The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy
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The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive’s content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp’s “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.
Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
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Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, and taking its title from Jacques Derrida's book of the same name, Archive Fever gathers leading contemporary artists who use archival materials in the fabrication of their work. The works take many forms, including physical archives arranged by bizarre cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums and photomontages composed from historical photographs. These images offer a wide-ranging subject matter, but are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.
The Archive (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)
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In the modern era, the archive -- official or personal -- has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored, and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields as anthropology, critical theory, history, and, especially, recent art. Traces and testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration of the authority given the archive -- no longer viewed as a neutral, transparent site of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself.
Disassembling the Archive
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Exceptionally well designed, engaging and mysterious, Disassembling the Archive is a quasi-fictional correspondence with the Amsterdam-based, Indonesia-born artist Fiona Tan. It departs from interpretations of postcolonial identity issues in Tan's work to trace the implications of the archival housing of photographs and moving images. By way of a detour through Siegfried Kracrauer's writing on photography and Jacques Derrida's writing on the Freudian impression, we witness--right before our eyes--the disintegrative and destructive effect of photography on the archive.
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