GIBBONS, J. (2007) Revisions: The Reassembling of ‘History’.

In: Gibbons, J. Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.

In this chapter Gibbons discusses the difference between history and memory; how communities and institutions affect histories and memories; concepts of counter-memories and counter-histories; and shows the relations between art and history from the XVI century hierarchy of painting genres to postcolonial art in the UK in late XX century.


Gibbons explains how Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, aimed to rewrite the history and add females to it, but eventually mimicked already existing hierarchies instead of fighting or destroying them. Generally, she states that in order to fit into the contemporary frames of feminist or postcolonial critique in the art world, an artist have to avoid universalization and work with themes connected to minorities/oppressed groups by creating more abstract imagery (like Doris Salcedo). Can an artist fit into those frames via addressing personal (hi)stories, working on the different level? Is Luc Tuymans fitting into those frames, because of the less didactic forms, his works take; are the "absence" and "opacity" and "simplicity" of his works affect this? Doris Salcedo works with "found memories", collected memories, and her approach to research can be compared to the one of Svetlana Alexievich with the one difference: Salcedo artistically reworks those memories/texts/objects, bringing them to the next level; and Alexievich, following a journalistic approach, collects quite raw textual material into books, affecting it more in terms of the sequence, juxtaposition and selection. Shoes in Salcedo's Atrabiliarios are displayed vertically and hidden in niches behind the opaque animal skin. Why does Salcedo hide the indexical trace of people who wore those shoes, if the main point of the work is pointing at missing people? Why does she display them vertically, if she hides the index anyway? Salcedo herself and art-critic Nancy Princenthal connect this concealment with secondary associations, people put on the shoes (of lost persons) and with unspeakability of trauma (Gibbons, 2007, p.59). Can it also be related to the blurriness of the memory itself, if the animal skin blurs images of shoes? Or it would somehow ruin the concept, contradict Salcedo's approach to memory? Can it be connected to the desire of the country (Colombia) to hide those lost people and traces of the war?


In this chapter were raised such questions/themes as: ownership and production of knowledge; institutionalization of art; counter-memories and counter-histories as (hi)stories opposed to hegemonic narrative; revising the past; colonialism; appropriation and re-appropriation.


#history #family #memory #death #photography #sculpture #domestic #home

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