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Essay On History And Memory In Notes For Basquiat

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Memory privileges the private and the emotional, the subjective and the bodily. Against history’s rationality, memory rebels. Memory is malleable and subjective, allowing the person recalling an event to alter or even distort the situation for their own purposes. This idea can be seen in the Smithsonian website and Gordon Bennett’s artwork “Notes for Basquiat” , which both represent the event of 9/11 in vastly different ways. Personal and political bias can thus be seen in the interplay between historical factualism and collective, subjective memories.
The relationship between representation and texts can highlight how the nature of individual memory allows for the addition to collective memory, which thus enhances the establishment of historical …show more content…

William yeingst’s recount in the “collection story transcript” pop-up box in the collection pages of the website, uses active verbs which brings life to the event an reminds us that history can be enhanced with such narrative elements. Through these narrative devices history becomes a reflection of lived experience.
By archiving these particular stories, the Smithsonian is portraying the way in which history and memory share an equal value as a means of representing human experience. The conventions of each work together to provide a richer, more powerful, view of events….
The composer’s purpose and representation of historic events inevitably shapes our understanding of their value and meaning to our society. Gordon Bennet’s artwork is politically explosive in exposing the surreal truth. The layout of the written words in the painting is positioned deliberately as towers. The words are arranged to represent what western society stands for and how this has been destroyed. The colour scheme in the painting is also mainly red, white, and blue, the patriotic American colours. This contrasts to the event which for many Americans was merely black and white. The melting and shifting in the colour scheme in the paining emphasises the disintegration of American society. Gordon Bennet uses this painting to ultimately alter and distort the collective memory of 9/11 by exposing

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Unmistakable author, Joshua Foer, examines in an extremely expansive, however learned way, the specialty of memory and its dynamic progression that it has made with new innovations and revelations through time in his paper, “The End of Remembering”. Foer opens his paper by reviewing a period when "There was nothing to do with thoughts expect remember them. Anything that has to be preserved had to be preserved in memory” (Foer 160). Foer discusses the way that there were no mechanical gadgets to help with the demonstration of recalling. It must be done singularly from recognition.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work is a good examples, a one of few, how an early 1980s American Punk or graffiti-based counter-cultural practice could become a fully recognized, critically embraced and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon. Also, it is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of Conceptualism and Minimalism, thus establishing a dialogue with the more distant tradition of the 1950s Abstract Expressionism Despite ‘’unstudied’’ appearance of his work, Basquiat very purposefully and skillfully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, styles and practices in order to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, partly, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean heritage. Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December, 22 in 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised in a

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To remember, one therefore needs to situate oneself within a current of collective thought. In the process of our day to day life, everything cannot be remembered. But something ought to be remembered in a selective method. Memory depends on valuation and valuation depends on our historical memory.

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Memory, as we understand it, is an exclusively human characteristic and of fundamental importance to our species. It is in the act of remembering that we build ourselves, not only when we remembering something but also in the way that we do it. Thus, it can be said that remembering is not restricted to an act alone, but any thing that we remember is attributed some symbolic value, which, added to the other life experiences of the person, to his ideology and the collective community's memory in which it is inserted, creates something that goes beyond simply remembering. Memory is at the same time an act of remembering a specific data, like a telephone number, but at the same time, it is a construction created from the idiosyncrasy of those who remember, added to the external influences of their environment. About the interaction between subject and ambient in the construction of memory

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Groups can even produce memories in individuals of events that they never experienced in any direct sense. The collective memory is shared, passed on and also constructed by the group. (Lavabre, n.d.) it is a dynamic cultural practice that sustains the cultural continuity of a community and in the meantime adapts to the cultural transformation of the community in a historical era. (Wang,

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Collective memory is not the opposite of individual memory, but what comes to be when individuals construct their memories in a shared setting, “[w]e can understand each memory as it occurs in individual thought only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding group’’ (Halbwachs and Coser, 1992). An individual will always reflect their own memory in those of others, creating a common memory shared and not confined to the individual. This can be as much of an issue as it can be a solution, as authors might plug the holes in their memory, but risk representing a memory incorrectly. Instances of collective memories going wrong are usually found in accidents where an involved party will have their memory affected by newspapers or other people’s statement, thinking that that version makes sense and

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