THIRD INSERT:
NICOMEDES SUÁREZ-ARAÚZ’S AMNESIS ART.“’Reborn digital’ material is taken from crumbling paper documents, wax cylinders like those Thomas Edison used for the first recordings, or early television programs recorded on two-inch videotapes that can only be read by a few remaining pieces of equipment.”
Bolivian-American artist, theorist, philosopher, and shape-shifter Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz began formulating his thesis of amnesis as a counter theory to the art of the objet trouvé and hyperrealism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an interview with the Massachusetts Valley Advocate, he traces its development back to his childhood in the “eastern Amazonian plains of Bolivia, where everything literally disappears, gets swallowed up by the jungle.” In his book Amnesis Art. The Art of the Lost Object, which offers a composite of visual, poetic, and architectural art accompanied by theoretical and political treatises, Suárez-Araúz offers a companion-definition of subjectivity: “We are, in large measure, what we have lost and can never recover or recall”. Picking up Nietzsche’s notion of necessary and creative forgetting, Suárez-Araúz insists that absence and forgetting are a source of creativity, consistently understudied and underappreciated. But unlike Freud or Lacan, he contends that he is not talking about the unconscious. Instead, amnesia “is a stalking presence that erodes, shapes, and refines our lives”. He calls it a “universe coexistent with the realm of memory and presences”. And it is this universe that forces each person to “improvise”: “We cannot remember, so we create” (95). The very reference to his so-called alive presence of childhood memories as opposed to the “abstract idea pulled out from philosophy” (Advocate, 3) partakes in the fictional construction of identity, space, and history.
The epistolary mode of this fictionality enters his “amnesis manifesto”, when Suárez-Araúz calls amnesis art ”letters to amnesia, messages inspired on a poetic and philosophical conception of amnesia” (96). Letters, once again, become “a poetic phrase” (102) for the description of that which happens between presence and absence, between send-off and arrival or send-off and evacuation. Letters to Amnesia trace the dotted line of the shifting contours between dichotomies, the very perception of a structuralist universe already including an “intermixing of an otherness”. In his “Amnesis Manifesto”, Suárez-Araúz shares Handke’s preoccupation with the past, memory, and forgetting, but decided to send letters on a different route. Instead of routing letters into the structure of literary language and textuality, he simply proclaims, and here he sounds like Derrida invoking Schlegel, that all amnesis art works are letters. Rather than having an epistolary character of function due to performance, the letter is defined through the concept of Being: “A ‘letter to amnesia’ obviously cannot expect an answer” (96, footnote2). Suárez-Araúz notes that his letters to amnesia share aspects of Umberto Eco’s idea of “open and closed works”, in so far as “they do not project a ‘message’, but rather proliferate meanings” yet also “embody a concept,” namely, amnesia. Culturally, these “imaginary artifact[s] from our unmemoried past and future” appear because of a sense of loss, however unspectified. The very perception of a loss indicates both “a whittling away of the reality of concrete objects within the contemporary and cultural supra-nature of technologically developed nations” and a Barthian sense of excessive creativity to make up for it.
As defined by Suárez-Araúz, Amnesis Art consists of “fabulations (narratives presented as though they were true)”. While a shift of attention from presence and immediacy to absence and forgetfulness seems to revoke modernist realism,the modernist teleology is still firmly in place: “ Without an awareness of amnesia,we cannot have a complete vision, it comes as no surprise that a large part of the artwork, supposedly by different artists (Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz in “diverse guises” as the dust jacket of the book suggests), featured in Amnesis Art, is characterized by a painted background dotted with pasted-on cutouts from another scene. Some of the paintings resemble either a tableau of several sets of puzzles mixed up and poured over another (#4, 5, 8, 12, 19, 212,22 by Bartolomeo Esteban, Nicolas Horacio, and Hans Klauss) or a wax-etching (#1, 13, and 14 by Robert Llewelyn). The puzzle approach to amnesia and history presupposes a primordial wholeness that leads back to the structural possibility of “putting the pieces together again”. Similar to the author’s “diverse guises”, the subject of history and the self are broken up into several pieces that now interact with each other and take up a life of their own (in this case literally, with the conclusion of the artist’s biographies, 59-92). While these interactive gestures may “underscore the dissolution of individuality and authorship” (Amnesis Art, dust jacket), is it enough to overlay the production of amnesis art with its demands for total recall? Or do they allegorical letters to amnesia, which have themselves been liberated from any specific epistolary form and function, become this destructive fifth element that neither theory nor art themselves can manage to produce, sustain, or control?
My previous discussion of postmodern fabulation and the “double fictionality” of the eighteenth-century letters should unclose the self-amnesic quality in mail-orders like amnesis art, even if, or precisely when forgetting is at stake. The mail-order orders itself to forget, be forgotten, and forget itself. I’d like you to ponder briefly how the East and South were won: After the fall of the wall in 1989, mail-order companies reached across the former borders of the Eastern block faster than investors could get their hands on retail space. Again and again, new frontiers s well as domestic markets are colonized by catalogue businesses, and progressively so by Internet services. Neither customer nor company needs to venture forth into the urban jungle or the uprooted economic infrastructure of old. One can display and shop directly into and from the newly fortified private sphere. Once old city centers are restored or new shopping malls or green fields surrounding the city have been built, the economic infrastructure of capitalist desire is already in place and will breach out into the open for further stimulation.
With mail-ordering, the act of shopping is assembled of several lust-filled time-place installments, not necessarily in the following order: receiving a catalogue, a fax, or an e-mail product list-browising through the offers-selecting items for purchase – perhaps comparing price, service, and quality with similar items from another catalogue – listing the ordered items – sending, faxing, phoning, or e-mailing the order to the company – paying – waiting – receiving the items by mail. The waiting phase of this list of delayed actions psychologically constructs a field of creative amnesia for the customer: he or she sometimes (deliberately? creatively?) forgets that and what was ordered. When the package arrives, it is almost, as David Duchovny, the TV-star of Fox’s X-Files, recently recognized, as if one receives not a product but a present from someone,a s if, by magic, someone, here the dominant discourse, had guessed one’s deepest desires and wishes and fulfilled them (GQ, February 1998). Capitalism has finally penetrated not just the lone ranch out West (Sears-Roebuck pioneered that invasion over a century ago) or the (sub)urban home (the invasion of the (sub)urban home was begun by door-to-door sales and the advent of the radio culminating in the rise of TV) but the very cycle of desire of interpersonal contact and mystic communication with the Beyond. Perceived or actual loss and fear of direct one-on-one contact in constant tension with the longing for a perfect communication without words leads to an act of creative forgetting. That this forgetting allows the customer to receive the ordered items as a personalized gift is doubly ironic, since (a) if all we ever received as gifts were things we had always wanted or needed, birthdays would be pretty boring; it would rain underwear, socks, and perfectly matched gifts, but no surprises and no things to throw at the wall in a fit of rage. And (b) the company never forgets to charge one’s credit card or cash in one’s check, often even withdrawing the money at the time of the order, not at the time of the contract’s fulfillment, thereby actually accumulating for themselves additional moneys due to the inflationary time-lapse between order and fulfillment (some of the worst offenders in this aspect are airline companies, with whom you might book a flight as much as a few months prior to departure and who cash in on the surplus the time-lapse creates; on the opposite end tend to be publishing companies, which ship you the books before payment clears your account).
The mail-order literally banks on its customer’s forgetting to create an ever stronger psychological and economic dependency for the next transaction. That the highest percentage of mail-order target groups are made up of lower- to upper-middle-class single women and housewives, who incidentally are also, studies have shown, at a higher risk to develop Alzheimer’s than men, should give reason to question the repression of gender- and class-specific, not to mention race-specific problems in the totalizing concept of a “philosophy of amnesia”. The specificity of female desires is on the one hand repressed and forgotten by male-dominated Western societies, leaving women “needy” to fill the lack (addicted to shopping, overeating) or become the lack (through anorexia nervosa, bulimia), while on the other hand its various socially mandated forms of expression are being exploited, thus reconfiguring female desire to match the market’s needs. Women are stuck in a double bind. Having to play nurturer to others and the market, they are still in charge of most of the food shopping and preparation. But ever since the rise of the suit with the advance of industrialization and bureaucratization, they have also been the major target of a fashion industry, whose demands on slimness have not ceased to increase since the Twiggy age. Woman is the consumer, who is not supposed to consume, at least not in public. The more she overeats, the more she becomes dependent on home shopping and the mail/male-order, adding agoraphobia to her list of socially induced anxieties. The more she exercises and starves herself, hoping to “put on male power and privilege,” the more she “serve[s] … a social order that limits female possibilities.”
If she rebels against it, she is told that she is “forgetting herself”. The moment of overstepping limitations and taboos coincides with a linguistic reminder that subjectivity and the notion of selfhood are guaranteed only within the social order, that excessive sexual or political desire is threatened with dissolution of the self, with the expulsion from personal and collective memory. Forgetting oneself, on the contrary, is usually a surefire way to inscribe oneself into local folklore, becoming a story retold again and again for amusement and as warning. Throughout history, while men’s acts of “forgetting themselves” have generally been seen as part of their initiation rite into manhood, women’s excesses have always been perceived as extraneous to their identity, and have been punished more consistently and much harder. And, in general, with few exceptions (Medea, Joan d’Arc), women’s moments of “forgetting themselves” were not made the “stuff of legends”. Fabulation, as we see, is not equally constructed. When one thinks of the gaps in knowledge about women writers and artists, these were not attributed to the fact that they didn’t matter to the dominant discourse but that there “weren’t any”. Feminist scholarship has taught all disciplines that asking the right questions matters more than notions of “being”.
The history of forgetting” contributes to new ways of remembering history: of interconnecting what was preserved in parallel structures before, of baring layers of seemingly solid sedimentation and having them cross-sectioned in different ways, by having (wo)man and machine interact to create a new perspective on the machine age, by experimenting with collective writing and the notion of intellectual ownership. Letters to Amnesia assume a gap in memory that can be assessed via metaphorical substitution. The mail-order of amnesia deals with letters that have literally lost their letter-ness, yet “are” letters more perfectly than ever. Like Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos letter, these letters to amnesia mourn not only their own loss of tangibility but metaphorically also of a culture’s anf time’s loss of “being-in-touch-ness”. To adopt a phrase from Luce Irigay, letters are “this genre which is not (one)”. Standing in for lack and total presence, even the “double your pleasure” presence of queered self-stimulation as moist envelope lips fold over onto each other, letters to amnesia are again made to negotiate the love/hate relationship of postmodernism with a feminized modernity (“woman as central metaphor, woman as creator”), Amnesis Art, 13). What the “philosophy of amnesia” itself tends to repress in its attempt to account for the “totality of human existence” is that there is “a dominant discursive mandate to disappear.” Forgetting does not only happen due to natural catastrophes as I the case of “the jungle taking over” but is also a political disappearing act enforced on and through the concrete bodies and memories of subalterns, minorities, and oppositional forces “that we have forgotten because those in power have willed our oblivion by altering recorded history, by erasing traces.”