Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection

This book investigates the role that the visual and performing arts play in our experience and understanding of the past. Expanding upon longstanding concerns in cultural history about the relation of text and image, the book highlights the distinction between enactive and cognitive memory and the implications of this for artists and their publics.

Richard Cándida Smith is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the Director of the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library. He focuses on the modern intellectual and cultural history of the arts. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (1995) and Mallarmé’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (1999).