As with many contemporary thinkers, Eisenman rejects the redemptive notion of collective memory and its unexamined links to the sacred, which unite its celebrants in a reassuring cult of remembrance. Memorials, Eisenman has noted, are not about memory but about nostalgia. (Ester da Costa Meyer, -Speak, Memory- on Peter Eisenmans Holocaust Memorial, Artforum, January 2006)
In reading the entire article about a year ago, I first came to notion of Eisenmans work in Berlin. Seeing it at first I felt awed by the visual impact it left, and after giving it more attention, it felt very close to my field of interest. First, the way of representing. I said earlier how I am trying to find new ways to represent. I wouldn't go so far to speak of any new ideas in theory or praksis, nevertheless I do find it puzzling, difficult, joyous and hard to deal with the idea of how to cloak old things with my own cape. To use them in my benefit. To take that serious stuff, anything, take your pick, Beuys, Bonnie Billy, Mike Kelley or Mike Patton, Hemingway or John Currin.How would the things they howled about all sound like if I was the one howling. With my own tools and voice that is of course. I also sense the danger in this and be that as it may that eclecticism is one thing and one's authentic research another. I believe individual need to make something happen is most sublime force and that all the work that stuck, were made out of sheer need to do them.
Second, as Eisenman noted that it is not about memory but about nostalgia. One thing in the North paintings I wanted, and I feel it close with me all the time, could unfairly be called by that word nostalgia . Unfairly because nostalgia has that tacky slightly pathetic sound to it. The better word is Portuguese saudade which translates as the as an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul. Nick Cave in his lecture -The Secret Life of Love Song- tempts to shed some light on this particular feel and speaks of Federigo Garcia Lorca coining the term duende which as he describes it is that certain feel that everybody has, but lacks closer definition or explanation. I have felt it close since I can remember, and it it haunted me as most dominant aim throughout anything I produced.