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Art and Unforgetting: The Role of Art and Memory in Postcolonial Landscapes

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Book cover Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

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Abstract

This chapter traces the history between art and memory across various fields including indigenous histories, Greek and Enlightenment theories and more recently the field of memory studies. It engages with practices and mechanisms of forgetting. It considers the way art performs memory work, with a consideration of artist Julie Gough.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Enwezor, Okwui (2008) ‘Documents into Monuments: Archives as Meditations on Time’. In Farr, Ian (ed.) Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art (2012). London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

  2. 2.

    Kearins, J (1986) ‘Visual Spatial Memory in Aboriginal and White Australia Children’. Australian Journal of Psychology, 38 (3), 203–214.

  3. 3.

    McCulloch, S & McCulloch Child, E (2008) McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Complete Guide. Melbourne: McCulloch Australian Art Books.

  4. 4.

    Witt, H (1991) ‘The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania’. Whole Earth Review (Fall). http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=2072.

  5. 5.

    Efforts have been put into retrieving more than 250 Aboriginal languages in Australia at the time of invasion. Of the estimated 145 languages spoken in Australia today, 110 are considered at risk. For further reading, see the Indigenous Languages Institute http://www.indigenous-language.org/ as well as the Federation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/.

  6. 6.

    Scanlan, P (2013) Memory: Encounters with the Strange and Familiar. London: Reaktion Books, p. 27.

  7. 7.

    Noorie, S (2007) In conversation with MCA curator, Rachael Kent. http://www.mca.com.au/collections/work/200985a-b/.

  8. 8.

    New texts such as novelist Keneally, T (2007) The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia. London: Vintage Books; Haebich , A (2008) Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press begin to provide a counter to these persistent accounts.

  9. 9.

    Tuhiwai Smith , L (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition. London: Zed Books, p. 35.

  10. 10.

    Chris, H (2008) Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: UNSW Press, p. 227.

  11. 11.

    Mundine , D (2012, June) ‘The Ballad of Jimmy Governor’. Artlink, p. 37.

  12. 12.

    Schama , S (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Vintage Books, p. 10.

  13. 13.

    For an examination of how perceptions of landscape have changed and differ today, see Layton, R & Ucko, PJ (1999) The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape. New York: Routledge. And for a specifically Indigenous account of the perception of landscape, see Gard, Stephan & Bucolo, Salvatore (2005) Capturing Australian Indigenous Perception of Virtual Landscape. In VSSM Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia: Virtual Reality at Work in the 21st Century: Impact on Society, Ghent, Belgium.

  14. 14.

    Pascoe , B (2008) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal People Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Books, p. 117.

  15. 15.

    Solnit , R (2001) As Eve Said to the Serpent. Athens: University of Georgia Press, p. 12.

  16. 16.

    For an overview of the impact of the Industrial Revolution, see O’Brien, P & Quinault, R (eds.) (1993) The Industrial Revolution and British Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whilst it does focus on Britain primarily, the chapter topics provide summaries on everything from art, those at the margins (such as women and the working class) as well as structural changes in parliamentary reform. There are a number of books that discuss these periods variously. Robert L. Herbert’s From Millet to Leger: Essays in Social Art History that considers Europe more broadly. Waite, I (2012) Common Land in English Painting 1700–1850. London: Boydell Press looks specifically at the politicisation of land through the loss of common land in Britain as a result of the Land Enclosure Acts and how this was depicted and negotiated by artists.

  17. 17.

    Chambers, J (1953) ‘Enclosure and Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution’. The Economic History Review, 5 (3), new series, 319–343. https://doi.org/10.2307/2591811.

  18. 18.

    Haebich , A (2018) Dancing in the Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance. Perth: University of Western Australia Press.

  19. 19.

    Schama , S (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Vintage Books, p. 18.

  20. 20.

    For further reading, see Spivak , G (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press. For Gunew , S (1994) Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms. New York: Routledge.

  21. 21.

    Lazarus, N (2011) The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 189.

  22. 22.

    See Ricoeur (2004, p. 385) and his discussion on ‘within-timeness and the dialectic of Memory and History’. He argues that memory may be only a province of history and visa versa.

  23. 23.

    Scanlan (2013) Memory Encounters with the Strange and Familiar. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 35.

  24. 24.

    Till , K (2012) ‘Wounded Cities: Memory Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care’. Political Geography, 31 (1), 3.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., p. 4.

  26. 26.

    Kuhn, A (2000) Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media. New York: Berg Press.

  27. 27.

    Kuhn, A (2000), p. 186.

  28. 28.

    Haebich , A (2018) Dancing in the Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance. Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, p. 1.

  29. 29.

    Nietzche, F (2006) ‘On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic’. In Pearson, KA & Large, D (eds.) The Nietzche Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 410.

  30. 30.

    Baldwin , J (1985) The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin’s Press, p. 536.

  31. 31.

    Cohen S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 79.

  32. 32.

    Mills , C (2007) ‘White Ignorance’. In Sullivan, S & Tuana N (eds.) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 27.

  33. 33.

    Bolt , B (2000) ‘Shedding Light for the Matter’. Hypatia, 15 (2), Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy (Spring), 202–216.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., p. 207.

  35. 35.

    Leader-Elliott, Lyn (2002) ‘Indigenous Cultural Tourism as Part of the Birdsville/Strezlecki Experience’. Australian Aboriginal Studies, Issue 2, pp. 35–44.

  36. 36.

    McMillan, K (2017) ‘Sidney Nolan and the Colonial Sublime: When History Fails, Myths Fill the Void’. In Daniels, R (ed.) Transferences: Sidney Nolan in Britain. Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, p. 55.

  37. 37.

    Shaw, Bruce (1995) Our Heart Is the Land: Aboriginal Reminiscences from the Western Lake Eyre Basin. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, p. 54.

  38. 38.

    Elder, Bruce (2003) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Press.

  39. 39.

    Bonyhady, Tim (1987) The Colonial Image: Australian Painting, 1800–1880. Australian National Gallery.

  40. 40.

    Gibson, G (2002) Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

  41. 41.

    Grieve , G (2018) ‘Connecting with Wounded Spaces’. Un-Magazine 12:1. http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-12-1/connecting-with-wounded-spaces/.

  42. 42.

    Gough, J (2018) ‘The Traveller’. Un-magazine edition 12:1. http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-12-1/the-traveller/.

  43. 43.

    Demos , TJ (2013) The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 8.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    See Vivian Sobchack, who has argued that these mediums fall within the bounds of the ‘cinematic’ and the ‘electronic’, states of experience fundamentally divorced from the ‘photographic’ mode that preceded them. See Sobchack, V (2004) ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence”’. In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 135–162.

  46. 46.

    Trotman, N (2010) Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance. New York: Guggenheim Museum Press.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., p. 86.

  48. 48.

    For further reading, see Doane, MA (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  49. 49.

    Deleuze , G (trans.) (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  50. 50.

    Baker, J (2016) ‘An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experiences in Art and Technology’. Contiuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 30 (2), 254–257.

  51. 51.

    Turum, M (2013) Flashbacks in Film: History and Memory. London: Routledge, p. 3.

  52. 52.

    Doane, M (2002), p. 82.

  53. 53.

    Furphy, E (2013) Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History. Canberra: The Australian National University, ANU E Press.

  54. 54.

    Journal of George Augustus Robinson, 2 November 1830, North East Tasmania quoted in Gough, J (2012) ‘Observance’.

  55. 55.

    Artist statement provided to the author (2012).

  56. 56.

    Pascoe , B (2014) Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident. Broome: Magabala Books.

  57. 57.

    Said , E (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage, cited in Genovese, Taylor R ‘Decolonizing Archival Methodology: Combating Hegemony and Moving Towards a Collaborative Archival Environment’. AlterNATIVE, 12 (1), 34.

  58. 58.

    Gough, J (2018) Fugitive Histories: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, p. 12.

  59. 59.

    In conversation with the Author, August 2018.

  60. 60.

    For further reading on this, see Storey, J (2001) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, pp. 156–160.

  61. 61.

    Jameson, F (1985) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In Foster, H (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, p. 125.

  62. 62.

    Delbo, C in Bennet, J (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 25.

  63. 63.

    Gough, J (2018) Fugitive History: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, p. 64.

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  1. Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London, London, UK

    Kate McMillan

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Correspondence to Kate McMillan .

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McMillan, K. (2019). Art and Unforgetting: The Role of Art and Memory in Postcolonial Landscapes. In: Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_5

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