18 and half minutes is part of a group of works that explore the concept of Social Amnesia and the politics behind memory through research and visual representation. During the research I came across the infamous case of the tape where a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, was abruptly erased for 18 and half minutes. This removal of information caught my attention because it illustrated an explicit intervention in collective memory. In the transcripts of the Watergate trial found in the Nixon Presidential Library Archives the explanations as to why this gap occurred, differ greatly. Nixon told the grand jury that his secretary, Rose Woods, had told him that she had damaged the recording but only briefly. Then the former president said that General Alexander Haig, his security adviser, informed him that 18 and half minutes of conversation had been erased from the tape. Further in the transcripts he suggests that the taping machine had malfunctioned. In another version Woods says that the president came into the room and began “pushing the buttons back and forth” and in a testimony in November 1973, she denied responsibility: “The buttons said on and off, forward and backward. I caught on to that fairly fast. I don’t think I’m so stupid as to erase what’s on a tape”.
Although we will never know what was said in that room, nor the true circumstances of the tape’s erasure, the 18 and half minutes of white noise nevertheless say a lot. They reflect a deliberate attempt to modify the record of events and symbolize the significance of erasure and gaps in the construction of History.
With this research in mind and with the actual static on the tape I made a prototype for a public sculpture to remember this event and to symbolize the many things that go unsaid in history.
Sound, desk, and sculpture
All rights reserved, Raul Ortega Ayala
[Bio c. 2014] Raul Ortega Ayala is a British/Mexican artist. He studied Visual Arts in Mexico City and then a Master in Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Art —in combination with Hunter College in New York, from which he graduated in 2003. He then moved to London, where he worked for 5 years on various projects and returned to Mexico in 2009 where he currently lives and works.
The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera is a thematic reflection on the archive and its discontents. Washington’s identity as the seat of American political power is amplified through its role as the locus of its own memorialization. Where there is history, there is haunting. By drawing on the archive’s unnerving, uncanny, and ephemeral specters, this exhibition is an effort to re-imagine and reposition archives as sites which not only have the capacity to produce and contest historical memory, but also generate significant gaps and blind spots.