0 Comments

I have recently come across a book entitled Contemporary Art and Memory by Joan Gibbons. Reading through the introduction it occurred to me that here were a lot of my thoughts written in a far more readable manner than I am capable of. The following is a selection of quotes;

“memory is never just a straightforward process of recording lest we forget and, even in the best equipped of minds, it can be a slippery mechanism. it can be both elusive and intrusive and we can rarely be completely sure of its fidelity to the events or facts that it recalls.”

“The claims that are made and the stories that are told in the name of memory can alter people’s understanding of the world and, of course, alter the ways in which they act in or upon that world.”

“Locke (John Locke, English philosopher 1632-1704) claimed that the knowledge that is recalled is frequently recalled through images or sense impressions. Because of this emphasis on imaging or the formation of impressions, memory became closely related to the imagination.”

“the veracity of memory began to be questioned by some of Locke’s contemporaries on the grounds that images and sense impressions are exactly that, never the real thing, making it difficult to distinguish memory images from those produced by the imagination.”

“In his quest for authentic personal knowledge, Proust,(Marcel Proust, French novelist, 1871-1922) like Wordsworth and Coleridge before him, treated memory as something that has an emotional rather than an intellectually organised base- as an important constituent of a persons inner self.”

“far more meaningful is the sort of unsolicited recall sprung by the involuntary memory, as produced, for example, by the randomly encountered taste of a petite madeleine, which, uninvited, calls up an assemblage of sensation and emotion that is beyond the reach of the intellect and voluntary memory.”

“Henri Bergson (French philosopher 1859-1941) defined memory as the intersection of mind and matter. It is a short step from this to see art as constituting a similar intersection, but, in this case, acting as a ‘memory object’ or a memory work that intervenes and forms a connection, as Proust knew, between the work and a number of minds-or, better, a number of persons”

“allusive and suggestive of the past, tapping into our reservoir of emotions as much as into our store of cognitive knowledge.             The way that memory is valued, then, has shifted enormously from the idea of it being a storehouse of data which, given the right techniques, is recoverable in an ordered manner to the notion that it is a key to our emotional understanding of ourselves and the world.”

So, that’s it then. I’m particularly taken with Proust’s “assemblage of sensation and emotion that is beyond the reach of the intellect and voluntary memory.”

I also found another quote from Henri Bergson;

“The present contains nothing more than the past and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.”

 

 


0 Comments