Grasping The Past Imperfect

The Age

Saturday October 18, 2008

Andrew Stephens

Andrew Stephens explores memory and truth, in archives both personal and collective.

SOMEWHERE BENEATH ALL the information, sounds, smells and images that we accumulate in our minds during daily life, there lingers our first conscious memory. This image is the ground zero of individuality - the primary entry in our internal archives, which make us who we are. It rests quietly as if it were a museum specimen behind glass. Occasionally, we might extract it for inspection.

Such memories resemble old photographs, the colours faded. It is a common enough story to discover that a memory is based on a photograph, as if it were the actual experience rather than a reproduced image of it.

But, like photos or books, most of our memories are filed and stacked away subconsciously. Who can say how much is accurately recollected - or how much truly forgotten?

Anyone who has read Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' collected short stories will remember the fable-like tale The Library of Babel, describing a library that is an apparently infinite universe. In its hexagonal galleries it houses all possible books - every permutation of words and letters including (somewhere within its vastness) the catalogue of all catalogues. Imagine if our minds could retain all those things?

It would be a curse: Borges also wrote the more frightening Funes the Memorious, about a young man who cannot forget anything. All his experiences remain conscious and accessible to him at all times. A similar, real-life case was reported in this month's New Scientist - a woman who remembers every single day of her life since she was a teenager.

At the State Library of Victoria, opened in 1856, visitors might easily imagine being inside Borges' library of Babel - or even inside Funes' memory-sodden head. Amid this collection of more than 2million books - 90 kilometres' worth, if placed end to end - the art of archiving is manifest. Rooms, basements and galleries also house several hundred thousand maps, 750,000 pictures and seven kilometres' worth of unpublished manuscripts, not to mention a wealth of electronically stored information.

Any such library might well be seen as a grand delusion, an attempt to enumerate every "fact", and thus The Truth. It might also be seen as a metaphor for the human mind, for memory.

Memory - the facility to store and retrieve information in our fragile human heads - is deeply enmeshed in the way we construct our sense of self-identity and, more broadly, the way we define and describe our cultures. We are fascinated with it. The fear of losing memory is equally gripping - Alzheimer's, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and other neuro-degenerative conditions can provoke severe anxiety (well, they do in me).

While we highly prize our personal memories, we also love to augment them externally with libraries, computer hard-drives, CDs full of photographs or text files, portable memory sticks or extensive online blogs to capture the events of daily life, trivial and otherwise.

With such new technologies and, of course, the internet, archival cultures have taken another interesting turn in the past couple of decades. Just as human memory is distributed across the hardware of the brain, so too is the internet's vast web virtually spread across computer servers. Further, the infinities of cyberspace have come to represent - and to actually be - a kind of collective consciousness or memory bank, with massive capacity for storage and retrieval. Millions of us interact with it.

Memory falls under the fascinated gaze of many disciplines - physiologically in cognitive neuroscience, as a phenomenon in psychology and, of course, as a broader cultural construct. Revelations in each realm continue: neuroscience, for example, has found there is no single vault into which all memories are deposited. Rather, our brains have various memory systems with different purposes (sensory, short- and long-term memory storage).

At least, that is what scientists think now: the book Memory's Ghost (1995) by Philip Hilts recounts the well-known story of Henry M., 27, who in 1953 underwent experimental brain surgery to treat his epilepsy. The hippocampus - "a greyish-pink organ the size of a fist", says the book's blurb - was sucked out. It is an image that makes me reel. While he could talk, read and write afterwards, he no longer had short-term memory (like Guy Pearce's character in the film Memento, 2000). Nurses at Henry's bedside were forgotten the moment they left his sight. This horror emphasises our heavy dependence on the mind's ability to organise, store and retrieve information, to give life meaning.

It is brought home how strongly memory is echoed in the archival systems we use in the external world when Des Cowley, the collections services manager at the State Library, leads me through some of the stacks alongside the Redmond Barry Reading Room. Here, for example, are a couple of shelves of beautiful leather-bound volumes about the history of Madagascar. This collection is written in French and there are two volumes alone dedicated to lepidoptera: exquisite hand-painted butterflies fill the creamy pages. Like long-stored memories, they probably haven't been accessed in many years - indeed, Cowley proffers one volume last requested by a patron in 1995.

Cowley is a librarian's librarian, drawn to the philosophy that his labyrinthine workplace inspires. "It feels quite infinite, sometimes," he says. "But everything that sits here is passive, unlike the very active way of making connections within it that individuals bring with them. When certain (staff) leave here, you lose all that knowledge."

As well as this erudite man, during the course of my research I speak with Peter Lyssiotis (an artist), Maggie Finch (a curator of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria) and Penelope Davis (who has all bases covered: an artist who is deeply interested in photography and who is a library officer). Each of them brings rich nuances to the idea of how we think about our memories and the process of cataloguing and archiving - internally and externally.

Lyssiotis, curiously, is fascinated by the idea of erasing information. In his art work, he takes common travel brochure images, usually of urban landscapes, and gradually scratches back the surfaces until they look like time-worn etchings. He transfers them to offset lithographs and compiles them in beautifully bound artist's books. The State Library has been collecting these extraordinary, beautiful volumes since 1984.

"It comes from that notion that we never see a complete picture, even though photographs give us the fiction that we do," he says. "I know that when we look at things, we don't come away with a complete picture. That's a good thing. What's happened is that we can trust in our imagination to fill in the gaps."

He used his imagination ("on the wings of magic realism", he says) when making imagery related to the sacking of Baghdad in 2003. Journalist Robert Fisk documented the giddy arson when a priceless treasure, the National Library and Archives, was "turned to ashes in 3000 degrees of heat", followed by the torching of the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment.

All those memories and histories, gone. Cowley, too, speaks of the information at our own library that is periodically lost to time - made inaccessible because of new technologies. Some of the obsolete and unreadable material in the State Library is stored on 51/4-inch and 8-inch floppy disks and 20-inch vinyl records - as in many libraries, the archaic hardware to read such things is gone. What might happen when CD and DVD drives become old technology and are consigned to landfill is anyone's guess.

Cowley talks about how the library forms its collections policy - what to acquire and keep, what to discard. "You can't collect everything," he says simply. "It's got to be selective - and that's something every library grapples with." As Rebecca Comay writes in Lost in the Archives (2002), this is a crisis because of increasingly vast amounts of material being archived and accessed. "In these memory-obsessed times," she writes, "haunted by the demands of history, overwhelmed by the dizzying possibilities of new technologies - the archive presents itself as the ultimate horizon of experience."

One clever way around this is the State Library's "snapshot" collection, started in 1975: every 10 years, the library buys every item at a particular newsstand as a kind of freeze-frame of contemporary culture. It is like the human memory: capturing just a smattering. After all, libraries and museums can't even begin to compete with eBay culture and all those private collectors creating their own snapshots of the world - viewers of the ABC's The Collectors know how amazingly diverse this can be.

"There is a staggering circulation of objects at a global level," says Cowley. "Will they have meaning in the future or just be so many objects? I have spoken to people who used to collect - and they have been utterly ruined by the global accessibility of objects via the internet. People who have spent their life collecting bootlegs by Pink Floyd - suddenly you can go on the web and there are literally thousands you can access and buy. But to what point? The whole search of going to strange fairs and meeting strange men in car parks and looking in their car boots - a whole level of salvaging what you thought was rare and unusual is gone."

When I meet Maggie Finch at the NGV, she is preparing for a new exhibition called Order and disorder: Archives and photography and she has on a large table a scale-model of how the exhibiting space will look. The model is ordered and neat, its walls graced by tiny replicas of work by insightful artists such as Ed Ruscha, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, Robert Rooney, Penelope Davis, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

After looking at this, we tour the gallery's photography storage space, an artwork in itself. In custom-made black boxes can be found prints and negatives. Some of the little boxes are tied up delicately with ribbon and arranged precisely in deep drawers. On the sliding racks in another room, Finch reveals some beautiful works by Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson alongside some of the images to be displayed in the show she has put together. "Archives are so open to different interpretations," she muses. "You can re-read them and find narratives of your own."

One of the works she has chosen is by Linda Judge, who presents photographs of historical lace she took at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Underneath each image is a clunky typewritten label, which may or may not be true. As Finch notes, 12. COLLAR, CUFF, BORDER: Italian, late 17th century seems genuine but 51. VEIL: Brussels, end 18th century, needlepoint on bobbin ground. Worn by Madonna, for 'Like a Virgin' in her Brussels tour '91 does not.

It brings me back to Borges, whose stories readily proffer such believable fictions and false trails. How can we ever know that museums - or our memories - are anywhere near able to present a genuine account of what actually happened? Why do we hold on to the fiction that our subjective memories can ever be without sentiment or inflection?

"Memories change," says Penelope Davis - and I am surprised to find I have never realised this. "Most people assume that when they look at a photo that they are looking at the thing photographed - but they are not. They are looking at a photo. Books and photographic images and archives are enigmatic - you can't be sure of a singular definition or meaning."

In her beautiful photogram of books being shown in Order and disorder, we see a row of old leather-bound tomes glowing through a gauzy veil of colour; they are perhaps more like memories of books than books themselves. To produce the final images, Davis goes through a laborious, many-layered process that includes searching for old books, casting their spines into resin and eventually producing the old-fashioned photograms. She says the whole process is about undermining the assumption that photography is about "truth".

"I am messing about with the idea of veracity," she says. It is an approach worthy of remembrance - if, perchance, we can archive that memory accurately.

Order and disorder: Archives and photography is at the National Gallery of Victoria until April 19. ngv.vic.gov.au

The City: A Memory Album, an exhibition of new works on paper by Peter Lyssiotis, is at the State Library of Victoria until April 3.

© 2008 The Age

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