Contemporary Memorials
November 1989, New Orleans, LA
A collaboration between visual artists and writers who examined a specific type of "vestige": the carefully salvaged and preserved memory, the Memorial. Through a series of multidisciplinary installations on three floors and a courtyard of a burned-out 19th century rowhouse, artists and writers used significant remnants of their past to reinterpret what was memorable in a contemporary context.
As repositories of collective memory, memorials reflect the time and place for which they are intended and the needs of those people who, as viewers, become participants in the remembrance. New Orleans' nostalgic narcissism fosters a peculiar tendency to transform the triumphs and misfortunes of life into the commonplace events of everydayness. In this haunted, decaying city whose residents are accustomed to living next door to their own dead, the inevitability of mortality is not just accepted, it is glorified.
Funded By : Contemporary Arts Center's Program for Interdisciplinary Artists, New Orleans, LA; Interarts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC; and the Rockefeller Foundation
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