In today’s barrage (read: persistent onslaught) of hyper-frenetic social media, I’ve been thinking about a way to try and make some sense out of how immediate, reductive, and transitory the exchange of information has become. Instant messaging has given way to texting, which, in turn, has birthed tweeting. And I don’t think that people are becoming robotic “outputers” of fragmented narratives–it’s more so the form of information exchange now, than the function. People think big–and today they just spurt small. Portion control: the Nutrisystem of information…
And yet, I think that what’s more glaring now, more so than ever, is the short-lived notion of an individual’s legacy or lasting footprint on the world (carbon or otherwise). Aren’t our legacies just tweets when compared to the timeline of all history? Do we take ourselves too seriously? Or perhaps, not seriously enough? Are we inconsequential blips–or confined pockets of unquantifiable potential?
And I’m still not set, by any means, on how I feel about this. But I guess one way to look at it, is by taking into account a few ways that people are memorialized–how a memory of one’s life can be aggregated into a series, or a singular, relic of sorts, one that was created by them, or informed by those who remain after their passing.
Like Picasso’s drawings with a flashlight (as shot by Gjon Mili for Life Magazine), even the most luminescent of souls can at once be a blaze–and then seemingly, overnight, left in the fabric of the past.
Of course there is the heartfelt goodbye blessing; the celebration of a lost life and the power that they left with us. Brooke Shields’ farewell speech to Michael Jackson was one of the most gut-wrenching speeches I have ever heard. Certainly, funerals are not very often made part of public discourse, or mass media to be catalogued on YouTube. So intriguing how this so private of a moment was made so public:
There are then too career-spanning retrospectives, curated glimpses in the cannon of a past artist’s creative record. DJ Soul’s recent tribute mixtape, celebrating the career of rapper Big L, certainly falls into this category (read: let’s take a trip, once again, down memory lane).
In some cases, even the relics of venerated artists, even some that have been re-erected, have too been replaced–as had the original–with a new work. The wheel keeps on turning, over and over… Os Gemeos’ “going over” Keith Haring’s memorial mural on Houston and Bowery is certainly a nod to even monuments being ephemeral. Not even a monument can be, or is intended to be, forever…
And the last type that I’m especially interested by are the ways in which some folks create self-referential ways of remembering themselves. The autobiography, the memoir.
Even Michael Jackson was memorialized–while he was alive–by Jeff Koons:
“I wanted to show Michael as a contemporary Christ figure: I wanted to give the viewer a sense of a spiritual authority…the type of adulation, the type of support that’s given to pop artists — this was the contemporary type of support that I thought that Christ would have received in his time”
In a much more “web 2.0″ way, Tyler Brule, for example, recently interviewed, well, himself.
And some, like Terry Richardson, even erect statues of themselves–while they’re still living… an action figure for the lens that captures fame…all is fair game, in love and mem-war.
I guess with all of our notes recorded in the digital world, we all have an RSS feed and a set of google alerts that will outlive our ability to add to them…
Ultimately, everything that you do in your life has the potential of being remembered in this digital age… choosing if you want to be memorable is now more deliberate than ever before… being recorded, however, is as much a given, and as fleeting an event, as a passing second in the annuls of time…
1 Comment
July 14, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Great Read!