Table Of ContentPerforming Memory in Art
and Popular Culture
This volume pursues a new line of research in cultural memory studies by
understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture. The
authors take their cue from the observation that art and popular culture
enact memory and generate processes of memory. They d o memory, and,
in this doing of memory, new questions about the cultural dimensions of
memory arise: how do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in
the present? What is their relationship to the archive? Does the past speak
in the performed past (or do we speak to it)? To what purpose do objects
‘recall’? And for whom do they recollect?
Here authors combine a methodological focus on memory as perfor-
mance with a theoretical focus on art and popular culture as practices
of remembrance. The essays in the book thus analyse what is at stake
in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting
and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis, that make up cultural
memory.
Liedeke Plate is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at
Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Anneke Smelik is Professor of Visual Culture at Radboud University
Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
17 Communicating in the Third 25 International Journalism and
Space Democracy
Edited by Karin Ikas and Gerhard Civic Engagement Models from
Wagner Around the World
Edited by Angela Romano
18 Deconstruction After 9/11
Martin McQuillan 26 Aesthetic Practices and
Politics in Media, Music,
19 The Contemporary Comic Book and Art
Superhero Performing Migration
Edited by Angela Ndalianis Edited by Rocío G. Davis,
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung,
20 Mobile Technologies
and Johanna C. Kardux
From Telecommunications to
Media
27 Violence, Visual Culture,
Edited by Gerard Goggin &
and the Black Male
Larissa Hjorth
Body
Cassandra Jackson
21 Dynamics and Performativity of
Imagination
28 Cognitive Poetics and Cultural
T he Image between the Visible and
Memory
the Invisible
Russian Literary
Edited by Bernd Huppauf and
Mnemonics
Christoph Wulf
Mikhail Gronas
22 Cities, Citizens, and
29 Landscapes of Holocaust
Technologies
Postmemory
Urban Life and Postmodernity
Brett Ashley Kaplan
Paula Geyh
23 Trauma and Media 30 Emotion, Genre, and Justice in
Theories, Histories, and Images Film and Television
Allen Meek E. Deidre Pribram
24 Letters, Postcards, Email 31 Audiobooks, Literature, and
Technologies of Presence Sound Studies
Esther Milne Matthew Rubery
32 The Adaptation Industry 41 Cultural Technologies
The Cultural Economy of Literary The Shaping of Culture in Media
Adaptation and Society
Simone Murray Edited by Göran Bolin
33 Branding Post-Communist
42 Violence and the Pornographic
Nations
Imaginary
Marketizing National Identities in
The Politics of Sex, Gender,
the “New” Europe
and Aggression in Hardcore
Edited by Nadia Kaneva
Pornography
Natalie Purcell
34 Science Fiction Film, Television,
and Adaptation
43 Ambiguities of Activism
Across the Screens
Alter-Globalism and the Impera-
Edited by J. P. Telotte and Gerald
tives of Speed
Duchovnay
Ingrid M. Hoofd
35 Art Platforms and Cultural
Production on the Internet 44 Generation X Goes
Olga Goriunova Global
Mapping a Youth Culture in
36 Queer Representation, Visibility, Motion
and Race in American Film and Christine Henseler
Television
Melanie E.S. Kohnen 45 Forensic Science in
Contemporary American
37 Arti(cid:2) cial Culture
Popular Culture
Identity, Technology, and Bodies
Gender, Crime, and
Tama Leaver
Science
Lindsay Steenberg
38 Global Perspectives on Tarzan
From King of the Jungle to
46 Moral Panics, Social Fears,
International Icon
and the Media
Edited by Annette Wannamaker
Historical Perspectives
and Michelle Ann Abate
Edited by Siân Nicholas and Tom
39 Studying Mobile Media O’Malley
Cultural Technologies, Mobile
Communication, and the iPhone 47 De-convergence in Global
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Media Industries
Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson Dal Yong Jin
40 Sport Beyond Television 48 Performing Memory
The Internet, Digital Media and in Art and Popular
the Rise of Networked Media Culture
Sport Edited by Liedeke Plate and
Brett Hutchins and David Rowe Anneke Smelik
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Performing Memory in
Art and Popular Culture
Edited by Liedeke Plate and
Anneke Smelik
First published 2013
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identi(cid:2) ed as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identi(cid:2) cation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Performing memory in art and popular culture / edited by Liedeke Plate,
Anneke Smelik.
pages cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mass media and the arts. 2. Collective memory. 3. Art and popular
culture. I. Plate, Liedeke. II. Smelik, Anneke.
NX180.M3P47 2013
700.1'08—dc23
2012040033
ISBN: 978-0-415-81140-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-07029-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture:
An Introduction 1
LIEDEKE PLATE AND ANNEKE SMELIK
PART I
Staging Memory
2 Life or Theatre, Diary or Drama: On the Performance
of Memory in the Visual Arts 25
LISA SALTZMAN
3 Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject:
On Sebald and Kentridge 39
MICHAEL ROTHBERG
4 Phantom Pains: Dramatising Flemish Collaboration
with Nazism 59
KLAAS TINDEMANS
PART II
Spectral Memories
5 Memories of Catastrophes Yet to Come: New Brutalism
and Thing-Memory 75
BEN HIGHMORE
viii Contents
6 Haunted by Hunger: Images of Spectrality in Literary
Recollections of the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1900 92
MARGUÉRITE CORPORAAL
7 Naming the Unnamable: (De)constructing 9/11’s ‘Falling Man’ 105
LÁSZLÓ MUNTEÁN
PART III
Embodied Memories
8 If These Walls Could Walk: Architecture as a Deformative
Scenography of the Past 123
KRIS PINT
9 Bodies with(out) Memories: Strategies of Re-enactment
in Contemporary Dance 135
TIMMY DE LAET
PART IV
Mediating Memories
10 Punctuating the Nation’s Narratives: History Painting
and Performativity 155
LOUISE WOLTHERS
11 ‘Forget Me Not’: The Performance of Memory
in Xena: Warrior Princess 170
WIM TIGGES
12 Textures of Time: A Becoming-Memory of History
in Costume Film 185
ELISE WORTEL AND ANNEKE SMELIK
Contributors 201
Bibliography 205
Index 219
Figures
3.1 William Kentridge, Video still from F elix in Exile ,
1994. 35mm (cid:2) lm; video and laser disc transfer.
8 minutes, 43 seconds. Courtesy of the artist
and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. 49
3.2 William Kentridge, Video still from M ine , 1991.
16mm (cid:2) lm transferred to video. 5 minutes,
49 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. 52
3.3 William Kentridge, Video still from Mine , 1991.
16mm (cid:2) lm transferred to video. 5 minutes,
49 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. 53
3.4 William Kentridge, Video still from M ine , 1991.
16mm (cid:2) lm transferred to video. 5 minutes,
49 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. 54
4.1 Stefanie Claes as Ilka and Veerle Dobbelaere
as Hanna, the teacher in Sleutelveld . Written
and directed by Klaas Tindemans, copyright
Raymond Mallentjer. 68
5.1 Eduardo Paolozzi, His Majesty the Wheel ,
1958–59. Bronze, 60 inches high. With kind
permission from the Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation. 83
9.1 Mirjam Devriendt, Photograph of Vincent
Dunoyer’s Encore , 2010. Dancer: Tuur Marinus.
Copyright: Mirjam Devriendt. 138
9.2 Anja Beutler, Photograph of Nicole Beutler’s
Les Sylphides , 2008. Dancers: Bojana Mladenovic,
Marta Reig Torres and Charlotte van den Reek.
Copyright: AnjaBeutler.de. 142
