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does
you believe in history?
Some philosophers have declared that today's postmodern times are
the “end of history.” For many,
history is felt to be not one story but many conflicting stories.
“I don’t really believe in history,” says the artist
Josiah McElheny,
“and I think that at some level that’s one subject of
some of my work—the
fact that history is mutable, which is essentially denying history.
So either you can believe there is this thing called history which
is a linear narrative or in some general sense a linear narrative
with a definable kind of thrust to it, or you could say that there’s
just a lot of different stories. And if you believe that, which
I would argue I believe, then you can’t really break with
them. You could only reassemble them, possibly in some other way.
Or you could add your own.”
“A lot
of what I do is capturing memory or eliciting memory from an object,” says
the artist Fred Wilson. “I think in the west, and particularly
in America because it’s
such a young country, you get the sense that so much comes into
America and is re-fashioned and regurgitated without really understanding
what it is. We’re such a young country, whereas in other
countries they know about the history of the thing that they have
and maybe that’s holding them back in some ways. So perhaps
their problem is not knowing what they know.”
Do you believe in history? If history is a fiction, then how are
we to deal with things of the past and with our own memories?
Is the purpose of art to record the present for posterity? Must
one understand the history of an object to fully appreciate it?
What is your opinion? SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
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