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Andrew Hoskins and Lucy Annison The dates above encompass a fundamental contradiction of this exhibition: if memorialising is foremost a process of preservation, then what remains of this memorial beyond its display life? What contribution can such a memorial make to an enduring public reminder of the lives scarred and lost in Iraq beyond that of our living memory, in other words beyond the often banal reduction of the continuing carnage and destruction to often snippets of selective images of the injured and the dead and the quantification of casualties that today passes as ‘news’? Using art to move beyond this living memory (or rather living amnesia) of the war is a laudable enterprise, but if it does not impact upon the prevention of the forgetting beyond the current generation (a central function of memorialising) then it risks becoming lost in the Western memory mediascape, notably one forged through the news media and defined (rightly or wrongly) by the iconic: the felling of the statue of Saddam, the bright orange flashes of ‘shock and awe’, and the smiling poses of Lynndie England in photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, etc. However, one of the Memorial’s stated aims is precisely an exploration of the possibilities of the memorial form in the context of the present day. To request that artists imagine a memorial of the 2003 Iraq War (26 of ‘a large number invited’ from Europe, America, and the Middle East accepted the ICA’s invitation) reveals its concern with the present conflict, as much as what its more settled history might or should become. The exhibition effectively challenges the forms and mechanisms of memory and memorialising in an age in which events deemed to ‘need’ memorials (i.e. wars and other catastrophes) appear perpetual and horizonless rather than of fixed duration and of unambiguous conclusion. Not only then do the flux, complexities and continuities of many contemporary conflicts require newly adequate approaches to memorialisation, but one central critique of the permanent memorial is that once constructed it actually forecloses the memory of the event it marks: there is no longer deemed a need to remember it. Thus the etching of public space is equated with a reflection of public memory of sorts: notably a public-political perception of the end of a process of negotiation of the meanings of an event to a particular group or society at a particular time. In this way, the irresolution of the Iraq War and its conjoined ‘aftermath’ (and the variations on the ‘War on Terror’ in which it is embedded) does not afford a juncture – temporal or spatial relief – for a public retrospective. Not only is the event fresh in living memory but it is inseparable from its consequences which continue to unfold as daily news. So, the exhibition not only provides a critique of what one might call an ‘extended present’ (to borrow from Helga Nowotny, 2004) but it also negotiates an imagined future without presuming that that future will necessarily be able to deliver the finality and distance that a traditional notion of a memorial requires. To this end, the Memorial is comprised of proposals for a memorial (only some of which have been ‘realised’ in the ICA exhibition space). So, the activities and the exhibition of the Memorial to the Iraq War subvert the model of memory upon which traditional understandings of memorialisation are founded, and even (paradoxically) challenge the common presumption in media-public discourses of the inherent value of both memory and remembrance. In this way the Memorial evidences ‘new memory’ (Hoskins, 2004 and forthcoming) which is both the media-affected formation and reformation of shared or social memory in the contemporary age and the consequential reassessment of the nature and the very value of remembering subject to the technologies of and the discourses disseminated by new media (principally, but not exclusively, journalism). Ann Rigney (2005), for example, argues for a move away from that which she calls a ‘plenitude-loss-restoration model of memory’, namely an approach which presumes memory as: (1) something that was fully formed in the past; (2) that frustrates as it diminishes over time and hence can never be totally recalled; and thus (3) requires preservation to mitigate against (2) from occurring. Instead, Rigney advocates a ‘thoroughly cultural view of memory’, particularly in relation to ‘artistic media’ in that: ‘By virtue of their aesthetic and fictional properties they are more ‘mobile’ and ‘exportable’ than other forms of representation, whether in translation or the original, and certainly more mobile than actual memory sites’ (2005: 25). Thus, Mark Sladen (Director of Exhibitions) in the newspaper guide that accompanies the Memorial, concedes that some of the most powerful exhibits ‘have an absurd or impossible character’, and that all of the works ‘are in one way or another paper monuments, and it is their hypothetical and provocative character which makes them relevant to the current moment’. In sum, the multiple texts, performances, and exhibits, that constitute the memorial inhabit a kind of node, posing a cluster of ‘connections’ and ‘transfers’ (again to borrow from Rigney’s model of cultural memory) and mediations of memory between and beyond communities, times, and places. In this way it memorialises a present past, and projects this into an imagined future, not one perhaps expected (by some curators, visitors, and by historians) i.e. one that affords an appropriately distant perspective of the past, notably one that is rendered relatively static and complete, but instead a future in which the same complexities and chaos are acknowledged as the very matter of memory, as opposed to its nemesis. One of the challenges faced by social memory in the age of the satiation of news images and the media pursuit of the iconic at the expense of comprehension, is the reduction of narratives on the past to simplistic sets of readily-assembled images through the editorial conventions which still shape the mainstream mediascape, and which diminish the potential for imagination. For instance, some images take on monumental form and function as they fix (and fixate) and leach out meaning from an event through their mass-mediated repetition, circulation and overexposure. The dilemma of what and whether to show or not to show is presented in Snapshots from Baghdad, 2007, an exhibit by Roman Ondák of a single use camera containing an undeveloped film of shots from present-day Baghdad. In this way it provides an antidote to the selective spectacle and overexposure that typifies habituated Western mediated views of catastrophes and conflicts deemed newsworthy. The unexposed images trapped inside the unbroken camera permit an imaginable, unimaginable future, both in relation to what the photographs may contain and their impact, and in the indeterminable moment of their exposure. In an age of the triumph of mobility, in which events, mundane and exceptional, are routinely recorded by professional and amateur media (and also the concomitant blurring of these distinctions) there is an unprecedented accumulation of images (and sounds) of events. Although much attention has been paid to this notion in relation to archival burdens and responsibilities, less explored is the vastly increased likelihood of transformative images emerging beyond the lifetime of the events that they depict. In this way Ondák’s intact camera confronts us with a new memory of the 2007 aftermath of war in Baghdad. Requiring this imaginary leap underscores the theme of the Memorial in reminding us just how much memory is contingent upon future times as much as the actual content of what is presumed to already exist, i.e. that was once already complete and thus ‘retrievable’ (as per the model that Rigney challenges, above). In this way, Ondák’s exhibit offers a counter to both the overexposure of modern (including home) media and to its fuel of instantaneity.
The places depicted are markers of memory – or, rather, markers of the absence of memory – in that their anonymity positions them outside of politico-media and other institutional recognisers as memorial memory. In this way – and in their potential for relatively ‘free’ circulation as postcard images across geographical, cultural, and temporal boundaries – they effect memorial diffusion, and thus an alternative to the concentration associated with repetitive media-memorial images and discourses that propagate the Iraq war as a discrete event. Moving beyond a play on the images of war is a full-size exhibit by Christoph Büchel of a cross between a drug administration room and a mausoleum. It is modelled on a drug clinic from the artist’s home country, yet the very matter of war – the ashes of its victims – would in part replace the drugs. The clinic leads into a waiting area and then an empty space where the users would then experience the effects of that which they had just consumed. Büchel is known for his creation of ‘hyperrealistic’ environments – fictitious, yet very believable renderings of situations that are constructed so that the exhibition or gallery context is removed. In the ICA gallery, the entrance door to the ‘drug administration room’ is convincing to the extent that it is very easy to walk by (presumably many visitors have missed it altogether). It is bizarre as it is horrific. To move through a single door from the neutral and thus comfortable exhibition space to an entirely convincing clinical environment almost without warning, is very disquieting. The squeaking hinges of the clinic door add to its realism – but also in the sense that entering would attract the attention of all those inside, adding to an overwhelming sense of intrusion. For whom are the drugs intended? Büchel’s exhibit is evocative of another temporality of warfare – the gestation of the suffering of civilian victims as well as that of war veterans (e.g. ‘Gulf War Syndrome’). Meanwhile, intruding into the clincial environment of the consequences of war, patients can watch the unreality (and differently ‘clinical’ environment) of CNN – synonymous with the 1991 Gulf War – playing continuously on a single TV monitor in the waiting room. The waiting drug-infused patients one can imagine here would pose a stark counter-memory to that of the Iraq War being recycled on the screen before them. In sum, through exploring the possibilities of the future memory of these conflicting times the exhibition sets out an agenda for artists that demands engagement with the means and mechanisms of unfolding history, rather than being driven merely by opposition to war. In this way, the Memorial opens up a space of new memory that demonstrates what is at stake is the very value of memory and remembering under the intensely-mediated conditions of our age of conflict, which, paradoxically, is seemingly driven by both ephemeral and monumental images of and discourses on warfare. References cited: Andrew Hoskins is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is: Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (with Ben’O’Loughlin, Palgrave Macmillan 2007). He is founding co-editor of two new Sage journals: Memory Studies and Media, War & Conflict. He is Principal Investigator of two newly-funded collaborative projects: ‘Conflicts of Memory: Mediating and Commemorating the 2005 London Bombings’ (AHRC) and ‘Legitimising the Discourses of Radicalisation: Political violence in the new media ecology’ (ESRC New Security Challenges Programme). Lucy Annison is studying for a BA in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her research interests centre on feminist theories particularly related to media and sexuality, with an evolving interest in gender violence and mental health.
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© the war and media network, 2007 |
New Memory at the ICA
The circulation and dominance of photographic images of war is a theme central to a number of other proposals/exhibits. Lida Abdul, for example, in her A history of the world through ruins, 2005-7, has collected photographs of buildings destroyed by the ‘reverberations of 9/11’, i.e. those in some way subject to the ‘war on terror’ and including schools, houses, mosques etc. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. Ten of these images, she proposes, should be printed as postcards without their locations being revealed to ‘make the viewers aware of their complicity in this anonymous engagement with the world’ and to generate interest in how the ruins came about. Abdul’s postcards are ‘exhibited’ in a rack on a wall next to a coffee table in the ICA bar/café as though ordinary touristic fare. So, the ritual of the souvenir collection and sending of picture postcards from captioned places, seen and visited, is subverted in the form of the postcard images of unknown places, unseen and unvisited.