The Theatre of Memory
Collins Gallery
University of Strathclyde,
22 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XQ
31st March - 5th May 2001
It was an encyclopaedic memory aid consisting of hundreds of images which were arranged on the tiers of an amphitheatre. The images were meant to ignite the imagination, and thereby to stimulate the memory, of the solitary spectator of the Theatre, enabling him or her to remember significant, esoteric knowledge.
It represented a unified referential system, alluding
to Hermetic, Judaic, Hellenic and
Christian motifs. An eschatological catalogue, the Theatre of Memory was
remarkable in its marriage of symbol with three dimensional space. And all
the more remarkable because, although the idea of the Theatre was known
throughout Europe, we cannot be certain that it was
actually built. A piece of
Renaissance conceptual art?
The
work in the exhibition at the Collins Gallery, Glasgow, is inspired by descriptions
of images from Camillo’s Theatre. Juno
and Apollo in the Clouds, Apollo and the Muses,
After Endymion and the
Saturn series are all drawn directly from mythical allusions made
in the Theatre. Often, in the Theatre, particular motifs will crop up again
and again, their meaning subtly modified by their position within the schema.
One such motif is Juno, and I have represented her here as Juno
on a Swing, to convey the idea of levity and abandon with which,
at times, she is associated.
In
researching current theories of the locality of memory within the body,
I worked at the Human Anatomy Department at Glasgow University. I made ink
on paper drawings and sculptures modelled from the human
brain and heart. For the drawings
I studied microscopic images of sections of the brain -
lower, mid and upper pons, and the hippocampus,
for example. I used the conventions of the laboratory to make decisions
about what sections of the body I would study and I was faithful to what
I saw under the microscope. I made no attempt at objectivity. I could have
measured the work, made grids on the paper, projected the slides and copied
their images. I wanted to make a subjective map of what I saw - and I think
the results are beautiful. It was the most intimate life drawing I have
ever done.
During
my experience at the Human Anatomy Department, I began to wonder whether
the real Theatre of Memory is not the body itself, and this lead me to study
other hermetic image systems which use the "corpus"
as its theatre. I am grateful to the Special Collections Department at Glasgow
University Library for digitising some images from the English philosopher
Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi for me. These images showing a cosmic
creation story also look like the iris and pupil
of an eye contracting and expanding. I know Fludd
and Camillo would probably never have met, but there is such a spare and
complex simplicity to Fludd's drawings in comparison to the dramatic flourishes
of Camillo's ideas, that he makes a perfect foil. I also hope that this
will help to place the work, to root the hermeticism of the genre in Britain
as well as Italy.
Fludd’s drawings, beginning
with Et sic in infinitum (And so, forever),
form the visual introduction to a computer generated model comprising
of the images that Camillo described in his Theatre.
The virtual Theatre of Memory, like a giant eye floating in space,
is the source for the rest of the sculptures in the exhibition,
all of which, in one way or another, are concerned with the body.
