Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

Conclusion: Installation Art and Memory

There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon . . . but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed. . . . Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing . . . and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. —Oliver Wendell Holmes As Oliver Wendell Holmes noted in the nineteenth century, photographic archives preserve works but also make them mobile and available. Archives even present the possibility that the objects themselves could disappear and be replaced by their photographic replicas. In this quotation, however, Holmes does not grant that, once objects are part of archives, they are subject to the conditions and rules of these organizations of knowledge. Ultimately, archives shape our understanding of objects and events. As the photography criticism of the twentieth century has made clear, it is important to question these technologies of vision, these historical devices, because they shape our memories and our understanding of history as well. Installations are often made to disappear, to become objects of history and memory. In this book, I have argued that installations produce their own archives. Lisa Le Feuvre puts it very well in her argument about the importance of photographs and texts to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark: “Robert Pincus-Witten, for example stated, ‘You had to be there.’ I would argue that the work is in fact all of these elements and, perhaps more importantly, it is also the spaces in between the pieces themselves.”1 She argues that works such as Matta-Clark’s need to be considered in terms of their existence over time, even when the original works have vanished. Such an approach means considering documentation and ephemera as part of the work. Allan Sekula and John Tagg each argued photographic meaning is ambiguous. A photoconclusion INSTALLATION ART AND MEMORY 202 FRAMED SPACES graph will reinforce whatever discourse in which it is used. Other artists that I have discussed in this book have made installations that encourage us to question how memory and history are constructed through objects such as photographs and archives. Renée Green for one has developed a politics of representation based on these ideas. The heightened consciousness of ephemerality and history has been part of the understanding of modernity since the nineteenth century due to the rapid changes that are an inherent part of modernization. In the 1980s, Craig Owens considered the issue of ephemerality in the context of modernity: “If the modern artist was exhorted to concentrate on the ephemeral, however , it was because it was ephemeral, that is it threatened to disappear without a trace. Baudelaire conceived modern art at least in part as the rescuing of modernity for eternity.”2 In his essay on allegory in postmodernism, Craig Owens offers the theory that modernism has always been concerned about the passage of time and, in the form of allegory, has brooded over it. Allegory, as Benjamin says, is one of the ways of saving things from disappearance in the passage of time. Following Benjamin’s description of allegory, Owens connects allegory to the photograph. It is the photograph that preserves the ephemeral incidents of modern life. And therefore, allegory is closely connected to the archive. Although site-specific art and installation art are not always identical, they often share the quality of ephemerality.3 In the work of Robert Smithson, Owens connects photography and site-specific art, declaring Smithson to be an allegorist. Photography’s importance in a work such as Spiral Jetty highlights the fragmentary nature of the work its own ephemerality and concentrates the desire to preserve the work. Photography and language in Smithson ’s work, according to Owens, are both extraneous and intrinsic.4 I have argued something similar in relation to the works discussed in this book. The book traces a constellation of relationships that are revealed when one considers photography and memory in the context of installation art. The relationships between installation art and its photographic representation, and the relationships between image, memory, experience, and archives, are present in the works in the 1970s. Installation art and site-specific art since the 1970s have raised questions about experience, memory, and representation . To paraphrase critic Ellen Handy, many installations are as sensitive to history and memory as painting is to light.5 CONCLUSION 203 Perhaps it is fair to say that these postmedium practices allow for contingency , in Mary Ann Doane’s terms. Anything...