In my research I've found an article by James E. Young called The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today (www.janetzweig.com/risdpdfpublicart/young_countermonument.pdf). He writes about the debates that have occurred in Germany around the contested area of memorials and monuments. Because Germany was the perpetrator of so many atrocities in the Nazi/WWII period, to many people it does not seem appropriate for the state to erect monuments to the victims of those atrocities. The debates have led to a memorialising trope that Young calls the counter-monument - "brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being."
The counter-monument is the opposite of the grand, imposing, solid memorial we are familiar with from WWI memorials. It is diffuse, decentralised, impermanent. The conceptual concerns usually echo the material forms that make up such memorials, and those remembered or celebrated differ from the soldiers and statesmen of traditional state memorials. Many artworks can be considered counter-monuments because of their lack of permanent physical location, their impermanent materials, and their personal rather than public focus.
Week 10
I've decided to concentrate on the use of names in a work which echoes the names of a traditional memorial, but with the conceptual concerns of the counter-monument. I've been using hair in my work, and I think I'll collect hair from people and use the names of the donors somehow in the final piece.
This is a sample of a twill weave made with a human-hair yarn. I could use different coloured hair from people to differentiate the people. I'm not sure how I'll incorporate the names yet. This work will continue my interest in groups and individuals. The individuals will be differentiated by the colours, but they'll all be joined together in a group. I've explored this relation in works in the past, and how groups are made of individuals, but also shape those individuals into a group mentality.
Week 11
I've been experimenting with writing names, and incorporating them into my artwork. I started with using carbon paper tracing on card. I think the results have a strong uniformity combined with a hand-drawn quality, but not sure how that would look with the earthy hair tones.
I've also typed names onto ribbon. I think this is also successful because of the neatness of the letters, but the ribbon gets a little scrunched when woven as a supplementary weft.
I've had some success with my weaving and have decided on a long strip of hair fabric as my memorial. A simple stripe in the twill pattern easily differentiates the donors of the hair.
Week 12
Six Degrees
Six Degrees is a long rectangular hair weaving with the names of the donors of
the hair written above it. Each person’s hair is distinguishable from the next
by its colour, yet permanently woven together. The series developed from an
earlier body of work, Memento Vivere, 2002, in which I produced hand-made
paper sheets, each embedded with the hair of an individual. Each square of
paper in the 9-piece by 18-piece grid was a “portrait” of the person whose hair it
contained. Although Memento Vivere was presented as a group, each piece
could be moved or separated from the rest. With Six Degrees, each person’s
place is set, their place in the group permanent and indissoluble.
As with Memento Vivere, the hair in Six Degrees stands for the donor, and is a
portrait of that person. The genre of the portrait, however, emphasises the
individual subject. “The portrayed person’s subjectivity is… defined in its
uniqueness and originality, rather than in its social connections…. The subject’s
continuity or discontinuity with others is denied in order to present the subject as
personality.”41 With Six Degrees, the “uniqueness and originality” of the subjects
is still evident, but their inclusion in a group is unmistakable. Here is an example
of symbolic communitas, with each individual an essential part of the makeup of
the group, but no one person being more important than another. The individual
is defined, but connected to the rest of the group.
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