#and also. the generic memento mori-ness of her is something that can be so personal

[francesderwent]

every day I come on this site, see my own little icon, and think “damn I have the coolest profile picture ever”

[lost-kinn]

so i did want to talk a little bit more about what ellina--and even the base game--seems to imply about monomon.

i dunno if you’ve heard, but generally people tend to sort university professors (and universities) into two categories: there's “teaching” professors who can and do teach, with a genuine interest in the welfare of their undergraduate students, and then there's “research” professors who delegate all their teaching responsibilities to their graduate assistants and focus on their research instead.

ellina's wanderer's journal hints that monomon was the researcher kind of professor, which is some Fun Times, because i think most of us were thinking that monomon was the teaching kind of professor.

backtracking a bit, so that we’re all on the same page, i think it's important to mention that the issue on the table is one that hallownest, as a general storyline, comments a lot on, which is the "ozymandias" issue--a human (and bug, apparently) tendency to build great empires and huge stacks of knowledge and piles and piles of achievement, all of which will largely mean nothing whatsoever when we all die, and/or when the empires fall and everyone forgets all of our achievements. the game would like us to become comfortable with the idea that all of our achievements in life won't follow us to the grave. ashes to ashes, more or less.

the project of the seals is to preserve the pale king's great achievements, which is hallownest. (the game goes to great lengths to remind us that the unnatural prolonging of mortal achievements comes at great, prolonged sacrifice of the people who have to bear that weight. in very blunt terms, preserving hallownest instead of letting it decompose is powered by The Hollow Knight's personal suffering. that, more or less, was the hollow knight's purpose.)

so when it comes to "should we try and prolong kingdoms and mortal achievements?" the void comes down on the side of No (partly because they seem to be the embodiment of entropy, or something like that). the radiance comes down on the side of Yes, rather than accepting her death. the pale king comes down on the side of Yes.

figuring out what monomon wanted to use her archives for speaks to that same issue: did she want to prolong her mortal achievements (the accumulation of knowledge), or did she wish for it to be disseminated (with the knowledge's survival being not as important as its dissemination)?

a lot of fandom interpretation has posed monomon as the second case. from the fact that monomon is referred to as "monomon the teacher," and that she had a student she collaborated closely enough with to do something vaguely treasonous (quirrel and the loophole in the dreamer seal), you'd think that she's the "teaching" type of professor, who takes an interest in the welfare of her students, and accumulates knowledge in order to pass that knowledge on.

that's doubly compounded by the fact that the one time we see her doing anything on-screen, she's actively undermining the stasis seal, and there's a whole chunk of deleted dialogue in which monomon talks about how knowledge kept in stasis is useless and ultimately for nothing. it's a pretty damning condemnation of the pale king's actions.

so the picture we've got from that is that monomon saw, ahead of time, that seeking to preserve hallownest would be a foolish endeavor (ashes to ashes, the folly of impermanent mortal glory, memento mori, etc etc), and this is why she did the plan with quirrel, and accordingly this is why she's so pro-seal-breaking when the player knight shows up.

but if what ellina tells us about the archives is true, then the archives are actually primarily a collection of research, gathered all together in one place by a professor who didn't give a fuck about teaching and spent most of her time accumulating research and knowledge. to that end, she would be rather pro-pale-king-stasis-seal, since preserving everything in stasis would also preserve her oh-so-precious stack of accumulated research.

that fits with her plan with quirrel; one of the effects of quirrel making off with her mask is that this ensures she can't be killed even with a dreamnail. so she's doubly sealed to doubly protect her stack of knowledge--and for that matter, it's worth noting that her stack of knowledge is VERY difficult to read, and might be difficult to read because it wasn't intended to be read. the point of monomon's archives, under this reading, is simply to have the knowledge, not to spread or teach that knowledge.

ultimately, she did call quirrel back and undo the seals, but that doesn't seem to be the original point of her sending him out of hallownest with her mask. rather, that would have been a pretty dramatic turnaround from her previous convictions.

overall, in version one, monomon's a clever bitch with enough foresight to, at the very least, seriously consider the possibility that the pale king's plan wouldn't shake out the way he hoped, and her actions during the game events are just her acting out her failsafe. in version two, she's a lot more like the pale king in her wish to accumulate knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and her change in attitude is more or less a complete 180 turn. which isn't a bad thing, mind you--it's actually a rather good thing, because it's a mark of a pretty thorough character arc (the character starts off one way, a series of events happen, they come out transformed).

the second one is a really interesting story, imo! but it's a fary cry from the fandom monomon that a lot of people have come to like, and i myself have found myself pretty comfortable with the first one (even speaking as someone who's co-written a fic more or less based around the premise that monomon was an imperfect person). plus there's ways to argue that ellina isn't the most reliable of narrators, and further ways to argue that the wanderer's journal wasn't exactly "made" by gibson and pellen's personal four hands (the book is officially credited to Kary Fry and Ryan Novak), which is a fun opening for people to argue about the status of the journal's "canon-ness." and on the other hand, it's got the Team Cherry logo on it, so whatever's in the book must have been signed off by gibson and pellen, no?

i'm not an advocate of losing sleep over the "canon-ness" of extra material, or even any fandom affairs whatsoever. i think the clearest and most objective reading of what the wanderer's journal has to say about monomon's archives HIGHLY implies that she was a research-oriented professor who, ironically, didn't do a lot of teaching.

but also if people, like myself, choose to interpret her in a different way, i really dont think it matters. it's fandom. it's literally fun and games and shits and giggles. YOLO, my dudes.

[lsmithart]

Research: Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection & Remembrance by Joan Gibbons

This is a book I started reading in 201 and it has proved to be a key resource for both my practice and essay topic. Gibbons brings an array of varied sources and ideas to the critical consideration of works by Salcedo, Whiteread, Emin, Bourgeois and more. Some of the sources are ones I have already been researching (for example her reference to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida theory), whilst also mentioning many more new theories and ideas. I haven’t finished reading the book yet as it is so rich in helpful content, it takes me much longer to unpick it all. However my key notes to date from text are as follows:

Pg 17 – Louise Bourgeois “They are my documents. I keep watch over them… To reminisce and woolgather is negative. You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you. If you are going to them, you are wasting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are seed for sculpture.”

From the late 1970’s, Bourgeois’ work is continually built upon personal experience. The Cells carry specific iconography from her past. They may be seen as her most specifically autobiographical works.

‘The Cells invoke a memory technique first recorded by ancient scholars in which memories are linked to imaginary objects and images and arranged in the rooms of an imaginary building, ordered visually for the easy retrieval of information or experience.’ Frances Yates 18-24 The Art of Memory 1966

Pg 18 - The exercise is not to objectify memory, as is the case with the ancient art of memory, but to find a physical expression not only for that which has occurred but also for the complex emotions that accompany the experience. The Cells are not rooms that can be easily read or inhabited due to the compressed space and objects. “Juxtapositions of objects and accessories resemble the comparatively unregulated realm of the unconscious mind rather than the well-ordered house.”

The Cells are made of found materials that evoke a jail-like structure that Bourgeois states “give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering” – Louise Bourgeois ‘On Cells’ pg 205 – Robert Storr, Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon

Furnishings and accessories in the cells are ‘orchestrated to evoke the past and the pain that it is embedded in it’. These include found or period objects that refer to Bourgeois’ childhood in her family tapestry workshop, e.g. the spindles and skeins of thread in ‘Red Room (Child) 1994. Actual objects from Bourgeois’ life include the clothes in ‘Cell (clothes) 1996 and the perfume bottles in Cell 2 1991.

‘Alongside the management of the present through the past and vice versa that is central to Nachträglichkeit, the decontextualization and recontextualization of materials and objects in these works clearly harks back to Dada and Surrealist strategies whereby additional and unplanned associations are generation by new juxtapositions. In this, the objects and spaces Bourgeois creates for them are more than illustrations of a life history and more than a making public of the private; they also allow for broader subliminal responses.’

Definition: Nachträglichkeit provides the memory, not the event, with traumatic significance and signifies a circular complementarity of both directions of time. Conceived by Freud as early as 1895 in the Project for a scientific psychology, the concept remains in his work without official status but through its character of biphasic development and latency indispensable for understanding temporal connections and psychic causality. - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17130077/

“A direct or indirect transcription of her own unblinking glimpses into the murkiest waters of the psyche.” – Robert Storr

An uncanniness, ‘a sense of unfamiliarity that appears at the heart of the familiar’

Pg 19 - ‘Emin constantly foregrounds specific events, experiences or emotions from her past, which she frames within familiar forms and materials of mass or popular culture. In doing this, she makes both her sufferings and pleasures directly accessible.

‘Rather than meeting a need to confess, the self-absorption of Emin’s work can be seen as a means by which she copes post traumatically with the cruelties and abuses of her life.’

‘My Bed’ is in the Dada tradition of the readymade – Marcel Duchamp.

Pg 22 - ‘Autobiography imagined as an unmade bed is  ‘inescapably a rumpled one – much slept in; still warm, if soiled; haunted by conspicuously absent bodies”’ - Sidonie smith and Julia Watson ‘getting a life: everyday uses of autobiography’. ‘The rumpled bed of autobiography: extravagant lives, extravagant questions’.

Pg 29 – Rachel Whiteread: ‘sculptures are essentially direct casts taken from objects – or better, the surfaces of objects that hold traces of the object’s life until being frozen in time by the casting process. Works come as close as can be to pure indexical relation.’

‘The most widely used medium in the visual arts that embodies an indexical relationship to its subject is photography.’

Personal possessions left behind after death show the traces of life.

‘Memento mori’ – the inevitability of death.

Themes of death, loss and absence.

Pg 30 - ‘The Commens Dictionary of Peirce’s Terms; www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionaryfront.html. ,Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Three types of sign, the index, the symbol and the icon, signalling various relationships between the object and its representation – the signifier and the signified. In Peirce’s scheme of things, the index is characterised by the existential relation to the object, as opposed to the symbol, which is a code that is entirely independent of the physical characteristics of the object (as in linguistic or geometric signs), and the icon which refers to analogous and purely mimetic types of representation (as in figurative art or language). The indexical sign may involve abstraction or may be heavily mimetic, but it is distinguished by the fact that the signifier retains at least something of the existential ‘having been thereness’ (Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 76-77, 85-89) of what is signified.

Mimetic definition: relating to, constituting, or habitually practising mimesis.

‘Whiteread’s casts come to this status of direct attachment to the signified, they are essentially traces off the object and not part or an extension of it. They are at the first stages of degeneracy.’

The cast separates it from the object. Neville Wakefield says: The separation is ‘synaptic’, a charged gap between the object and its cast, ‘a space of release’ and a space that is ‘heavily impregnated with memory’ through which interiority and exteriority form a two-way traffic and one which, due to the traces of lived experience captured in the casting, is as much redolent with somatic memories as with emotional associations. – Neville Wakefield, ‘Separation Anxiety and the Art of Release’, pp 77-78.

Pg 31 - ‘Signification is mediated or deferred. Memories are figured at this interface, but at the same time they are in deferral, present only in the forms of traces – not icons or symbols but indices. This space of release is a liminal space at which both the fact of the object and its representation, imaginings and associations overlay one another. As a space that is indexical, it is also dependent on the properties of the medium that determine not only the nature of the representation but also the nature of the memories that are carried by it.’

‘Whiteread’s early casts were rooted in her own formative experiences and were an attempt to capture the feel and actuality of those experience – in effect, to memorialise them through objects that were representative of the period in her life and redolent in association with it.’

‘Emin and Whiteread both chose domestic and everyday objects as their vehicles. Emin’s work are actual and present. Whiteread’s are representations that mark the absence of the object and give only surface details. The material differences have been abstracted by the transformation into a single, usually monochrome material such as plaster.’

Emin’s presents the lived-in-ness by presenting the real physical objects. Whiteread ‘gives evidence that is almost forensic in status, due to entirely to the indexical relations that govern the casting processes that she employs.’

Untitled (Yellow Bed, Two Parts) 1991, cast of the base and mattress of a divan bed in dental plaster ‘a finely ground plaster that picks up on minute detail with accuracy. The plaster reveals the creases in the mattress and absorbs some of the staining that had occurred on it, revealing forensic-like traces of its past life.’ These objects are not actually personal to Whiteread, although carry personal histories and links through her connection to them by the means of choosing them specifically and recreating them herself.

“The thing that has been there” that is no longer – something of absence. - Roland Barthes.