Gabriella Haynes

Introduction

I want to be recognised for the force with which I can explore the limits of my identities, the ends of my institutions. I want to be valued for the amnesia of my history, the contingency of my cultures, the silence of my languages, the boundaries of my body, the miasma of my memories – and in that reach beyond, I want to touch your histories and silences, configure our cultural confusions, meld memories of what remains untranslatable but no less telling (Bhabha 1993, p. 30).

Time and identity are the central themes of the Memory Grid, a permanent exhibition of digital art at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).  As a representation of personal stories and fictional narratives from a range of sources aiming to address the idea of ‘memory’, it is a cosmopolitan space indicating that society has moved beyond a nation-based modernity and that ‘individuals now seem to be, more than ever, prone to articulate complex affiliations, meaningful attachments and multiple allegiances’ (Vertovec and Cohen 2002, p. 2). Yet beyond being a reflection of postmodern identities, the site can also be assessed in terms of its usefulness in creating a space which legitimises and facilitates discussion of the failings, paradoxes, contradictions, borders, hybridities, and dichotomies inherent in such identities and their memories.  Cosmopolitanism as an ideal has been raised, in a broad political sense, by Ulrich Beck (1999, p. 39), who proposes a ‘politics outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political system of nation-states’ and a cosmopolitan society empowered by ‘transcultural civil resistance’ (p. 46).  To narrow the terms of reference for this analysis, and to engage with the particular role of an exhibition such as Memory Grid, an ideal of cosmopolitan artistic representation can also be posed as a tool for facilitating engagement with identities which modernity has failed to include or legitimise.  In engaging with paradoxes and interstices, creative projects such as the Memory Grid have the potential to:

stud[y] complexity and defend complex systems of communication against over-simplification. It [can explore] the irreducible heterogeneity of cultural identity, the always unfinished process of making and remaking ourselves through our symbolic forms. Its success cannot be measured in terms of simplification and closure (Carter 2004, p. 13). [1]

Instead, the success of the exhibition may be measured by its ability to do that which Bhabha (1993, p. 30) implores: ‘meld memories of what remains untranslatable but no less telling’.

The Memory Grid is made up of three main components. Firstly, the exhibition space contains five ‘pods’.  Each pod contains a viewing screen, multiple earphones, and a touch screen through which the visitor selects a short film, documentary or animation to view.  The films are arranged by categories generally based on the source of production (for example, short films by primary school students, film students, or independent film makers).  Film subjects are diverse and include: the story of an Aboriginal primary student who describes her relationship to the land; a fictional short film about losing a partner in a car park; and an animation about fleeing from persecution and the subsequent impersonal experience of dealing with the Department of Immigration.  The second element of the exhibition is a project called MAP – Memory and Place - which aims to ‘create a topography of memory for Victoria by absorbing the stories of its towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods and sharing them with its people’ (ACMI [online] 2006).  Images of Victorian people and communities, which can be archival or recently produced by members of the community, are projected onto a wall in order to convey a sense of ‘identity, memory and place’.  For example, archival footage of the ‘Stawell Gift’, or the stories of migrants in Bendigo, may be displayed.  The final element of the Memory Grid is a series of computer screens through which ‘digital storytelling’ films are displayed.  As in the case of MAP, the emphasis in digital storytelling is on memory, and participants record a short film about a particular story in their lives in order to create a ‘living’ memory.

Grid

Walls and grids…offer no protection from spreading webs; as webs grow, walls collapse and everything begins to change…  In this situation, the structural oppositions, which had long informed thinking and guided policy, unravel and the political balance of power disappears.  Whereas walls divide and seclude in an effort to impose order and control, webs link and relate, entangling everyone in multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is really in control. As connections proliferate, change accelerates, bringing everything to the edge of chaos.  This is the moment of complexity (Taylor 2001, p. 23).

Mark Taylor (2001, p. 25) writes about the grid as ‘the figure of modernism’.  Using architecture as a metaphor, he describes the grid as ‘the straight lines and right angles of streets and avenues as well as modern houses and buildings [that] channel desires in ways that allow controlled moments of release necessary to keep the wheels of industry turning’ (p. 30). Taylor asserts that not only do grids aim to determine the experience of the individual in a particular context by ‘channelling desires’, but they also represent modernity’s need to continually create the present as something unrelated to the past.  Taylor argues that modernists associate this present with the grid, and thus somewhat paradoxically create something ‘new’ and present using a reproduction of the grid.

Using such a conceptualisation, the Memory Grid is fundamentally the expression of a problematic, tension, or contradiction that defines contemporary experience.  By displaying a multitude of genres, identities and art forms it aims to emphasise complexity, hybridity, multiculturalism and interconnectedness, through an artistic form which is constantly changing through sequences of scenes, changes in technology, and the changeover of exhibition material.  Films are not organised by nationality, or artist origin, or even by genre.  If there is a common thread through each piece, it is that they largely tell stories of the function of identity beyond, around, or between the state: for example through migration, or at the level of the individual whose everyday experience is unrelated to the nation.  By creating a space through which identity in various forms is expressed in an un-categorised and, in many cases, undefined way, the exhibition draws attention to what has been described as ‘one of the paradoxes of this age…so deeply marked by mobility and rupture, that the metaphors of identity place such exclusive value on a sense of “rootedness” to the place of origin’ (Papastergiadis 1995, p. 5).

The physical context of ACMI as an institution within Federation Square is in itself an expression of the contradictions and paradoxes of modernity, and in particular highlights an interaction between the national and transnational.  While it is not represented as the main repository of national memory and art, the Centre represents a departure from traditional forms of artistic arrangement, curatorship and representation.   As Elizabeth Gertsakis (1994, p. 37) notes, the tension between the single, sequential, national narrative and the increasing impossibility of, and resistance to, categorisation and specific contextualisation of artistic works creates:

anxiety because a politics of expanding representation is tantamount to incitement to anarchy.  A surfeit plenitude of heterogeneity challenges the museum’s intrinsic logic for history as a series of successions.

Particularly within the context of nationally-funded institutions, the tension between national and transnational representation is also a practical issue.  Sneja Gunew (1994) draws attention to the tension between the state as a patron and the state as a promoter of the arts, which may create tensions in relation to funding practices that support largely traditional rather than alternative art forms.  It also creates the potential for a situation where ‘the state itself may be seen as providing a particular type of culture of its own when it displays state power in the spectacle of state rituals’ (Gunew 1994, p. 2), thus providing a determinative framework for the display of culture.  Kim Montgomery (2006), ACMI’s Content Development Manager, has argued that at ACMI ‘a new context is already in play because there’s already a sense that if you offer works up for public view in a major cultural institution in the middle of a major capital city that these are stories and memories that people should care about’.  Federation Square is an example of the interaction between ‘official’ and non-official mythology, as its creation occurred as a result of a ‘state ritual’ – the Centenary of Federation – and yet resultant spaces such as ACMI and various public artworks ( particularly Paul Carter’s Nearamnew) try ‘to evoke the open-ended process of many unfinished journeys, building a place out of the collective residue of their different energies’ (Carter 2004, p.3).

In a similar way, the Memory Grid – by presenting the past as multiplicitous and organic, and relevant to the present, yet being labelled with the modernist label ‘grid’ and situated in a national space – encapsulates a fundamental paradox of cosmopolitan society. This contradiction is heightened by the specific relationship between past and present in the Australian context.  It has been noted how:

settler societies…are modern societies par excellence. At the heart of modernity has been a vision of progress, in which there is a constant movement that continually breaks with the past, particularly that of local places (as opposed to metropolitan ones) (Attwood 2005, p. 14).

The break with the past that is required by Australian national mythology could potentially be facilitated by the ‘teleologic’ of a museum, as well as through the implications of its location within a place that represents a fin de siècle break between past and present which was visible in 1901, and again in 2001. [2]   Yet the Memory Grid specifically disrupts this grid logic, not least because of its emphasis on memories and stories of migration, and the continuity between the ‘pasts’ which it displays, and the present as experienced by the contributors (expressed through their work) and the viewer (who is experiencing memory as an immediate and relevant event).  Again Gertsakis (1994, p. 49) draws attention to the particular ‘anxiety’ that such an engagement may evoke in an Australian context:

ACMI is a gallery exhibiting non-traditional art forms within the context of a place which aims to represent national mythology, albeit in a less rigid and determinative way than other national spaces.  The Memory Grid is a space that represents non-linear time and undefined identity within a society that has struggled to confront its past and acknowledge its relevance to the present.  As various theorists have articulated, this is an expression of the various contradictions of cosmopolitan society in which: 

a new world-space of cultural production and national representation which is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance) in everyday texture and composition (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996, p. 1). 

Put simply, the exhibition can be seen as a metaphor of memory (local, past in present, organic and cosmopolitan) versus grid (metropolitan, present without past, rigid and modern).

Versus

Yet, with such an interpretation, the temptation is to reduce the complexity of identity as conveyed through art either to simple oppositions or unproblematic hybridities.  As Nikos Papastergiadis (1995, p. 6) argues, this dichotomous interpretation has been apparent in ‘the institutions of art [which] tend to construct antagonistic alternatives: an artist is either marginalised or placed within the mainstream, leaving no space for a third position’.  A reliance on dichotomies has also been inherent particularly in the context of bicultural exhibitions.  Lue Jie (2005, p. 24) indicates, for example, that Chinese art has been subject  to:

‘over-exposure, but under-exposed’. This contradiction is a continuously existent dialectic, which is to say that, no matter whether it is inside China or outside of China, whether it is the art world or not, the judgements about the so-called rise of contemporary Chinese art are all based upon a historically rigid and simplified set of clichés.

Ultimately, the language of exchange between two nationally-defined artistic communities glosses over ‘the complex set of transnational relations and cross-cultural social formations of Asian Australians, connections that may be social, political and economic and which may span several continents and dramatically impact upon the everyday experiences of Asians living in Australia’ (Ang 2000, pp. xv-xvi).  Through this centre versus periphery relationship, artists are left feeling that they are ‘ethnographers of the centre’ (Davila 1995, p. 19).

Subject to similar criticism as these dichotomous relationships is what Jacqueline Lo has called ‘happy hybridity’.  Also raised by Juan Davila (1995), Lo (2000, p. 157) argues that a form of uncritical and unproblematised multifaceted identity is both Eurocentric and inherent to art and performance because:

the works lend themselves to a visibility that encourages a form of visual fetishisation – the specular consumption of the Other – which is linked to a specific Orientalist and colonialist history in this country.

As with the construction of false oppositions, ‘happy hybridity’ ignores the complexities and nuances of identity and its application in artistic forms.  Jie (2005, p. 26) suggests that within the context of institutionalised art, Eurocentrism is persistent because:

Western museums and the entire social system are currently undergoing a different type of self-imagination that continues to be based upon the imagination of the ‘Other’.  However, the difference this time is that this imagination of the Other is not used to exclude, but rather to welcome.   

While aiming to include others, such representation does not necessarily disrupt hierarchies and power structures because, in its quest to emphasise multiplicity, it fails to engage with the points of intersection, resistance and collaboration which constitute the meaning of identities which are not based on nation or place.

Acknowledging this tendency in artistic representation, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1995, p. 15) point out that:

a radical, polycentric multiculturalism…cannot simply be nice, like a suburban barbeque to which a few token people of colour are invited…It is not merely a question of communication across borders but of discerning the forces which generate the borders in the first place. 

Similarly, Lo (2000, p. 167) calls for an ‘intentional hybridity [which] stresses its strategic use as a mode of intervention and politicisation’.  While such a form of representation would draw attention to the power relations inherent in ‘versus’ relationships (local versus global, centre versus periphery, for example) it would focus upon and problematise these relationships rather than discounting them through including multiple, defined forms of identification in a harmonious collaboration, or in simple opposition to each other.  The Memory Grid, as a representation of digital technology and its potential, recognises that ‘we are living in a networked environment, not a sequential one, and audiences are becoming increasingly used to absorbing information through fragments that are linked in a myriad of ways rather than through single narratives’ (Lynn 2003, p. 588).  This ‘interdependent dataism’ (Taylor 2001, p. 23)  is an example of the creation of the ‘webs’ which override the grid and entangle ‘everyone in multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is really in control’.  The way in which these mutations are interpreted through artistic expression thus must necessarily engage with questions of hybridity and paradox, yet ultimately move beyond them.  As Bruce Robbins (1998, p. 2) has argued, the nation versus cosmopolitanism dichotomy is perhaps the most irrelevant conceptualisation because:

like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular… they are weak and underdeveloped as well as strong and privileged…for better of worse, there is a growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it.  It is thus less clear what cosmopolitanism is opposed to, or what its value is supposed to be.

Memory

To move beyond nostalgia is not to reject the past but to defy the ideology that identifies belonging ethnically and genealogically. It is to embrace the concept of local invention (Carter 2004, p. 5).

How then does the Memory Grid respond to the need to problematise and represent interstices without oversimplification or representing ‘happy hybridity’?  By making the claim to the creation of a ‘topography of memory’, and by emphasising stories of migration, the exhibition falls into the potential territory of both these interpretations of identity within the realm of artistic representation.  Lynn’s description of digital networks is full of hybrid ‘potential’, however the version of hybridity represented by the Memory Grid is saved from the charge of ‘happy hybridity’ because it is an example of the way in which:

a network can be a living archive, an aide memoir, and an environment in which montage is the key experience.  A network can facilitate future moments of exchange (Lynn 2003, p. 589).

While the exhibition claims to represent ‘memory’, and thus a version of the past, it emphasises the notion of exchange and dialogue in this process of representation.  It aims to encourage the ‘transfiguration of the gallery visitor from a spectator to a participant’ (Gye 2004, p. 62).  By setting up a dialogue between the ‘spect-actor’ (Shohat and Stam 1995, p. 14) and the screen visuals, the exhibition thus acknowledges the interaction between the past and present.  It is an acknowledgement of the irrelevance of linear, progressive versions of the past, and in a further contradiction of modernity’s obsession with the present as represented by the ‘grid’, it aims to demonstrate that ‘there is…always the distracting presence of another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present’ (Bhabha 1990, p. 295). [4]  It is an alternative vision of the temporal markedness represented by its surroundings, which, as Bhabha (1993, p. 21) notes, raise not necessarily a cleavage between past and present but instead show that:

beginnings and ends may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siecle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.

This alternative representation of the past, and the dialogue which saves it from the categorisations of oversimplification and happy hybridity, is largely facilitated by the use of digital technology in the exhibition.  Dialogue occurs because of the relationship between ‘texts, readers and communities existing in clear discursive and social relation to one another.  [Media spectatorship] is thus a negotiable site of interaction and struggle’ (Papastergiadis 1995, p. 12).  Within the context of the exhibition, the visitor is presented with multiple interpretations of memory, but is able to determine the experience by selecting stories, and interpreting them as an individual.  Not only is the sequence of narratives contained in the exhibition determined by the visitor, but the visual and kinetic nature of the experience also acutely interjects in their own context, heightening their sense of interaction and the impact of the images on their own perceptions, and thus ‘digital art is precisely the kind of interface that both reflects and redefines contexts’ (Bolter and Gromala 2003, p. 27).  In this way, the experience is like a form of collaboration, which can be:

a technique for making sense of gaps, interruptions and unpredictable crossovers.  [Moreover] … the refinement of such techniques has a political utility: it gives the other voices and stories of migration a creative role in the weaving, and reweaving, of the federal text (Carter 2004, p. 5).

Carter (2005, p. 3) emphasises this exchange in his own artwork Nearamnew, in which ‘time is present in the ‘marbled cake’ of the sandstone…and all these traces of time focus attention on the apprehension of the work as a process of exchange’.  Ultimately this is what occurs within the Memory Grid, not only in the sense of collaboration between the viewer and the works exhibited, but also in the contributions of community members, who are able to add their own memory to the multiple narratives of the exhibition.  Dialogue and exchange is thus the key to emphasising the multiplicity of memory and its relationship to the present, creating unforseen relationships and ruptures rather than arbitrarily assigned borders and dichotomies.

The potential for ACMI and the Memory Grid to provide or create a space for cosmopolitanism is perhaps greater than in the mainstream media or the National Gallery by virtue of their status as ‘alternative’ art spaces.  Yet the exhibition is an example of the way in which cosmopolitanism can be expressed not as a ‘suburban barbeque’, with a smorgasbord of cultures unaffected by power relations, nor as the expression of relationships between clearly defined identities.  The choice of title, ‘Memory Grid’ draws attention to an inherent contradiction: the ‘grid’ represents a rigid, determinative modernity, and ‘memory’ brings something fluid and web-like into a predetermined structure.  Yet by using this name, the exhibition space does not shy away from this contrast or simplify it.  As the name suggests, it does not gloss over power relations and borders, but instead draws attention to them and their reason for being.  Multiple perspectives, styles, and genres, oscillating between reality and fiction, mean that hybridity is expressed but saved from an arbitrary form.  The various stories draw attention to ‘hybridity in all its dark, shadowy and well lit form’ in contrast to ‘the identity of the nation which has been so heavily garbed in the costume of purity and exclusivity’ (Papastergiadis 1995, p. 7).  Finally, the exhibition engages with the past in a way that renders it a contingency of the present, rupturing progressive narratives and creating a space where migrancy and undefined identities are deemed as natural, or more natural, than histories grounded in a sense of defined place. It is an example of artistic practise which:

does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ is part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living (Bhabha 1993, p. 28).

Thus the Memory Grid’s engagement with identity and time rejects the ‘nostalgia’ and myth-making of national narratives without discounting the past or rejecting its paradoxes; instead it allows its subjects and participants to engage in the process of ‘making and remaking’.  The exhibition is not centred on oppositions.  It is not ‘memory versus grid’, but is instead an alternative idea of:

a grid, implying a network of interactions and intersections, a charting of trajectories, a framework, a storage cell, a conductor for the distribution and supply of a current, superimposed lines providing reference points.  This was a central metaphor, because it implied connections and a gathering of power.  In this case the power that is generated by stories, ordinary and meaningful and legitimated by their presentation, a power that emerged from setting these stories in dialogue with one another in the middle of a new cultural institution speaking about media (Montgomery 2006). 

The Memory Grid’s apparent paradox thus invigorates this cosmopolitan space of exchange and engagement.

NOTES