From Between Artists, Some Thoughts on Memory by Allan McCollum

Allan McCollum: 40 Plaster Surrogates

“It seems to me if we didn’t have artifacts to remind us about the past, everything would disappear. We would be living in the continual present all the time. The only way we have any sense of the past is through artifacts, or memories — if memories can be called artifacts. We either have inner representations or outer representations, but we don’t have any actual experience of the past. We can have wonderful representations of the past, voluptuous and emotionally charged representations of the past, but they’re always going to be just representations and stories.”

“The awareness of time falls into that category of other things that we push out of our consciousnesses, like sexuality, violence, death, and so forth. And we save objects which seem to me to allow us to dwell on this only when we feel like it. Or we create archives that we visit to look at these things on special occasions.”
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