SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

THE ROLE OF MEMORY IN CULTURE
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Rutgers University
I begin this writing inspired by an esthetic insight from my study of divination, from ancient
Tibetan palmistry and Chinese face reading, that I have for many years now applied to art: That
my art works like the palms of my hand are a kind of memory that speaks of my “Nature” and
“Nurture,” even revealing the alchemy of my genetic potential, revealing who I am, my
thoughts, my feelings and history as a human being. It is an esthetic that bridges my emotional,
bodyfelt and abstract cognition in memory, an esthetic within which the marks, bridges, creases
and scars of my palms like all the drawing marks, color and textures of my art work similarly
contain embedded memory of my imperfections and contradictions, memory of my hopes,
successes and failures, memory of feelings that so often contradict my memory of fact. Of
course this esthetic has always posed complicated question, such as if my art is embeddedmemory
is my memory an embedded art, and if so does the process of one reveal the process of
the other.
It is out of a desire to answer the endless questions that lie buried in this esthetic, to
understand its meaning in cognition that I search cognitive science itself and share the research
with you. Thinking it would be simple, it was not, each answer led me to yet other questions.
Such as what are the origins of memory and art? What was the relation in kind and process, to
memory and art, of the bio-brain system-developments and resulting cognition, within the
various stages of our evolution as a species? What is the relation of remembering and the
documenting of remembrance in each of those stages of our evolution as a species? How does
memory and therefore art assert itself beyond an individuals remembering to others? How did
our species come to distinguish between the real and the imagined, between the self and the
other, in memory, cognition and art? What is their relation to each other? What role does
memory and therefore art play in the construction and de-construction of ones personal, and
ones larger social culture and tradition? And the question the answer to which for me as an
artist and artist-educator is of special importance: How does memory, its kind and process in
cognition and therefore process of embedded meaning, the art inherent to all processing of
information, contribute to or inhibit realization and expression of the memory and cognition
inherent to each of our species stages of bio-brain system evolution?
Endel Tulvil in The New Cognitive Neuroscience states that memory is the capacity of nervous
systems to benefit from experience, which reaches its culmination in human beings. He states
that it is a vast domain with a vast diversity. There are kinds of memory, tasks, kinds of memory
process and memory systems. Memory he states is best understood as we understand observable
behavior and reportable experience, as we understand the relation between brain and behavior,
between brain and mind.
Its important to remember that memory is cognition and that the various kinds of cognition
produce various kinds of memory, each with their own degree of veracity. We must also not
forget to remember that the various kinds of memory each within there various degrees of
veracity serve the potential in cognition of a bio-brain system, or suppress its potential in
cognition. Further we must not forget to remember that within evolution, our species various
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