Art and the Immemorial

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between art, politics, and memory. It works with Arendt's conception of works of art as preserving the public realm as spaces of appearance. Following Lyotard, it also argues that such an interpretation of works of art is too redemptive and pardons politics for forgetting the exclusions implicit in its representative models. The article proceeds to articulate the public realm as spaces of anamnesis whereby politics is opened to exteriority or what Lyotard has referred to as the Law. As an example of a space of anamnesis the article examines one specific artwork, namely Rachel Whiteread's Untitled Monument, which briefly occupied Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth. The argument concerns Whiteread's own interest in the theme of memory and how her sculpture interrupts the aestheticized politics of the spectacle and intimates a path for a politicized art that opens the subject to the immemorial.

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