PROOF

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments viii

Notes on Contributors x

Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction 1 Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

Part I Mediating Memories

Introduction: Mediating Memories 15 Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

1 Tourists of History: Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 18 Marita Sturken

2 Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence 36 Wouter Weijers

3 The Virtuality of Time: Memory in Science Fiction Films 52 Anneke Smelik

Part II Memory/Counter-memory

Introduction: Memory/Counter-memory 71 Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

4 The Astonishing Return of Blake and Mortimer: Francophone Fantasies of Britain as Imperial Power and Retrospective Rewritings 74 Ann Miller

5 Writing Back Together: The Hidden Memories of Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea 86 Nagihan Haliloglu

6 Liquid Memories: Women’s Rewriting in the Present 100 Liedeke Plate

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March 18, 2009 19:28 MAC/TEEM Page-v 9780230_575677_01_prexii PROOF vi Contents

Part III Recalling the Past

Introduction: Recalling the Past 117 Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

7 The Matter and Meaning of Childhood through Objects 120 Elizabeth Wood

8 The Force of Recalling: Pain in Visual Arts 132 Marta Zarzycka

9 Photographs that Forget: Contemporary Recyclings of the Hitler-Hoffmann Rednerposen 150 Frances Guerin

Part IV Unsettling History

Introduction: Unsettling History 169 Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik

10 Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan 172 Julia Noordegraaf

11 Documentaries and Mediated Popular Histories: Shaping Memories and Images of Slovenia’s past 188 Maruša Pušnik

12 Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts 203 Marta Cabrera

Bibliography 216

Index 232

March 18, 2009 19:28 MAC/TEEM Page-vi 9780230_575677_01_prexii PROOF 1 Tourists of History: Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory

Marita Sturken

Technologies of memory take many forms, from photographs to archi- tectural designs, from docudramas to memorials, from talismans to souvenirs, from diaries to the body itself. The aesthetic styles and designs of these memory technologies can span a broad range of taste categories and stylistic intents, from the sentimental object of loss and mourning to the angry political statement of an AIDS quilt panel. Such distinctions of taste are, of course, deeply tied to class-based notions of what constitutes appropriate taste in relation to memory and loss. They are also crucial to understanding the relationship of memory and politics. It is the case that the aesthetics and forms of cultural memory both enable and limit the memories that circulate through them. The aesthetics of technologies of memory are thus deeply political. In this essay, I examine a trend in the kitschification of memory that has emerged in American culture over the past twenty years, and what it indicates about particular narratives of innocence and a consumer cul- ture of comfort in the United States. I am interested in the political implications of kitsch forms of remembering and how an aesthetic of reenactment, which is a key factor of kitsch remembering, enables cer- tain kinds of memory narratives and limits others. Is a particular kind of kitsch aesthetics of memory emerging at this moment in history – a his- torical time framed by the events of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and the war in Iraq? I would like to look specifically at the way that the mem- ory of 9/11 is being encoded into a particular set of aesthetics of kitsch and re-enactment at Ground Zero in New York City. Such a set of aes- thetics emerged in the context of a particularly troubling and extreme moment in American political history, when the stakes in reproducing notions of innocence were very high in the United States.

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9/11 souvenirs

My story begins with two souvenirs. The first is a plastic snow globe pencil holder that contains a miniature of the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing next to an oversized St. Paul’s Chapel with a police car and a fire truck sitting before it (Figure 1.1). When the globe is shaken, bright moons and stars float around the towers. It is labelled, ‘World Trade Center 1973–2001’. I purchased it from an illegal street vendor selling wares at a temporary table next to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. My second souvenir is a teddy bear that wears a FDNY firefighter’s uniform, which is sold as part of a broad (legal) consumer network related to the New York City Fire Department (Figure 1.2). The WTC snow globe is not only an object of tourism but is also an object of memory that depicts the insulated world of the US nation in the small bubble-like worlds of its globe. We look into the small world of a snow globe as if from a god-like position. The effect of the miniature

Figure 1.1 World Trade Center memorial snow globe Marita Sturken

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-19 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 20 Technologies of Memory in the Arts is to offer a sense of containment and, in this case, to narrate particular stories about the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The snow globe’s miniature world is not simply small, but animated. When shaken, it comes alive with the movement of moons and stars, offering a kind of celebratory flurry that then settles back again. This snow globe also has a very particular relationship to time. It notes the dates of the ‘life span’ of a building, the World Trade Cen- ter, and captures it in a mystical temporal moment – the towers remain

Figure 1.2 Fire Department of New York teddy bear Marita Sturken

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-20 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 21 standing although the emergency vehicles that signal the towers’ demise are already present. Time-wise, a snow globe is itself an object of time that one is encouraged to ‘visit’ on a regular basis, absentmindedly giv- ing it a shake in a moment of distraction. Yet, a snow globe also offers a sense of time as a return – one shakes the globe, but it always returns back to the landscape before the snow flurry. I see this snow globe not simply as an object of kitsch, but as an object that embodies the way that kitsch can produce a sense of innocence and comfort. The comfort of the snow globe derives in part from this expectation that it returns each time to its original state. The FDNY teddy bear is an example of the broader role that teddy bears have played in the kitschification of memory and the predom- inance of a culture of comfort in the United States. The ubiquity of teddy bears in New York City after 9/11 brought the national trend of giving teddy bears to the grieving and the sick to unusual proportions. Ever since the early years of the AIDS crisis, when people began to give teddy bears to people who were ill with AIDS, the teddy bear has been increasingly deployed as a commodity of grief. This recent consumerism of comfort teddy bears is aimed at adult consumers, not children, and carries with it the inevitable effect of infantilization – teddy bears have proliferated in the comfort culture of breast cancer advocacy and at sites like the Oklahoma City National Memorial. This FDNY teddy bear is an object of memory – it is a reminder that several hundred New York City firefighters lost their lives on 9/11, and that they left behind bereaved families and colleagues. It is also an object that can aid in screening out many other stories of 9/11 that have been overshadowed by the sancti- fication of the New York City firefighters – or the brutal truth that it was lack of preparation that fated them, rather than sheer heroism. A teddy bear is a primary object of comfort culture. It is a tactile object – one is supposed to hold it in order for it to convey its fully resonant meaning. In the aftermath of 9/11, the power awarded the teddy bear to provide comfort was extraordinary – as early as the next day, the Salvation Army handed out teddy bears to people returning to the city. Importantly, the teddy bear promises comfort, not necessarily the comfort that things will be better, but the comfort that one will feel better.

Tourists of history

The snow globe and the teddy bear are emblematic of the ways that American culture processes and engages with loss, and of the economic networks that support the consumerism of American kitsch. They are

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-21 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 22 Technologies of Memory in the Arts both mass-produced and labelled ‘Made in China’. They are thus pro- duced out of the elaborate global economic networks that manufacture the objects of American patriotism (including the vast majority of small American flags, which are made in Korea and China). Their produc- tion of American innocence is the product of low-level, lowly paid, outsourced labour. The snow globe and the teddy bear are both objects that participate in what I call the tourism of history; they form part of the broad array of cultural practices that reveal the deep investment in the concept of innocence in American culture. The tourist is a figure who embodies a detached and innocent pose. In using the term ‘tourists of history’, I am defining a particular mode through which the American public is encouraged to experience history through media images, souvenirs, popular culture, and museum and architectural re-enactments, a form of tourism that has as its goal a cathartic ‘experience’ of history. I am concerned with the subjectivity of the tourist of history, for whom his- tory is an experience once or twice removed, a mediated and re-enacted experience, yet an experience nevertheless. Tourists visit sites where they do not live, they are outsiders to the daily practices of life in tourist desti- nations, they are largely unaware of the effects of how tourist economies have structured the daily lives of the people who live and work in tourist locales. Tourists typically remain distant in the sites they visit, where they are often defined as innocent outsiders, mere observers whose actions are believed to have no effect on what they see. It is the case that there now exist many forms of tourism, such as ecotourism, that attempt to produce different kinds of tourist subjectivities, but my intent here is to deploy the very modernist notion of the tourist as a metaphor – I want to consider how this subjectivity of the tourist can serve as a metaphor for the ways in which American citizens are encouraged to situate them- selves as innocent outsiders in relationship to history and in particular to world history. The investment in reaffirming American innocence that underlies the tourism of history functions not only to mask US imperialist ventures but also to obscure the degree to which violent conflict is a fundamental aspect to American society. For instance, the narrative describing the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as comparable to Pearl Harbour as the country’s ‘loss of innocence’ about being attacked on home soil helped to affirm an isolationist shock – the jolting response that suddenly the rest of the world had come into view to the American public, the anger of that world suddenly in focus. Yet, the narrative of innocence enabled the US response to avoid any discussion of what long histories of its foreign

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-22 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 23 policies had done to help foster a terrorist movement specifically aimed at the United States and its allies. The cultural memory of events such as 9/11 is intimately tied up with this culture of innocence. Narratives of innocence need constant maintenance in order to be sustained, and this maintenance is manifested in many places including popular culture, tourism and memorials.

Kitsch

The tourism of history that I see in American culture is intimately tied to the production of American kitsch. Kitsch has historically been consid- ered to be an aspect of mass culture (McDonald, 1952). The word itself is derived from the German verkitschen, meaning ‘to cheapen’ (Broch, 1968, p. 49). Thus, kitsch is often associated with cheapness both in terms of cost and production, as well as with the idea that such cheap things are without any cultural refinement or taste. Mass production is a key component in this definition of kitsch, since these qualities of cheapness are related to the mass production of objects with no rela- tionship to craftsmanship. Yet, a kitsch aesthetic is hardly restricted to cheap, mass-produced objects, though these may constitute the origin of the term. Matei Calinescu notes that many objects that constitute kitsch, while they may be inexpensive, are intended to suggest richness in the form of imitation gold and silver, and that luxury goods can often be seen as kitsch in style (1987, p. 243). Similarly, as I will discuss further, high-end design can often engage in a kitsch form of sentimentality. Kitsch was thus initially associated with a set of social factors that accompanied modernity, with the rise of mass culture, the sense of alienation that accompanied the shift to industrialization and urban- ization, and the widespread commodification of daily life. Calinescu writes that kitsch ‘has a lot to do with the modern illusion that beauty can be bought and sold’ and that ‘the desire to escape from adverse or simply dull reality is perhaps the main reason for the wide appeal of kitsch’ (1987, pp. 229, 237). This sense of easy formulas and predictable emotional registers which form a kind of escapism is essential to most definitions of kitsch. In his well-known essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Clement Green- berg wrote: ‘Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and fake sensations. [ ...] Kitsch is the epit- ome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time’ (1986, p. 12). While I am not interested in retrieving Greenberg’s

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-23 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 24 Technologies of Memory in the Arts dismissal of kitsch, I am interested in revisiting his analysis of the problematic mechanics of kitsch. Critiques of kitsch such as these have been largely understood within the framework of critiques of mass culture, and within that, the critique that mass-produced objects of prepackaged sentiment offer a cheap- ened way to engage with interpersonal emotions, tragic sites of loss, and political complexity. Yet, it is worth noting that kitsch objects are often quite spontaneously mixed with objects that are understood to be less prepackaged and more personalized and individual. In the United States, spontaneously created shrines at sites such as Shanksville, Pennsylvania or along the fence that surrounded the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City, are as likely to have mass-produced objects such as teddy bears and Hallmark cards as they are to have objects that are less likely to be seen as kitsch. Of course, these categories can be immensely problematic, since a handwritten note, understood in many contexts as more authentic than a mass-produced souvenir, can deploy kitsch sentiment as well. In addition, there are many ways in which individuals make meaning with kitsch objects and do non-kitsch things with mass-produced souvenirs. It is not useful to understanding kitsch, particularly in the context of postmodern culture, to simply dis- miss tourist practices and the purchasing of kitsch souvenirs as activities that are superficial and meaningless; certain kinds of tourist practices, broadly defined, enable people to respond to loss and make sense of their grief. Yet, I also do not feel that the model of cultural analysis that sees such cultural practices as people ‘making do’ with the symbols at hand in order to make sense of loss tells us very much about what happens politically at such places. It may be that the purchasing and display of a FDNY teddy bear allows someone to feel a connection to and sadness about those who lost their lives on 9/11. But in offering simple com- fort, such a teddy bear also disables certain kinds of responses. It is not a versatile object that can be employed for a range of responses; it is a cir- cumscribed one, precisely because of the message of sentimentality and reassurance it offers. When someone leaves a teddy bear at the memo- rial, it is to signal an empathetic and caring response, to offer comfort to the dead. When people purchase FDNY teddy bears in New York City, they are fulfilling a particular set of needs to feel connected to particular traumatic events, a connection that the teddy bear enables in a narra- tive of simple comfort. However overstated this may sound, such a teddy bear is ultimately not an innocent object.

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Kitsch as irony

While modern critics of mass culture have historically defined kitsch as an aesthetic of the masses (and thus as an aesthetic of lower-class culture), contemporary kitsch cultures defy simple hierarchies of high and low culture or class-distinct cultures. In the context of postmodern culture, understanding kitsch thus means moving beyond these simple definitions of high and low, precisely because of the way that kitsch objects can move in and out of concepts of authenticity in contem- porary culture. Kitsch objects from history can also be imbued with a kind of playful engagement with history, a kind of humorous pastiche. For instance, there are many levels of ironic engagement at work in the proliferation of kitsch artefacts of the former Soviet Union and East Germany. The proliferation of Cold War kitsch in places such as Berlin, where, for instance, the former Checkpoint Charlie site has been trans- formed into a tourist site where one can purchase Checkpoint Charlie coffee mugs and chocolate bars, demonstrates the role that kitschifica- tion can play in simultaneously processing and erasing history. What does the souvenir replication of the Checkpoint Charlie sign that once marked a site of oppression, a place where people were shot for attempt- ing to cross a border, do to notions of history? What kind of cultural memory does it produce? In China, objects from the Cultural Revolu- tion now decorate the walls of ironic cafes in Beijing, and Chairman Mao dinner plates are sold as pricey collectibles at Sotheby’s. In many ways, this can be seen as an aesthetic of kitsch as irony, the reduction of historical objects into humorous souvenirs which reduce historical events to something containable, laughable, and hence less powerful. Yet, at the same time, we cannot deny that this process of kitschifica- tion also takes the edginess and tensions of history and makes them more palatable and less present. Kitsch as irony is a particular kind of kitsch aesthetics. Thus, when an object of the past is labelled kitsch, it can indicate a doubled reading – that is, an object is defined as kitsch when it is seen to have an original aesthetic status that is reread as being tasteless, a lava lamp for instance, but then recoded as valuable. Daniel Harris refers to the distancing asso- ciated with this second stage of kitsch as a ‘twice-removed aesthetic’ that shifts toward irony (Harris, 1995, n.p.). Yet, the second, ironic and transcoding stage of kitsch takes time. It is difficult, for instance, to think about purchasing 9/11 souvenirs in order put them on ironic display next to nuclear-inspired household appliances from the 1950s that have

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-25 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 26 Technologies of Memory in the Arts gained value because they display the naïve and crass tastes of previous eras of popular culture, or even beside the Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs. Kitsch’s relationship to ironic distancing and playful pastiche shows how many of the modern mass-culture critiques of kitsch fall short in the context of postmodern culture. The challenge to understanding how kitsch operates today is to see the range of responses that it produces, to consider how it can encourage: 1) a prepackaged and unreflective sentimental response; (2) a playful irony; and (3) a serious engagement with history, simultaneously both innocence and irony. The tourism of history of American culture is fuelled in many ways by the first category of kitsch, kitsch as a prepackaged and sentimen- tal response, which directly relates to its political meaning. This kind of kitsch is meant to produce predetermined and conscribed emotional responses, to encourage pathos and sympathy, not anger and outrage (though there is plenty of kitsch in many of the 9/11 artefacts that promise to get revenge). Even when a kitsch object might be used by someone in a non-kitsch way, as a means to recognize loss, it can rarely be an incitement to historical reflection or political engagement. Kitsch does not emerge in a political vacuum, rather it is more often than not a style that responds to particular kinds of historical events and that indi- cates particular kinds of political acquiescence. The well-known German critiques of kitsch saw it as an element of the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, and kitsch has often been associated with a totalitarian or fas- cist aesthetic. Greenberg wrote: ‘the encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. [ ...] Kitsch keeps a dictator in close contact with the “soul” of the people’ (1986, p. 20). During the Cold War, kitsch was the dominant style of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, and dissident writer Milan Kundera famously wrote that it was the function of kitsch to curtain off the abject: ‘Kitsch is the abso- lute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence’ (1991, p. 248). Kundera argued that totalitarian regimes use kitsch to sell the idea of a ‘brotherhood of man’. In a well-known passage he states:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch (p. 251).

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It is this relationship of sentiment to the idea of universal emotions shared by all of mankind, Kundera’s ‘second tear’, that gives kitsch a broader political meaning. And, when teddy bears are circulated as ‘uni- versal’ symbols that can ‘make us feel better’, they provide a means to participate in Kundera’s image of the universal second tear of emotion. The FDNY teddy bear says that Americans are innocent, unknowing and, by extension, that the United States as a nation is innocent too. A kitsch teddy bear can thus be seen not only as embodying a particular kind of prepackaged sentiment, but as conveying the message that this sentiment is one that is nationally if not universally shared, that it is appropriate and, importantly, that it is enough. When this takes place in the context of politically charged sites of violence, the effect is inevitably one that reduces political complexity to simplified notions of tragedy. To go back to my initial declaration, kitsch images and objects are not innocent, they sell the idea of innocence, and at this particular moment in US history, that belief in innocence is particularly troubling.

The myth of innocence

In the aftermath of 9/11, the proliferation of kitsch consumerism was quite stunning. As Salon writer Heather Havrilesky wrote on the first- year anniversary, ‘sifting through the consumer fallout from 9/11 can incite the kind of cultural vertigo heretofore only achieved by spending several hours in a Graceland gift shop’ (2002, n.p.). Daniel Harris writes:

Does an event as catastrophic as this one require the rhetoric of kitsch to make it less horrendous? Do we need the overkill of ribbons and commemorative quilts, haloed seraphim perched on top of the burn- ing towers and teddy bears in firefighter helmets waving flags, in order to forget the final minutes of bond traders, restaurant workers and secretaries screaming in elevators filling with smoke, standing in the frames of broken windows on the 90th floor waiting for help and staggering down the stairwells covered in third degree burns? ... Through kitsch we avert our eyes from tragedy ... (2002, n.p.)

The souvenirs at Ground Zero, the snow globes and FDNY teddy bears, as technologies of memory, inevitably collapse history into simple nar- ratives. The focus of such images and objects is invariably not the why of such events or the complexities of history so much as it is about pro- ducing narratives of redemption and comfort. Thus, many of the objects that circulate at Ground Zero offer a kitsch embrace of redemption,

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-27 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 28 Technologies of Memory in the Arts exemplified by images of angel figures surrounding the Twin Towers. This emphasis on redemption is a key element in the deployment of such events for political gain. The snow globes, the teddy bears and the images of the Twin Towers with the angels and seraphim actively produce innocent subjects. They affirm the broader American myth of innocence, a well-entrenched and heavily maintenanced belief that the United States is a country of pure intentions to which terrible things can happen, but which itself never provokes or initiates attack. This narrative of innocence and comfort functions to screen over the imperial projects of American history and its aspirations to empire, both historical and contemporary. Hal Foster notes that in the post-Cold War context, the proliferation of national kitsch evokes many of the forms of Cold War totalitarian kitsch, which was itself a highly constructed façade of innocence. He writes:

... we are surrounded by ‘beautifying lies’ of the sort noted by Kun- dera – a ‘spread of democracy’ that often bolsters its opposite, a ‘march of freedom’ that often liberates people to death, a ‘war on terror’ that is often terroristic, and a trumpeting of ‘moral values’ often at the cost of civil rights. [ ...] the blackmail that produces our ‘categorical agreement’ operates through its tokens. For instance, in support of the ‘war on terror’ are the decals of the World Trade Center towers draped with Stars and Stripes, the little flags that fly on truck antennas and ... business-suit labels and the shirts, caps and statuettes dedicated to New York City firemen and police (2005, p. 29).

The dominance of a kitsch aesthetic as the style of the nation invokes a notion of the people. Thus, in the United States today, kitsch thrives in a context in which the nation is deeply wedded to an abstract notion of populism which is distinct from the people. This is a highly con- structed sense of populism, through which the ‘American people’ are constantly marshalled to affirm policies that are actually quite destruc- tive to the well-being of most of the American public. This is a sense of populism that is so constructed and kitsch that it was easily inhabited by a President who is a member of the elite. Thus, the kitschification of traumatic and highly political events in the United States, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, allows for, if not facilitates, the means through which these events can both be depoliticized into prepackaged sentiment and exploited for particular political agendas. These forms of consumer culture enable a political acquiescence, one in

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-28 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 29 which consumers signal their ‘categorical agreement’, as Foster notes, through the purchase of tokens.

Cultural re-enactment

Kitsch and re-enactment are closely allied. Whereas the kitsch object smooths over conflict and complexity in terms of circumscribing sen- timent, in cultural re-enactments the repetition of memory can often serve to reinscribe those narratives into containable frameworks. Sig- mund Freud believed, for instance, that the compulsion to repeat was a mode through which most people would act out, rather than remem- ber, their childhood dynamics and traumatic experiences. For Freud, a patient needs to work through their resistances to seeing the distinction between the present and the past in order to move beyond compulsive repetition (Freud, 1958). The work of confronting traumatic memories is thus understood to give them representational and narrative form and to integrate them into one’s life-story. Traditionally, psychoanalysis has contrasted compulsive repetition with this working through of trauma, yet this binary is highly problematic. One could argue that it is often the compulsive repetition of a narrative that allows for the subjects to feel some form of agency over the story of their own trauma, and the idea of a ‘working through’ of trauma implies too simply the emergence of a new state of being in which the effects of trauma are properly man- aged (Brison, 2002). Here, I am interested in looking at the aesthetic of compulsive re-enactment in architectural design that has emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, in particular in New York City, and how it enables a kind of kitschification of history. Post-9/11 American culture proliferated with forms of cultural re- enactment, not the least of which were the many renderings that circulated of the now lost Twin Towers. For instance, in July 2002, when the New Yorker magazine asked a group of artists to reimagine the space, the artists produced a series of ironic, oddly humorous, ambiva- lent, and whimsical proposals that almost all replicated the towers in some form (Tomkins, 2002). Despite its intention to use humour and cynicism to intervene in the hypersentimentalisation of the site, this project became an exercise in reimagining twin structures, two build- ings, figures of two. Artist Nancy Rubins inverted the towers with a proposal for two 110-storey underground structures, and graphic nov- elist Art Spiegelman proposed 110 one-storey buildings. Artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, who are well known for their avant-garde work on issues of aesthetics and taste, produced a comical proposal for

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-29 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 30 Technologies of Memory in the Arts a farm on Lower Manhattan, with the Cortlandt Street subway station surrounded by cows and fields. Yet, the two silos of the farm are unmis- takable references to the two towers, hovering over the bucolic rendition like a shadow of the past. Video artist Tony Oursler created two scaf- foldings in the shape of the two towers that would hold video screens onto which video coverage of 9/11 would be replayed in a continuous loop. He suggested that the footage be run for a period of time and then buried, so that it would ‘consume itself’. Re-enactment, much of it bordering on or fully immersed in a kitsch aesthetic, has also been a key factor in a large number of the archi- tectural designs that were put forward for the rebuilding of Ground Zero in the years after 9/11. British architect Norman Foster (since commissioned to produce a new office tower at Ground Zero) initially designed two ‘kissing towers’ that he described as ‘two towers that kiss and touch and become one’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 10; Stephens, 2004, pp. 78–81). Foster’s plan, which consists of two towers angling towards each other, held observation decks and ‘sky parks’. The design was oddly reminiscent of the numerous children’s drawings that had proliferated throughout the city, in which the towers had been imagined as brothers embracing each other. Other designs, such as the one by Richard Meier and Associates, proposed to incorporate shadows of the Twin Towers, by extending two long piers into the Hudson River the size and shape of the former towers, as if to install their shadow permanently (Stephens, 2004, pp. 82–5). The THINK project design, which came second in the design competition, offered two lattice structures of steel in the shape and out- line of the two towers, into which would be inserted several cultural and conference centres. Toward the top of the structures, an elongated shape connected the two buildings, a shape that looked uncannily like the image of an aircraft hitting the towers. This design, a re-enactment not only of the Twin Towers but also of the catastrophic events of 9/11, exemplifies the degree to which the architectural imagination of Ground Zero has had a tortured relationship to memory. The design that re-enacts the events of 9/11 the most dramatically, some would say insensitively and compulsively, is Peter Eisenman’s office complex, which was originally published in the New York Times in September 2002. Eisenman, now best known as the designer of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, designed a set of buildings with crumpled facades designed to look as if they are in a state of perpetual collapse. The buildings appear from an overview perspective to be an exploded structure; from the street, their facades seem to be collapsing down- ward in rapid motion. The design is thus a reenactment of the towers

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-30 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 31 falling, precisely one of the most traumatic moments of that day. As the New York Times puts it, in all seriousness: ‘the buildings would echo the devastation wrought on 9/11 and offer a striking memorial to the fallen towers; at the same time they would provide three million square feet of new office space’ (Muschamp, 2002, p. 53). This design is so strangely inappropriate, and so insensitive to the grief and pain that sur- rounds Ground Zero (one can hardly imagine survivors of 9/11 wanting to work in a building that reenacts the towers’ collapse), that I think it can only be read as itself an indicator of grief, unprocessed, inchoate, in a continual state of re-enactment. It is tempting to interpret the constant re-imagining and re-enactment of the Twin Towers as a form of disavowal. Norman Foster explained his proposal’s re-enactment of the towers as a kind of unconscious response: ‘it wasn’t a conscious decision to emulate the Twin Towers; at first we designed something completely different ...’ (Pearman, 2003, n.p.). To think of these designs as a form of compulsive repetition is, of course, to indicate that they constituted a kind of overwhelming grief, one that must be couched in terms of architectural criteria rather than acknowl- edged. One could speculate that the grief evident in the constant desire to reimagine Ground Zero not as renewed but as a site of memory is also, for the architectural community, about a disavowal of the role of the buildings themselves in the tragedy of 9/11. While no one believes that buildings can be built to withstand the effects of being hit by jet- liners filled with fuel, it is nevertheless the case that the Twin Towers, like most other skyscrapers, were inherently unsafe for the people who worked within them. Thus, to reimagine the Twin Towers is to disavow so much – to deny the fact that it was as much the buildings that killed people as the planes that destroyed them (many more people died from the buildings’ collapse than from the impact of the planes), that they were symbols of architectural achievement at the expense of those who worked inside them. It is to disavow the most harrowing images of that day, that of people falling/jumping to their deaths because they were trapped by the buildings themselves. These architectural designs thus constitute technologies of memory that also effectively screen out these images. Reenactment of what took place on 9/11 is also a key element in the master plan by architect Daniel Libeskind, which was approved in early 2003. As the rebuilding process has become increasingly fraught and divisive, Libeskind’s master plan has been rendered increasingly irrele- vant, yet it is worth re-examining his original plan, since its aesthetic demonstrates the way that re-enactment and memory have dictated

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-31 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF 32 Technologies of Memory in the Arts visions of the site. Libeskind can be said to have won the design com- petition precisely because of his ability to negotiate this terrain fraught with aesthetics and mourning. Libeskind presented his proposal, Mem- ory Foundations, not as a reconstruction of Lower Manhattan so much as a memorialization of the site, and initially kept part of the slurry wall of the pit of Ground Zero exposed in his design, to pay tribute not only to the ‘bathtub structure’ of the foundation of the Trade Center but to the experience of Ground Zero itself. Fully cognizant of the demand for symbolism, he imagined a set of buildings that ascended along a spiral, culminating in a tall and slender skyscraper, later dubbed the Freedom Tower, that would be 1,776 feet tall and would echo the Statue of Liberty across New York harbour. Libeskind presented his architectural design by portraying himself as an intensely patriotic New Yorker: ‘I arrived by ship to New York as a teenager, an immigrant, and like millions of others before me, my first sight was the Statue of Liberty and the amazing skyline of Manhattan. I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 8). Libeskind evokes a set of historical meanings as a culture figure – a Jewish refugee, a patriot immigrant, and one of the primary interpreters of Jewish history and cultural memory. Libeskind’s presence in the pro- cess of rebuilding Lower Manhattan in New York City was thus coded as a redemptive one. Libeskind’s plan for Ground Zero is not the first time that he has used memory as a guiding means for design. As he states: ‘I have been trying [in my work] to redefine the relationship between architecture and memory’ (Goldberger, 2004, p. 120). And, indeed, this is precisely the same strategy that Libeskind deployed in designing his now-famous building for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. As Noah Isenberg has writ- ten, Libeskind often described the Jewish Museum (as he did his design for New York City) as a building about his own biography, and the museum, which is a compelling edifice, has often been seen to be more of a memorial than a museum (2002, p. 171). In his philosophy of architecture and memory, Libeskind deploys a kind of ‘narrative architecture’ that is intended to tell stories, what Mar- tin Filler calls a kind of updated architecture parlante of ‘buildings whose forms “speak” of their function’ (2001, p. 28). Thus, Memory Foundations narrates a memory of the day of 9/11. It initially included ‘The Park of Heroes’, demarcating the space where firefighters entered the buildings, and a ‘Wedge of Light’, a triangular plaza where the sun was supposed to reach from 8:46 to 10:28am each year on 11 September, each an explicit restaging of the day of 9/11. In designating the footprints of the towers

March 18, 2009 19:30 MAC/TEEM Page-32 9780230_575677_04_cha01 PROOF Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory 33 to be voids in the space, an element that is reiterated in Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design for the memorial at Ground Zero, Reflecting Absence, Libeskind used an aesthetic of absence to reiterate the presence of the two towers. This concept of the void has been a central element of Libeskind’s architectural style and has been seen by some critics as ‘nearly necrophiliac’ (Franklin, 2005, p. 29). Libeskind’s propensity for re-enactment is also tied up in the elements of his work that critics have seen as kitsch. So, in Memory Foundations, the re-enactment of the events of 9/11 is essential to the patriotic ele- ments of the design, elements that were seen by many as Libeskind wrapping himself in the flag. From its tower to its rhetoric of free- dom and equation with the Constitution, Libeskind’s original master plan used narrative to inscribe the space of Ground Zero within a discourse of American exceptionalism. New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp wrote a now-famous critique of it, accusing it of being ‘astonishingly tasteless’ and ‘an emotionally manipulative exercise in visual codes’. Muschamp went further to state: ‘A concrete pit is equated with the Constitution. A skyscraper tops off at 1,776 feet ... Aprome- nade of heroes confers quasi-military status on uniformed personnel. Even in peacetime that design would appear demagogic’ (2003, p. E1). As Muschamp wrote:

... had the competition been intended to capture the fractured state of shock felt soon after 9/11, this plan would probably deserve first place. But why, after all, should a large piece of Manhattan be perma- nently dedicated to an artistic representation of enemy assault? It is an astonishingly tasteless idea. It has produced a predictably kitsch result (ibid.).

Here, re-enactment converges with kitsch to produce a narrative of patriotic embrace. Had it been built as intended, Libeskind’s memo- rial plan would thus have operated as a counterpart to what is often described as the ‘Spielberg style’ of history, in which simplistic symbols are deployed to evoke empathetic responses in viewers. As Hal Foster has written: ‘The real pessimists glimpse a Trauma Theme Park in the mak- ing, with Libeskind a contemporary cross between Claude Lanzmann and Walt Disney, the perfect maestro for an age when historical tragedy can become urban spectacle’ (2003, p. 17). While its Minimalist aesthetic makes it less kitschy, the memorial design by Michael Arad that is planned for Ground Zero, Reflecting Absence, also participates in an aesthetic of re-enactment, using the two

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‘voids’ of the towers’ footprints to evoke absence in a way that replays, of course, their presence. As the fraught political process at Ground Zero has succeeded in eviscerating the Arad design to the point of unrec- ognizability, its designation of the two voids looks increasingly like a terrible loss of public space that reinscribes a large area of the city into a kind of memory replay. In many ways, the re-enactment of Libeskind’s design and of Reflecting Absence share a sense of suspended time with the snow globe souvenir from Ground Zero. In the souvenir, the Twin Towers are still standing, together, whole and untouched. Yet they are surrounded by police cars and fire trucks, and the sense of emergency is present. This reenactment, like Memory Foundations, reproduces again and again that sense of emer- gency. It hardly needs to be said, of course, that that sense of emergency has been exploited politically, and in the context of Ground Zero, it has helped to enable a particular set of discourses of New York City exceptionalism, 9/11 exceptionalism, and American exceptionalism.

Re-enactment and irony

What, then, would be an aesthetic of re-enactment that would not deploy kitsch sentiment that might engage irony rather than an easy comfort culture? Ironically, one of the architects of the most appalling designs for Ground Zero, Peter Eisenman, has created in Berlin (ini- tially in collaboration with Richard Serra, whose lasting influence on the design would seem to be present) a memorial that produces an experi- ence of memory that re-enacts, but which does so in an open-ended, unsentimental way. The location of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the middle of Berlin, next to the former site of the Berlin Wall, situates it in the middle of a city that has used architecture in stunning and highly varied ways to integrate memory into the present: with buildings that are hybrids of old and new (Norman Foster’s Reich- stag building), buildings that place the skin of modern materials over a palimpsest of the brick and mortar of the past (the Akademie der Künste) and buildings that declare a break from the past in their futuristic aes- thetics (the Potsdamer Platz). One can certainly have sympathy with the critical arguments that the memorial is too big, too central, too overde- termined. Yet, its achievement is in precisely the way in which it does not demand of visitors a particular, prescribed emotional (one might say kitsch) response. Eisenman has stated that he did not want the memo- rial to allow for sentimentalization, ‘I did not want people to weep and

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then walk away with a clear conscience’ (Ouroussoff, 2005, p. B6). Walk- ing between the pillars of the memorial, one can have an experience of the tenuousness of history, the inescapability of different paths. As one gets deeper into the chasms and loses the city behind, one catches glimpses of others moving through, fleeting and then gone, never to be seen again. In walking through the memorial, one experiences the arbitrariness of life, its ungraspability. Is it possible that architectural design that allows for this kind of open- ended response could be built in New York City, or in the United States, at this moment in history? Of course, the Berlin memorial was the prod- uct of intense debate over several decades, and is a memorial to those who died in a tragedy that occurred more than sixty years ago. Never- theless, I would argue that the tourism of history has been a mode of American public discourse for some time. Americans are still caught, in many ways, in the repetition of snow globes, in the moment of emergency and in the contained comfort zone of souvenirs and kitsch. Perhaps what Americans need in order to fully engage with the histor- ical implications of 9/11 and the sense of loss it produced in New York City and in the United States is time and irony.1

Note

1. This essay is derived in part from my book, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

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Index

Italic page numbers indicate illustrations

2046 (Wong) 63–5 representations of pain 133–4 6 de Noviembre (Salcedo) 211 staging of 47–8 9/11 souvenirs 19–21, 27 see also works as specific objects 42–3 September 11, 2001 ‘Art and Objecthood’ (Fried) 47 artists, use of archival material 177 AMovie(Connor) 175–6 Assmann, Aleida 3, 9, 86, 189 absence, representing 210–12 Assmann, Jan 3, 7, 89, 204 acted scenes, in documentary association, affective 185 films 197 adolescence 126 Bachelard, Gaston 121 adults, definitions of childhood 129 Backup: the Slovenian Word in Carinthia ‘aesthetic of quotation’ 79 (Dolinšek) 193, 195, 198, 201 aesthetic styles, memory technologies Baer, Ulrich 210 18 Bakhtin, Mikhail 72 affect 53–4, 62–5, 66, 67 Bal, Mieke 6, 89, 117, 134 affective association 185 Barthes, Roland 193 affective memories 145–7 Baudrillard, Jean 6, 55 Ahmed, Sara 145 Bauman, Zygmunt 101, 105, 106 Alina’s Funeral (Szapocznikow) 134, beholders see also viewers 141–5, 142 space and time 48–50 Alphen, Ernst van 182 Bellour, Raymond 183 American innocence, and tourism of Belsey, Catherine 72–3 history 22–3 Bennett, Jill 62, 133, 134 amnesia 171 Berlin, use of architecture 34 Anderson, Steve 193 Bhabha, Homi 81 Antze, Paul 9, 117 biographical objects, identity and Appiah, Kwame Anthony 8 personal memory 121–5 Arad, Michael 33–4, 36, 50 Black Box (Smith) 41 archaeology of knowledge 191 Blake and Mortimer architecture anxieties 76–7 Berlin 34 Belgium, in Blake and Mortimer as re-enactment 29–33 83–4 9/11 32–40, 48, 50–1 cinematic sources 80 archival films see compilation films Cold War 77, 80–3 archival material, re-use of audiovisual evocation of originals 84 material 174 imperialism and colonialism 76–7 Armstrong, Isobel 62 Jacobs’s albums 75–9 art masculinity, threatened by the ethical aspects 5 feminine 78 as memory work 118 nature of reader’s pleasure 78 political aspects 5 rape myths 82

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referential system, adjustment collective memory 2, 3 79–80 of childhood 118, 126–8 remakes 79–84 and childhood artefacts 126–8 representation of Britain 75–6 childhood context 125 resurrection 74–5 documentaries of 171 rewriting colonial narrative 81–3 and toys 128–9 sales 75 Colombia satirical appropriation of style 79 historical imagination 203–4 Sente and Juillard albums 80 Palace of Justice hostage taking settings 83–4 210 unconscious of the text 78 violence 203 Van Hamme and Benoît albums 80 visual arts and cultural memory Bocas de Ceniza (Echavarría) see Mouths 205 of Ash body colonial film footage, displacing inside and outside 139–40 174–5 as lieu de mémoire 138 colonial, meanings of term 91 and national identity 199 colonial memories, reconstructing as site of violence and memorial 178–80, 184 208 colonialism space and temporality 143 re-use of audiovisual material 170 Boltanski, Christian 120 represented as love affair 82 Braidotti, Rosi 64 subjectivities of 86 Brockmeier, Jens 53 in writings of Jean Rhys 91 Bullock, Alan 161 comfort culture, teddy bears 21 Bush, Vannevar 55 comic strips, recycling 5 see also Blake & Mortimer Cabrera, Marta 171 commemoration, spatial practice Calinescu, Matei 23 138 Calvino, Italo 182, 185 commercialism 10 cancer 143–4 commodification 74, 104 Carter, Angela 102 compilation films 174–6, Cassell, Eric 138, 143–4 184–5 childhood computers, as memory 54 in American culture 126–31 Concealed – the Power of Survival collective memory of 118 (Možina) 193, 194, 195, 196, childhood artefacts 121–2, 125, 198, 201 126–8 Connor, Bruce 175–6 children, changing societal view of consumption, of memories 105–7 128 cinema, about memory 17 conventions 6 cinema spectatorship, as changing Corcoran, Farrel 191–2 180 corporeality, space and time 139 Citizen Kane (Welles) 127–8 cosmopolitanism 8 Cixous, Hélène 105 counter-memory 71–2 class base, of taste 18 Coupe, Laurence 112 close-ups, in documentary films 197 crises of memory 15 codes 6 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Colebrook, Claire 54, 62, 65 122, 126

March 19, 2009 16:20 MAC/TEEM Page-233 9780230_575677_20_ind01 PROOF 234 Index cultural memory 3, 6–10 use of personal stories 194 defining 1–2, 189, 204–5 use of tenses 193 and feminist re-vision 103 use of voices 197 globalising 2 visual rhetoric 197 and minimalism 40 reconstruction 200–1 Echavarría, Juan Manuel 206–10, relationship to history 169 214 revising in Wide Sargasso Sea 97–8 Edgerton, Gary R. 189 role of visual arts 205 Eisenmann, Peter 30–1, 34–5, 39 within society 190 El Bogotazo 204 cultural re-enactment 29–34 El Testigo (Echavarría) see The Witness cyborgs 54 Eliade, Mircea 111–13 Eliot, T. S. 111 Dargaud 74 elites, as audience 45–6 David’s role playing games 124 Elkins, James 138–9 deconstuction 5 Erinnerungsräume (Spaces of Delbo, Charlotte 144–5 Memory) 9 Deleuze, Gilles 53–4, 62, 65, 66, 67, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 145 (Gondry) 57, 63–6 democratization, of history 71, 103, ethics, of images 164 105–6 experiencing 48 demythologizing, and remythologizing 109 Facing Forward (Tan) 180–4, 181, 185 derealization effect 6, 55–6 fantasies, utopian and dystopian 55 Destination Culture fascism, and kitsch 26 (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) 8 Favorite Objects (Boltanski) 120 Dia:Beacon 40 Feldman, Allan 208 Didi-Huberman, Georges 177 feminist re-vision 100–1, 102–5 see Die (Smith) 40–1, 43, 44–5, 48 also re-vision digital memory, in science fiction Fer, Briony 42 films 52 Filler, Martin 32 digital technology 17, 54 Final Cut (Naim) 56–60 digitalization 52, 53 Fire Department of New York teddy Dijck, José van 4, 6, 16, 55 bear 20, 21–2 ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin) 72 flashbacks 57 discourses, surrounding images 164 fluidity 106 distancing, of childhood 127, 130–1 focus of experience, shift of 51 documentary films see also Slovenia forms, of memory technologies 18 aesthetics of 190, 193–8 fossilizing 6, 55 choice of content 194 Foster, Hal 28, 33, 132, 177, 185 genre conventions 192–3 Foster, Norman 30, 31 ideologies 199–200 Foucault, Michel 3–4, 71–2, 191 rewriting the past 199–200 found-footage films see compilation role in shaping memory 188–9 films selection of topics 195 ‘Four Formats of Memory’ soundtrack 197–8 (Assmann) 3 and struggle for memory 191–3 Frente Nacional 204 use of acted scenes 197 Freud, Sigmund 29 use of language 196 Fried, Michael 47–8, 49

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Friedberg, Ann 180, 183 history Friedländer, Saul 153 challenged by images 159 Frow, John 16 changing view of 105 furniture, representing absence 211 as counter memory 72 futures democratization 71, 103, 105–6 past 108–11 effect of kitsch 25 willing new 104 images and understanding 160–3 popular mediated 188–9 galleries, spectators in 183, 184–5 and tourism 16–17 Gasché, Rodolphe 81 tourists of 21–3 geography 8–9 unsettling 169–70 Gestalt 44 uses of 201 Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina 92 women’s 103 Gibson, William 54 Hitler, Adolf Gilbert, Sandra M. 88, 100 representations 154 globalization, memory as part 11 explanation industry 161 globalizing imagery, reappropriation cultural memory 2 153–5 historical tourism 8–9 Hobsbawm, Eric 201 gorn 133 Hodgkin, Katharine 7, 55, 64, 71 Gramsci, Antonio 191 Hoffman, Heinrich 150, 158 Greenberg, Clement 23–4, 42 Holocaust, as culture specific memory Grosz, Elizabeth 139 154 Ground Zero Hoskins, J. 122 architect plans 30–3 Huyssen, Andreas 16, 58, 153, 169, changes to project 50 200 Groys, Boris 183 Guattari, Félix 66 Gubar, Susan 88 iconographies, painful 132–3 Guerin, Frances 118–19 iconology 176 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich 106 identities colonialism 90 Halbwachs, Maurice 3, 189 relationship between self and place Haliloglu, Nagihan 72, 73 91–2 Harris, Daniel 25, 26, 27 identity Havrilesky, Heather 27 biographical objects and memory Heavenly Muse (Restrepo) 212–14 121–5 hegemony 191 and language 91–2 Heizer, Michael 40 and memory 64 Henry Ford Hospital (Kahlo) 139–40 memory and violence 214 heritage 8 memory in construction 117–18 Herz, R. 158 and remembering 1 Hirsch, Marianne 52, 55, 68n, 103, retrospective creation 124 165n social construction 121–2 historical culture, new 10–12 transitional 92 historical documents, identity crisis, of cyborgs 54 renarrativization of 161 ideologies, documentary films historicizing 7 199–200

March 19, 2009 16:20 MAC/TEEM Page-235 9780230_575677_20_ind01 PROOF 236 Index images and non-kitsch 24 as challenge to history 159 and politics 26 discourses 164 and postmodernism 25 as means of persuasion 164 as prepackaged sentimental political and ethical status 164 responses 26 remixing 59 and re-enactment 29 and understanding of history kitsch remembering 18, 19–21 160–3 Ko potrka vojna (Mrovlje) see When imperialism, narratives of 81 War Knocks at the Door ‘Impossible Histories’ 203 Koepnick, Lutz 151 individual memory 2, 3 Krauss, Rosalind 44, 50–1 Indonesia, reconstructing colonial Kundera, Milan 26–7 memories 178–80, 184 innocence 22, 27–9 La Machination Voronov instability 12, 61 (Juillard/Sente) 80 interaction, memory building 9, La Marque Jaune (Jacobs) 76, 77, 78 94–5 La Violencia 204 intersubjectivity, Wide Sargasso Sea L’Affaire Francis Blake (Van Hamme) (Rhys) 94–5 80 intertextuality 12, 72 Lambek, Michael J. 9, 117 irony 25–7, 34–5, 153 Landsberg, Alison 54 language Jacobs, Edgar P. see Blake and in documentary films 196–7 Mortimer and identity 91–2 Jameson, Fredric 76 latent memory 86 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 86, 90 Laura Jean’s book 124 Jen’s ice cream scoop 125 LeMystèredelaGrandePyramide Johnny Mnemonic (Longo) 55 (Jacobs) 76, 78 Judd, Donald 42–3, 46 Le Secret de l’Espadon (Jacobs) 77, 84 Kahlo, Frida 134 Lecigne, Bruno 75 depiction of suffering and pain L’Énigmedel’Atlantide(Jacobs) 77–8 135, 136–40 Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire use of space 138 (Halbwachs) 3 Kear, Adrian 144 Les lieux de mémoire (Nora) 7–8, 10 Kelly, Joan 103 Les Sarcophages du 6ème continent Kendrick, Robert 92, 94 (Sente) 81–3, 84 Kershaw, Ian 150 L’Étrange rendez-vous (Van Hamme) Kiefer, Anselm 153 80 Kimmelman, Michael 40 Libeskind, Daniel 31–3 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 8 lieu de mémoire 7, 15, 138 kitsch Life on Mars (BBC) 60–1 Checkpoint Charlie 25 ligne claire 72–3, 75, 79, 84 Cold War 25 ligne de mémoire 190 Cultural Revolution 25 Lipovetsky, Gilles 106 definition and understanding of liquid memories 101 term 23–4, 25 liquidity 106 as irony 25–7 literalism 47–8, 49 and modernity 23 location, and remembering 89

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Luckhurst, Roger 132 Minimal art Lyotard, Jean-François 104 as appropriate for memorials 45 development 41 Mapiripán massacre 207 and Modernism 42, 47 mass culture, as transformational 76 networks of relationships 43, 45 materiality 2, 9 objecthood 47 of memory 61 in public domain 51 McLuhan, Marshall 15, 16 senseofplace 43 meaning 24, 182, 184 minimalism, and monuments 17, media 39–42 fossilizing effect 6, 55 Minority Report (Spielberg) 56, 57, 60 as mediated 16 Mnemosyne (Warburg) 176–8 shaped by memory 16 Modernism, and Minimal art 42, 47 as technologies of memory 190 modernity 15, 23 as untrustworthy 160 montage 174–5, 177, 180, 184, 185 virtualizing effect 6, 55 montage consciousness 180 medial frameworks 3 monuments, and minimalism 39–42 mediation 11–12, 15–17, 52–3 morality, and memory 54–7 Meier, Richard 30 Morris, Robert 41, 44, 45, 46 Memex machine 55 Mother Dao: The Turtlelike Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Monnikendam, Vincent) (Eisenmann) 34, 39–40 178–80, 184 memories mourning, and remembrance 140–5 affective 145–7 Mouths of Ash (Echavarría) 208–9 as competitive 71 Možina, Joze 192 consuming 105–7 Mrovlje, Bogdan 192 use of 56 Musa Paradaisiaca (Restrepo) see memory Heavenly Muse in construction of identity 117–18 Muschamp, Herbert 33 culture-specific 154 museums, as focus of experience 51 four formats 189 myth, and memory 111–13 and identity 64 mythical retelling 73 identity and violence 214 myths materialization 61 as alternative to rewriting 113 and morality 54–7 capacity for change 111 and myth 111–13 of innocence 27–9 obliteration 200 of rape 82 personal 53 retelling 107, 108, 109, 112 prosthetic memory 54 relationship to history 169 narrative technologies of 3–6 coherence 65 theatrical 50–1 confusing 62–5 ‘memory boom’ 53 in documentary films 193–4, 195 memory fatigue 10, 32 fragmentation 62–3 Memory Foundations (Libeskind) 32–3 narratives memory-making, national 7–8 of imperialism 81 Meyer, James 50 of pain 144 Michaud, Philippe-Alain 176 personal 121–2 Miller, Ann 72, 73 repetition of 29, 31

March 19, 2009 16:20 MAC/TEEM Page-237 9780230_575677_20_ind01 PROOF 238 Index narratives – continued past retelling 82 commodification 104 supplements to 81 in contemporary cultural transformative power 98 practice 12 national pasts, investments in 8 as manufactured 11 National Toy Hall of Fame 120 as part of present 113 Nazi iconography, reappropriation revision 200–1 153 value of 106 Neisser, Ulrich 140 patriotism, objects of 22 Pécaut, Daniel 204 Nelson, Ted 55 personal memory 53 New Yorker, re-imagining Twin Towers biographical objects and identity 29–30 121–5 Nigro, Georgia 140 and toys 128–9 Noordegraaf, Julia 170 persuasion, through images 164 Nora, Pierre 7–8, 11, 15, 36, 103, petrification, in science fiction films 105–6, 190 61 North, East, South, West (Heizer) 40, photography, techniques 206–7 40 Plate, Liedeke 73 nostalgia political memory 3 for childhood 128 political status, of images 164 commodification 74 populism, US 28 ‘Notes on Sculpture’ (Morris) 44 Portraits (Echavarría) 206 Noviembre 6 y 7 (Salcedo) 211 postcolonial intertextuality 72 postmodernism, and kitsch 25 objecthood, Minimal art 47 Potts, Alex 42, 43, 49 objects ‘presentification of the past’ 9 biographical 121–5 projection 138 connection to time 124 proprioception 138–9 creation of meaning 122–3 Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg) 54 favourite 120–1 Proust, Marcel 121 as mediators of experience and public domain, Minimal art in 51 memory 122–4 public monuments 17 public sphere, pathological 132–3 and memory 118 Pušnik, Maruša 171 Ochse, Iep 172 omnipotence 61 Radstone, Susannah 7, 15, 16, 53, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 55, 58, 64, 71 (Winterson) 108 ‘Raj nostalgia’ 81 rape myths, as allegories 82 pain 118 re-enactment memory of 133–5 architectural 29–33 presence of images 132 as close to kitsch 29 recycled through art 5 cultural 29–34 spatio-temporal location and irony 34–5 139 re-presentation 4, 6 temporal structure 140–1 re-vision 72 see also feminist timelessness 140 re-vision visualizing 140 reader, role of 111–12

March 19, 2009 16:20 MAC/TEEM Page-238 9780230_575677_20_ind01 PROOF Index 239 reconstruction 5 in documentary films 199–200 recontextualization 118–19 from marginal perspective 102–3 redemption 27–8 novels 5 Rednerposen Rhys, Jean 90 circulation and use of images 158 Rich, Adrienne 100, 102, 103 description 156 Rigney, Ann 3 exhibition and context 155–7 Robinson Crusoe (Stevenson) 108, historical contextualization 164–5 110–11 integrating into the present 153 Rochberg-Halton, Eugene in The New Yorker 161–2 122, 126 possible interpretations 150–1 Rosenbaum, Ron 161 presentation of Hitler 150 Routeau, Luc 75–6, 78 as propaganda 150 Rushdie, Salman 81 re-representation 158–9 reappropriation 161–2 Salcedo, Doris 210–12, 214 recontextualization 152–3, 155–60 Sandusky, Sharon 184 recycling 151–5 Sarah’s painting 123 in Underexposed 155–60 satire 153 Reflecting Absence (Arad) 33–4, 46 scale contemplation room 48–9 Reflecting Absence (Arad) 46 memorial room 38 size and sense of place as minimalist 39–40 44–5 original design 36–9, 37,50 science fiction films responses to 39 ambiguity 60–1 sense of loss 48 digital memory in 52 remembering effects of digital technology 54 and identity 1 endings 61 and location 89 flashbacks 57 remembrance, spatial practice 138 mediation of individual memory remythologizing, and 53 demythologizing 109 representation of time 66 renarrativization, of historical sculpture documents 161 size and response 45 Renk, Kathleen 91 and viewer participation 44 repetition, of narrative 29, 31 Second World War, redefining representation 52 199–200 response to events, kitsch as 26 self, memorizing 136–40 Restrepo, José Alejandro 212, 214 self-narration retelling as act of memory 86, 88–91 myths 107, 108, 109, 112 and context 88–9 stories 5 revising cultural memory 97–8 in work of Jeanette Winterson 107, Seltzer, Mark 132–3 108 sense memory 144–5 as world making 113 sense of place Retratos (Echavarría) see Portraits Minimal art 43 rewriting 12, 73 size and scale 44–5 as remythologizing 109 September 11, 2001 32, 36 as technology of cultural memory settlers 91–2 100, 107, 103 Shoah 9

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Shohat, Ella 81 subjectivities size, scale and sense of place of colonialism 86 44–5 of tourists 22 Slovenia see also documentary films Suleiman, Susan 104 creation of new cultural memory supplements, to narratives 81 188 suppression, of stories 105 cultural memory 190 Sutton Smith, Brian 122 debates over meaning of the past Szapocznikow, Alina 134 191–2 depiction of illness 135 foundational myth 193, 200 temporal structure of pain 140–1 presentation of history 198 temporality of body 143 Smelik, Anneke 6, 52, 58, 138 Smith, Tony 40–1, 44–5, 48 Tan, Fiona 172–4, 176 Smoke Screen (Tan) 172–4, 174, 184, Tangled Memories (Sturken) 4 185 taste, class base of 18 Sobchack, Vivian 15–16, 58 technological frameworks 3 social amnesia 200 technologies of memory 3–6 social forgetting 89 teddy bears 21, 24, 27 social memory 3 temporal distance, collapsing social practices, shared 5 15–16 Sontag, Susan 193 Tenebrae Noviembre 7 1985 (Salcedo) S.O.S. Météores (Jacobs) 77 211 soundtrack, in documentary films teratologies 144 197–8 Terdiman, Richard 7 space The 39 Steps (Hitchcock) 80 in body 143 The Broken Column (Kahlo) 140 and corporeality 139 The Butterfly Effect (Bress) 58, 61 representation of in science fiction ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late 66 Capitalist Museums’ (Krauss) 51 time and beholder 48–50 The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al) transformative power 92 86 space and time, collapse 58 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) spaces, as focus of experience 51 3–4 spatial context 50 TheMadwomanintheAttic(Gilbert spatialization 9 and Gubar) 88 ‘Specific Objects’ (Judd) 42–3 The New Yorker, Rednerposen in spectacle, frenzy of 57–62 161–2 spectators 183, 184, 184–5 The Stone Gods (Winterson) 107–11 Stacey, Jackie 144 retelling 112 staging, of art 47–8 role of reader 111–12 Stam, Robert 81 stories 109–10 Stamelman, Richard 36 The Two Fridas (Kahlo) 134, 136–40, Steedman, Caroline 72, 170 137 Stimpson, Catharine 102 The Witness (Echavarría) 207 stories theatrical memory 50–1 alternative versions 105 theatricality 48–9 as construing the real 104 THINK project 30 Strange Days (Bigelow) 56 Three Smoking Toddlers on the Island of Sturken, Marita 4, 7, 169, 170 Bali 173

March 19, 2009 16:20 MAC/TEEM Page-240 9780230_575677_20_ind01 PROOF Index 241 time Warburg, Aby 176–8, 185 and corporeality 139 Weight (Winterson) 108, 112 loss of linearity 113 Weijers, Wouter 5, 36 representation of in science fiction When War Knocks at the Door (Mrovlje) 66 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201 space and beholder 48–50 Whitlock, Gillian 89, 94 as split 65 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) time and space, collapse 58, 67 Antoinette as Creole 92 totalitarianism, and kitsch 26 Caribbean as transformative space tourism, of history 8–9, 22–3 92 tourists, of history 21–3 characters as archetypes 88 toys 120, 122, 128–30 Christophine’s perception of cultural values, and toys 120 Antoinette 96 transformative power, cinematic affect colonial identities 91–7 66–8 control of memory 96–7 transitional objects 130 effect of 100–1 trauma culture 132 forgetting and remembering 89 trauma, recycled through art 5 intersubjectivity 94 Trinh T. Minh-ha 95 leakage of discourse 95 Tropisch Nederland (newsreel), re-use of narrative strategies 90 images 179 as ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre 86–8 trust 160 revising cultural memory 97–8 ‘twice removed aesthetic’ 25 Rochester as settler 92 Twin Towers, re-imagining 29–30 role of Victorian family 93–4 self-narration and memory 88–91 Underexposed (exhibition) 154, story 88 155–60, 163 Williams, Linda 61 images of political violence 156 Winterson, Jeanette 105, 107, Urabà, Colombia, perceptions of 110–11 213–14 women artists, representations of pain Uribe, María Victoria 208 134–5 women’s history 103 viewers see also beholders Wood, Elizabeth 118 distancing 47 World Trade Center as participants 44 Memorial Site Competition 36 violence 141 snow globe 19, 19–22 archaeology of 212–14 ‘wound culture’ 133 Colombia 203, 207–8 ‘writing back’ 86 identity and memory 214 wtinessing 209–10 virtual time 65–7 virtualizing 55 Xanadu 55 visibility, and existence 61 visual arts Young, James 155 and cultural memory in Colombia 205 Zamolˇcani – moˇcPreživeti(Možina) see as technologies of memory 214–15 Concealed – the Power of Survival Vitruvian man (Leonardo) 45 Zarzycka, Marta 118 voices, in documentary films 197 Žižek, Slavoj 6, 55

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