Andreas Huyssen: “The destruction of memory is at stake here.”

An unassailable figure in contemporary cultural criticism, Andreas Huyssen is one of the founding editors of New German Critique, the prestigious academic journal that greatly contributed to the dissemination of the Frankfurt School in the United States . Since 1970, this academic journal has focused on issues of Germanic culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, with special attention to the Holocaust and its effects. A broad range of topics of interest, including literature, literary theory, philosophy, popular culture, and audiovisual media, is another of its major contributions.

Professor Emeritus and founding director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University , Andreas Huyssen has reflected extensively on the question of memory and its political dimension in the field of culture. From this perspective, he has focused on various contemporary artists whose projects have addressed this dimension as part of their strategies of meaning. Along these lines, the publishing house Adriana Hidalgo has just published Arts of Memory in the Contemporary World (Confronting Violence in the Global South), a series of his own texts that, unlike many others that precede them, address issues of this nature that connect artists who work and live outside the Europe-United States axis, a coordinate that for a long time attracted almost exclusive attention from international critics.

Through this decentered lens, which analyzes the art of memory from the perspective of the Global South, he spoke with Ñ.

–I remember a text of yours that accompanied an Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Proa Foundation in Buenos Aires, written in 1998. He was a German artist whose work referred to postwar German memory. What made you now focus on artists from the Global South such as Guillermo Kuitca, William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram, and the also Indian artist Nalini Malani?

–Since the mid-1970s, part of my work focused on how German artists, writers, and intellectuals addressed, evaded, or repressed the historical facts of the Holocaust in the decades following 1945. This was a central theme for my generation of Germans born after World War II, and only gained prominence after 1989. Kiefer's work, appropriating Nazi imagery and tropes, was enormously controversial at the time, as it seemed to leave open the question of whether it was affirming or critical of the world of Nazi imagery. Contrary to the widespread views in the German serial, I interpreted it as a critical confrontation with the German past and a powerful recognition of the Holocaust. I found it significant that the Proa Foundation exhibited Kiefer's work at a time when Argentina was in the midst of discussing the crimes of the military dictatorship and its Dirty War.

The case of post-dictatorship Argentina was, in fact, the first to draw my attention to how Holocaust images and tropes had begun to be integrated into discourses unrelated to national trauma, and how the trope of Nunca Más served to articulate connections of historical trauma from a transnational perspective. Kentridge and South African apartheid followed. As did Salcedo and the violence of the Colombian civil war, and Sundaram and Malani, whose work centrally addresses the traumatic history and aftermath of Partition in the present. For me, the complex aesthetic operation of these artists in different media establishes a kind of cross-border and continental human solidarity in the face of political violence. As my comparisons of specific works show, this solidarity is based on the universal significance of the Holocaust, which today, largely as a result of Israel's war on Gaza, is being secondary to increasingly narrow ethno-nationalist uses and abuses of Holocaust memory.

–Your book devotes an important chapter to Chile's Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which includes Alfredo Jaar's 2010 work, Geometry of Consciousness, and the Bogotá memorial, Fragments, conceived by Doris Salcedo. Have you visited the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, overlooking the Río de la Plata?

–During one of my first visits to Buenos Aires, I believe it was in 1997, Marcelo Brodsky introduced me to the architects and designers of the Parque de la Memoria, and I have visited it several times since its construction. The original design, in its multiple resonances with both Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, fascinated me, and I wrote about these powerful comparative dimensions, which were not always appreciated in Argentina (https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/el-parque-de-la-memoria/). I still regret that, due to a lack of funding, as I was informed years later, the original design could not be fully implemented, but the Parque de la Memoria remains, without a doubt, one of Buenos Aires's major sites of memory. The other two memorial sites in Santiago and Bogotá that you mention highlight the importance of public memorial institutions, which can also serve to showcase memorial art, as the Parque de la Memoria does.

–Today, much more than thirty years ago, the culture of memory seems to have been replaced by the logic of consumption and obsolescence that invades cultural spaces. The era of “artistic capitalism” seems to condition or absorb any form of dissent. To what extent can artistic projects oppose this trend?

–At a time when Western art markets and capital have captured aesthetics and increasingly subjected it to strategies of investment and commodification, to empty spectacle and empty eclecticism, we must rethink the potential of artistic criticism and resistance to the status quo. We cannot do this without insisting on the specificity of the aesthetic experience, which must be rescued from a neoliberal discourse that promotes everything as aesthetic, from oatmeal advertisements to TikTok accounts. If in the 18th century, the arts had to free themselves from the shackles of Church and State, reflected in Immanuel Kant's demand for the autonomy of art, aesthetics today demands liberation from capital and immersive spectacle. Perhaps an effective culture of political memory has always been threatened not only by its political opponents, but also by the logic of consumption and obsolescence. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that, under capitalism, the commodity as fetish is itself a key to forgetting: forgetting, that is, of the living labor necessary to produce it in the first place. With Adorno in mind, I have argued in the past that the rise of memory culture has been accompanied from the beginning by a crisis of historical amnesia. Today, however, the undoubted successes of memory politics in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and the United States are threatened by political and cultural forces that are unraveling the very field of memory studies as it emerged since the 1980s.

In this context, your comment on our “age of artistic capitalism” is pertinent to the question of the critical potential of the arts. While operating within current art markets, the artists discussed in my book achieve this goal with a multitude of strategies that undermine immersive consumption and immediate gratification. Their works require slow and deliberate affective and cognitive labor on the part of the viewer. So yes, I trust in the capacity of art and aesthetic experience to provide spaces for reflection and empathy, to create shared meaning in deeply divided societies; to strengthen demands for accountability, to sabotage organized forgetting, and to counter the insidious impact of social media and artificial intelligence. “All works of art,” Adorno wrote, “bear witness that the world should be different from what it is.”

–Since the late 1970s, when postmodernism burst onto the scene with new visions of history and art history, various previously silenced reflections on memory have also been activated. You actively participated in these debates. Can you assess their current impact?

Postmodernism, as it emerged in the United States, was always a controversial and amorphous concept, attempting to mark new developments in architecture, literature, and the arts. Key to a critical postmodernism since the 1970s was the rise of feminist, queer, and Black cultural and political movements, and their critique of the white exhibition cube, associated with a limited version of transatlantic high modernism. I tried to understand this early move toward the postmodern as a resurgence of the historical avant-garde in the North American context, where, unlike in Europe or Latin America, it had until then played only a minor role. Later, in the 1980s, the debate in the United States became entrenched in the false dichotomy between French poststructuralism and German critical theory, both of which in reality offered theories of modernism distinct from its North American canonization. However, the initial connection between aesthetic projects and new social movements has had undeniable effects on culture at large, up to the Black Lives Matter movement and the current cultural focus on minority rights. What we're seeing now, under the Trump administration and elsewhere, is, of course, a major backlash not just against grassroots social movements on the left, but against the elite appropriation of DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion). It's difficult to contemplate the fate of art in an era that sees the dismantling and collapse of basic institutional structures in the democratic world.

–One of the most intense debates that took on ethical overtones in our country focused on the problematic connection between memory and forgetting. What, in your opinion, would be the point of balance that could contribute to addressing the traumas affecting Argentine social and political culture?

–I don't know enough about current Argentine culture to answer your question in detail. But although memory is always closely linked to forgetting, and although narratives of memory, whether individual or collective, are destined to change over time, I doubt there can be a balance between memory and forgetting in the case of military dictatorships, ethnic or political cleansing, and crimes against humanity. One remembers or forgets, one evades, one represses.

In Argentina, the culture of memory seems to have been quite effective until recently, thanks to the activities of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and their successor organizations, the recovery of spaces of terror like the ESMA (Spanish National Security Institute) and memorial sites such as multiple neighborhood torture and detention centers and the Parque de la Memoria (Memory Park). And, of course, also thanks to the robust public debate in the media and academia. But memories of the military dictatorship and the Dirty War no longer only have to fight against evasion and forgetting; they also have to contend with counternarratives that legitimize the criminal past actively pursued by the current government, its attempt to falsify history and close or disable memory institutions. What is at stake is the very destruction of historical memory and its search for truth. A situation, unfortunately, all too familiar around the world at this moment.