Critical Perspectives 7 – 6/11/14 – Making Histories with Clare Johnson

History is not “dead” (fixed)

Important – makes sense of where we are now

How are histories formed? Why are certain things historically significant?

Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes (1964) – a piece of history preserved in time

Attention placed on it; packaging isn't celebrated like art is

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto

Historical fact vs. something that happened in the past – who decides [the difference] and how?

Historiography – the process of writing history and study of that process (not literally writing – exhibiting; interpreting)

We all report on what we're doing and archive images (family photo albums; social networks) - how do we decide what's significant? We all carry cameras now

To talk about the past is to tell a story – not necessarily the truth

Which stories do we choose to tell? In whose interest?

“Grand Narratives” (big meta-stories)

Histories of practice → leave out examples that don't fit the bigger story – they aren't celebrated in the same way

Edward H. Carr said: “all history is a history of the present” - what matters to us NOW?

You can't ask anyone about the past if they're dead or it wasn't in their lifetime

Sojourner Truth – a slave; impossible to imagine that past

1851 – gave a speech on civil rights (the “Ain't I A Woman” Speech) of which there are two different accounts:

Marnius Robinson (a white man), 1851 and Frances Dana Gage (a feminist writer), 1863 – the position from which somebody writes makes a difference*

[Gage's account is] more direct (we assume)

Truth was from New York – would [the dialect of a black woman from the Southern States] have been her dialect? We just don't know → Stereotyping as opposed to being an individual

*So do modern values and censorship – censoring the N word (not everyone can reclaim it) creates ANOTHER version

*In a broad sense, think about this when making your work

Historical truth is a process of consensus – there's no one single HISTORY

History is always and necessarily constructed, selected, interpreted and edited – this differs from POSITIVISM [which] aims to classify the world objectively

Fantasy of total knowledge (Wikipedia – knowledge as “quantifiable”)

We always impose our own values on the histories we write

Judy Chicago – The Dinner Party – a practitioner challenging a version of history – feminist revisionism (reinterpretation)

[Chicago said] “The dominant version of history does not include me” … “Men decided that The Dinner Party would not be included in history” (until 2007)

All this has implications for the history of your process