Abstract
Orley considers the defining features of a commemorative performance by reflecting on and discussing a solo show she created in 2016 about her grandfather who was an immigrant and radiologist in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter is driven by two key ideas, namely that heritage is a moment of action that is vital and alive rather than something frozen in the past (Smith in Uses of Heritage. Routledge and Taylor & Francis Group, London, 2006); and that the dead are still with us (Berger in Here Is Where We Meet. Bloomsbury, London, 2006). Orley experiments with Jane Rendell’s practice of site-writing (Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism. I.B. Tauris, London, 2010) to present a chapter arranged in fragments. She concludes that the kind of commemorative work in which she is interested is one that accounts for different perspectives, challenges one-sided historicity and offers new possibilities in the present.
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Notes
- 1.
The use of the fragment in literature and philosophy has a rich history, and can be traced from the Pre-Socratic philosophers (whose thoughts come to us in fragments); to the Romantics (for example Friedrich Schlegel and Samuel Taylor Coleridge); to Friedrich Nietzsche (for example The Will to Power (1968) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005)); Walter Benjamin (whom I mention above); Roland Barthes (see for example Roland Barthes (1977, pp. 92–95)), the successive entries ‘The circle of fragments’; ‘the fragment as illusion’, ‘From the fragment to the Journal’; Jacques Derrida (for example his chapter ‘52 Aphorisms for a Foreword’ in A. Papadakes et al. (1989)); to Maurice Blanchot (for example The Step Not Beyond (1992) and The Writing of the of the Disaster (2015); to the modernist poets (as well as the ones I have mentioned, T. S.Eliot and Ezra Pound). For discussions on the use of fragments, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (1988), Timothy Clark (1992), and Simon Critchley (1997, pp. 105–117). See also Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide (Benson and Connors 2014, pp. 12–13) for a brief discussion of the use of the fragment in literature and criticism.
- 2.
See https://x-rayaudio.squarespace.com/x-rayaudiorecords/ for images of X-ray ribs and audio samples.
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Orley, E. (2018). Searching Shadows, Lighting Bones: Commemorative Performance as an Open-Ended Negotiation. In: Pinchbeck, M., Westerside, A. (eds) Staging Loss. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_14
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