Art and the Performance of Memory

This book investigates the role that the visual and performing arts play in our experience and understanding of the past. Expanding upon longstanding concerns in cultural history about the relation of text and image, the book highlights the distinction between enactive and cognitive memory and the implications of this for artists and their publics. The essays highlight the role of oral history in the documentation of the visual and performing arts. Contributors are drawn from a range of backgrounds, including art and architectural history, film, theatre and performance studies, social and cultural history. Blending theory and case study, they cover subjects such as: * The response of artists to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, violence in Columbia and Mexico and the Balkan Wars * The circuit of sexual desire in contemporary art and photography * Sites of collective and personal memory, including the internet, the urban landscape, family photographs and hiphop. Stressing the relation of media to the formation of collective memory, the volume explores how media intertextuality creates overlapping repertoires for understanding the past and the present.
Scholars of art history, media and cultural studies, literature and performance studies will all find this work a valuable resource.

Author Biography

Richard Cándida Smith is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the Director of the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library. He focuses on the modern intellectual and cultural history of the arts. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (1995) and Mallarmé’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (1999).