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Last Armistice Day, historian Niall Ferguson wondered whether in the contemporary cult of memorialisation, commemoration itself, had not been devalued to the point of worthlessness. ‘If everything ends up being the object of formal remembrance’, he wrote, ‘perhaps nothing actually will be remembered’. Ferguson’s distinction between the objects of formal remembrance and memories finds its theoretical corollary in Pierre Nora’s twinned concept of the lieux de mémoire—a constructed entity made to secure a notion of the past—and the milieux de mémoire—a sense of lived history, something embedded in tradition and social practice. For Nora, and for others, constructed histories have come to replace real memories.2
Nora’s model, hugely influential in recent historiography and in what is called memory studies, described a profoundly altered relationship with the past. The ‘age of commemoration’ he outlined cannot be divorced from either an uncertainty about the future, a future in which the only constant will be change but a change that can no longer be called ‘progress’, or a past that has become uninhabitable because we are no longer on very good terms with it. According to Nora, the loss that results from this altered relationship to the past and the future leads to an ‘acceleration of history’, a stockpiling of traces, signs, and materials in an ever growing number of institutions—libraries, archives, collections—devoted to this task.
Among the range of activities Nora cites as evidence of this turn to memorialisation are several that feature in contemporary art practice: criticism of official versions of history, the recovery of previously repressed histories, and the creation of new commemorative events. All but the last are part of contemporary art’s critical engagement with the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline