Narrative, Memory, Archive:

Some Thought's on Louisa Conolly's Print Room in Co. Kildare, Ireland

--Ann Bermingham, Professor of Art History, UCSB

"...I begin with this simple distinction between narrative and painting, familiar to critics of literary pictorialism, in order to frame a different issue, one of interest to critics of visual culture. What interests me is what happens to narrative and those things that depend on it--such as empirical knowledge, history, and memory--when we live, as we do today, in an image saturated culture. I believe that the issue emerges in the eighteenth centuy, and that it appears not in the public realm of high art but elsewhere in the the spaces of domestic decoration, popular amusement, and amateur art. I don't intend to provide an answer to the problem of meaning posed by the modern image explosion, so much as an exploration of the nature of the problem.

I cannot imagine a more fruitful place to begin than at Castletown House in Co. Kildare.

It is not the house itself that interest me so much as the print room desinged by Lousia Lennox (1743-1821) in the 1760's and 70's.

The discontinuous elements in the print room share a surface not a narrative. While the room's non-hierarchical assemblage of images make any single reading appear false and diminished, this does not mean that the print room escapes the narrative of history, for as we know such rooms would have been impossible before printmaking and the widespread practice in the eighteenth-century of reproducing works of art. In fact, we could say that the print room is an effect of the age of mechanical reproduction, and a harbinger of a modern, image based society. It provides an early lesson in how the multiplicaiton of images in our own visual culture has the power to transform narrative into archive. The print room is in a category with the family photograph album and other such mechanically produced, popular visul archives which inventory experience through the multiplication of images. In looking backwards to te seventeenth century cabinet of curiosity, the print room looks forward to an emergeing media culture: to the photograph and, ultimagely, the Internet. ..." (Copyright reserved: Ann Bermingham)

Full slide set from the lecture.