Confused Forces: The Tree, Living Memory in Twenty-First Century Art

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article concerns the way in which a perceptual shock caused by a tree can constitute an event for artists, to the point of motivating the project and then the production of a work. In other words, the issue is to analyze how the encounter with certain alive or dead trees, whether physical or through a medium/reported, can determine a creative process in which memory plays an important role. The analysis will be carried out through two works in progress that are very different in their conception as well as in their means of production (the “Beuys’ acorns” project by the artist couple Ackroyd and Harvey and a personal project entitled “Forces confuses”). Various conceptual tools from psychoanalytical theory, anthropology, sociology, phenomenology of perception, theory of memory, and art history structure the case studies; these define a specific relationship between the life of forms and forms of life, linked in the experience of these works, in relation to the aesthetic, ecological, and sociopolitical context of the beginning of the twenty-first century.