Armando: Shaping Memory by Ernst van Alphen

For almost fifty years the Dutch multimedia artist and author Armando has been presenting his poems, prose, paintings, sculpture, film, theatre and musical performances to an always-intrigued public. In the 50s and 60s Armando was involved with experimental literary magazines and innovative movements in the visual arts. In 1979 he moved to Berlin, where his art became increasingly dominated by the theme of World War II--since then both his literary and visual works have been read as autobiographical, relating to a youth spent under German occupation. In Shaping Memory , art and comparative literature scholar Ernst van Alphen undertakes an expansive and revelatory exegesis of Armando's multidisciplinary work--treating the artist's oeuvre as an indivisible whole, van Alphen shows how Armando's themes of faltering memory and the passage of time find entirely different expressions in each discipline. Beautifully and intelligently presented in both text and image, Shaping Memory is a comprehensive look at the artist that places his work in an art-historical and literary context.