Call for Projects

by Cover by Steven MacIver

For our fourth issue, the editors of The Forgetory call upon writers and artists to respond to the theme “Repetitive and Impolite.”

Susan Sontag used these words to describe the creative faculty of mystic and radical philosopher Simone Weil in her eponymous essay:

“The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization…are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force— not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity… Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction.”

Though written over fifty years ago, Sontag’s words bear force and urgency in our current time. We would like for proposals to consider the theme in an expansive way, not only directly relating to Sontag’s words in regards to our cultural heroes, but also in the exploration of the semantic space between the words “repetitive” and “impolite.” Though Weil was deemed by Sontag as “one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit,” we would like for proposals to go beyond her writing to the relationship of repetition and impoliteness in any form.

Any rhythmic or ritualistic act may lose its true intention over time through unexamined repetition. Sometimes rogue acts of history, absent of new meaning, tirelessly repeat. From the regressive demands of zealous bewigged politicians to the vapid tropes of advertisements, and from cultural memory to personal ritual, we will look deeply at those things that keep coming back to us asking to be fully seen.

Please send proposals to theforgetory@gmail.com

The Power and the Glory, Harare 1980

by Helena Callinicos

The following piece was written before the coup d’etat on November 14th, 2017 that led to the end of President Robert Mugabe’s thirty-seven year reign in Zimbabwe.  It comes from a standpoint where, despite the unlikelihood of his political immortality, it was impossible to envisage someone other than Mugabe in power. 

There is a toxic image on my phone that I look at with an unhealthy regularity. It is a photograph of a magazine cover I found in a black mold-ridden archive in the north of England, the poisonous spores dancing perhaps around the malignant source. The incongruity of its provenance made it all the more rare to me, but I keep the picture on my phone mostly out of a diasporic obsession with anything—no matter how perverse—to do with home. The magazine’s title, Jesuit Missions…Harare 1980, printed in a chubby red font that I imagine could never inspire great religious zeal, is imposed above a black and white photograph of a nameless bishop and the then Prime Minister (later President) Robert Mugabe outside the Catholic Cathedral in Harare. It celebrates the year of Zimbabwe’s Independence and the same era of Mr. Mugabe as liberator, whose inaugural portrait hung in every institutional building and classroom of my childhood.

At first I found it amusing, it being so easy to satirize the hypocrisy of a despot-as-good-Catholic; surely this display of piety was a ruse. If I blur my eyes the figures look like a couple on their wedding day: Mugabe’s stance so pillar-like, enforced by the stiffness of the Maoist styling of his safari suit, countered by the bishop’s beatific smile and the lace of his cassock jellyfishing in the wind. All this points towards a shiny, happy future.

In a futile way, the fuzzy impression of holy-man and homophobe as newlyweds is thrilling to me, delivering me such delicious irony given Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party’s anti-gay human rights abuses and the Catholic Church’s public homophobia. Homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe. Mugabe can shout, “We are not gays!” and still get a few sanctioned laughs from the UN General Assembly. This kind of jocular— but in reality—chilling rhetoric is inescapably Trumpian.

And so, more recently, Mugabe’s image here leads my mind straight to Donald Trump. Both men seduce those living in the cracks of their societies with fear and hatred, the benefits of their strategies bolstering only a small elite. They happily share the epithets “braggadocious,” “fabulous,” “terrific,” versus the “weak,” “stupid,” “losers” tirelessly attacked in their rhetoric. To the rest of us though, their spin seems transparent, clunky, unpolished…impolite.

Some days I look at the photograph and focus on negative space between the bishop and Mugabe. The air seems close. The pixels are static electric—their pointillism a result of whatever archaic printer was used in the magazine’s production, and then fed by the backlit blue light of my iPhone. Maybe there is something more animated there, the monochromatic particles betraying something complicit in this tryst. Does the man on the left know what the man on the right is planning? Probably not, I think. I have constructed something sinister colored by the centuries-old tradition of byzantine dealings between Church and State.

Often I indulge in the sincerity of the moment captured here: it is 1980 and a siege has been lifted. How rightfully buoyant and beaming the characters are at the dissolution of an oppressive and racist white regime. This feeling is short-lived as my prescience of the Mugabe of the future, of the now, overrides that of the fresh version so full of promise in the picture. Does the man on the right know then that in only two years he would orchestrate a massacre?♦  I am saddened that the moment captured might be an idyll, and as such, a fiction. Its purity is surface-level, and draws light to the absurdity of myth-making involved in a country’s historiography.

As a child I remember there being an airborne reverence for Mr. Mugabe in my school playground in early 90s Harare. I knew who the President was and, without any influence from my parents, regarded him as a pseudo-avuncular authority. I was seven years old when I pressed a Zanu-PF rally flag against our car window and made an army truck full of soldiers cheer. I did this without really thinking, not knowing what the flag stood for, only that it had the President’s face on it which would get me a thumbs up. With a basic, child-like understanding then it is obvious to me how quickly patriotism-nationalism-jingoism can take hold: meeting the soldiers’ exuberant approval in that way was thrilling, and more importantly gave rise to an acute sense of belonging. My wonder at the simplicity of the action of waving the right symbol to the right audience and affirming a positive reaction had nothing to do with any grasp of the country’s politics. I was a privileged white child with an assumption of racial harmony and national pride fostered by the cultural doctrine of my schooldays. At school we sang the national anthem every morning; we learnt the Shona words phonetically “Si-moo-kai moo-reza weh-doo weh Zim-bab-weh” until each syllable was so ingrained in our minds and on our tongues that the song became comforting and beyond meaning—a performance of our utmost fidelity. How could we attribute any significance to these words? We knew nothing really of what struggles and power imbalances had led to that song. It was a purely ritualistic act that we relished performing. This blindness to truth has a way of carrying through to adulthood, and is demonstrated in how a nation’s consciousness can let the duality of public and private spheres of life to go unchecked—most Zimbabweans were aware of the ethnic cleansing in Matabeleland, yet it took a decade for the murders to be recognized publicly. For the many it is safer and easier to accept the mythology and the façade of respectability when the horror of the reality is so sickening.

Though my interpretation of this image perpetually shifts, what resonates unceasingly with me is that it represents a pivotal moment universal to all histories: the interstitial space where hope exists, however frustrated, between the end of a brutal struggle and more violence yet to come. Nostalgia is a deplorable sickness, and history in its nature is repetitive and impolite. In repeating itself it does not perfect itself… inexact echoes and shades of Caligula/ Hitler/ Stalin/ Gaddafi/ Amin/ Ceaușescu/ Trump and all the other categorical et ceteras and iterations of leader, rich in foibles, copied and pasted ad infinitum.

Photograph of the Cover of ‘Jesuit Missions 1980,’ 2016, Courtesy of Helena Callinicos

1. Here I refer to the Gukurahundi killings, which started in the early 80s, where Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade soldiers systematically wiped out villages of rival party ZAPU’s Ndebele people. The atrocity, categorized as ethnic cleansing, went widely unreported and unacknowledged up until the 90s.

Helena Callinicos is a Zimbabwean artist who lives and works in London and sometimes on the Greek island of Ithaca. She paints places, people, and things that intersect notions of the uncanny, diaspora, and imagined histories.

Ritual Image

by Robyn Barrow

An illuminated woman scurries through Stowe MS 17, a small, 14^th century Book of Hours now housed in the British Library♦. The codex is a richly decorated mélange of the sacred and the profane, with costumed baboons and hybrid monsters dancing in the margins of earnest prayers to the Virgin♦. Constant like this clash of comic beasts and devout worship is the lady, ambling through the pages like they were rooms in her home. Seated in tiny architectural frames or kneeling in brightly painted clothes beside the full-page miniatures that begin the prayers—which are divided into hours of the day—the noblewoman is pictured ten times. She shares space with the Virgin and is witness to the Passion Cycle, a series of images depicting the Crucifixion of Christ♦. Though not a portrait, this figure was a visual signifier of the original owner of the manuscript and possessed a kind of totemic resonance. The owner’s painted counterpart conveyed her daily♦ devotion to the texts in her book.

The Book of Hours was an incredibly successful genre in the 14^th and 15^th centuries across Western Europe, but particularly in the early years of their popularity, the books were unique, and the text and images were selected for a particular person or community’s use♦. The books represent a commercial and religious conversation between patron, artist, and clergy. Stowe MS 17, then, is intrinsically tied to the woman for whom it was made, to the context of her life, and to the daily ritual of her worship. Like a flower pressed between pages, the original owner of the manuscript survives in relic form, with traces of both her cultural and personal memory preserved. Stowe MS 17 remains as an artifact to a repetitive framework of piety; this text was designed to be absorbed, rehashed, and considered through daily observance.

This repetition of prayer might have created for a 14^th century woman a space of self-actualization that was otherwise unavailable to her. Consider the full-page miniature on the verso of folio 157, which precedes the Gradual Psalms♦. Of the twelve images in the book’s cycle of full-page miniatures, this one alone does not feature a biblical or apocryphal scene. Folio 157 visualizes the owner of the manuscript in her rich, fur-lined cloak set against a bold blue background. The space is held up by delicate golden colonettes, the field energized by the contrast of geometric reds and blues. The owner kneels at her prie-dieu, a table covered with embroidered altarcloth that falls naturalistically, undulating as if in a light breeze. Eyes raised and hands clapsed, she prays to an icon of the crucified Christ, who seems to return her gaze.

It is an image designed to be seen up-close, held in the hands and perused for a long time, many times over. Like all the Stowe MS 17 images, it was incredibly costly to make. The parchment is very fine, and adorned with significant passages of gold leaf. A multitude of pigments were used, including two shades of precious blue, both made from lapis lazuli imported from the Middle East. These materials were chosen to capture and hold the eye through repeated viewings. Beyond the supply cost, the time taken on this image would have been significant. Working on a miniscule scale, the artist demonstrates tremendous precision. Time was taken in rendering the vair-lining of the woman’s cloak, as well as its delicate folds as it puddles on the floor around her. The altar cloth is also a careful study in the way fabric moves. Finely-tuned geometric patterning in the columns, architectural framing, and backgrounds lead the eye on journeys through exquisite lines and colors. The angels in the roundels each carry a specific musical instrument, calling out to the eye and the ear. It is a work of art designed to captivate and inspire daily, to uplift the mind through repeated viewings.

What would viewing such an image many times do for the owner of the manuscript? This picture is unique in the book, significant in that it alone shows the woman in a solitary act of devotion. She is the focal point, and the subject of the image is her own ritual worship. She prays not to Christ himself, as in other images in Stowe MS 17, but to an icon, demonstrating faith without seeing. It is a portrait of her own individual, unsupervised piety. Beyond this, through its size and placement, it elevates her praying act, giving it equal significance to the biblical scenes portrayed in the other miniatures. The owner kneeling at her prie-dieu is just as large, just as colorful and detailed as the image of the Crucifixion itself a few pages before. In this way, her own action of devotion is attributed the importance of biblical revelation. Her personal faith is visualized as a miracle.

To the modern mind, ideas of rote memorization or ritual repetition carry connotations of the automated and thoughtless. For the owner of a Book of Hours, many of the prayers were likely recited from memory, the images providing invigoration during a daily routine. However, medieval concepts of memory were different, with memory as an essential part of intellect and the critical step in the acquisition of knowledge. To memorize was to know, to mull over, to understand♦. To someone living in the middle ages, there would have been nothing mindless about a daily repetition of memorized prayer. Books of Hours used images combined with known texts to challenge a devotee to higher understanding and sanctity.

Though the words she recited were chosen by someone else, and were not written in her native tongue♦, the ritual of their recitation could potentially provide the owner of Stowe MS 17 with a temporal and visual space occupied exclusively by her. Contemplation of her faith and her proximity to the Almighty insisted upon some consideration of herself and her place within a universal scheme. Looking back, we can now find only traces of this woman, only guess at what her daily life might have been. But if, as a 14^th century woman, her experience revolved largely around husband and household, children and social circle, the self presented by her Book of Hours might have provided a reprieve, an independence, and an opportunity for reconsideration. Already rendered subversive by the often-bawdy marginalia, Stowe MS 17 then also had the potential to inspire independent reflection, unsupervised by Church or husband, propelled by image; it could be a woman’s world.

Folio 157r, Stowe MS 17 (“The Maastricht Hours”), First quarter of the fourteenth century, Parchment, 95 x 70 mm, British Library. © The British Library Board.

1. Research for this article and information provided in the footnotes are derived from my Master’s thesis “Stowe MS 17: Text, Image and the Ramifications of Female Viewership” (2016) completed at the Courtauld Institute of Art. An article version of this thesis appeared in the 2017 edition of Immediations, the Courtauld postgraduate journal.
2. “Stowe MS 17,” British Library Digitised Manuscripts, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Stowe_MS_17; Stowe 17 has often been referenced in general studies of Gothic illumination. Studied particularly for its rich variety of marginal imagery, the manuscript has appeared in a number of published works on various Gothic themes and decoration from the early 1950s to the present. Stowe 17 was most referenced by Lillian Randall in her indispensible book, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts as well as by Horst Woldemar Janson, who cited the manuscript thirteen times in his chapter on Gothic manuscripts in Ape and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most importantly for this study, Judith Oliver’s analysis of the Mosan Gothic manuscripts, Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liège (c. 1250-c. 1330), provides a thorough exploration of Stowe 17 as it relates to other books of the region.
3. The eleven owner portraits are located on folios 18r, 72r, 99r, 108r, 130v, 140r, 147r, 157r, 168v, 256r, 271r.
4.  Alexa Sand writes extensively on these ‘pre-modern’ portraits in her book Vision, Devotion and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art, arguing that these owner portraits were part of an inward gaze, the physical eyes seeing the spiritual self (Sand 166). See also Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of a King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2009.
5.  Examining a Book of Hours’ liturgical ‘Use’, or the textual content of the manuscript as compared to others by region, is often an important means of analyzing where it was meant to be used. Stowe 17 is sometimes called the ‘Maastricht Hours’ due to supposed textual links to a town in the region, though there is little concrete evidence for this conventional attribution. ’Since no other ‘Use of Maastricht’ Hours survive for comparison, the attribution is not a useful label when trying to understand the texts of Stowe 17. When compared to the seventy-five documented uses on the CHD Institute for the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts in Denmark, it is most textually similar to the Use of the Carthusian Order.
6.  In Stowe MS 17, the Gradual Psalms are located towards the end of the Book of Hours, following the Office of the Virgin and the Penitential Psalms. The Gradual Psalms include Psalms 119-133 and begin on 158r “Canticum graduum. Ad Dominum cum tribularer clamavi …”
7.  For more on medieval concepts of memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); 2 edition. June 2, 2008.
8.  The contents of Books of Hours were largely derived from the psalms and written in Latin as opposed to the owner’s vernacular French, though are are two French poems at the end of Stowe MS 17. It is likely that the owner had at least some basic Latin literacy, though it is difficult now to assess how much.

Intervening Time

by Hannah Kim Varamini

Hannah Kim Varamini is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, originally from the DC area. She will receive her MFA in art from California Institute of the Arts in May 2018.

He Learns Me

by Abigail Jones

Abigail Jones was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1986. She studied Fine Art and History of Art (BA) at Goldsmiths and Violence, Conflict and Development (MSc) at SOAS. She is a contributing writer at Black River Press and makes work for the ATFP series. She lives in London, where she works as a researcher and artist.

A Thousand Kisses, In My Living Room

by Gyun Hur

Durational performance 7 hours, Photography by Lauren Hughes

Atlanta, Georgia, 2010

I often find my father asleep on his couch.

I hear fanatical sermons for hours on ‘truth’ by evangelical pastors on a Korean Christian television channel.

My mother listens, too, obsessively washing the dishes as if she is cleansing her own regrets.

The houseplants thrive with my mother and father’s daily care.

I kiss the houseplants thousands of times, emulating the adoring care they have received from the ones who bore and raised me.

I whisper the prayers with amens thousands of times, the Lord’s prayer my parents taught me, hoping for my own regrets to wash away.

하늘에 계신 우리 아버지여 …

Then, I watch and I listen.

And I wait for answers.

I fall asleep, savoring every word, sound, and image as they converge into a poetic panorama, rather than an aching reality.

Gyun Hur has performed and exhibited in Canada, China, Hong Kong, Italy, Turkey, and the United States. Gyun’s work has been widely recognized for her floor installations comprised of hand-shredded silk flowers. Through her menial process of making and transforming materials, the artist constructs a visual landscape to evoke a sense of labor, loss, and memories.

Born in South Korea, she moved to the United States at the age of 13. Gyun attended the University of Georgia (Painting, BFA) and Savannah College of Art and Design (Sculpture, MFA). She recently returned back to the States from four years of living in Hong Kong. Gyun currently lives in New York City and enjoys taking care of her indoor plants and teaching her students at Parsons School of Design.