The Art of Memory, the Legacy of Objects, Work of the Void:

Introductory thoughts on Souvenirs exhibition

 

A. The Art of Memory

A man dips a madeleine cake in his cup of tea and its taste not only triggers within him the secretion of digestive fluids, but also set in motion his memories’ reservoir: the memory becomes a sort of film, a stream of consciousness, an uncontrolled flow of memories.

Thus begin Marcel Proust’s recollections in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time.

 

Human memory may be likened to running water that could sweep and flood our consciousness, but once we repress or suppress it, we actually relegate it to the unconscious. From there, from the backyard as it were of the consciousness, it can haunt us like a continuous, recurring nightmare, like a broken record, like an “unfinished business.”

 

I am not an expert memory researcher, nor do I pretend to present scientific findings on that issue. Nevertheless, I know that visual arts (as well as other arts) deal with memory, be it in its conscious or unconscious manifestations and representations. Artists such as those participating in the Souvenirs exhibition wonder sometimes, how does one freeze and preserve memory? How does one reconstruct a memory and perpetuate it? How can one represent, visually or verbally, memory-related phenomena that involve several senses or one major sense such as vision, hearing, smell or touch? How does one present a whole memory by means of a segment or an element that can evoke that memory along with the associations surrounding it (as in the case of a “charged object” or a “landscape-location”)?

 

As we describe it, we must bear in mind that memory can be either personal (my story) or historical memory (history), i.e. the so-called collective memory (all story), which is actually the dominant version dictated and formulated by an elite/ruling group. Be it as it may, recent research has shown that memory-story is a flexible and changing story.

Memory is fluid and flexible as we relive (our) memory and endow it with powers of amendment, of revision – color, form, beginning, middle and end revisions; we beautify memory (nostalgia) and even invent it in the form of false and surrogate memories. In sci-fi movies, we witness an ever-growing tendency to erase, implant and interfere with the memories of humans and androids.

 

In any case, memory relates to the past, to what was and is no longer (although sci-fi movies already deal with future memories). If memory relates to what was and is no longer, the only way we can resurrect the past, “resurrect the dead,” is by remembering them. Oblivion, the death of memory, is truly death. Rather than “I remember, therefore I am,” it should be read, “I remember, therefore I am preserving (the lives of others).” In one of his poems, Yehuda Amichai asks,

And who will remember the rememberers?

The generation of memory veterans is dying out,

Half at a ripe old age, half at a rotten old age,

And who will remember the rememberers?

Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open: Poems (2000), translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kornfeld, p. 167

 

There are also “second-hand memories” like those that pass on as “oral tradition,” like an intergenerational transfer from the one who had the experience, who lived the event, to another person – a son, a friend, an heir, who in turn receives the fibers of memory and becomes a “torch bearer”.

What are those fibers of memory, and what is the importance of the role they play in the winding journey back in time? The fibers of memory are a sort of a “mental medium.” They connect, hybridize and create a link between the world of the dead and that of the living, between those living “here and now” and those who lived “then and there.”

By nature, fibers of memory interweave and get entangled in distant reasons and circumstances, which leave their genetic, so to speak, imprint on us, who hold on to this end of the memories and try to remove the screens and rescue the remnants and traces of what was and is no longer from the debris and absence.

We may entangle or unstitch these fibers of memory, or cling to them and trace their origins to the utmost heights of pain or pleasure.

Like Ariadne’s thread, the fibers of memory lead to ghosts, spirits or ogres, thus enabling us to confront and eliminate them, to overcome the ever-present and disturbing fear of erring spirits that haunt the living. Alternatively, they lead to the land of pleasure, to a lost, preserved, repressed and suppressed paradise, via the gyri and sulci of the brain.

The fibers of memory allow us to penetrate deeply into the black boxes of our consciousness, to look at the treasures of our families’ lost arks, to illuminate them, to sharpen dull, faded or deleted images, to salvage photographs, objects, words and tales and break out of the mental maze.

The fibers of memory are those thin, flexible and dissolving threads that could be used in a surgery, in the stitching up and healing of those areas dominated by forces that tear, erase and repress. In his poems, Israeli poet Abba Kovner, who was raised in Lithuania, described his world as a picture of words torn to pieces. These pieces were piled up in a mound of rubble, in a heap of rubbish, and could not become a picture again. The picture of that torn world is his “story,” the dismantled narrative that was bound to the altar like Isaac on MountMoriah and even his story (that of the victim/sacrifice) cannot be transmitted in full. In his poem “A Canopy in the Desert” (62), Kovner writes:

            "I don’t know how or what

            Hand plucked my story

            In cold blood

            (In the thicket

            In the thicket)

            Walls of stone cry at night in a jackal's voice

            Your story

            Your only one

            Your loved"

             [Translated by Shirley Kaufman].

 

These thoughts welled up in me as I was reading some memoirs and, in particular, that of Amnon Shamosh (an Israeli writer and poet, born in Aleppo, Syria), For Past Thou Art and unto Past Shalt Thou Return: Memoirs.

Why are autobiographical memories called “memoirs”? Is it because they consciously illuminate the “me” like a beam of light bursting out of the past, banishing the darkness of oblivion. Or, maybe, the Latin word “memoria” is actually a code used by writers and artists to trick readers or viewers into believing that their wonderful memories are historical truths?

 

In my mind’s eyes, I saw the delicate cobwebs that creative people spin around important moments or periods of their lives or the lives of others in order to ensnare them (and us), cobwebs similar to those a spider weaves in order to pads its victim’s last abode.

 

Zikaron,the Hebrew word for memory or remembrance, is a masculine noun: it sticks its virility into a point in time, penetrates it and draws out of it lost and forgotten moments. Shikhecha, the Hebrew word for forgetting or forgetfulness is a feminine noun and its implied vaginal quality is analogous to the path of the river Lethe, the mythological river of oblivion.

The English word “re-member” alludes to rejoining members, to patching up the shreds of memory. A patchwork that is never perfect.

Amnon Shamosh expresses the same concerns when he writes: “Maybe matters were not exactly like that, but that is how I remember them”; “the weaker one’s short-term-memory grows over the years, the more old memories keep welling up”; “everybody remembers something different, or remembers the same things differently”; “memory at times sieves, at times maps and at times covers, but it is always personal, exclusive and subjective; like a finger print of the soul.” And in another passage, he notes: “it is unclear where the borderline runs between what merely seems to be memories and real memories from early childhood. The former are the ones you were told time and again, until they were fixed in your memory as if you were the one who had experienced as well as remembered them. They influence you no less than real memories”.

 

In a similar vein and following an image used by Israeli poet Yona Wallach, I may liken memories to subconscious that unfolds like a fan. This metaphor conveys, as it were, both a statement and a counter-statement: something repressed and stored away slowly opens up and infiltrates the consciousness and the work of art. But, like an unfolded fan that hides and covers the face behind it, here too the opening up of one thing conceals something else.

The reasons for it, I believe, are many-fold, however the artistic one stands out clearly among them.

In one of the works shown at Souvenirs, the painter Michal Na’aman deconstructed the word “painting” into “pain” and “ting,” thereby associating painting with pain. The painting stems from or reacts to a wound, a bruise or a scar. The painting is hinged on expressing some kind of pain, pain painting.

Likewise, the author Amos Oz once said that, “each story begins with an injury.”

Art that deals with an “injury” is a biographical art. The autobiography of a writer/artist undergoes a “treatment.” His artistic “work” “liberates.” His artistic journey throughout his works deals with mental burden, with emotional-conscious load that weighs heavy upon him. However, to continue Amos Oz’s observation, an autobiography is not a confession.

 

Indeed, an autobiography is not a confession. Jorge Luis Borges wrote that it is possible to write, “I was born in such and such year, and such and such things happened to me,” or equally “Once upon a time there was a king who had two sons.” Whether the artist uses his own “personal voice” in the “first person singular” and thus sounds closer and familiar, or transfers his story to another time and place and thus sounds distant and exotic, it is all a question of packaging. Adorned and sophisticated artistic packaging may conceal the historical truth, but nonetheless reveal and enrich the artistic truth that would affect the reader or viewer.

 

In other words, just like the tool of poetic deceit in writing, a biographical work of art is more committed to artistic creativity than to the factual truth. Artistic manipulations, screens, camouflages and concealments are the daily bread of a work of art.

 

To conclude, one may say that a good story is not necessarily a true one. Also as far as memoirs are concerned!

 

“The past is the archaeology and the mythology of tomorrow,” writer Nava Semel told me once. In her novel And the Rat Laughs, she examined the memory of the Holocaust in the distant future, in the year 2099, when none of us will be alive. “Maybe history is a story, or a poem, a collection of legends people tell themselves at night. And these stories, poems and legends contain the truth, in an encoded form that only a few will want to decipher in the future,” she writes in that book.

 

For artists and creative people, the past is an excavation site inundated with potential finds or an unsown field waiting to be plowed and to have its hidden treasures revealed. These become tomorrow’s myths, through the act of blending and artistic seasoning.

 

B. The Legacy of Objects

A souvenir is a present or a keepsake from a specific place or event, which is kept in order to remember past experience. But a souvenir can also serve as a key to open and decode a legacy or a burden from the past, a ticking bomb or a Pandora box. At times these remnants of the past also attest to a past legacy the existence of which is known, albeit unresolved, like an unsolved, but undeniably present, enigma.

In this context, a souvenir exists as

1. A mental image – memory of a view, a taste, a smell or a sound from the past that reappears faded, unclear and filtered, or sharp, painful and disturbing.
2. A real object – a photo, a letter, a whole or partial object that functions as an amulet, a relic, a sacred object or a remnant.

Sometimes a souvenir is directly related to a personal memory or to a historical memory that is repressed or silenced. At times, a souvenir is a distorted or restored reincarnation of a personal memory or a historical one. In this case, a souvenir gains a new life. It produces a narrative that may be linked to “its origin” in a distant and vague manner, but which is nevertheless intense and moving.

 

The Three Strangest words

When I say the word Future,
the first syllable is already a part of the past.

When I say the word Silence,
I spoil it.

When I say the word Nothing,
I create something that nothingness cannot contain

Wisława Szymborska (Translated by Ian Firla)

 

In her wonderful poem, Wisława Szymborska formulates in precise and concise manner the obvious tension created in the encounter with the terms “future,” “silence” and “nothing” – three keywords in the relation between souvenirs, memories and works of art. The works discuss and treat a repressed past and the way it informs the present and the future. They deal with rummaging the nothing, the silence left by such a repressed past. By virtue of their existence, the past becomes a present and meaningful entity that rediscovers its voice and occupies a space.

 

C. Work of the Void

The works shown in the exhibition represent a present that willy-nilly entails remnants of a personal-family or national-collective past that has not been deciphered nor fully resolved. These works take on the silence of the muted and the darkness of repression. They resemble the tip of a melting iceberg fraught with frozen secretes that are brought to light. Thus they turn the memory of the nothing into something meaningful and present – into an object of memory art, into a souvenir of souvenirs.

Their art turns a painful heritage into a meaningful image. Words (or images) of a personal elegy that cite canonical elegies and aesthetic conventions enable one to pour one’s heart by “enlisting” words (or images) from the past. Israeli poet Lea Pilowski offered a succinct definition of licentia poetica in a four-line-poem that actually illuminated the relation between the past and the present, between personal pain and collective canonical sorrow:

Art is:

To cry Abshalom, Abshalom

When our dear one dies

Who’s name was actually Rani or Shay.

Lea Pilowski, [Hebrew] Helicon, The Best – Israeli Poetry, issue 71, Winter 2006

The past is not a tabula rasa. Whether or not we want it, its ghosts put obstacles in front of anyone trying to erase, cleanse or launder it.

Souvenirs are objects of memory. Memories are the objects of our desire, and whenever they are hidden or suppressed, we choose to produce them ex nihilo, to rescue them from the flames that consumed them.

By giving, endowing or bequeathing a souvenir, one also imparts a memory (conscious, repressed, silenced, muted, or hidden). Soon or long after receiving it, the heir may (or may not) discover the depth of its meanings and the width of the associations surrounding it. What began as a word in a foreign language, a fragment of a melody, a number tattooed on an old woman’s arm, a yellowing newspaper shred, a fading picture, or a dusty object stored in or thrown into a boydem (attic) or a basement, would be translated eventually into the language of art, into an artwork. And that artwork would express much more the present speaker than those who spoke (or kept silent) in the past.

The use of words such as “boydem” and “basement” or “attic” and “storage room” in the context of souvenirs relegates them to areas of hiding and concealment, to places in the domestic sphere that are reserved for things unmentionable in family circles or in the public sphere and discourse. Like a sleeping beauty waiting for the kiss that would awaken her from her eternal slumber, souvenirs wait for their redemption from the house hiding places, from the nether worlds of the basement or from the hidden compartment above the ceiling or under the roof of the house. Objects that are secrets. Objects that are history. Objects branded as “useless” or “dangerous to look at or to use,” wait to be used again or differently.

 

In her book, Comment j'ai vidé la maison de mes parents (Seuil: Paris, 2004) [The Final Reminder: How I Emptied My Parents' House, trans. Elfrede Powell (Souvenir Press: London, 2005)], French author Lydia Flem describes the objects she inherited from her parents, and her feelings when she sorted them, deciding whether to keep or throw them away, shortly after her parents’ death. She found it difficult to cope with this act of “clearing out,” which for her was tantamount to an act of expulsion. She perceived it as a process of turning a receptacle, a place, into a void, or as a revealing activity since clearing out means also emptying your thoughts, exposing and giving yourself, showing your true face, by earmarking each object, each piece of furniture, each piece of clothing, each piece of paper for keeping, giving away, selling, or throwing away.

Objects have several lives, she tells us and goes on to wonder whether they keep any traces of their previous existence, once they change hands. Being somewhere else, in the hands of someone else, used in ways that are different from those they previously knew cannot leave them indifferent, she concludes, since they too become orphans. They need adoptive parents, new friends, exclusive and startlingly jealous owners, who will take a good care of them. They suffer if they are rendered useless and meaningless, if they are abandoned. Lydia Flem observes that grieving by means and through objects is also a rite of passage, a metamorphosis in which the dead settles within us, since death belongs to life and is part of it.

 

Likewise, in the exhibition, Polish and Israeli artists alike also rework inherited or acquired objects, words, tunes, pictures etc. This mental reworking is not necessarily a reworking of a grief or a loss, but rather an artistic one that investigates, analyzes and reacts to a series of “unresolved issues” related to identity, culture, homeland, heritage, a denied and abandoned territory, a common history, barren and destructive ideologies, personal-family/historical memory and oblivion. Each artist – in his/her own way, style and manner – takes his or her souvenir and translates it into an art object with new and meaningful life, the reflective statements of which are either direct, blunt and revealing, or indirect, disguised and hidden.

This pensive text about the art of memory, the legacy of objects and the work of the void, cannot end without mentioning the Holocaust, the “black hole,” into which also the associations of some of the Israeli and Polish artists are drawn, in one way or another. In the dialogue between the exhibited works, one may sense a desire or a hope for a “clean,” neutral speech that would not make a Pavlovian connection between “Poland” and the “Holocaust”; a speech that would not place the burden of the past on the present. Noa Sadka, an Israeli artist whose life and work are conducted on the Tel Aviv-Warsaw axis, writes about it in her contribution to this catalogue: “Please, is it possible to have a ‘Poland’ without immediately invoking the Holocaust? / Without immediately invoking the Holocaust / Give me a little break / from the Holocaust.”

 

Is it necessary? Is it possible? I do not know. Only time will tell!

_______________________________________________________________________________________ 

List of Artists: Miroslaw Balka, Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Dorota Bielas, Bilu Blich, Maya Cohen Levi, Inga Fonar Cocos, Yair Garbuz, Shuka Glotman, Penny Hes Yassour, Rafał Jakubowicz, Sara Katz,

Anna Konik, Zofia Kulik, Yifat Lajst, Haim Maor, Dvora Morag, Michal Na’aman, Anna Płotnicka,

Noa Sadka, Jadwiga Sawicka, Osnat Shteinberger, Artur Żimijewski