Retroactivity and Contemporary Art by Craig Staff;

Author:Craig Staff; [Staff;, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350009998
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.2William Christenberry, Site of Palmist Building, Havana Junction, Alabama, 1988. © William Christenberry; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

In one sense, the act of returning to a particular site is analogous with Agee’s own desire, as we have seen, to return to the primal scene which he described. Within this particular context, Agee’s ‘recollected being’ is read through and premised on a primal scene of his childhood.22 This idea, and the pull it exerts on an individual also appears as a narrative trope within the novels of Toni Morrison, an author who, like Christenberry, focuses on what is in one respect the historical consciousness of America’s rural south. To this end, and as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy points out: ‘the primal scene need not be sexual, it need only be of such significance that an individual would recollect that episode, and not another, at the crucial moment when driven to re-evaluate her or his life. A primal scene is, then, an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory and through what Morrison felicitously calls “rememory.”’23 More pointedly, and what the instances of rememory within Beloved, Morrison’s novel of 1987, suggests is that memories can manifest themselves physically within the world.24 So, for example, a particular exchange within Beloved between two of the novel’s main characters, Denver and Sethe is premised upon the acknowledgement that ‘places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world’.25 Moreover, and as their exchange works to evince, the ‘thought picture’ of what Sethe describes is in fact somebody else’s rememory. And it is the fact that even if, in Sethe’s case, the farm from where he has come burns down, the picture of the farm ‘is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you’.26

In one respect, what this passage from Beloved is suggestive of, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy points out, is that ‘remembering the past is exactly like perceiving the external world’.27 Arguably, it is also the means by which, on one level at least, Christenberry’s prolonged engagement with and interest in the Palmist building can be approached, if not understood.

According to Rebekah Modrak and Bill Anthes, rephotography ‘usually refers to the act of retaking a historical photograph: locating the original vantage point, under the original lighting conditions in the present day, and taking a second photograph that reproduces the earlier shot’.28

Christenberry’s photographic studies of the Palmist building, and more broadly rephotography as an artistic as opposed to a strictly ethnographic strategy can evidently render visible such alterations. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, through the process of rephotography, with its overarching impulse to revisit or, in Christenberry’s words, ‘retrace’ a site wherein either a structure existed or,

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