Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History

Introduction: Collecting Junk/Collecting Memory

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Memory Fragments examines a group of contemporary Australian artists who visualise ‘difference’ in Australian history and identity. It investigates a series of works by four artists who have teased open a diverse range of unresolved memories within Australia’s collective consciousness via their collections of discarded objects. The book contends that these artists illuminate the forgotten recesses within Australian history and memory by collecting and framing material forms that fall outside of the parameters of conventional history. It regards derelict objects, general waste, redundant forms and obsolete commodities as vital clues for renewing our understanding of the past. This project therefore offers a supplement to existing historical accounts of Australia’s past that often narrate one aspect of Australia’s past in exhaustive detail. It offers a reminder of the presence of those fragments that exceed historical accounts based around singularity, cohesion and narrative closure, aiming to be deconstructive in its approach to history and narrative rather than constructive. The artists’ fragments are viewed as disturbing to official versions of Australian history and nationhood, prompting an open-ended view of Australia’s past and encouraging us to see history in new ways.

The artists’ appropriation of memory fragments participates within the bourgeoning interest in cultural memory that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, and during the 1990s most intensely.¹ Historians, cultural theorists, literary critics, social scientists, artists and writers turned to the topic of memory with such vigour during the 1990s that the era became identified with mnemonic obsession.² Jacques Derrida, for example, describes the widespread archive fever at the end of the millennium in his book of the same title (1996). Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories also traces the widespread ‘memory boom’ in culture since the late 1980s, noting the new approach to remembering amongst literary critics and social scientists, exceeding conventional historicism’s limitations (1995).³ Despite the contention over the critical import of this recent memory boom (discussed later on), the interest in memory (and forgetting) is often regarded as a liberating shift away from historicism’s closure, its purported objectivity and neutrality and its reliance upon concepts of progress and linearity. This shift is often theorised as a result of post-structuralism’s thoroughgoing deconstruction of official or so-called objective histories and their professional/academic sites: the written record, the archive and the museum.⁴

Cultural memory studies also facilitated a wider range of topics within its axes than traditional historicisms. Personal and oral recollections, amateur museums, private collections, memorials, rituals, commemorative ceremonies, tourism, material cultures and various aspects of popular culture (including television, music and film) were just some of the phenomena considered as mnemonic fodder within new studies of cultural memory. This broader approach to the representation of the past was understood as an overtly politicised engagement with the representation of history’s alterity, its omissions and its numerous forgettings. It also offered a more thoroughgoing awareness of memory as a collective or public matter of national and cultural significance, rather than a personal or subjective matter.⁵

These politicised approaches to cultural memory proliferated in diverse forms around the globe after the Second World War,⁶ most notably in France, Britain, Israel, Germany, Italy, the former Soviet Union and the United States. Australia was slower to register the impact of these memory studies.⁷ Such sustained examinations of cultural memory only reached their full potential in Australia during the 1990s, when scholars began to address the issue of representing Australia’s ‘Bicentennial’ celebrations of European settlement (1988). This event sparked intense debate about how history should be represented in the public sphere, particularly in relation to Australia’s colonial history and its lasting impact on Indigenous people.⁸ These debates were continued into the 1990s, as the politics of remembrance were debated with specific reference to Australia’s widespread frontier violence known as the ‘Black Wars’ and addressed under the rubric of the so-called History Wars.⁹ These debates about the figuration of history were also articulated in relation to the ‘Stolen Generations,’ which involved ways of representing the systematic removal of Indigenous children from their homes between the 1930s and 1970s in an attempt to assimilate them into white Australia.¹⁰ Prior to these debates, the commemoration of the First World War, the Second World War and the Vietnam War were also closely related to vexed debates about Australia’s national identity.¹¹

The title and focus of this book – ‘Memory Fragments’ – contributes to this bourgeoning interest in cultural memory in Australian and international art and critical theory. It examines cultural memory beyond official narratives, focusing specifically on the way memory is mediated in and through objects that have been collected and composed by four contemporary Australian artists from the 1990s – Ricky Swallow, Ah Xian, Julie Gough and Donna Marcus. Each of the artists collects material fragments obscured from the official historical record, thus working towards a broader concept of Australian history and remembrance. They resuscitate the kitsch, obsolete, outmoded fragments and detritus dismissed as the trash of history – the objects discarded from official narratives about the past. Memory Fragments therefore contributes to the contemporary interest in cultural memory as a reconfiguration of history proper. It investigates some of the sites neglected from Australian history, whilst also examining how redundant objects question the very methodological basis of history. The project therefore appropriates fragmentation in both its literal and metaphorical dimensions. It not only examines how the fragment metaphorically prises open the narrative closure of conventional historical methodology, but it also focuses on the literal and tangible aspects of memory fragments. It tracks the way the literal presence of the fragment also plays a role in disturbing dominant historical narratives.

The memory fragments under examination are the objects that have been rendered ‘Other’ to official historical discourse because they are too personal, too ‘everyday,’ too familial or too ephemeral. Most of these discarded objects herald from forgotten or marginalised social, cultural and geographical sites from within Australia, including objects from domestic spaces (household objects, appliances, clothes, decorations and toys etc.), redundant commodity cultures (outdated technologies and fetishes), unfashionable forms of popular culture (songs, jokes, mass-marketed entertainments, films, television, books) and marginalised locations (op-shops in Tasmania and Queensland). The specific items collected by the artists include objects as diverse as redundant technological toys and commodities from the 1980s, hackneyed discards from China’s tourist art market, Aboriginal kitsch rejected from Tasmania’s colonial history and post-war plastic and aluminium kitchen refuse discarded along the eastern seaboard of Australia. Most of these collected objects are products of industrial culture, yet they are mass-produced forms that have since become outdated in the ever-onward march of industrial capitalism.

The artists’ compositions of trash therefore nuance conventional forms of history canonised in academic texts or museum collections, some of which are based around written accounts of large-scale events and notable public figures. The artists’ collections of trash differ from these models of history because they are visual images comprised of object-fragments that exceed narrative closure. The objects and images collected have often played an intimate role in many Australian people’s daily lives, and therefore open up a more subjective and personal engagement with the past than many abstract, written historical texts. They evoke personal and shared cultural memories from the recent past that are within the living memory of anonymous people. The artists’ collections therefore bear the traces of subjective recall, and are thus subject to discontinuity rather than cohesion. However, while the objects collected do evoke personal, private and fragmented recollection over and above official narratives, this revalorisation of memory should not be perceived as a return to an authentic, unmediated and immediate site of personal, tactile ‘truth’ in response to history’s abstracted and overarching fictions. Memory is not involuntary or organic, as Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past narrates. Nor is conventional history understood as entirely stagnant or hegemonic. Rather, the very title of this project acknowledges both history and memory as unfinished projects – literally inscribed in this book as ‘fragments’ or piecemeal narratives –their re-composition hotly debated territory. As Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton note in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, the making of memories (and history) is contested terrain − rarely closed and final. If the preoccupation with claiming a past in conventional histories too often proclaims a sense of cohesion, closure and stasis where there is none, then shared memories may also be a source of great conflict, particularly when memory fragments are synthesised into a collective unity in order to form a stable and unified national identity (1994 1). Such projects are always beset by contradictions, subtleties and alternative stories, with important questions raised about who is excluded and what memories are occluded (1). Any attempt to contain and unify cultural memory is therefore closely related to previous attempts to create a national identity and history that is singular and unified – projects that are inevitably beset by oversights and omissions.

Object collections are one of the inevitable sites through which to mediate these vexed questions of Australian memory, given the role they have already played in forming aspects of Australia’s history and identity. British colonists frequently deployed collections of objects and the natural world as a means to fix, contain and confirm their own narratives of the antipodes. As Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton note, classifications of objects (such as those housed in Australia’s public museums) played an instrumental role through which white colonists not only represented their possession of the land, but retained control over representations of history and nationhood. The European naming and mapping of the zoological, botanical and geographical features of the land was in itself an act of remembrance, self-consciously etching the social and natural world of Europe onto a new landscape (1994 3). Compositions of objects have therefore played a key role in legitimating narrow colonial views of history and memory in Australia. Nevertheless, it is precisely because objects exceed the meanings ascribed to them by their placement within collections that they also hold the potential to evoke different meanings if they are released from conventional taxonomies. Collections therefore hold the potential to disrupt narrow colonial views of history and national identity.

The presence of Otherness within the making of cultural memories and national histories has continued to unsettle Australian national identity in recent years, generating heated public debate. As previously mentioned, these issues of public remembrance and national identity became an increasing part of public discourse during the 1990s, particularly after the 1988 ‘Bicentennial’ celebration of Australia’s colonisation by the British. Since then, many events in Australia’s past, including the ‘Black Wars’ and the ‘Stolen Generation’ have been debated at length. Contestation over the ‘official’ versions of these events in Australian history gave rise to John Howard’s repeated attempts to ‘reform’ and hence unify and standardise the way history was being taught in Australian schools between 2005 and 2007 – an anxiety that was repeated during his 12-year term as Australia’s Prime Minister (1996–2007) and which culminated in his national history summit as an address to the issue in 2006.¹² Howard’s attempts to define and prescribe a distinctive Australian culture and national history throughout the 1990s was part of the neo-liberal conservatism that underpinned Australia’s politics at the time, and which resulted in the resurgence of traditional images of Anglo-Celtic dominance, conservative nationalist rhetoric and the implementation of border protection policies in the 1990s and 2000s.¹³ In this context, Howard’s attempt to unify the school curriculum (and his focus on Australian history specifically) was an attempt to retain an image of Australia’s past that confirmed the white colonial presence as the legitimate centre of the Australian nation. It was also articulated as an attempt to address the forms of deconstructive history (or ‘history from below’) that had been institutionalised within academia and the museum sector in Australia in the wake of post-structuralism’s influence during the 1980s and early 1990s (Taylor 2010). Howard therefore envisaged his revised curriculum as a corrective to the subjectivism and open-endedness that he regarded to be tantamount in the forms of critical, deconstructive history entrenched in scholarly discourse − the most reductive endpoint of which became evident in the curatorial rationale of the Museum of Sydney during the mid 1990s, and related developments at the Museum of Victoria and the Museum of Australia.¹⁴ Howard’s revisions therefore attempted to mark a return to the white blindfold school of history that had underpinned Australian consciousness up until post-structuralist theory had decentred the white subject from the basis of history.

This book’s critical efficacy emerges from the exploitation of these cracks within the whitened versions of national identity/history, at the same time that it is invested in productively engaging with the problematic loose-ends of 1980s deconstructive histories. The book appropriates material collections, or ‘memory fragments,’ as the central leitmotif through which to cleave open ruptures within history proper, scrutinising the lines of closure through which Australian history has fantasised its unity as predominantly masculine, heterosexual and Anglo-Celtic. It suggests contemporary artists’ collections of objects, discarded from Australian culture, hold the potential to wrest open official versions of Australian cultural memory and history because they enable us to see what has been excluded from conventional historical narratives and museum collections. The artists’ compositions of objects tactically discarded from official historical narratives under the rubric of ‘trash’ challenge us to question what we know about the past and how we have come to gain this knowledge. The act of collecting trash, and emphasising the fragmentation of memory, is an act of re-classification – freeing up older patterns, associations and constellations through which meanings about nationhood are fixed and controlled.¹⁵ Claiming objects overlooked within conventional histories and/or museum taxonomies − those objects demarcated as junk, industrial trash or everyday refuse – can enable new ways of understanding the past.¹⁶

Nevertheless, at the same time that this book questions the closure of history, it also argues that memory fragments are timely because they ask us to re-think what we can do with the loose ends of history. The book seeks to imagine memory fragments beyond theories of postmodern deconstruction, by showing how the four artists in question use fragmentation, incompletion, endless subjectivism and hopeless repetition as the basis for the emergence of something new. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the fragment and the dialectical image are instructive in this context. This project argues that Benjamin’s writings on the dialectical fragment are enabling for reading the artists’ compositions beyond postmodern eclecticism and the related ‘end of history’ thesis. It draws upon Walter Benjamin’s study of the fragment from The Arcades Project, which was written between 1927 and 1941. Benjamin’s enormous treatise examines the cultural legacy of fragmentation of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, examining the critical import of cultural fragments discarded from the onward march of capitalist progress − forgotten and discarded as ‘the trash of history.’ For Benjamin, this cultural refuse is telling precisely because it has been dismissed from dominant views of modernity and progress. Once collected and brought into the light of the present, trash holds the potential to disrupt cohesion of dominant versions of history by highlighting what conventional histories have omitted in order for them to retain their image of seamlessness. Trash therefore possesses the ability to unsettle the way we understand history. This is not only because it exceeds official knowledge’s (being too recent and too mundane to be considered ‘heritage’) but because it can no longer be regarded as ‘contemporary’ or ‘fashionable’ within the realm of the present. It exists between history’s binary division of past and present, and hence it is capable of unsettling established forms of historicism and their reliance upon the separation of now and then. Trash therefore enables a different historical methodology because it eschews progression and linear modes of narrative in which the past only exists to confirm the dominance of the present. For Benjamin, trash holds a potentially disruptive potential because it allows the past to unsettle the present in the form of discontinuous minor threads and images, challenging the status quo that defines any given contemporary moment.

Benjamin’s analysis of the viability of obsolescence in staging a critical and transformative encounter with the past takes on a new urgency in the contemporary cultural milieu, complicated by the cultural–economic shifts of the 1990s. The insatiable desire for endlessly new outdated ‘retro’ objects has now come to suture the historical consciousness, such that the coveting of trash is often cited as holding little of the critical potential that Benjamin once ascribed to it. ‘Trash’ has been understood by Fredric Jameson and other Marxist critics to be the latest symptom of postmodernism’s post-historical penchant for ‘pastiche’ – a facile interest in the fragments of the past that does little to displace the presence of the present, so much as confirm the ubiquity of late capitalism.¹⁷ According to Jameson, contemporary culture’s fetish for retro images and styles is a seductive image of change – a symptom of capitalist reification − that functions to stall real historical alterity.¹⁸ The fragmentation of historicism’s presence enables the collusion with late capitalism’s celebration of difference and obsolescence, rather than an unsettling engagement with the alterity of the past. That is to say, the celebration of fragmentation confirms the death of history − paralysed in an interminably disjointed and discontinuous present. Its gravity is reduced to the endless recycling of past moments and styles that does more to confirm the present than unsettle it.¹⁹

Despite the fact that the meaning of obsolescence has changed in late capitalism (given that the defunct object and its signification of difference is now a coveted currency of late capitalism), this does not necessarily mean that obsolete objects have been entirely vacated of their critical purchase within postmodern culture.This book proposes that the artists in question animadvert clichéd readings of postmodern pastiche, post-historicism or ‘retroversion,’ in which formlessness, fragmentation and transitoriness reign over meaning. The artists certainly mobilise the figurative devices that critics like Craig Owens (1980) have associated with postmodern aesthetics²⁰ – repetition, reproduction, eclecticism, fragmentation and the use of appropriated objects – but their fragmented aesthetics do not confirm the ubiquity of the present or the death of ‘history,’ ‘form’ and ‘modernity’ in favour of open-ended fragmentation. Rather, the artists use fragmentation in a way that challenges a neo-conservative rehashing of past moments and dead styles, symptomatic of late capitalism’s attempt to still real historical change (1991 xii, 17–18). Fragmentation is not simply celebrated as a post-historical aesthetic within the artists’ works, but rather, it is framed and exposed as the very condition of historicity and contemporary culture that must be examined and worked through. As Hal Foster notes in The Archival Impulse anomic fragmentation may not only be a condition to represent, but a state to work through even as it highlights the difficulty and at times the absurdity of doing so (11). Trash, fragmentation and obsolescence are framed as the very figures that can speak of the problematic conditions of historicity in the present. To borrow Charles Merewether’s words: ruins and trash mark the site where the impossibility of remembering and the necessity to forget are both the ground on which history has been founded and the foundation on which to build a future (Traces of Loss 37–8). It is this possibility of constructing a different future from within fragmentation that is discussed in relation to each of the artists’ compositions of trash. Their nuanced appropriation of obsolescent objects opens up innovative engagements with the potential alterity of the past, beyond the ‘end of history’ thesis.

Furthermore, the artists’ engagement with the potentiality of historical difference is understood with recourse to Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical tensions that reside within trash and fragmentation – his articulation of the potential alterity residing within outmoded objects. That is to say, Benjamin’s writings on trash retain their critical potential for contemporary culture when they are read in conjunction with his related concept of the dialectical image as a potential site for an arrested counter-memory image to emerge. This conjunction between trash and the dialectical image animadverts postmodern theories of pastiche and retains the potential for trash to open up a critical encounter with the overlooked past. Drawing on Susan Buck-Morss’ reading of Benjamin’s work in her study The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project [1991]), this book argues that Benjamin’s dialectical image is capable of exceeding postmodern theories of retroversion and pastiche, by drawing postmodern retroversion to a halt and allowing for a more complex view of modernity’s unresolved antinomies to emerge. Benjamin’s trash therefore holds the potential to exceed concepts of postmodern pastiche because it retains within it a more nuanced presentation of modernity’s antinomies than the terms conventionally ascribed to it by postmodern theory. Benjamin’s writings on the frozen after-images of modernity signal more than the disintegration of modernity as a totalising grand narrative transformed into the ‘liberating’ emergence of postmodern fragmentation. Rather, Benjamin’s writings are a useful framework through which to read the artists’ figurations of modernity as a field of complex and irresolvable tensions and differences that are instantiated in the act of being cited. Benjamin’s trash is a figure for the tautological temporality of the modern, a figure that accounts for the way the modern is, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, made in the act of making it.²¹ His theory of the frozen dialectics of trash therefore opens up a reading of the artists’ works as figurations of modernity that are emergent, potentially critical and performative.

Situated in this way, Memory Fragments reads the artists as part of a much broader trend to rethink the present’s relationship to the dynamic potential latent within modernity. They highlight modernity as a field of contradictory dialectical images that are always productively caught in what Benjamin termed the time of the ‘now.’ This does not mean the work marks a return to a simpler modern impulse in its repudiation of the postmodern, but rather, that the artists’ pieces enact the porosity of the boundaries separating the modern and the postmodern.²² This is in keeping with the recent cultural impulse that Rita Felski identifies in Doing Time – as those new conceptualisations of modernity that emerged during the 1990s in an attempt to write the modern in terms that exceed those denigrations of it as a standardised, homogenous tranche of primarily European time. Numerous cultural theorists have begun to reimagine modernity as a multifaceted, trans-cultural landscape characterised by ruptures and ambivalences, in which difference is perpetually negotiated (Doing Time 2–3, 61–3).

Benjamin’s writings on the dialectical tensions within trash therefore offer an important framework for the artists’ works because they show how they articulate a return to the past without endorsing the logic of nostalgia. His theory of dialectical tension articulates the possibility of mobilising trash to refuse the large-scale forgetting within postmodern culture in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than locating trash as the symptom of post-historical amnesia (purportedly exacerbated by the universe of simulation and fast information and cable networks). Because the present is only ever made up of the traces of the past, these traces also retain the capacity to realise the contingency of the present if they are resuscitated in the right way. Therefore, the return to the image reserves of the past does not necessarily confirm the dominance of the present − it may also hold the potential to displace its hegemony. When read through the lens of Benjamin’s theory of dialectical tension, post-historical amnesia is not as inevitable as Jacques Derrida proclaims (Archive Fever). As Andreas Huyssen notes, the recent cultural obsession with memory is not only a function of the fin de siècle syndrome − another symptom of postmodern pastiche − but a welcome critique of compromised teleological notions of history rather than being simply anti-historical, relativistic or subjective (1995 6). In short, the obsession with the fragments of the past may not simply signify contemporary culture’s absence of memory, but it may also signify a productive transformation of the way the past is framed and understood.

The four Australian artists under examination in this project were ‘minor’ artists during the 1990s – either emergent during this period or small players in the field of global art practices and movements, despite the recent international success that some have since achieved. Their works are therefore situated, not only within debates relating to Australian national identity, but within broader global issues facing Australia during the 1990s. These issues include global debates about commodity culture and historicity at the turn of the millennium, in addition to a range of aesthetic, political and cultural questions relevant to Australia’s involvement within the context of globalisation. This bifurcation of Australian culture along national and global interests is performed by the artists’ selection of mass-produced commodity forms, many of which allude to Australia’s nexus within global capitalism. The artists’ framing of these obsolete objects therefore opens up questions about Australia’s relationship to globalisation at large. This not only encompasses the way Australian memory is effected by advanced capitalism and the incessant turnover of commodity images, but it also includes an examination of the ongoing impact of English colonialism in Australia and the ongoing debates about Australia’s history and the representation of cultural differences. The artists’ collections of detritus therefore represent Australia as it is imbricated with other nations around the globe. Australia is positioned in relation to theoretical debates, economic conditions, aesthetic movements and historical events that have taken place in the United States and in Europe and Asia, such that it is understood to be in dialogue with an international community. All of the artists address global-theoretical debates about culture, as they relate to the place of memory and forgetting in post-industrial cultures and the state of history and art as the commodity (and its dereliction) infiltrates all areas of cultural production.

This positioning of the Australian cultural imaginary in relation to other nations is appropriately figured in the appropriation of waste. Trash is a highly useful metaphor for representing Australia’s imbrications with other nations because it operates metonymically for Australia’s identity as an outpost of the British Empire. Australia was ‘founded’ as Britain’s dumping ground, so to speak, and has often been conceived, since colonisation, as a ‘wasteland.’ Indeed, its identity as a ‘wasteland’ has infiltrated Australia’s imaginary such that it was famously described by A. A. Phillips to be suffering from a cultural cringe in relation to European culture (1950).²³ It is often figured (in fiction, film and public rhetoric) as a landscape of refuse and kitsch, devoid of any of the pretensions to ‘Culture’ that inscribe Europe’s imagination of itself. Robyn Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960) for example, figures Australia as a nation of waste – its trash sensibility pushing into the flat lanes of the suburban sprawl with its cheaply erected architecture, its disposable kitsch objects and its inauthentic featurist facades.

This