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The Art of Memory

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The Art of Memory The Art of Memory Given that John Clang is known for his photographic its subject, is the punctum — the ‘detail’, ‘partial data on the works, lives, and deaths of philosophers By Dr June Yap oeuvre, that he generally does not tote a camera object’, and ‘wound’ that is not ‘coded’ into the and thinkers from antiquity into the present, including Curator and Art Historian around may strike one as a little curious. According image but lies within the image’s field, and that of Haar, himself, and, apparently, of Critchley. to Clang, the absence of the camera allows him to is subjectively experienced by its beholder. Unnerved, and after some uncanny coincidences, view the world as it unfolds before him: unmediated. This subjectivity, that is revealed through the Critchley is led to build a memory theatre charting Indeed, it is in this and his candid description of punctum and that drives Barthes’ exposition, his own life up to the time of his death as predicted the camera — as ‘blocking’ one’s view — that the finds parallel in the purposive subjectivity of Clang’s by Haar. While Critchley appears to have cheated essence of Clang’s practice comes to light, of impressions produced in layered mediation and death in the tale, the narrative intertwines the impressions and their mediation, two elements in distillation in print and video, with the both further subjects of death and memory, as well as confirms, distinct view in this new series of works comprised converging at Fried’s point on antitheatricality. finally, repetition as memory’s device — the other of photographic prints and videos. Fried’s purpose (extending from his earlier and part of the method to the art of memory, besides Within The World Surrounding an Indoor much debated differentiation between minimalist the dramatisation of space. Plant, impression and mediation meld in what Clang and literalist art begun in ‘Art and Objecthood’ Although the coincidence that Yates’ study designates as ‘internal mindscapes’, the product in 1967) was to situate Barthes’ Camera Lucida ‘in points to is of how the late-Renaissance Hermetic of an absorption of the world and those around relation to the all-important current of antitheatrical philosopher Robert Fludd’s memory theatre may him, and his imaging of these via the photographic critical thought and pictorial practice’. Asserting that be transposed upon the actual site of the illustrious device of the camera. That is, rather than the world antitheatricality was crucial to the aesthetic form, Globe Theatre of Shakespearean familiarity (first presented in its capture by the camera to the eye, for Fried, Camera Lucida revealed Barthes’ attempt erected in 1599, and rebuilt on the same site after it is what is perceived by the eye that is presented at engaging with antitheatricalism, specifically it was burnt down in 1613), in relation to Clang’s as produced via the camera to the world. Describing in noting that, in presenting the historicity of the works, two aspects of note of the memory theatre his arrival at this approach, Clang recalls his father image, the punctum acts as its antitheatrical and its history are: first, that the memory theatre who, using a photographic film camera, would snap guarantee. Certainly an antitheatricalism may be was inherently cosmological and, second, numerous rolls of film that he did not subsequently posited of Clang’s works as seen in the suspension the primacy of sight in its technique. The first is process as he already knew what he had captured. of the narrative as well as the avoidance of its clear in Clang’s works — that his scope is his For Clang, processing these images at a later date temptations. Even in the video works, narrative is cosmos or ‘world’ that encapsulates his personal allowed him to see the world through his father’s eliminated: a female form contorts, twins reveal history and experience, its hermeticism incidentally eyes. That said, inevitably, in the subjectiveness of and conceal themselves, a line is drawn but then corresponding to trends observed by Yates. the experience as absorbed and as filtered through erased, mortality is suggested, and birds take to As for the latter, the method in the art of memory perspective and memory by Clang, at times, these flight. As Clang describes, in reducing to the ‘pure is couched on the fact of the ‘superiority of the impressions may be embellished, at others, they accent’ of the image, the image becomes ‘singular’, sense of sight over the other senses’, which has, may be flawed. As such, with this transformation in in that, there is nothing to reflect its details of its one might say, a high compression rate. That is, mediation, presented within these works is the act photographic event and, as a result, the image as noted in the art of memory, a complex of ideas of perception itself — an awareness as much as it also becomes ‘open’ to being read. may be visualised through a single image. It goes is an interpretation. As much as Clang’s works may embody without saying that, in the isolation (in part due to Clang’s new body of works is produced or present antitheatricality, in the accumulation the magic lantern effect) found of the photographic in a series of transformations. In the case of the of the memories that Clang stores, retrieves, prints and the compact nature of his video vignettes, photographic prints, these are charcoal drawings and reconstructs, this cache of the remembered, the sense of these being rooms, spaces, and of photographs produced by projection through ironically, recalls the memory theatre, though less niches of Clang’s own memory theatre would seem a vintage magic lantern which are then re- for its drama (which was the source of Fried’s apparent. However, unlike the honing of rhetorical photographed, even as, in the act of drawing, objection) than for its architecture in the art of and oratory capacity that set the art of memory on its the image is reduced to its impressions by memory. Simon Critchley’s Memory Theatre, is a path, Clang’s memory theatre appears quite silent, Clang. As for the video works, these present the narrative in the first person that was developed in reticent even. Occurring in brief statements and persistence of memory in episodes sourced from reference to Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory. queries in the videos, and as enigmatic descriptions the artist’s life that reveal the enduring nature of First published in 1966, Yates’ The Art of Memory of the images within the prints, the words one these experiences, which are then reenacted as traces the history of mnemotechnics back to the encounters in Clang’s works would seem meant impressions rather than as their actual episodes. Grecian perfection of rhetoric and oration, through to evoke rather than explicate. As Clang describes, In observing Clang’s process of mediation, two to its developments in the medieval period and they are ‘quiet sensations’, words that linger in the concepts come to mind: memory and theatre, Renaissance, into systems of codification and mind and memory, like whispers that one almost through which Clang’s works may be further read, understanding that found scientific method, in an doesn’t hear. Yet, it is, perhaps, because of these and that also introduce the subject of mortality exposition to connect ‘the history of memory and ‘quiet sensations’ that these memories persist and, (recollecting Susan Sontag’s familiar phrase, that the history of method’. In essence, the method to like the punctum, registers the moment’s reality. ‘all photographs are memento mori’) or, from memory was to ‘imprint on the memory a series of In speaking on the nature of the photograph, another perspective, time. loci or places’ that act as ‘spaces’ in which one Barthes claimed that ‘every photograph is a References Like Clang’s impressions and their mediation, might stow that which needs to be remembered; certificate of presence’ — that it is ‘true on the Roland Barthes (1981) Camera Lucida: memory and theatre are seen to intertwine within a method credited to a ‘disastrous banquet’ (due level of time’ in presenting that which has been. Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard (trans), New York: Hill and Wang this account, first in Roland Barthes analysis of the to a fallen ceiling) survived by the pre-Socratic As such, fundamentally, the photograph presents appeal of the photographic image in Camera Lucida, poet, Simonides Melicus of Ceos, who, as told to the viewer the intractability of time and mortality, Simon Critchley (2014) and Michael Fried’s interpretation of Barthes’ by Cicero in De oratore, due to his memory of as Sontag had also observed. This intractability Memory Theatre, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions punctum; and second, in the memory theatre via the places individuals occupied just before the would appear to be at the core of Clang’s works, Frances Yates and Simon Critchley. Regarding the architectural failure, could accurately identify their though, in the form of the impressions that linger: Michael Fried (1998) ‘Art and first, Barthes concern was the ‘attraction’ of the mangled forms. Handed down through a lineage at once here, and not here. Or in Barthes’ words, Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago: photographic image that ‘animates’ the beholder, that includes ‘Tullius’ (who recommended Ad ‘a mad image, chafed by reality’. In presenting these University of Chicago Press a subject that may also be said to be central to Herennium) and Thomas Aquinas (‘patron saint’ works, Clang evokes the image of an indoor plant to Clang’s analysis of the intensities of the impressions of the art of memory), the reader is told of sixteenth- illustrate his own position as unobtrusive observer Michael Fried (2005) ‘Barthes’s Punctum’, Critical Inquiry received from the world around him.
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