“Objects and Memory: Engendering Private and Public Archives” Workshop

Participants will include:

Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University;
Patricia Dailey, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University;
Marianne Hirsch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University;
Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University;
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, New York University;
Nancy K. Miller, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY;
Lorie Novak, Professor of Photography & Imaging, New York University;
Valerie Smith, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and Director of the Program in African American Studies, Princeton University;
Silvia Spitta, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Dartmouth College;
Leo Spitzer, Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History, Dartmouth College; and
Kate Stanley, PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

And Featuring Artist Presentations:

Lorie Novak, Reverb
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Things Matter: Tracing Objects across Artistic Practice

No registration required.
For more information please contact Vina Tran at 212.854.3277 or email irwag@columbia.edu

Also, please visit the Cultural Memory Colloquium and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University for more information.

• Program
• Abstracts, Images, and Links

Program

1:00-2:30pm

The Afterlife of Objects
Introduction: Sarah Cole

Nancy K. Miller, “Family Hair Looms”
Patricia Dailey, “Transmissions”
Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer, “The Tile Stove: Embodied Memory, Touch, and Taste”

2:30-3:00pm

Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock
Things Matter: Tracing Objects across Artistic Practice
Introduction: Sonali Thakkar

3-3:15pm

Coffee break

3:15-4:30pm

Collections & Dispersions
Introduction: Susanne Knittel

Silvia Spitta, “The Importance of the European Wunderkammern in Modernity's Divide between Subject and Object”
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Ring Once For Lurie”
Kate Stanley, “Fault-lines: A Fractured System of Objects”

4:30-4:45pm

Coffee break

4:45-6:00pm

Politics of the Private
Introduction: Joanna Scutts

Valerie Smith, “Emmett Till's Ring”
Lila Abu-Lughod, “In My Father’s Palestine: National Appropriations”
Andreas Huyssen, "Objects, Citation, and the Impasse of Memory"

6-6:30pm

Lorie Novak
Reverb
Introduction: Jennifer James

6:30-7:00pm

Concluding Discussion: Jennifer James and Sonali Thakkar

7:00pm

Reception

Abstracts, Images, and Links

The Afterlife of Objects
Introduction: Sarah Cole

Nancy K. Miller, “Family Hair Looms”

• Abstract: “Family Hair Looms “
• Since 1990, the year after the death of my father, I’ve had this box of hair, which I found among his affairs. I assume that my father saved the locks because they belonged to his mother—a widow who had lived alone and in his care for twenty years. To whom does this hair belong? What kind of hair is it? A man’s earlocks? A child’s curls? Is it a precious heirloom? Or is it rather family hair that looms—i.e. that I perceive through the distance of time and the darkness of untold stories. What does it mean to inherit an object that embodies a relation of familial care, but a relation shrouded in mystery?
  
• Please click here for the epilogue to Professor Miller's last book, But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives called: "My Grandfather's Cigarette Case: or What I learned in Memphis"--it's an earlier discussion of the objects she will be speaking about
• Images:
  
  

Patricia Dailey, “Transmissions”

• Abstract: “Transmissions “
• I would like to reflect on a recent experience of inheriting a car, a 1907 Mitchell, from my father, and attempting to find the lost engine that he had given to someone to repair when I was a teenager in junior high school. He had, in the course of the past twenty-five years, forgotten to whom the work was entrusted, and had no written trace. When he suffered from stroke related dementia in 2000, my father could provide only one clue as to the location of the engine (a clue he could not remember previous to his dementia): it was in Sun Valley, California. This clue came like an oracle, bridging time past with the promise of a future, from a father already no longer fully present.
• Through a brief recounting of the pursuit of this vehicle's engine, I would like to look at how the vehicle of memory transmits beyond the question of the subject and of self-presence, beyond the question of a will (of a testament) and of will itself, and how this affects the question of transmission and belonging, the relation between subjects and objects. Through the story of the literal re-membering of this automobile, I will look a the role of this engine in relation to public space, the body, the construction of familial relations, and the way in which objects and place bear witness to a kind of autonomous performative power. I hope to tie this into Lyotard's notion of a hypo-biographical element (in his work on Malraux) in "life", and to what l will call the silent life of objects.
• Images:
  

Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer, “The Tile Stove: Embodied Memory, Touch, and Taste”

• Abstract: “The Tile Stove: Embodied Memory, Touch, and Taste “
• While many of the presentations in this workshop focus on private familial objects that are displaced by immigration, exile and diaspora, or by museum display, we want to focus on a stationary object, the tile stove. Its powerful associations with nostalgic feelings of home and family, and its concomitant ability to signal loss and deprivation, makes the tile stove a magnet of journeys of return. For us it will serve as a vehicle for thinking about the transmission of sense memory, gender and embodiment.
• Please click here to download a pdf version of "What's Wrong With This Picture? Archival photographs in contemporary narratives" (from Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5.2 (2006): 229–252).
• Please click here to download a pdf version of "Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission"
  (from Poetics Today, special issue on "Testimony," 27.2 (2006): 353-384).
• Images:
  
  

Things Matter: Tracing Objects across Artistic Practice
Introduction: Sonali Thakkar

Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock

• Abstract: “Things Matter: Tracing Objects across Artistic Practice“
• This presentation will introduce the projects “Places of Remembrance” (Memorial in Berlin-Schöneberg, 1992-93), “Who Needs Art, We Need Potatoes” (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1998) and the “ebay-Portraits.”
• Please click here to visit the artists' website
  

Collections & Dispersions
Introduction: Susanne Knittel

Silvia Spitta, “The Importance of the European Wunderkammern in Modernity's Divide between Subject and Object”

• Abstract: “The Importance of the European Wunderkammern in Modernity's Divide between Subject and Object “
• In this short presentation I will talk about what happened to the objects (artificialia and naturalia) from the Americas that were collected in the early European Wunderkammern post 1492. The objects collected and their organization according to ever more sophisticated classificatory systems would lead to the epistemological divide that characterizes modernity. Europeans emerged as knowing subjects and the Americas as object of knowledge and naturalists' paradise.
• Images:
  
  

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Ring Once For Lurie”

• Abstract: "Ring Once for Lurie“
• This list, which instructs the visitor to ring once for Lurie, twice for Rotsztajn, and so on, was posted next to the doorbell of an overcrowded apartment in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was saved by an underground team, lead by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, which documented every detail of daily life (and death) in the Warsaw Ghetto. The archive they formed, under the code name Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath), was buried in tin boxes and milk cans; two of the three caches were dug up in 1946 and 1950. In the shadow--and then the face--of death, these individuals ensured that these records and objects would, at war's end, "scream the truth at the world," even as those who created those records were silenced forever. What is the nature of this material witness? How did this object function in situ? It was not only a way to call on the addressee, but also marked a fundamental condition--the crowding--of ghetto life. Its removal indexes the fate of those who were once called by their identifying number of rings. Its preservation indicates the awareness of all that it signified during its life as a functional object and indexical sign of the conditions of life and death of the inhabitants of the apartment. Its display in exhibitions of the Oyneg Shabes archive is subject to its own set of protocols, to a kind of museum halakha specific to the Holocaust.
• Please click here for a link to a pdf version of "Performing Knowledge" in Folklore, Heritage Politics, and Ethnic Diversity: Festschrift for Barbro Klein. Edited by Pertti J. Anttonen, with Anna-Leeena Siikala, Stein R.
  Mathisen, and Leif Magnusson. Botkyrka: Mångkulturellt centrum, 2000. Pp. 125-139.
  
• Images:
  
  

Kate Stanley, “Fault-lines: A Fractured System of Objects”

• Abstract: “Fault-lines: A Fractured System of Objects”
• What is the status of the individual object in the self-enclosed seriality of the collection? As many have argued, the collection works to overwrite the object’s histories of production and circulation with a narrative of the interiority of the individual subject. What has been underattended is the fragility of such an identificatory gesture, particularly if the collection’s autonomous coherence is threatened. If the collected object is subsumed into an articulation of the collector’s own “identity” what are the consequences of the collection’s dissolution, for the collector’s projected self and for the interiorized object? These questions arise out of my interest in the figure of the modernist collector and a concomitant desire to better understand the status of the collection in my own family. Accordingly, I will compare the dismantling of my parents’ extensive Canadiana antique collection that followed their split with James’ representation of another collection under external pressures that fracture its contained unity in The Golden Bowl. In both cases, objects that once formed a coherent whole assume new kinds of singularities as charged sites of familial contention but also as reminders (often nostalgic) of a prior constructed unity that has now been dispersed.

Politics of the Private
Introduction: Joanna Scutts

Valerie Smith, “Emmett Till's Ring”

• Abstract: “Emmett Till's Ring”
• I'd like to examine Emmett Till's ring; how it consolidated the relationship between Emmett and his deceased father. It signaled Emmett's transition into manhood and then became the marker by which his mother was able to identify his mutilated body. I'm especially interested in the constructions of black manhood that circulated in and around both the figures of Emmett and his father.
  

Lila Abu-Lughod, “In My Father’s Palestine: National Appropriations”

• Abstract: “In My Father’s Palestine: National Appropriations"
• Taking a book published in Palestine on my father's life story as my object, I reflect as a daughter on my ambivalence about ways that both my father’s death/body and his storied memories of Palestine before the expulsion in 1948 were appropriated for a national cause, gendered masculine, and on my attempt to find a different register for making the intimate politically effective.
  
• Images:
  
  

Andreas Huyssen, "Objects, Citation, and the Impasse of Memory"

• Abstract: "Objects, Citation, and the Impasse of Memory"

Reverb
Introduction and Wrap-up: Jennifer James and Sonali Thakkar

Lorie Novak

• Abstract: “Reverb"
• I will present an excerpt from REVERB (2004-present), a computer-based projection piece. Reverb investigates the afterlife of photographs, questions what makes an image private or public, and explores the process of memory and transmission. Three archives — historical and news photographs, my personal photographs, and archival Internet speeches, broadcasts, testimonials — are juxtaposed to explore the political, historical, and social landscape of the last 50 years. My own photographs are examined against the backdrop of history and current events while fragments of speeches from the Internet play. A different set of audio plays with each loop of the visual sequence accentuating the fluidity and complexity of our perceptions of the past.
• Please click here to visit the artist's website
• Images: