Memory lapse
| Description: |
Shows Meadors mastery of the form of the visual book in the pacing and interlacing of photos and text. The text uses the layered history of a significant site (a remote Russian monastery that served as the first prison camp in the Gulag) to interrogate the nature of memory and memorials, humanity and inhumanity.--Nexus Press from Vamp & Tramp Booksellers website (accessed August 18, 2018).History itself is a consuming narrative, continually rewritten from the viewpoint of the reader.Memory Lapse is a question about the nature of monuments and attempts to build a monument that exists in the mind of the reader. One of the functions of a monument is the effort to insert a particular understanding of an event or a person into the narrative of history, to create a permanent reading through the text of the monument. Glorious victories become glorious through the heroism of the monument. Brave warriors are proven brave by a status. Our understanding of the past is written, to some extent, by monuments. But how do we remember the horrors of the past? What kind of monument can we build to our errors?Russia is full of examples of dreadful terror, governmental actions that killed millions and millions of people. The GULAG, or prison camp system, absorbed people, exploited them in forced labor, and then killed them through neglect and mistreatment. The very first camp was situated in an old monastery on an island in the White Sea, very near the Arctic Circle. The transition of this monastery from one of the holiest monasteries in Russia to one of the most dreadful camps (the arctic Auschwitz according to Solzhenitsyn) is a fascinating shift in reading/meaning, a narrative of uses and signification. Memory Lapse is an inquiry into reading architecture as a shifting narrative, from the beautiful to the horrific, using the Solovetski monastery as its text.--Artist statement from Vamp & Tramp Booksellers website |
|---|---|
| Origin: | 1999 |
| Created By: |
Meador, Clifton |
| Publisher: |
Atlanta, Ga. : Nexus Press, 1999. |
| Source: |
http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/BookArts/id/1328 |
| Collection: |
Herron Library Fine Press and Book Arts Collection |
| Rights: | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Copyright: |
In Copyright |
| Subjects: |
Meador, Clifton. Solovet͡skiĭ monastyrʹ. Artists books--United States. White Sea (Russia) cloth over boards and offset printed dust jacket. |
Further information on this record can be found at its source.
This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, administered by the Indiana State Library.