Ian Farr
Introduction

Blurred or out of focus or overexposed, or otherwise ‘flawed’ in innumerable ways, they (Tinchy’s secret archive of erotics and poetic prints between 1960s and late 1980s) memory-impressions we might at first want to recall as if in the bright focus of the present but learn to cherish more in the fragmentary and fragile way they are offered up to us.

…the phenomena of ‘haunting’ and the activation of memory.

…the practice of remembering or forgetting, and their effect on the possibilities of art, are the subject of this anthology. It looks at a diversity of artistic relationships to memory association, repetition and re-emergence, as well as forms of ‘active’ forgetting, ranging from re-enactments…

…but we might stop and ask: who, or what, is haunting whom?

Breton - surrealist salvage-merchant to Dada’s demolition crew - did not turn away from the notion of ‘haunting’ and thus of memory as a pathway to discovering who one is, or equally, what one’s art might be.

Rather than fixing on associations that would bring the workings of memory into conscious recollection mode…, the surrealist passes over into a different register, or ambience, of the memory-image, what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘pitfall of the imaginary’ for memory.