Making Memory Matter
Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art
In an ancient account of painting’s origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions.
Exploring these artists’ work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.
“Lisa Saltzman is the first to have noticed the emergence of an unexpected paradigm in contemporary art: a conjunction between emotions of loss, grief, and trauma, and a visual language that places absence at its very center. The shadow, the profile, the silhouette; light projected on to a surface; the waxwork, the death mask, the plaster cast—what they share is a structure of preservation or memory, but one that is fundamentally hollow or empty, a vacant outline nothing can fill. This is an art based on the persistence of the past in the present, an art of memory. But the waters of Lethe run deep through this territory, and if the past is still with us, it is likely to assume the form of a shadow, a specter, a haunting.”<Norman Bryson, University of California, San Diego>
“Lisa Saltzman’s new book is a rare and beautiful work, a deeply thoughtful and succinct reflection on contemporary art’s unending preoccupation with memory. Her writing on artists like Maya Lin, Ann Hamilton, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tony Oursler, Kara Walker, William Kentridge, Rachel Whiteread, and Christian Boltanski, among several others, is informed by a profound grasp of the history of memory in art, from ancient times to the contemporary cutting edge. No single work I know has bridged so gracefully and concisely, and with such visual acuity, the daunting range of contemporary expressions of memorial art—from painting to installation to video to monumental architecture.”<James Young, University of Massachusetts–Amherst>
“This is a book with big ambitions. There’s no doubt that the works it features—Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Bunker Hill Monument Projection, various pieces by Kara Walker, and Rachel Whiteread’s House—come in for masterful treatment. Lisa Saltzman’s interpretations are original and specific to the pieces, yet they also resonate provocatively with a broad spectrum of contemporary art.”<Martha Ward, University of Chicago>
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Notes on the Postindexical: An Introduction
2 When Memory Speaks: A Monument Bears Witness
3 Negative Images: How a History of Shadows Might Illuminate the Shadows of History
4 What Remains
Notes
Index
Art: Art Criticism
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