Memory, Visibility, and Public Space

Abstract

memorial exemplified by makeshift shrines, posters of the missing, and graffiti; the museum installations that reflected on these street memorials and on the media's role in our collective experience of 9/11 and its aftermath; and the contested site of the permanent memorial at Ground Zero. The authors argue that both street memorials and museum exhibitions exemplify a tension between utopian and critical relations between the art and its public and that a balance between utopia and critique is perhaps the greatest challenge for the yet-unfinished memorial project in downtown Manhattan. The authors' goal is not so much to propose an ideal design for the memorial as to reflect on the aesthetic and political function of commemoration within the context of debates over public art and public space in the United States.

First Wave Collecting – Christchurch Terror Attacks, 15 March 2019

“…Spontaneous memorials are not usually purposefully staged. People gravitate to fences, walls, trees, posts, barriers and steps to leave their offerings: these spaces become a canvas or a stage for expressing grief, love, and at times, protest (Haskins & DeRose, 2003; Figure 4). The scale, color and texture of these sites attract wider attention from viewers and often the media (Doss, 2006; Fraenkel, 2011).…”

“…The relationship between violence, and our efforts to understand and document it, are almost simultaneous (Haskins & DeRose, 2003). Spontaneous memorials have value in the way they contribute to the democratization of the official record through their citizen testimony, helping define what happened through the eyes of the people (Døving, 2018).…”

The ‘Manchester Together Archive’: researching and developing a museum practice of spontaneous memorials

“…Spontaneous memorials have been the subject of different disciplinary and interdisciplinary investigations. They have been studied as spaces of cultural negotiation of public grief (Doss 2008;Senie 2006); for their commemorative and performative roles (Santino 2006); as forms of secular and liminal ritual, which, by promising continuity and certainty in a time of chaos, negotiates the early stages of public and private grief (Jorgenson-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998); as rituals of gift-giving and the material culture of mourning (Hallam and Hockey 2001); as both monuments of mourning and grassroots performances of social and political action (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011); as political protest and death rituals (Marchi 2006); as sites of controversy and power over who should be memorialized (Doss 2002); as counter-narratives to 'official' memory and a vehicle for bringing justice and raising awareness (Milošević 2017); as examples of mass mediation of disaster and tragic death (Dayan and Katz 1994); as forms of temporary public art and a critique of urban spaces distinct from permanent monumental structures (Haskins and DeRose 2003); and as the expansion of spontaneous remembering on social media (Harju 2015).…”

“…As will be explained later in the paper, most often this removal leads to the formation of an archive or a collection of items left in the memorials by museums, libraries, archives, or related cultural and community organizations. Such archives can be seen as a contradiction to the ephemerality of such memorials, which themselves are a contradiction in Western memorial practices, as discussed by Haskins and DeRose (2003) and Forty and Kuchler (1999). Trying to explain this movement from a temporary memorial to a permanent collection, Doss approaches the memorial items as a bond between the living and the dead, a material presence of an embodied absence that needs to be preserved (Doss 2008).…”

Mediated Memories

“…SeeAnderson and Dean, 1998;Carroll, 1996Carroll, , 1998 Carroll, , 2000Devereaux, 1998;Gaut, 1998;Levinson, 1998; Lagueux, 2004. 7 SeeHaskins and DeRose, 2003;Curtis, 2004.…”