Postmemory and forgetting

I've recently picked up Joan Gibbons' 2009 book Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance and I am processing some of the concepts of the book.  In the chapter "Postmemory: The Ones Born Afterwards" Gibbons uses Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to talk about some works by Christian Boltanski and Ansel Kiefer and their relationship to the Holocaust (to put it simply).  Kiefer (b. 1945) is of a generation in Germany known as Nachgeborenen, which translates as "the ones born afterwards."  The heart of the chapter is to work with the ideas of how memory of an event (especially a tragic event like the Holocaust) is remembered by generations that did not experience it, especially artists who are dealing with the remembering (or, rather postmemory) of the event of the Holocaust.  The chapter has been ringing in my head, especially with the broader implications of postmemory in art making, its relationship to nostalgia, and the imperfections of memory and how they translate into a concept like postmemory.

With the discussion of memory comes the discussion of the accuracy of memory.  I think it is a common assumption that the only accurate memory is one that is experienced by an individual (I'm going to leave this on the individual level and tackle how this applies to collective memory at a later date) and that a memory of an event that an individual was not alive for is not memory at all, but rather something more akin to history (as in an individual being told what has happened at a particular time).  An individual can, of course, have a memory of history but most would argue that the individual can never have a direct memory of an event in which they did not experience.

I think postmemory begins to address this in that, in a broad sense, people can have memories of something that they did not directly experience.  Undoubtedly these memories are imperfect (which is in line with most forms of memory!) and suspect to bias, but they are memories that come up just the same.  I think the most obvious example of this for me might be a photo album of my parents' lives before I or my brother was born.  The pictures are filled with people and places that I know and, in some capacity, fill in information of what happened before my own consciousness.  I know what my mother and father looked like, and, because of the photographs, I have a memory of what my mother and father looked like when they first started dating.

I have very little interest in nostalgia, and I think that the concept of postmemory might start to explain a nostalgia-esque feeling that I have had in my experience--looking to what has happened in the past and how it fits into my identity. In particular, I have been thinking about nostalgia, postmemory, and contemporary artists (and pop culture, for that matter) invested in Americana.  It is widespread throughout contemporary music, and is prevalent enough in contemporary art for their to be exhibitions surrounding it (Old, Weird America comes to mind).  I was accused a few times in graduate school of being nostalgic or even ironic when I used symbols of rural american culture; and what could be seen as 'americana' contemporary art is typically approached skeptically and is seen as romantic (almost as an opposite of contemporary art that engages with current social issues).  Can there not be a group of artists who also look towards the past--which they have no direct experience with or memory of--as source material for their work?

I am feeling myself veer back towards Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History", so a re-read of that is probably in order.  To try to summarize a bit of what I am talking about here, I would like to claim that the past is such a monumental entity in our identity, and we as individuals are aware of the past exceeding our interaction with it, that we can not but help deal with it in our current selves.  Perhaps this means that postmemory is an intrinsic part of identity. More on this to come, for sure.

Other books that I am reading, currently:
Wieland, or, the Transformation by Charles Brockden Brown
The American Soul by Jacob Needleman
A Void by George Perec
"Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission" by Marianne Hirsh (mentioned above) and Leo Spitzer (a great essay from Poetics Today dealing, in part, with miniature books from the Holocaust).

And, of course, some new studio work:
too many gone without a song, 2012
spray paint and weed