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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts


Fall/Winter 2004

table of contents

    1. In This Issue
    by Trena Noval

    4. The White Outside the the Line: September 11, 2001
    A Reader's Response
    by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

    9. Seeing the Past in Present Tense: Working Thoughts on Monuments
    by Paula Levine

    14. Artist Portfolio

    32. Interpolations from the Subduction Zone
    by Mark Bartlett

    38. In the Gallery
    Body:Building

    39. Exhibition Review
    Temporalscape
    by Erin Garcia

    40. Book Review
    by Kyle Stephens

    42. Books Noted
    by Brian McDonald, Whitney Grace, Marisa Olson

    45. Books Received



in this issue:

    Monument Recall: Public Memory and Public Spaces

    While walking in my East Bay Hills neighborhood, located across the bay from San Francisco, markers surround me breathing memories of a past: a park dedicated to the WPA workers that built its stone pathways now registered as a National Historic Landmark, street signs named after original homesteaders, trees planted from seed by Italian immigrant farmers to resurrect a living reminder of their faraway homes, a placard about the canyon in the woods that forged a living stream through this landscape. Another sign near some decaying foundations recalling the history of an estate, turned hospital, turned local landmark, and a neighborhood house referred to as “the road house” marks a history of East Bay prohibition, with lingering vibrations from the sounds of cowboy crooner Bob Wills echoing out its doorways. These markers are common and somewhat conventional. They can be found anywhere, but they have created for the people living in my neighborhood a process to remember a history we did not experience firsthand - they activate our minds, redefine the place, and position us in the seat of remembering. They take us to a place of understanding the environment in which we live, giving us an avenue to travel from the present to the past and back again.

    This fall San Francisco Camerawork celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Thirty years of presenting artists and ideas that step outside conventions, marking a monumental accomplishment in the world of nonprofit arts. In this issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts titled Monument Recall: Public Memory and Public Spaces, we continue this mission by looking at how contemporary artists, writers, and architects have explored, created, and redefined the processes for cultural remembering, offering new imagery, concepts, and dialogue of what a monument can be. The three featured writers, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Paula Levine, and Mark Bartlett, explore events of the past in relation to public memory, challenging us to rethink our own place in history, in order to, as Paula Levine states, “redefine the ground under our feet.”

    In her essay, Paula Levine, takes us on a detour through a history of movements in monument making that came out of cultural and political needs for remembering, shifting through time to create new forms that would reactivate events. But in describing her recent travels to see and meet monument makers in Germany, she reveals the potential complacency replacing the poignancy of one particular modern monument once revered as an innovative new art form to ignite a lost history, through time losing its power for remembering the event at all. Can monuments and their meanings leave a trace that can be read through time? What are the consequences of losing this meaning? Levine questions what route we will have to take for memory to remain active. How can twenty-first-century artists harness new tools for expression to sustain the lessons and memories of history, active sensibilities that we pass on through daily life from parent to child to grandchild?

    Thyrza Nichols Goodeve’s takes us on the painful yet necessary journey through the devastating outcomes of 9/11. She begins with memories and unfolds the haunting tale of Michael Richards, an artist who was working in his studio on that fateful morning. His most recent completed works foreshadowed the events that led to his death - events that he could not have foreseen consciously - constituting what Goodeve describes as a memory premonition. Our lives have dramatically shifted since that day. How do we continue from here? Goodeve looks to Alfredo Jaar and Ann Hamilton, artists who bring light to the process of remembering, giving us the tools to negotiate the past in order to forge a new future.

    And Mark Bartlett unearths the hidden past of the city of San Francisco through his detailed research into the lost and forgotten footprints of the city’s roots. Deconstructing the current urban development, he takes us down to the foundation, revealing as he goes, the strata of these lost and forgotten histories on which current culture was built. But he also asks us to acknowledge these roots, to use them to question where we are now, to trace their path through the current politicized process that determines what culture chooses to remember and to find our own cultural significance in this past.

    Monuments both remind us of the past and warn us of the future, but the process of remembering still remains a public and individual responsibility. In the portfolio section curators Laurie Blavin, Paula Levine, and I take a global look at how some contemporary artists and architects are setting an innovative course, leading to new avenues of remembering. On these pages you will see a glimpse of our thirtieth anniversary exhibition Monument Recall: Public Memory and Public Spaces. Unlike some conventional commemoratives, these works are not stagnant; they do not allow us to forget but rather instigate new ways to remember. Works range from public installations (not formally sanctioned) to photography, architecturally driven sculptures, video, sound, and interactive pieces in the gallery. These artists and architects address some of the complexities relating to the very difficult task of representing and sustaining public memory. They explore the impact of changing politics, question what culture chooses to remember (or forget) and how, and uncover histories we have taken for granted.

    It is our hope that the writers and artists in this issue of Camerawork will inspire us to seek new grounds for understanding the consequences of cultural actions, giving us a meaningful avenue for traveling to the past and back, in order to better understand the environments we inhabit.

    Trena Noval
    Guest editor

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