A head full of (scattered) gold
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, “Allegro”, 1908
I have a photographic memory.
Seeing a face once is enough to remember it for a long time… seeing an artwork once is enough to store it in my memory, relate it with other artworks, recall it when I see something similar. Having studied Archeology for 5 years and Art History for just as many, means that in my brain I have stored thousands of art images, from prehistoric times until contemporary artworks. But…
All the words are gone. Sometimes it’s impossible to remember names and details.
That kind of memory is the worst kind you can have in our days. Because if you remember the name, you can look up for the image in Google. But you cannot enter the image that you have in mind in a search engine in order to get the missing details.
When technology fails, there’s only one thing you can do: ask for help! Like today, that I described to my sister the exact place where I had seen an image (book, chapter, page) about 5 years ago, so that she could find the book and give me the details. And these are the words that were missing from my memory: Allegro by Ciurlionis.
Hopefully it will turn out to be useful for the text I have in mind 
P.S. I got my title from an album by Trypes, “A head full of Gold”, because this is how I feel sometimes: that my education has given me a head full of gold -images of the artistic production of many cultures and centuries- that I often feel unable to use…
Filed under: Contemporary art | 1 Comment
I feel the same or even worse ! I’ve been in contact with so much things, reading so much books, and it seems out of my reach when I want to… but sometimes I’m lucky and something comes out of this mess that is in my head !