Storm Jameson: artist, activist, and "Cassandra".
Studies in the Humanities › Vol. 35 Nbr. 2, December 2008
Linked as:
Extract
Storm Jameson: artist, activist, and "Cassandra".
The fate of artists like Storm Jameson (1891-1986) recalls Chaucer's House of Fame, where, depending on the prevailing wind, the names of people inscribed on different sides of a rock are clearly visible or obscured: her name would be one of those covered with moss. For, as Walter Benjamin writes in 1940, "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (Illuminations 247). Thomas Sutcliffe, developing Benjamin's contention further, argues pertinently:
For countless reasons unconnected with inherent talent one artist will blossom into florid and propagated reputation while another withers and is forgotten.... We're inclined to select the works that point interestingly towards us--our judgments and our concerns--and ignore those that don't. And because such choices further cement reputations (and generate "influence"--by which contingent success comes to seem something destined and ineluctable) they help to mask the truth of a period's culture--which is always more variable and contradictory than we remember. (Independent 23) The result, he concludes, is a kind of "sustained cultural amnesia" which needs to be challenged to "usefully remind us how vulnerable our current certainties are" (Independent 23). Certainly, Storm Jameson's is one of the voices that challenge the "cultural amnesia" Sutcliffe deplores, and she also demonstrate...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
