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The internet version of two interrelated but independent art projects, "Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933" and "Memory Arena" have been produced by artist Arnold Dreyblatt in collaboration with the Kulturinformatik Dept. of the University of Lüneburg, Germany. "In the twentieth century, it is the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, with its mechanisms of public surveillance, such as the archive, that bestows "identity." The mode of so much recent work is to offer a gesture of resistance to the bureaucratization of modern society, by attempting to promote an alternate notion of identity. This often involves a retreat from the public to the private (to go from the Who's Who to the interior life of an individual), to an ethnic or communal heritage (resurrecting a fading tradition), or to the autobiographical (recovering the past by linking it in some way to one's own personal history). Dreyblatt's project, in contrast, maintains its edge--and its importance for the rethinking of identity, history, culture, and memory--by refusing to retreat from or transcend these public, archival traces." (Jefferey Wallen, Preface to "Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933", Janus Press, Berlin, 1995) |
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