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Book review: Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory

It is important to mention that each of the sections about Balnakiel is complemented by an essay, the first one by Caterina Albano and the second by Jill Bennett, both researchers of art. These critical essays about the exhibition are delightfully written and give a detailed idea of the installation video, of Illingworth’s conceptualizations that underlie her work and also of the experience sought on the viewers. Even if these texts constitute a necessary complement to the artistic documentation of the installation, it is a pity that the book does not include an interview with the artist, like the one made by http://www.apengine.org in 2010. A document of this sort would be extremely useful and valuable for readers who have not had a first-hand experience of the installation. As Claire Bishop (2005) and Julie Reiss (2001) have claimed in their respective monographs, an art installation is conceived as a single situation which requires an embodied and active viewer – and not simply a pair of disembodied eyes, like in painting – to get its full meaning. Spectator participation is not only essential but integral to installation art, making it difficult – if not impossible, according to Arthur Danto (2001) – to write, analyse and even speak of one piece without having undergone a first-hand experience of it. It would seem from this that readers of The Watch Man/Balnakiel who have not been present at the installations would not find any pleasure or interest in reading a book whose content cannot function as a substitute, or even a reproduction of the original piece because of the key characteristic of this particular kind of art. In contrast, however, the video stills, together with the voice and sound transcripts, especially in The Watch Man, constitute an excellent choice to dislocate the readers/spectators and make them experience different perspectives and different ways of perceiving, relating to and remembering the same event, the same space. The interplay between the firstand third-person points of view, between external and internal, objective and subjective, physical and psychological suggested by the use of these two media, allows the readers/spectators to capture something of the ‘what it is like’ to attend and go through Shona Illingworth’s installations. In this sense, The Watch Man/Balnakiel constitutes not only a documentation for a specific public such as art historians but also a sort of ‘book-installation’ in itself, certainly different from the original installations, but nevertheless enjoyable for everyone interested in contemporary art, and more precisely for everyone interested in memory studies and interdisciplinary research between art and science.