Memory

This anthology investigates the turn in art not only towards archives and histories,the relics of modernities past, but toward the phenomena, in themselves, of "haunting" andthe activation of memory. It looks at a wide array of artistic relationships to memory association,repetition and reappearance, as well as forms of "active" forgetting. Its discussionsencompass artworks from the late 1940s onward, ranging from reperformances such as MarinaAbramovic's Seven Easy Pieces (embodied resurrections of decades-removedperformance pieces by her contemporaries) to the inanimate trace of "memory" Robert Morrisassigns to his free-form felt pieces, which "forget" in their present configurations theirprevious slides and falls. Contextualizing memory's role in visual theory and aestheticpolitics--from Marcel Proust's optics to Bernard Stiegler's analysis of memory's"industrialization"--this collection also surveys the diversity of situations andregisters in which contemporary artists explore memory. Art that engages with memory embodied inmaterial and spatial conditions is examined beside works that reflect upon memory's effects throughtime, and yet others that enlist the agency of remembrance or forgetting to work through aspects ofthe numerous pasts by which the present is always haunted.