Making Artworks Present, or Embodiment and the Site of Self-Inscription
Paper given at MSA Conference, Newcastle, July 2023.
What happens when we ask the identity and status of the narrative agent in the artwork? What is the “visual subject”(Mieke Bal) expressing itself in the image that constitutes the text? While recovering biographies from scraps is an act of protest against forgetting (Zuzanna Hertzberg), and the process of abstraction as an intuitive embodiment of memories, feelings, and desires (Christine Safatly) relates also to process, of doing/undoing, as a form of resistance (Alina Szapocznikow/Hannerlore Baron), how might we read beyond the specifying elements of the artist’s biography to yield difference, incongruent “unrealized possibilities,” in the words of Hirsch, “eventualities that resonate across time and space”?
Feminist theory teaches us that by focusing on emotions as mediated rather than immediate reactions, we remind ourselves that knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation. (Sara Ahmed) How might this support a reading of the art object as a response to, but also beyond the context of the maker’s biography? What are the ways in which we might read a work with reference to the named trauma, but not limit this reading and therefore reduce it to a silent document of the past? Furthermore, the paper will discuss Marianne Hirsch’s theory surrounding postmemory’s connection to the past as mediated by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” through a selection of contemporary artworks. Crossing geographical and theoretical boundaries to negotiate ideas of modality, materiality, conceptual analysis, I will attempt to extend Hirsch’s belief that a retrospective glance at trauma can be expanded and redirected to open alternate temporalities to be more porous, more present and future-orientated.
Associating materiality and making to literary themes of translation, anachronisms and narratology I will ask how art can reveal the micro-narratives of our time, but also provide a multi-directionality approach to thinking about the present. The paper will demonstrate a model to test conventions of interpretation, arguing for the application of alternative theoretical paradigms as opportunity to rethink the influence of visual creative practice as a dialogue with catastrophe and engagement with the multi-various experiences associated with memory studies today.