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Memoriae Damnatio 1989
Acrylic on plywood
49 × 16 in. / 124 x 41 cm | Frame 51 x 17 in. / 130 x 43 cm
Signed Rene Ricard lower edge in paint
Memoriae Damnatio / On his succession each Pharaoh erased the traces of his predecessor. Inferior artists are truly puzzled at another artist’s success, obsessively analyze other’s success in terms of their own failure. What if all the bad artists got together and killed all the successful ones?
Memoriae Damnatio is a Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory” or “damnation of memory”, indicating that someone is to be excluded from official historical accounts. Ricard used the expression in his seminal essay “The Radiant Child” to describe the palimpsest of graffiti-adorned subway cars: “…trains get buffed (the damnatio memoriae of the Transit Authority)…”
Ancient Egypt’s radical pharaoh Akhenaten was purged from history when his monuments and statues were destroyed by his son. His existence was only re-discovered in the late 19th century. Ricard’s tongue-in-cheek poem imagines a similar fate for successful artists, erased by a mob of hacks, though a short search of Artforum’s archives reveals that time has rendered obscure many of the well-known names of his era.
Ricard chose a length of plywood as the found-object canvas and a stark palette of white, green and black. The dimensions recall a stone tablet or grave marker, a reminder that history–and one’s own legacy–are fallible constructs, vulnerable to redaction.