The Eiffel Tower wasn’t a popular piece back in the day and was only meant to be up for the expo. People got used to it and quite attached and in the end didn’t want it knocked down. One fellow went to the Eiffel Tower every day to have his lunch, he hated it that much that he did this as he remarked that it was the only place he could have lunch and not have to look at the Eiffel Tower. It was used as a radio mast but it didn’t need to look like that and so took on a useless function. Symbolic power of something. What the Eiffel tower has become is a ritual, a ritual to go up to the top of it to see the views of Paris. Las Vegas, Paris, Venis + gambling, it’s what it generates and produces not the thing itself. Blackpool tower was modelled on the Eiffel Tower but it wraps buildings around it in the form of amusement arcades as it cannot exist on it’s own.
Rodchenko’s tower design - overly literal, overly determined. Material, functional, symbolic. Important in sights of memory, embed memory - how these things come together, they have to co-exist at the same time. Memory and history interact, the creation of memory. Overdetermined because of this interaction.
Rachel Whiteread memorial - temporary and eternal at the same time. memorials preserving, immortalise death. What happens around that? One artist (annoyingly can’t remember who) created an art piece which was a blank memorial. This didn’t matter that it was blank as it was symbolic, people still attached memorials to it, it’s the symbolic language of things. Automatically geared to inscribed things onto the surface of things.
Events themselves are not as important in terms of memory, its what attached itself to the event, i.e. the memorial.
memory - sights
history - events
Barthes writing a biography, not an autobiography for himself. Biographine, made up of fragments, his choice for images was a treat to himself.
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