The history of amnesia is not only what has been written or created, but
also what is present in us at every moment. Facing it, the mind is
compelled - like an actor without script - to improvise, to feed the continuum
of our existence.
We cannot remember, so we create. We cannot remember our beginnings,
so we can fabricate them with images and theories: matter emerging from
spirit; a prime mover; the big bang. As Robert Jastrow has said, the cosmologist
grudgingly recognizes that a curtain has been drawn - perhaps forever -
on our knowledge of the inception of the universe and its early development.
The theologian smiles with pleasure, seeing in that fact a proof that the
eternal and the divine cannot be apprehended by reason.
At every turn in our lives, a crevice in our memory:
Last Friday a full moon was shining. Or was it Thursday? it was a
light yellow coin. Or did it have a greenish haze? Or orange glow?
Because you said it was going to rain the next day, I can't remember.
We'll have to construct it against a pearl black sky, out of cartilage
and glass, wire and papier-mache, a coin, a white shadow, perhaps with
thistles, yellow and ashen. Ant it will be there - a gap. A
round hole, on which we will have constructed our moon, which will evoke
that absence - that lacuna in our memory.
Creation is brought forth by amnesia as much as it is by memory.
As Heidegger remarked in Being and Time (1927), "Forgetting is not
nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a 'positive'
ecstatical mode of one's having been - a mode with a character of its own.
Bertrand Russell in the Analysis of Mind (1921) postulated a world
created a moment ago, populated by beings who recall an illusory past.
(Freud called the fabrications of false memories by the psyche paramnesia).
There is the perfect creative amnesia: out of the present, an illusory
past. A fiction.
We who recall you, Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, recall your daughters,
the nine muses who feed on memory. Without memory there is no presence,
there is no art. But memory is the form, that which the hand and
the mind recall. Rhetoric is an aggregate, the remembrance of the gestures
and efforts at creation of so many who came before us.
Memory is the form; amnesia can be the content and the structure.
Amnesia seeps like a many-tongued fire between the firm fingers of traditional
forms. Memory is essential to paint in a certain style, to cluster
words in certain rhythms, to dance with certain body movements - all growing
from the past.
To enter the kingdom of amnesia is to enter a world where names have been
displaced by water and shadows. It is to find oneself again
speechless, with one's heart beating without words. It is to face
a tree, a house, a street, a cloud, a bird, a song - a world we cannot
gather beneath the marble domes of traditional forms of labels from the
past. it is to enter a world forever marvelous.
The creations of the Amnesis artist are letters to amnesia, messages
inspired on a poetic and philosophic conception of amnesia. Without
an awareness of amnesia, we cannot have a complete vision. The poetry,
the painting, the music, the ballet, the theater of amnesia: all are forms
of forgetfulness resonant with allusions, polyvalent in meanings, aesthetic
objects that illuminate life.
But what is the color of amnesia? What is the form of amnesia?
What is the sound of amnesia? What are the gestures of amnesia?
We cannot know, but we can imagine them. For example, we can imagine
the visual forms of forgetfulness (as the plastic artists of Amnesis have
done) as parks full of images the resist being gathered into symbols, trees
cut in half, ghost images of objects, lost alphabets, objects at the edge
of cognition, ephemeral gestures: emblems and presence of the landscape
of amnesia.
Giorgio de Chirico wondered at the possibility of entering a world where
the links, the associations of memory, have broken down. In his essay
"On Metaphysical Art" (1919) he wrote: " I enter the room, i see a man
sitting in an armchair, I note a birdcage with a canary hanging from the
ceiling, I see paintings on the wall and a bookcase with books... But let
us suppose that for a moment, the threads of memory were broken completely,
since illogic is predicated on the loss of memory, who knows how i might
then see the room, who knows with what astonishment, what terror and possibly
also with what pleasure and consolation I might view the scene".
Facing Amnesia, the scribes de Loen said, "The artist, like the proverbial
amnesiac of Eritrea, fabricates stories to cover he voids in his memory...
The stories of the artist are those that lend themselves to the paintbrush,
to marble, to the movements of his body, to music and to writing."
The fables of the arts of amnesia are testimonies to the absences in our
minds.
What words can represent the form of formlessness of amnesia? Expressions
(such as those written by the scribes of Loen) with an indeterminate semantic
focus can, r others composed in a fractured rhetoric, stories that make
us feel and understand the confusion, astonishment, and vision of amnesia.
The theater and ballet of amnesia enter the realm of absences and presences
that constitutes amnesia: from light to darkness, from the visible
to the invisible, from presence to what is hidden, from variety to a nuance
that approximates uniformity and sameness.
Memory and amnesia are as much a part of music as sound and silence.
A melody depends on remembrance verging on amnesia. the music of
amnesia, like the ultimate zikr of Middle Eastern music, pursues
the purest silence, which cannot exist in reality, but only in our psyche
as a forgotten sound.
In the plastic arts, particularly since 1982, the expression of amnesia
has rapidly expanded in the work of the artists of amnesis. Surprisingly,
aside from Giorgio de Chirico, who hinted at the possibility of seeing
amnesia as a creative premise, plastic artists throughout the ages have
gathered beneath the shadow of Mnemosyne - or memory.
All art movements spring from certain assumptions or premises. Surrealism
maintains that the deeply embedded memories of the subconscious ca be expressed,
without rational control or aesthetic and moral constraints, through formal
approaches that range from the blob to figurative representation.
Expressionism claims that the distortion f perceptual reality can reveal
the soul or inner world of beings and things. Abstract Expressionism
affirms that color has an affective and mystical quality. the attitudinal
art of Marcel Duchamp assumes that the nominative act by the artist can
render a common technological ware into an objet d'art.
The plastic arts of Amnesis assume that amnesia is immanent to the psyche,
that the mind invents "fables" when confronted with forgetfulness, that
the notion of the lost object is integral to aesthetic amnesia. Amnesis
affirms that the fables of amnesia can be given a spatial dimension or
structure, much like mnemonics (techniques to assist and develop memory)
attribute to memory artificial spatial arrangements (images set within
invented loci, or places).
Amnesis works of art adopt a symbolic representation (in the sense that
a minimal spot of paint can act as a symbol). They include singular
combinations of spatial and temporal planes, the indeterminate use of signs
and a self-reflexive fictionalization. This is an art whose content
and structure are fundamentally molded by amnesia and absence and not by
presence and memory (be it conscious or, as is surrealism, subconscious
memory).
The essential elements of this art are:
-
An
aesthetic atmosphere allusive to amnesia created by the formal elements
of the work - in painting, for example, by the allusiveness of perspective,
line, form, and color.
-
The
lost object as an emblem for the absence of amnesia. Such symbol
may be an absent image or silhouette, a half image, a fractured image,
a ghost image, et cetera. These generalized forms, in some instances,
point to our shared realm of experience and to our similarities.
-
the
incongruous organization of disparate icons that suggests the bewilderment
and dissociative effect of amnesia and that can lead the viewer to a singularly
polyvalent semiotic reading.
-
A
sense of ahistorical or undifferentiated time. Memory operates by
association in space and time (it has a geometry and a chronology).; amnesia
dissociates the normal arrangement of both. Some Amnesis painters
represent this quality by a suitable manipulation of spatial planes, or
by quoting art and fragments of history from various periods.
-
A
sense of ephemerality implied by the notion of amnesia and often embodied
by the transient nature of certain works of art and media.
-
The
link between linguistic elements (titles, letters, phrases, et cetera)
and the theme of amnesia.
The
totality of human existence is circumscribed by amnesia: the amnesia of
a prehistory entirely unrecorded, and the amnesia of a possible
(thereby in itself a presence) posthistory when a human race, bu
its own hand or because of a natural catastrophe, would be extinct.
The written history of mankind began barely five thousand years ago.
from that point back to the inception of the universe, we have a vast gap
in our collective memory. And now, after that fateful August 6 in Hiroshima,
we are overwhelmed by the visible threat of the possible annihilation of
every human being and of all human memory. our hand has added a greater
weight to that of the biblical prophecy of an apocalypse.
The problem of memory appears in large measure resolved. Writing
and modern mnemotechnical inventions such as cameras, tape recorders, movies,
videos, and computers, scrupulously document fragments of our lives, dreams,
and fears. Yet the waters of amnesia that run beneath us, as the
scribes of Loen stated, will always be with us. Our words,
our gestures, our dwellings and all the supranature we have built will
always be set on a sea of amnesia.
Amnesia can be considered, as the scribes affirmed, terrifying and destructive,
comical and beneficent, a state of emptiness or a state that poetically
alludes to all things. Amnesia is a physical phenomenon and implies
a metaphysical entity. There is something divine, something that
frees us, in forgetfulness. If we had flawless memories, our existence
would be unbearable. on the other hand, the interior world of an
amnesiac is one of confusion, bewilderment, and terror - a world we cannot
completely imagine but which we can intuit in our daily lives.
Amnesia is certainty: it is an undeniable presence and essence of
our personal and collective worlds. It evokes - particularly in our
day - the human condition, more than ever so tenuous and precarious.
the arts of amnesia are an exaltation of the miracle of human life, which
survives, as the scribes said, "as a leaf on a sea of amnesia" To
see that leaf vividly, we must look at the waters of forgetfulness.
Thus we will pierce the blinding dome of our technological supranature,
that thick covering of presences and memories, of facts and documentation,
that can prevent us from conceiving ourselves in the total context of the
universe.
Amnesia can erase all things, as Plutarch said, and all things can be within
it. It suggests the elemental void of the creatio ex nibilo;
for some, it may evoke the vacuity of Nirvana, but such notions are fundamentally
colored by inhuman or superhuman assumptions. Amnesia is everything
and nothing, qualities which have been attributed to divinities.
But this divinity (unlike Mallarme's mystical silence) does not dwell in
a distant or recondite heaven, but rather within us. She is a void
and a plenitude in our lives. Memory emphasizes our differences;
amnesia illuminates our similarities. Amnesia does not imply the
negation of our memory; it implies the expansion of our consciousness.
The written record of mankind is the work of amnesia as much as it is of
memory. A weave of words, of images and traces, testimonies and fables.
Amnesia has always been relevant to our destiny. History records
references to psychological, social, and cultural amnesia.
Through the webs of memory, we can see the fables of the fountains of amnesia,
fresh and sublime, humorous and joyful, traditional and new - a new vision
of art, language, and reality.
We who feel inspired to write, paint, create music, act, dance, or produce
films with the gestures of everything we have lost and can never recover
or recall sign our names as testimony of everything that has vanished in
us. |
