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David Miller Memorial for an Invisible Monument
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Towards the end of the XXth century people are looking backwards, into the past, as did Angelus Novus in Klee's painting interpreted by Walter Benjamin. If I remember well, the angel's gaze froze as in a 'flashback' that momentarily shed light into the dark corridor of history.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise- This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin,
The gaze of this non-human being -- an angel -- anticipates machine-vision which came to replace the omnipresent triangular vision of God. Objective, remote, cold and merciless, this way of seeing lacks sympathy, empathy and fear. Today the surveillance camera turns towards the past in an attempt to make whole what has been smashed. A mechanized device for scanning public and private space, for changing the past into presence, its images draw the outlines of history, a 'theater-of-atrocity' in close-up.
Our epoch is shaped by cinematic, cyber-memory, a prosthetics of memory that can atrophy human sight, wilt language and substitute remembrance with appearance. The stage for this mechanical theatre-of-memory was shaped in the mode of a panopticom that Michel Foucault described as a system for manipulation and control, a myth of a transparent society visible and legible in all its parts. The extension of this depersonalized cyber-environment to public and domestic space -- shaped according to a utilitarian and ideological concept of control -- has institutionalized and made homogenous our once living, intimate and sacred places.
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One symptom of this new paradigm took root in European monumental sculpture. In the establishment of the Public Memorial we see a systemic degradation of the object/fetish's magical function, the loss of its sanctity and today, the sanctuary itself is substituted by History for the public's consumption. The practice of creating a monument in public space is based on this idea of the theatrical 'flashback'; a wrenching forward of one constructed frame from the stream of time, bringing it out from the past to stand obstinantly in the present, aspiring to eternity. Contamination of memory can be seen in the wide-spread tendency to reconstruct historical buildings and environments into mere appearances or fictions of the past. Memorials. These sites are disengaged from their continuity, from their contexts and instead become mixed into the flux of the contemporary. Organic decay, oblivion, recuperation and personal reconciliation with the past, with missing persons or desecrated places is contradictory to this positivistic and monumental approach to memory-sites. This is manifest in the gradual museafication of personal experience, the pollution of our sensory environment with horizonless stacks of shelving that buckle under the weight of empty signs, old and new symbols, corporate idols and objects. An alternative concept of the memorial seems to be appearing in the work of David Miller. He focuses on the phenomenology of places, the devalued histories encircling their periphery. By rejecting ready-made formula or the reflexive use of iconography, his site-works instead find their compassionate locus or 'voice' in the incompleteness, the openness of the library's yet-to-be-written pages. Here it is possible to build upon creative acts begun before. Miller's contextual practice begins in this ambivalent excess, where the forgotten, anonymous makers left off. In this way his works recall acts of piety or empathy and consequently reclaim and revitalize the sites he engages, the social residues that bind us to a place. Since every building, environment, space, 'domesticated' object or action can become a 'witness' and conceal traces of humanity, memory and meaning, each is a potential source for further scrutiny and interpretation. Miller's process pays attention to these traces drawn in the shape and surface of these things, and listens to the minor testimonies and reports spinning around their time-axis. The artist's personality becomes transparent to reveal an inner, latent memory -- the enigma of the site.
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Top Image: David Miller Untitled 1994-1998 Installation with suitcases and piano wire Photo courtesy of the artist
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David Miller's works have been exhibited in Canada and in Europe. In August he contributed lasting site-works for the exhibition Yawning in Samorin, Slovakia. Other past residencies and exhibitions include Center for Metamedia in Plasy, Czech Republic; W139 and Stichting Steim in Amsterdam, the Institute for Computer Studies, University of Amsterdam; Denkmalshmiede-Hofgen, Leipzig, Germany; Stichting Casco, Utrecht and the Oud Amelisweerd, Bunnik, Netherlands. In March 1999, together with the St Mary's University Art Gallery in Halifax, he will mount Collecting Shadows: Photographs, 1985-1999. David lives in Toronto.
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