Memorial Hunt - Sara | Hoagyland!

In subsection 4, page 12 of his manifesto on "separation perfected," Debord proclaims that "spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." Taking my cue from Debord, I sought a memorial for this projct that was local to campus, but detached from the lived experience of "being there"--a commemoration of a memorial mediated through images that epitomizes Debord's characterization of the modern mind as preferring the signifiers to the signifieds.

I present "Hoagyland! The Secret Life of IU's Hoagy Carmichael Statue":

 I stumbled across this blog while doing a research project about the use of social media in and around the university. A student, Tina Hanagan, maintains a wordpress account with which she documents what she terms the "secret life" of the Bronze statue of Hoagy Carmichael in the Fine Arts Plaza. Though most of the images are her own, she also accepts submissions from the general public, and has gotten quite a few, though most amount to little more than images taken from odd angles, with  instagram filters, or in the case of the above illicit additions to the tableau. I am also quite amused and intrigued by all the people who just pose with Hoagy--not because they have a particular affinity for the musician or his work, but because at the time it must seem funny or clever or cute. The seeming "realness" of the figure cast in bronze and his slumped posture and loosely curled hands seem to invite interaction. It is not uncommon when encountering the statue in real like to see the many tokens and profanities with which students have decorated him--flowers, cigarettes, funny hats, bottles of booze. They are not attempts at vandalism as much as they are offerings of a sort--an attempt to interact with this inanimate object that is a sort of "realistic artifice." Unlike those who might bring flowers or tokens to a monument commemorating another celebrity, the students seem not to be attracted to the aura of celebrity of the historical figure of Carmichael, but rather the statue itself and its association with an idea of campus life.

The blog is an extension of that "virtual interaction"--calling itself not the secret life of Hoagy Carmichael, but rather the secret life of IU's Hoagy Carmichael Statue, the photographers not only acknowledge but celebrity the divorce of the sign from its signifier. As Debord notes, "The spectacle is essentially tautological, for the simple reason that its means and its ends are identical." (Debord 15) The statue is an effigy in Roach's sense of the word, "it fills by surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original" (Roach 36) and serves as a performance of the absence of the actual historical memory of Carmichael as a person and musician associated with IU. For now it is not the memory of Carmichael that lives on through the statue, but the spectacle of forgetting, present in bronze out in the Fine Arts plaza and in the digitized expose of the Hoagy Statue's secret life.

How fitting, as Hoagy did acknowledge the evanescence of memory in his most memorable hit written here on the IU campus, the lovliness of life preserved only  in the "stardust of a song":

"Though I dream in vain In my heart it will remain My stardust melody The memory of love's refrain."