Liverpool Biennial - Leung Mee-Ping

'Out of Place', 2012

Leung Mee-Ping's videon installation was also part of the Biennial and was located in the Copperas building Liverpool. The installation consisted of six videos, which were projected onto screens that were hanging from the ceiling, that you had to walk between in order to view what was on all sides. The videos were set in six different places: Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Smokey Mountain Manila, Bangkok and Varanasi. They depicted busy city life and traffic. As a viewer, you walk through the projections as though you are walking through a city. The camera viewpoint is very much from the eyes of the viewer, as though it is a simulation. The work is interesting because we feel as though we are there, and these are our own memories and experiences. Some of the videos are walking down a busy street, where people push past you and you feel as though you are in the way. The uncomfortable feeling of constantly being in the way and out of place, causes you to keep moving around the space, watching all of the videos. The sounds of traffic, car horns, people talking all add to the stressful scene. I think this was a really successful piece in creating what the artist intended; to make the viewer feel out of place and lost in a different culture. The screens are slightly high up, so that the crowds are too tall, making you feel small and even more lost and insecure in this new world. If I was being critical, I do think the screens could do with being slightly lower, just so that the viewer can implicate themselves in the scene even more so. I found this piece interesting for the same reasons that I found Edward Kienholz's 'Sawdy' interesting - the viewer feels as though they are in the scene, which is a really useful technique for my own themes to do with shared experience and collective memory.

Edward Kienholz, 'Sawdy', 1971

In the Tate Liverpool this week I saw this piece by Edward Kienholz. The scale replica of a car door is mounted on the wall, and is made from materials including metal, glass, plastic and rubber, amongst other things. On walking up to the piece, the window is already wound down, and you look beyond it to work out what is depicted. The scene is set in America, and shows a group of white men castrating a black man, surrounded by four parked cars. The viewer is immediately implicated in the scene as you feel as though you are sitting in one of the pickup trucks, looking out of the window and watching this attack occur. The window of the car is mirrored, showing your own reflection and forcing you further to place yourself in the scene. The image is a dark side of American contemporary life. In my own practice I am interested in British contemporary life and the shared experiences of my generation, but from a much more lighthearted point of view. I like the viewer to see themselves in my work as though they could be looking at their own memories, and I think Kienholz has done this so successfully by creating a scale replica of a car, which we are all familiar with being in and looking out the window. It places you directly in the scene. Most recently I created a piece that was based on an experience of a music festival/outside gig. I wanted to create the feeling of being in the crowd, so I tried to make other crowd members life-size, as though the viewer would be standing behind them, having a slightly blocked view of the stage. I think I could have done this a lot more successfully by depicting the people in the crowd that would be standing directly in front of the viewer more clearly, and experimenting with altering the perspective so that they were more or less focused, depending on which worked best. I do like this technique of making work of memories as though it is from a person's eyes though, as it implicates the viewer in the scene. It is useful for my theme of collective memory, as it suggests that my work could be the memories of any viewer.

Liverpool Biennial - Yukinori Yanagi

Pacific, 1996

When I originally saw this work I wasn't so much interested in the flags or worried too much what the piece was about - but I was immediately intrigued by the materials used in the piece. The flags were presented in perspex boxes, and inside are flags which look to have eroded somehow. I initially thought that this was polystyrene, that had been rubbed away in parts, as the texture looked very similar. On reading up on the piece I discovered that it was in fact sand inside the perspex boxes, and  ants had been released inside them, to create these tunnels between the grid-like flags as a comment on migration. It's the idea of erosion and the fading of the bright flags that I am drawn to. I think because they are images that we all recognise so much, it makes the fading away of them even more symbolic. I am interested in this idea of fading away in my own work, in relation to memory. Yanagi's piece has made me think more about my own work. Although I have since found out that it is made from sand, I am interested in my initial misconception of it being made from polystyrene. I would like to try using polystyrene in my own work to create some of the fragmented images; cutting it away or using certain liquids to dissolve parts of it and make it disintegrate.

Liverpool Biennial - Jakob Kolding

This week I visited Liverpool to have a look at the Liverpool Biennial. I was quite interested in the work of Jakob Kolding, which I found in the Bluecoat's exhibition space. Inspired by modernist architecture and city life; Kolding works with collage and collective imagery, such as pop-cultural sources like music and football. Kolding is interested in the idea of 'local identity', and creates posters and maquettes based around this theme.

As I walked into his exhibition the first thing I noticed was the lack of colour, all of Kolding's selected work was black-and-white. A lot of the work is also quite minimalist in nature - sometimes with only a few small images on a page. Generally his work has the feel of old newspapers; a lot of the images are pixelated as though they are small images found from secondary sources which have been enlarged, reducing the picture quality. The connotations with architecture are strong - his work is very structured, using bold designs and layouts, and he also creates cardboard maquettes which immediately remind me of an architect's model. It's the more minimalist prints that I find the most interesting. I think they're simple and effective, and relate to themes that I am looking at in my own practice. The large amount of white space in the images makes me think of the absence of memory, and the use of pop-culture/secondary imagery, makes me think of collective memory and the idea of shared experience. In my own work I generally work with layered rectangles which mirror the dimensions of standard photographs, as I am interested in the relationship between photography and memory, but Kolding carefully cuts around details that he wants to display. I would like to try this technique of cutting around the details of images I am collaging, so that I am clearly selecting parts of an image, creating isolated parts of a memory. 

Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

Recently I have read 'Camera Lucida' by Roland Barthes, which is a far more personal approach to an analysis of photography than Susan Sontag's. His problems with photography stem from his search for the 'perfect' picture of his dead mother. The first part of the book Barthes takes a more objective viewpoint of photography, and identifies two planes of an image. He calls the one the 'studium' of an image, which is the subject and meaning of the photograph. The other, he names the 'punctum', which refers to the aspect or detail of an image that hold our gaze.  Barthes writes about the punctum as often piercing through the studium of a photograph. It's the second half of the book where it becomes more moving, when he writes more about his grief for his mother's death and begins searching for a perfect picture of her. Barthes wants to find a picture of his mother that encompasses everything he remembers about her visually, as well as summing up her personality, which proves to be an almost impossible task. He eventually discovers a photograph that depicts the 'air' about his mother, when she was aged only five. There is an immediate sense of jubilation as Barthes finds this picture and has an onrush of emotions triggered by her photograph and the memory of her. Barthes never shows the photograph, making it clear that it is a personal journey: 'It exists only for me. For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.' This is the thing about personal photographs; - other people's are rarely interesting because we have no personal attachment to it, there is no 'studium' as Barthes would put it. This is why I am far more interested in the idea of collective memory rather than individual memory. My search for photographs tends to be the opposite to that of Barthes', I am interested in images that are not personal, that anyone may have already seen in real life. My hope would be that viewers might believe they have already have experienced the memory, even if they remember it just through looking at the photographs and starting to believe that the images are familiar and in fact their own memory. Barthes' view on photography is that 'it actually blocks memory, [it] quickly becomes a counter-memory one day, some friends were talking about their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had none left.' I find this idea of memory being replaced by memory really interesting, we start to forget what we actually remember and what we have just been shown through images. Barthes' view on photography in relation to memory is not very different from Susan Sontag's, who writes that photographs are 'not so much an instrument of memory, as an invention of it or a replacement.' [Susan Sontag, On Photography, pg. 165].

In my work I am interested in depicting the visualisation of a memory. I try to do this through fragmentation - some part of the image are photographs (some clear, and others less so), to refer to the idea of photographs filling in the blanks of our memory, or even replacing it. In other parts of the image I like to use other methods such as drawing and painting, to portray the other parts of a memory, possibly the less well remembered; what there are no photographs of to serve as a reminder or memory replacement.

Susan Sontag

Recently I have read 'On Photography' by Susan Sontag, to get a better understanding of photography itself as a medium. Sontag generally raises issues of a photographic world replacing the real one, and talks about a culture that is becoming increasingly obsessed with images. Sontag talks about photography as a replacement of reality. We have become reliant on photographs as a way of preserving and freezing moments of time. Images are everywhere - and we regularly experience things through photographs before we experience them in reality. An example of this would be holiday brochures: - we don't need to go to the place to experience it when we have a photograph. This also takes away from the virginity of a new experience. Since the invention and ever widening use of social networking sites I think this has gone to another level - I, and many others in my generation, see so many photos of our friends' daily lives now that we almost live through them, and they become our own memories too. We are constantly looking at other people's memories. I think social networking sites really confuse and blur the line between individual and collective memory, as we blog our own personal thoughts and photos, but this gets framed alongside everybody else's and becomes a wider, more collective narrative reflecting today's times. I find myself sharing in my friends' experiences through their photographs. As Sontag states: 'essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.'

In terms of photography in relation to memories, Sontag states that photographs are 'not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement', highlighting that photography can be used as a replacement of memory, but it will never be that memory. 'Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.  But this is the opposite of understanding'. This is interesting in terms of preserving memories, as we have become reliant on photography as a way of freezing moments and serving as a reminder or explanation of the past, but we can't always believe that what we see in a photograph is a true reflection - seeing a memory is not the same as understanding it, feeling it and recalling it involuntarily. That would be what we truly remember, if our memory hasn't been infiltrated by photographs. Sontag states: 'of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and future', further emphasising that photographs do act as a replacement of memory some instances. In my own work I am interested in this idea of seeing a memory in photographs, or at least certain parts of it being replaced by photographs; whether that be our personal photographs or ones that we have seen in mass media, or possibly more commonly nowadays, on social media sites. I am intrigued by the struggle of what we actually remember and what has just been filled in by photographs.

The Forum: Memory

I listened to a radio programme called 'The Forum' on BBC Radio Four, as the episode was titled 'Memory', and looked into the idea of memory itself, asking questions on why and how we remember things. The discussion was led by radio presenter Bridget Kendall, and the guests were Dorothy Bohm, a documentary photographer, Raymond Tallis, a neuroscientist (who now writes about the relationship between science and philosophy), and Zinovy Zink, author of 'History Thieves', a book in which he unravels his family history.

The broadcast was really interesting as it posed questions that I am really interested in in my work - why are memories formed? What impact do they have? Do we distort memories?

Photographer Dorothy Bohm very much uses photography as a way of capturing time and preserving memories. She mentions putting 'a limit to forgetfulness'. She also states: 'In my photography, I hold time. I have a picture of a child, and that child will be a child forever.' I think this really says something about the permanent and static nature of photography. Once something is photographed, it lives on for as long as the photograph survives, which, in the age of digital photography seems infinite. Printed photographs would eventually fade and become damaged and worn, but taking a photograph today feels as though it will exist forever, whether that be on computers, cds, or online. I think photography really does fill in the blanks for forgotten memories, but it also fails to tell the whole story and can fail to preserve a memory in this way.

Bridget Kendall suggests:

'The power of a visual image can imprint on your brain in such a way that all your other memories somehow get elbowed out, don't they? Do you sometimes feel that photography can do that, that it can preserve memory, but perhaps it also distorts the whole picture of what could be there as memories?'

I have recently been reading Susan Sontag's 'On Photography', and she tends to agree with this idea that photography can be linked to the distortion of memory, stating: 'photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.' Sontag also states 'photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and future.' Sontag suggests that photography can distort memory, and mental images can be confused with photographic images.

I was interested to hear about memory from a neuroscience point of view, but Raymond Tallis stated that 'neuroscience can tell us very little about memory.' I think this is why I am so intrigued around the subject of memory - there seems to be no explanation as to how and why we visualise our memories. Raymond Tallis stated that memory is 'a present experience of a past experience' which I thought was a succinct way of describing it.

Raymond Tallis: 'what's already starting to emerge from our discussion is the extent to which memory isn't something utterly solitary and individual which you can find in the darkness of the individual skull, it's something that's collective, and shared.'

'We are, unlike any other creatures, part of a community of minds. We have a shared explicit public arena to which we together refer and we pay joint attention, once a prime example of that of course is that form of pooled memory called 'history'.

'But one of the quite disturbing things, and there is evidence of this from Psychology, that every time you recall a memory, you change it... that's what I find quite disturbing, even when you're trying to narrate your own life accurately the very process of doing it and telling yourself about yourself distorts what it is that you're trying to capture.'

This is what I find particularly interesting about memory - the ever-changing distortion of it. Things come in-and-out of focus for different reasons; stories possibly exaggerating certain parts, photographs filling in blanks, parts becoming completely forgotten. I think memory is very much a living thing, parts of it decay over time if you abandon them and don't recall the memory, whereas other parts become prominent and remain detailed if you think about them a lot, or if they have a lot of significance to you, and especially if you have photographs that serve as a reminder.

Raymond Tallis: 'I don't think that memory is entirely internally constructed; it has external constraints and external checks, and the very fact of making sense of ourselves in the context of public understanding of what we are, or an understanding of what we are that's drawn from public discourse.'

This is really interesting for me as my work deals with the idea of collective memory, and Tallis here suggests that memory is very much constructed by both the individual and the collective. We are affected by everything around us, and this all feeds into our memory.