主編語

Abstract

The theme of this issue is “Memory and Identity in Art.” Philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, who established the school of phenomenology, characterized the “conscience-mémoire” that reveals and continues to shape our identity. Also, Paul Ricoeur analyzed the importance of memory to identity with the concept of narrative identity and investigated how an individual’s identity is related to memory. Husserl and Ricoeur, half a century apart, were merely two scholars within the vast array of scholarship. Th e relationship between memory and identity is now a core issue in social sciences, including art. How is memory constructed? What is identity? Is it individual, collective, or even global? How does identity depend on the other, which is both a source of attention and recognition? What are the role of memory in the writing of art history, the construction of aesthetic theory or art criticism, and the practices and expression of art? How does it relate to the so-called “artworks”? How is the identity between the subject and the object established in a complex power relationship? The keywords here may be mnemonics, the writing of power, collective memory, cultural memory, representation, and public art, to name a few.

We are honored to receive responses from several outstanding domestic scholars and include four articles on this issue. Ya-Ting CHANG illustrates how the renowned French art historian Daniel Arasse, based on the British historian Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory, deduced that European paintings operated as a "system of memory" before the introduction to perspective in The Art of Memory and Painting: Daniel Arasse's Structural Theory and Interpretation. In CHANG's article, she clearly demonstrates how place and image function as the protocol of "the art of memory" established in ancient times and cites some cases mentioned in the book, including how Arasse's method of interpretation was infl uenced by Giulio Camillo Delminio's Theatre of Memory. The article then moves on to Arasse's hypothesis and his brilliant arguments based on the iconographic analyses of the Renaissance works. Finally, CHANG off ers an excellent twist and discusses Arasse's opinions on how contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer deals with his German cultural roots and collective memory through the "mises-en-scene" in his studio.

WANG Jianan explores the relationship between “place” (lieu) and memory and employs a series of works and concepts as his methods in his article “Military Dependents' Village in Taiwan as a Les Lieux de Mémoire.” The concepts include Maurice Halbwachs’s Collective Memory, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, Pierre Nora’s “site of memory,” Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann’s “cultural memory” (kulturelles Gedächtnis), Paul Ricoeur’s idea on memory and space, Yates’ “the art of memory,” and Giulio Camillo Delminio's Theatre of Memory she discussed. Interestingly, he takes the “Heart Village,” a military dependents’ village which he has experienced personally in Beitou, as a case study. Wang poses a critical suggestion: To maintain the military village as a cultural asset, we should enhance its “image” to solidify the place into a spiritual “site of memory,” rather than turning it into a rigid physical museum.

In “Whose Memory does Taiwan’s to-be-looked-at-ness Belong to? Moriyama Daid?’s Taiwan Travel Notes,” Min-Chi CHANG also refers to Pierre Nora’s “site of memory” at the fi rst place. She examines how the memory of Taiwan has been constantly reshaped and reinterpreted through photography, which is also known as “the mirror of memory.” CHANG encapsulates the document from the maritime era and Taiwan’s image in early documentary photography. She then analyzes the memory composition of Taiwan’s image under the lens of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, a “snapshot legend.” Also, she declares that what Moriyama presents is a mémoire mixte formed through the photographer as the agency. Mémoire mixte is shared by the photographer and the photographed, the subject and the other, “making the present before the camera lens a carrier that overlaps the impressions of diff erent time and space.”

WANG Hsiao Hua also investigates the construction of memory and the relationship between subject and object in photography. In her article "Other am I: Memory Construction and Disappearance in Christian Boltanski's Early Autobiographical Photograph," WANG takes the autobiographical photographs of French artist Christian Boltanksi from 1968 to 1975 as the subject of her study. With philosophical inferences, she attempts to point out how Boltanksi's autobiographical photographs, such as the fi ctitious and indistinguishable "family albums", mobilize a large number of images of the other to endorse his autobiography and construct a "myth" or "universal memory" about "Boltanksi" under Roland Barthes's defi nition of photography. Th e author also emphasizes that by claiming that all the characters in the images are "I", Boltanksi evokes the lives and memories of the others through the "other am I" photographs while at the same time erasing his memories and reversing the role of subject and object, so that the autobiography, which is supposed to emphasize individuality, obtains a universal character.

We provide articles related to “Memory and Identity in Art” and a feature article in this issue. Through an anonymous review system, we ensure the quality of the articles for the reader of the Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Th e four aforementioned interlocking articles brilliant take theories on memory as the methods and span from the ancient times to the present day, covering from the West to Taiwan and dealing with issues such as painting, photography and urban planning. In Yi-Hsiu CHOU’s “Musical Inspiration in the trandence of Abstraction in the Early 20th Century: The Question of Time and Rhythm in the Analogy Between Painting and Music,” she explores how abstract art extracted inspiration from music in the early twentiethcentury modern art. The researched subjects are various; however, CHOU mainly focuses on Paul Klee and František Kupka. The purpose of the study is to examine the temporal and spatial issues involved in the comparison between painting and music and the rhythmic expressions in painting.