Text and Image

Expanding upon longstanding concerns in cultural history about the relation of text and image, this book explores how ideas move across and between expressive forms. The contributions draw from art and architectural history, film, theater, performance studies, and social and cultural history to identify and dissect the role that the visual and performing arts can play in the experience and understanding of the past.The essays highlight the role of oral history in the documentation of the visual and performing arts. They share a common set of questions as they explore, firmly grounded in their distinctive disciplinary standpoints, the circuit of word, gesture, object in the formation and reproduction of knowledge, identity, and community. Blending theory and case study, they cover subjects such as the response of artists to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; violence in Columbia and Mexico and the Balkan Wars; the circuit of sexual desire in contemporary art and photography; and sites of collective and personal memory, including the Internet, the urban landscape, family photographs, and hip hop.Stressing the relationship of media to the formation of collective memory, the volume explores how media intertextuality creates overlapping repertoires for understanding the past and the present. Scholars of art history, media and cultural studies, literature, and performance studies will all find this work a valuable resource. List of illustrations, Notes on contributors, Acknowledgments, 1 Introduction: performing the archive, 2 Resonating testimonies from/in the space of death: performing Buenaventura's La maestra, 3 Truth and consequences: art in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 4 Precarious boundaries: affect, mise-en-scène, and the senses in Theodorus Angelopoulos's Balkans epic, 5 Stratum and resonance: displacement in the work of Renée Green, 6 Cities memory voices collage, 7 Eros in the studio, 8 Muscle Memory: performing embodied knowledge, 9 Hope . . . teach, yaknowhati'msayin: freestylin knowledge through Detroit hiphop, 10 Les gammes: making visible the representative modern man, 11 Composite past: photography and family memories in Brazil (1850–1950), 12 Memories of mammy, 13 Official art, official publics: public sculpture under the Federal Art-in-Architecture Program since 1972, 14 Private reflections/public matters: public art in the city, Index