application (Abb. 13 -
17). On some of these pictures one can read the name of the title: Daisy
Opel (Abb. 13: Frank Müller, Daisy Opel, 1998). The curator Esther Ruelfs,
who presented this work in the exhibition “Zurückgelassen (Left Behind)”
in the Kupferstich–Kabinett (“copperplate engraving's cabinet”) in Dresden,
puts it in her catalogue article[35]
into the context of “securing traces” (“Spurensicherung”; p. 13). Günter
Metken[36]
has coined this term for a type of art which seems to secure materials and
put them into an order by using criminal investigations and ethnological
and archaeological methods. Herbert Molderings has remarked correctly that
the term seems to suggest “a type of art which is simply supposed to find
already existing material or mental facts, to put them into an
order and to preserve them from being forgotten”.[37]
In a work by Boltanski Molderings shows as an example of what the paradigm
of “securing traces” in the form of conceptual art means. Here again we meet
the two sides of the work, i.e. the archivist part and the inventory (p.
15).
There is a story told about the objects and materials
that Müller shows, which says that Daisy Opel suddenly gave up her home in
Saxony short time after the reunification and left back great parts of the
furniture and interior decorations of her flat she had left so rashly and
completely. A letter of application and a wage settlement refer to Spring
1991 (Abb. 18: Frank Müller, Daisy Opel, 1998). As far as it is about “reconstructing
Daisy Opel’s story”[38]
and saving it from being forgotten, we seem to face a typical case of the
art of memory which operates with the techniques of securing traces. In contrast
to Boltanski’s installations and the works of Clegg & Guttmann, the dimension
of an order presented in a catalogue or inventory is missing in Müller’s
work. Without making suggestions for an internal relation of the materials
or giving any aid for the use of the archives Müller puts his pictures in
a somehow “flat” order one beside the other (Abb. 19 a – b). Not only the
“fantastic name” Daisy Opel (Opel is a famous car brand in Germany, the rarely
used name Daisy is known from the girl friend of Donald Duck) makes us “doubt
her real existence”, says Esther Ruelfs (p. 13); Müller also renounces of
any external reference – the postcards, documents, settlements that he shows
are presented on the same level as all other potential memorial objects.
Exactly the types of material, which Boltanski collects in order to create
“The Museum” or to equip the Multiple, become in “Daisy Opel” part of a work
which does not offer any differentiation in its levels and thus breaks out
of the paradigm of the archives. This renunciation of an archivist part,
which would inform quasi “authentically” about Daisy Opel’s biography, seems
to me the more conspicuous as a huge interest of the public and the media
for an almost exemplary career of a young woman, who is first struck by the
“annexation” of the East and then gives up everything and leaves her flat
and her belongings, can be expected. But Müller leaves it completely open
whether he has saved or produced traces.
The consequence is a kind of uncertainty about the
status of the materials photographed: Are they false or authentic? Does the
work remember Daisy Opel or does it rather generate her? For the question
of forgetting this distinction between memory and fiction is essential because
in the case of a fictional work the typical recourse of the memory is missing.
The work emphasises the spatial coexistence in contrast to the chronology
in time. It calls into question whether one remembers at all. And if nothing
is repeated no structural formation or scheme is produced. This can be noted
as a confusion in the observation of the installation which results from
the fact that Müller’s presentation renounces of any pre-selection by an
archivist order. The access is motivated only optically but it is not led
by the consultation of a register or an order which would turn the images
and pictures into a biography.
As we could see in the “Missing House” the reception
of the work is co-ordinated by the social memory of the archives which therefore
present scripts – thus the probability grows that some things are remembered
but others are forgotten. Müller has renounced of this selective function
of the “archivist” memory; by the way, he has done so, too, in another photographic
installation which is, ironically enough, called “memory images”. The aesthetic
dimension of the observation takes on the lead again, and the work is more
about a spatial distribution of pictures than about the question of historical
references (Abb. 19a - b: Frank Müller, Daisy Opel, 1998). The primacy of
aesthetics is also stressed by the curator – one could add that Müller’s
aesthetic is almost timeless; it forgets the program of selection which must
have led to the point of showing what is shown; or formulated in another
way: The work “forgets what could have been made differently during the construction.”[39]
The question is whether this is a different model of the memory which remembers
and forgets without using the distinction of archives and register. Under
an art historical viewpoint this seems to be exactly Müller’s aesthetic innovation.
He cites the paradigm of the archive-art in order to disappoint the expectations
which are connected with it. Instead of serving the mechanisms of the art
of memory Müller focuses on the qualities of the pictures themselves which
become autonomous again if any archivist parts or registers are missing.
The project “take inventory” by the
Austrian curator Arno Gisinger may show once again what I have called archive-art.
The context of the objects shown or missing was closely investigated and
presented in the installation. (Abb. 20-27: in: Ilsebitt Barta-Fliedl,
Herbert Posch, inventarisiert. Enteignung von Möbeln aus
jüdischem Besitz, Wien 2000). They belonged to
Jewish families who were expropriated. Their belongings were brought into
the court depot in Vienna and then, after being declared as Aryan, they got
to private persons or Nazi organisations without any form of memory related
to the former proprietors. The installation represents almost ideally the
connection between the process of securing traces and the use of archives
in art and makes also visible a corresponding form of forgetting. The archives
of the court depot store objects and data in order to turn then predominantly
to the production of forgetting. Thus the inventory is turned into an Aryan
inventory.
It seems almost unavoidable to place the “Interior”-pictures
by Ricarda Roggan into this context. (Abb. 28a-b, 29 a-b): Ricarda Roggan,
Interieur, Dresden 2002). Also part of the exhibition “left behind” they
are obliged by Wolfgang Holler to the “task of keeping the past and left
moments in pictures”.[40]
Esther Ruelfs speaks of an almost “reflex-like allegation” of an “archivist
form of organisation” (p. 27). Here, too, one could expect in the context
of the art of memory that, with regard to the objects presented, a second
level would be given in the form of an inventory in order to explain their
origin. Obviously the model of the memory as an archive itself has turned
into the pattern of a social memory which is permanently remembered while
other forms are forgotten – but although one part of Roggan’s work was meant
to be called “inventory” the typical register part of the work is missing.
The former interior of a house presented in the installation rather reminds
of the ancient and classical conception of the memory as Thesaurus, warehouse
or storing hall.[41]
Augustinus speaks for instance of the “wide palaces of my memory where the
treasure of uncountable pictures is heaped up”.[42]
Again any sort of catalogue, which the art of the archives normally presents,
is missing here. This is also the case for the classical model of the rhetorical
memory which imagines the memory as a furnished room where the speaker walks
through[43]
– and not as completely non-topological archives which can be revealed by
using only a catalogue. Script and writing do not play any significant role
in the spatial paradigm of storage but the archives are nothing without script.
Does Roggan present us perhaps the furniture of a memorial room? Also the
title of this part of the work – “interior” – would support this mnemo-technical
way of reading which the curator has decided for. In the classical interior-paintings
of the 17th century the objects refer beyond the spatial dimensions
of the painting – they are like painted topoi. The viewer
finds in them the motivation to remember what he already knows. These pictures
do not inform, they do not surprise but they store objects in a room that
one wishes to find in there again the way one has put them in. “All that”,
to quote Augustinus once again on the remembrance of particular objects, “is
kept in storage by the huge collection place of the memory, ready to be taken
out” (p. 242). Of course, not the objects themselves but their counterfeits
are stored in the halls: “Not these objects themselves, only their images
are seized wonderfully quickly by the memory, they are stored in wonderful
cells and taken out wonderfully by remembrance”.[44]
Riccarda Roggan has made pictures of these stores or “warehouses”. But it
remains a riddle what they are supposed to remember. The stored objects are
covered by a plastic foil, they are packed up hermetically as if the store
was to be conserved that way and the fading of the topoi
to be avoided for all times. These endeavours may keep the stocks existing
in their material form, however, they do not secure them from being forgotten
socially. With regard to Roggan’s pictures one could rather assume in the
reverse sense that the care for the stocks will force and speed up the process
of forgetting because it remains hidden what the “objects” in their “wonderful
cells” are supposed to remind of. The topoi of the “interior”
have lost their topological function.
After all that one could assume that we are currently
confronted with several forms of the social memory and correspondingly with
several forms of remembering and forgetting. The discourse of art, the art
critics and curators in mass media and catalogues expects and assumes several
models – and what is expected in that way counts for Luhmann and Esposito
as part of the social memory of society. If this were really the case there
would be three forms of forgetting in spite of all evolutionary assumptions
– and it would be difficult to classify the current epoch in only one way or form. Esposito, in contrast, expects in her book
“Social Forgetting” an “implosion of past and future” (p. 360). Our social
memory: The worldwide net of digital media and data processing only knows
the “present” (p. 358) in which data are turned into pieces of information,
the present which does not remember anything although it refers back to data
stocks which have been installed in the past. Each new data processing processes
the data in an unique way. For instance, each operation of a search machine
leads to different results, even if the same search algorithm has been used,
because between the two data inputs time passes in which the “net” has changed.
Each search attempt already alters the structures. As nothing is repeated
in digital networks nothing is remembered – and nothing forgotten.
This may be one model of our present
time but I do not believe that it is the only one. Especially the art of
memory shows the permanency of the archive-model of social remembering and
forgetting, and even the topological model of the memory as a storing place
does not remain without resonance in contemporary art. However, if we can
assume resonance then the process of remembering and forgetting already takes
place – in which form ever.
Dr. Niels Werber, born in Freiburg/Breisgau in 1965,
is professor of New German Literature and Media Theory at the University
of Bochum.
Publications: Literatur als System
(Literature as System, 1992), Beobachtungen der
Literatur (Observations of Literature, 1995, together
with Gerhard Plumpe), Kommunikation, Medien, Macht (Communication, Media, Power) and Raum. Wissen.
Macht (Space. Knowledge. Power, Suhrkamp 1999 and 2002,
together with Rudolf Maresch), Liebe als Roman (Love as Novel, Fink, 2003).
[1] Translation by Fabian Lettow.
[2] The catalogue was published in the Prestel Verlag,
München et. al. 1999.
[3] Similar to Julian Rosefeldt in the work „global soap“
or Rosefeldt and Steinle in the installation „News“.
[4] The catalogue was published in the Cantz Verlag,
Ostfildern, 1994.
[5] Elena Esposito, Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main 2002. In this context also see: Niels Werber, Die andere Seite der Gedächtniskultur: Elena Espositos Studie „Soziales Vergessen“, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, issue 25 May 2002.
[6] This differentiation in Esposito, Soziales Vergessen, p. 184.
[7] I follow here Sabine Kampmann, The Missing House, Thesis, Bochum 1999. See also Hans Dickel, Das fehlende Haus. Christian Boltanski in Berlin, in: Ästhetik und Kommunikation 21 (1992), issue 78, p. 43.
[8] Compare for instance the interview with Boltanski
in: Inventar, Hamburg 1991, p. 61.
[9] Significant in the context of a specific memorial
culture. It thus must have been Neonazis who destroyed the „Museum“.
[10] The Multiple was published in 1991 in an edition
of 100 issues (+ 20 left with the publishers) by Flammarion, Paris.
[11] Co-curator of the effective exhibition „Spurensicherung“
in Hamburg.
[12] Uwe M. Schneede, Die Mittel der Erinnerung, in: Inventar, Hamburg 1991, p. 9-22.
[13] Friedrich Kittler, Vergessen, in: Ulrich Nassen (ed.), Texthermeneutik. Aktualität, Geschichte, Kritik, Paderborn 1979, p. 195-221, p. 206.
[14] Boris Groys, Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien, Munich 2000, p. 7ff.
[15] Compare Michel Foucault, Die Archäologie des Wissens, Frankfurt/Main 1981.
[16] Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt/Main 1987, p. 103 (footnote 19).
[17] Compare Esposito, Soziales Vergessen,
p. 341.
[18] I believe that in the case of Proust’s „Recherche“
it would be useful to discuss technical media not only with reference to
memory, as Manfred Schneider does in the „Erkalteten Herzensschrift“ (Munich
1986, p. 100f.), but also in the direction of forgetting.
[19] Indifference is thus excluded. No constructionalism
is presented here which would indicate that the past could be constructed
in the present arbitrarily only because it is not accessible to operative
means. The memory, which the picture enables, has rather to pass the test
of consistency of communication among several persons, possibly under very
specific circumstances such as intimate or scientific communication.
[20] Compare Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 225.
[21] Marius Babias, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit. Interview, in: Kunstforum International, vol. 110, 1990, p. 340-346, p. 341.
[22] Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski. Paris 1994, p. 140.
[23] Sabine Hassler, Eine ständige Installation Boltanskis, in: taz (Bremen) from 22 March 1997.
[24] Christoph Köster, Stumme Schreie im Kirchenschiff, in: taz from 21 May 1997.
[25] Compare taz (Bremen) from 29 March 1996.
[26] Compare e.g. Harald Fricke, Ein Platz der Schönheit und der Vergeblichkeit. Der Streit ums Holocaust-Mahnmal spiegelt sich auch in Absagen von KünstlerInnen wider, in: taz from 29 July 1998.
[27] Harald Fricke, in: taz from 18 November 1998.
[28]
Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt
am Main 1997, p. 579. One could also say that
the enormous potentials of sense of complex archives are structured.
„Structures“, Luhmann writes in Soziale Systeme, „place the open complexity
of the possibility of linking each element with all other elements in a more
narrow pattern [...] of probable, repeatable or in any other way preferable
relations.“ (p. 74) While the events of a process are unique and irreversible
„structures can be abrogated or changed“ (p. 73). „If one wants to understand
structural changes in an evolutionary way one must give up the idea that structures
are something ‘solid’ in contrast in difference to something ‘fluid’. [...]
They are used in the process from operation to operation
– or they are not used. They condense and confirm through
repetition [...]; or they are forgotten.“ (Luhmann, Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 430) This corresponds exactly
with the definition of the memory. Redundancy and structural formations produce
the effect of remembrance – but only in the present while structures, which
had been abrogated or changed before, have already been forgotten.
[29] How much can be forgotten if one remembers can be
seen in the legendary statement by Gerhard Schröder who wishes to have a
place for the Holocaust-memorial where one „likes to go“, also with his wife
and his children.
[30] Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, Opladen 1996, p. 120f.
[31]
Compare Nicolas Berg / Jess Jochimsen / Bernd Stiegler (ed.), SHOAH. Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst, Munich
1996.
[32] The magazine „Literaturen“ (May 2002) has raised
attention for the author Gerd Ledig who described the air war in a very hard
and merciless way with success and high circulations already in the 1950s.
Obviously W. G. Sebald, who initiated the air war-debate, did not know the
novels as many others either. They had simply not been read in the 1990s
and had been forgotten.
[33] Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, München 2002, p. 16.
[34] Compare also Dieter Baretzko, Nacht fiel auch über die Debatte. Vor vierzig Jahren wurde das Thema Vertreibung zum ersten Mal populär – und wieder vergessen, in: FAZ from 14 February 2002.
[35] Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden (ed.), Zurückgelassen, Dresden 2002.
[36] Compare Günter Metken, Spurensicherung. Kunst als Anthropologie und Selbsterforschung, Köln 1977 und Günter Metken, Spurensicherung – Eine Revision. Texte 1977 – 1995, Dresden 1996.
[37] Herbert Molderings, „Spurensicherung“ in der bildenden Kunst, in: Detlef Hoffmann (ed.), Spurensicherung. Geschichte und Vergangenheit in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Loccumer Protokolle 55/1984, p. 8-43, p. 9.
[38] Esther Ruelfs, Frank Müller. Auf den Spuren von Daisy Opel, in: Zurückgelassen, p. 13.
[39] Niklas Luhmann, Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main 2002, p. 35.
[40] Wolfgang Holler, Vorwort, in: Zurückgelassen, p. 3.
[41] Compare Esposito, Soziales Vergessen,
p. 157.
[42] Aurelius Augustinus, Bekenntnisse (Confessions), Stuttgart 1863, p. 241.
[43] Compare Frances Yates, Art of Memory,
London 1966.
[44] Augustinus, Bekenntnisse, p. 244.