andrew j harrison works memorializing

memorializing is an artworks studio inquiry into 3 related questions:

what is the relationship between memorializing and public shared identity?

What is it we choose to represent about public shared identity, what do we exclude from the chosen narrative? Who chooses?

what is the artistic expression of the relationship of the present moment to the past & by implication to the future?

We tend on the whole to represent the future as a memorialized version of the present. There’s a link here to the process of re-membering; we expect what we already know, gathering together impressions & associations from the experienced past as a guide to an otherwise uncertain future. How then can we move towards change, a different kind of future that includes excluded narratives & identities?

how can we find artistic expression of the living – can there be memorializing without petrifying?

Visiting the library of Trinity College, Dublin, you encounter busts, almost all male, of a bygone age, implicitly representing the established idea – literally carved in stone – of what is good, what is of value.

The same is true of the Glyptothek in Munich, where fragments of architecture & sculpture are held up as representations of what it means to be civilized.

The genre of the bust relates the process of memorializing to power & colonizing, silently establishing the hegemony of the elite, the rulers, those who have been victorious, who control the narrative of what happens. Those whose gaze under which we live.

There are 3 public places that require silent reverence: the church, the library & the art gallery. We are presented with an idea of public good, enshrined, metaphorically & often actually written in stone – petrified, impervious to change.

The question becomes, how do you have an explicit shared identity that is not petrified? How do you build in relationality, responsiveness to change. Can we have commemoration without colonization?

John Akomfrah addresses the question of finding new forms of representation of shared identity in a BFI interview from 1989:

“Black cultural movements always have to deal with this question of memory because it is the only raw material, the only stock, that they can turn to. Since you don’t have statues and memorials which speak about slavery and colonialism and so on, Black culture finds itself endlessly confronted with the question of what one does with a body of informal codes.”

The movement between a petrified memorial & a representation capable of transformation can be movement towards redressing the balance of power (See Hew Locke on statues).

Andrew Harrison’s Metamorphosis is a series in progress in conversation with these ideas: