Jon Rafman

In the preface to The Art of Memory, 1966, Frances Yates describes the mnemonic system of antiquity as “a technique of impressing ‘places’ and ‘images’ on memory.” This art, she admits, may serve a less vital importance in modern times than it did before the advent of printing (what now, after the Internet?). “Modern times” for Yates is the mid-1960s, a point at which she could not have imagined the transmutation memory would undergo in the digital age; how it would become a “thing” marked by distinct limits of capacity more than an open-ended act, how it would come to be a kind of commodity we feared losing while attending less minutely to the integrity of its structure, how it would become machine and mind so closely intertwined that persona and person become increasingly difficult to parse.

Beginning a review on Jon Rafman with a reference to the classical art of memory might seem a dislocated point of departure. When we think of Rafman, we think of the Internet, Second Life, Google Street View; mediated worlds—sublime entities whose momentum, superficially speaking, is forward directed. Rafman has made the observation that our contemporary moment (particularly through the influence of the Internet) has had an assimilating effect on the image so that little distinction exists between high and low forms of art, rendering terms such as “classical” increasingly ambiguous. However, if I am momentarily permitted to resurrect the distinction, I would offer that Rafman’s recent exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal was positioned on classic philosophical and literary issues around temporality and identity, and every so often these formal concerns wriggle through the ones and zeroes of data to reveal or reassure that at least some part of our otherwise untethered moment is anchored to the past. By positioning a self-reflexive exchange between recollection and repetition, Rafman evokes Robbe-Grillet in narrative, and Kierkegaard in agenda, placing the problematization of temporality and historicity at the heart of the human experience, while revealing technology’s truncating effect on our understanding of these concepts.

Rafman’s show at the MAC is largely centered on his videos, work which curator Mark Lanctôt describes as being at the heart of his practice. There are also striking examples of recent 2-D work such as the series “You are Standing in an Open Field,” 2015—large inkjet, resin-coated prints that use as backdrops images of paintings from the late Renaissance and Romantic periods or Hudson River School, while the foreground holds the more ominous scenery of Internet addiction in the form of desktops overloaded with soiled keyboards and the detritus of consumer culture. New Age Demanded/Manifold, 2015, is a series that combines image and sculpture, which according to Lanctôt refers to modernist poetry and sculpture, as well as classical statuary. Similar poetic/statuary referencing which gives a layered, nostalgia effect can also be found in the earlier video work Woods of Arcady, 2012, which pairs a machine-generated recitation of Yeats’s “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” with a tour of classical sculpture gardens gleaned from Second Life.

For me, the overall strength of the show is its constant tendency towards narrative; the narrative voices leading the videos give these works a compelling literary quality. As such we are guided through virtual worlds by a narrator at once authoritative and unreliable, in a style and tone reminiscent of how Barthes, in his 1954 article “Littérature objective,” described Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writing, that is, “without alibi or resonance, keeping to the surface of things, examining without emphasis, favoring no one quality at the expense of another.” In Remember Carthage/A Man Digging, 2013, the exhibition’s showcase videos, we are taken on a surprisingly meditative journey through sublime landscapes gleaned from state-of-the-art video games (heavy with aftermath or foreshadowing) by a self-reflective narrator whose voice never strays from a modal register, using a language that does not escalate despite the self-confessed struggle to recollect a past that refuses to coalesce. Sharing the centre gallery with these two videos is the docu-fiction Codes of Honour, 2011, a nostalgia-saturated essayistic video in memory of the arcade hero of a not-so-distant past. Recounted in an autobiographical voice, there is a personal longing here that then becomes a kind of archetypal lamentation associated with ancient myth, mourning not only the loss of the hero but the disappearance of the time and circumstance that defines the figure.

As issues of memory related to the Internet become increasingly complicated in the age of acceleration, Rafman’s work is sure to assume an ever-deepening resonance. In a recent Guardian article, the vice-president of Google warned that we are “nonchalantly dumping our data into an information black hole” and therefore face what could be a “forgotten generation or even a forgotten century” as old computer files become unreadable in the future. Meanwhile, with the perspective in mind that the Internet never forgets, last year a European court ruled that search engines must grant “the right to be forgotten,” which could have long-reaching effects on free expression and historical record. It is both such failings and promises of memory and machine that form a vital interest for Rafman. Manifestations of memory, particularly as they contribute to the sense of self and history (both cultural and personal) are themes heavily played upon in his canon. Engaging in repeated attempts to order plastic histories that resist linear arrangement, Rafman forms a highly unstable meta-narrative of identity and historicity that captures one’s attention with a grip now increasingly rare. Counter to contemporary culture’s archival obsession made up of such simplified methodologies as the timeline and the profile, Rafman illustrates that the oscillations of time and human spirit cannot be sufficiently contained by such limited geometries and that the virtual world may in fact provide an authentic backdrop for real narrative. ❚

Jon Rafman was exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from June 20 to September 13, 2015.

Tracy Valcourt lives and writes in Montreal, where she is the current project manager of .txtLAB @ McGill.