The Contingency of the Void: Archive as Hallucination

International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science, 2015

The will to archive continues to be a powerful impulse in contemporary culture (Featherstone 2006). This literature review critically reflects on literature on the topic of the Archive and the engagement of contemporary artists with ideas about archives and archive-making, including the author's concept of the future archive. A refrain heard in the course of this review was a contemporary preoccupation with memory, particularly with the advent of a possible new age of forgetting as global digital connectivity promotes an unprecedented externalisation of personal and social memory into the virtual memory spaces of the Internet. Selective artistic responses entering and exploring this site of ephemeral potential and emergent creativity are introduced. Publication: 2015, International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science | KEYWORDS: Archive, contemporary art, forgetting, counter-archive, material trace, sound archive, ephemerality, future archive

But because archive-based art essentially reuses physical traces, the extent to which much of it truly and fundamentally threatens the ubiquitous power of the archive is questionable. While it provides a much-needed counter memory and plays an essential role in analyzing historical discourse, questioning problematic representations and attracting the spectator’s attention to illusions of credibility and completeness, it simultaneously asserts the power of the archive by positioning itself in relation to it, dwelling within its aesthetic, and reacting to its narratives.

Photography and Culture, 2008

Archivaria, 2009

Dans les centres d'archives, les objets sont souvent séparés physiquement et intellectuellement des documents textuels et visuels, même quand ils font partie d'une grande acquisition de documents d'archives. Cependant, les objets, comme les autres documents, ont une valeur de témoignage et peuvent être « lus » dans leur contexte de création. Ce texte se sert d'une collection d'objets spécifique -la Magic Box [Boîte magique] de l'artiste-auteur David Wojnarowicz, qui fait partie des ses documents conservés à la New York University Fales Library and Special Collections Downtown Collection -afin d'examiner comment la présence d'objets dans des fonds d'archives complique des concepts archivistiques comme la provenance, le contexte, la description et l'enregistrement. En se servant d'un exemple concret d'une collec tion d'objets dans un fonds d'archives, ainsi que des textes du créateur de cette collec tion et des écrits théoriques provenant de l'extérieur de la discipline archivistique, ce texte explore comment un nouvel examen de la place des objets aux archives peut mener à une meilleure connaissance de la double valeur symbolique et matérielle de tout document d'archives. ABSTRACT In archives, objects are often both physically and intellectually separated from textual and visual materials, even when they arrive as part of a larger manuscript or archival collection. But like other documents, objects are inscribed and can be "read" within the context of their creation. This essay uses a particular collection of objects -the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz's Magic Box, which is part of his papers housed in the New York University Fales Library and Special Collections Downtown Collection -to examine how archival concepts such as provenance, context, description, and inscription are complicated by the presence of objects in archives. By looking at the case of an actual object collection in archives, along with both the writings of its creator and theoretical writings outside the field of archives, this essay asks how a re-examination of the role of objects in archives can contribute to our understandings of the dual symbolic and material value of all archival documents. Most archives house three-dimensional objects, and yet the status of these objects is often ambiguous. Frequently, archivists separate objects both physically and intellectually from textual or visual materials, even when they arrive as part of a larger fonds. To arrange and describe objects as something distinct from documents is to implicitly claim that they do not play a role

Archives and Records, 2019

I n archive fever, one of the most well-known lectures on archives, Jacques Derrida argues that " even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could do neither without substance nor without residence. " 1 By looking at the relationships between art and archives, the articles in this issue of Dibur discuss the role that literature and cinema play today in being a residency for archives and in providing a space for selecting and reflecting on the archive's substance. The articles explore how art interacts with archives, the nature of the relationship between archive, memory, and oblivion, and how literary works and films can themselves become a kind of archive and, by so doing, serve as a space for reflecting on the archive as a concept. We ask how literature and film question the historical and fictional aspects of the archive, its hermeneutic, its preservation versus its construction of narratives. We look at the intersection between art and archive as a productive space for playing with the dynamics between voicing and silencing, past and becoming, singular and collective, oblivion and focaliza-tion, and much more. This issue raises questions such as the extent to which the act of archiving serves as a way to slow down oblivion or even to censor. And are there forbidden archives and hidden archives that can appear only through works of fiction? Thinking of archives through art allows us to rethink the nature and genre of the archive, which may be especially useful at a time when the residency of archives is shifting away from physical dwellings to digitized spaces. It might help with new attempts to understand the

Leeds: The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, 2009

2020

The following thesis surveys artistic utilizations of the archive and underscores its role as a tool for knowledge disruption. Fluctuating between theoretical meanderings, autobiographical reflections, and the analysis of artwork, I propose one avenue in which to reinvigorate conversations around the archive began by Derrida in Archive Fever and by Hal Foster in “Archival Impulse.” Approaching the archive as both a theoretical container and as a charged artist medium, I argue for a new archival impulse — one that embraces opaqueness and mess over clarity and order. Comprised of eight individual sections, and a parallel dialogue presented in the form of extended footnotes, the thesis borrows formal and stylistic strategies from arenas of creative non-fiction, diaristic writing, and art historical analysis. Archive scholars — Derrida, Foster, Michel Foucault, Annet Dekker — are cross-examined with thinkers in fields of queer theory, ecology, art history, philosophy, media studies, per...

With the invitation to participate in the series "Untitled" at the Berardo Museum in Lisbon, I was asked to gather together a body of work from the collection that would cohere thematically. In this short book, I bring together the work of a few artists from this collection, in an attempt to probe what has come to be called "the archival turn" in contemporay art. I was able to explore this theme much more broadly in the exhibition I curated in the same museum, Between Memory and Archive, 2013.

Archival Science, 2009

Humanities award, the conference was part of the ongoing Investigating the Archive project which was established to examine the role and nature of archives and the debates surrounding their selection, application and interpretation. The project aims at promoting interdisciplinary scholarship on research into the construction, representation and use of archives, examining the theoretical issues inherent in their preservation and interpretation in all formats. Two other interdisciplinary conferences have been held during the first phase of the project: A Triangular Traffic: Literature, Slavery and the Archive , which considered the literary/archival and creative and scholarly work in literature, grounded in archival research; and Media, Migration, Archive (2008), which examined the issues surrounding the use of photographic collections, both practically and theoretically. The second of these brought together archivists and theorists from a variety of disciplines for discussions relating to historical context, method and policy in the context of the empirical investigation of photography's archival presence. Two workshops, 'Across the Divide: Interdisciplinary Dialogues on the Archive' and 'Archives and Publics' sustained the interrogative and self-reflexive methodological critiques brought to light during the conferences.