Archive in Flux: A Diffused Narrative of Material and Geo-History

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the spectres of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial present. Interrupting established historical narratives of colonial domination, artists have started to address the legacy of imperialism by examining the colonial archive. At work in the archive, these artists examine the possibilities of decolonialising colonial subjectivities. Through the return, recuperation, and re-enactment of archives, archival art points to the potential of forgotten pasts and unanticipated futures lingering in the imperial archive. As the articles in this volume demonstrate, such archival interventions often serve an emancipatory agenda.

Archival Science, 2002

This article is the continuation and conclusion of our introduction, as the guest editors, that appeared in the first of these two special issues of Archival Science, which together are devoted to the theme, "Archives, Records, and Power." It argues that, in performing their work, archivists follow a script that has been naturalized by the routine repetition of past practice. They act in ways that they anticipate their various audiences would desire. If archival practice is to be influenced by the postmodern ideas of the authors of the essays in these two volumes, then archivists must see that the script, stage, and audiences have changed. Theory and practice are not opposites, not even polarities, but integrated aspects of the archivist's professional role and responsibility. Transparency of process about the archivist's performance will facilitate this integration, stimulate the building of archival knowledge, and enable present and future generations to hold the profession accountable for its choices in exercising power over the making of modern memory.

Archivaria, 2001

Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives * SARAH TYACKE RÉSUMÉ L'auteure propose ici une réflexion sur quelques questions que soulèvent la culture, la critique littéraire, l'histoire et le post-modernisme pour la gestion des documents, les archives et les archivistes, d'un point de vue britannique. Cet essai se fonde sur les changements observés, au cours des dix dernières années, dans la place des archives telle que perçue dans différents pays. L'auteure soutient que les archivistes ont le rôle majeur de résoudre les tensions sociales contemporaines concernant ce qu'il faut conserver et détruire et ce qu'il convient d'ouvrir ou de restreindre, que ce soit pour le présent ou, plus important encore, pour les générations futures. Les archivistes doivent expliquer de façon claire les fondements de leurs décisions et comprendre les biais inhérents qui les sous-tendent. ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical, and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. * This is a revised version of an unrefereed article for a Festchrift. I am indebted to discussions I have had with Michael Moss, Elizabeth Hallam-Smith, and Ian Willison. In particular, they have improved my own slender knowledge of the battleground between postmodernists (or at least some) and other historians (or at least some) and drawn my attention to the work of Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2d ed. (London, 1997).

CRiSiS - 7th Biennial Conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium, 17-19 Sept. , 2020

Practices related to the archive in contemporary art in Europe have become prevalent in the last decade. The concept of the archive in contemporary art has undergone radical and experimental changes after the 1960s and 70s by affecting artists such as Hans Haacke, Goshka Macuga and Ilya Kabakov. Later on curators, institutions, audiences, memory, and the internet are also affected by archival trends and today bring out a new network of relationships. The production possibilities in archiving practices of artists in contemporary art are endless and open-ended. Artists such as Walid Raad who established the Atlas Group’ (1989-2004) project and Akram Zaatari who archived the photographic history of the Arab World commonly use documents (images, texts, objects) as a part of the artwork for many different reasons. The relationship between contemporary art and the archive presents archive materials related to artworks or other cultures and differentiates from other disciplines that utilize documents such as human rights. The archive in contemporary art has no critical function to judge the perpetrators of human rights abuses in post-conflict governments. However, it can create an open space for discussion to re-evaluate critical issues by pushing people into questioning and thinking. Thus, it can become a tool for conflict prevention and reconciliation. How do artists reactivate the archive in their archiving practices? How do the archiving practices affect actors (e.g. the effect on institutions, internet, society…)? What factors support or constrain their development? The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of archiving practices of artists and their challenges in the art environment.

PS: Political Science & Politics, (Spotlight: Archives in the History of Political Thought), 57:1, 2023

, genealogy avoids imposing a preestablished meaning on a text and instead allows meaning to emerge from the text itself. The difference between documentary and genealogical approaches, therefore, is less one of archival practices than one of orientation to documents and history. Finally, some political theorists find their archive in space, architecture, and the built environment. Built structures serve as an archive in both the traditional and metaphorical senses insofar as they are collections of artifacts to be interpreted and a medium that "shapes what is salient within our visual and auditory field, habituates us to circulate in certain ways, affects who we are likely to encounter as we go about our daily affairs, and imparts meaning to what we do together" (Bell and Zacka 2021, 2). As Bernardo Zacka suggests in his contribution, the architectural features of bureaucratic institutions can be read not only with an eye to functionality and aesthetics but also for deeper insights about competing rationalities of welfare capitalism. To reveal these insights, archival work takes the form of an immersive observation that foregrounds the situated experience of the researcher and the people inhabiting spaces. This is a simultaneously descriptive and hermeneutic ethnographic practice that "interprets [ordinary people's] interpretations of the social world" (Herzog and Zacka 2019, 764). The distinctions suggested in this Spotlight introduction among documentary, digital, genealogical, and ethnographic approaches are not intended as a comprehensive system of pure types but rather as a preliminary heuristic device that may be useful for methodological self-reflection. Along with its immense benefits, archival work also poses difficult challenges. As Nancy Luxon and Kevin Olson describe in their contributions, archives are incomplete, partial, and limited and they contain silences. How can we discern such silences and what can be inferred from them? How can we respect the foreign context of a historical document while also making it relevant for our present? Whose history and present are we concerned with exactly? What types of translation, transcription, and transposition are necessary and possible? How are we to identify what is salient for our inquiries from the mass of available data? How do features of the researcher mediate access to and engagement with the archive? Moreover, for whom is this work? How we answer these questions depends on our particular understanding of and approach to archives, as well as on the ends to which we enlist them. These brief reflections can serve as a first step toward possible answers.

2013

In his 2004 article, An Archival Impulse, Hal Foster asserts that 'archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present'. 1 Moreover, artists mediate archival material in such a way as to invite the viewer's interpretation. 2 The use of archives in contemporary art does not adhere to classifications such as those applied in institutional archives, for example, the Organisation of American States (OAS). 3 Foster further alludes to archival material as contingent, since their mediation seeks 'to probe a misplaced past, [and] to ascertain what might remain for the present.' 4 Thus, rather than merely a collection of ordered documents, the archive becomes a tool through which artists revisit the past and re-examine the role of documents in describing, for example, people and places. This becomes evident if we consider the practices of the artists Fernando Bryce (Peru) and Carlos Motta (Colombia). Both artists recontextualise the past by utilising the archive as a tool to critique power and power relations between the USA and Latin America. Through a close engagement and re-working of documents, Bryce revisits and re-examines the aims and initiatives of the OAS in his series of 44 ink drawings titled 'Américas/Americas', 2005. The artist entered the archives of the OAS and spent considerable time selecting and reproducing primary material. In this process of 'mimetic analysis', one that Bryce developed himself, he not only chose selected covers and pages of the magazine Américas, which is produced by the OAS, but also revisited the objectives inherent in the various pages of this publication between the years 1950 and 1963. Bryce assumed the role of mediator, fragmented the contents of this archive, and brought historical documents into the present in order for them to be reviewed critically. By doing so, Bryce highlighted the use of print media in the description of culture, and the promotion of economic and 1

Art Journal, 2024

The archive has been one of the most persistent buzz-words in the international artworld since the turn of the twenty-first century. While some claim that it has been used with such abandon that its usefulness is questionable at best, others view it as indicative of an important theoretical framework, necessary to make sense of some of the most important contemporary artworks and artistic practices. Several decades after the proposed “turn” to the archive, it is now possible to examine the phenomenon with the benefit of some historical distance, and ask: what was the archival turn, and is it still turning? The first part of this essay argues that an important explanation for the ubiquity of references to archives in the artworld was that elements of the notion theorized by philosophers, historians, and others lined up with a number of issues already of interest to artists and art writers. Two such intersecting interests are considered: first, the focus on institutional structures and a break with traditional forms of history, and second, a concern with critical research practices. In the essay’s second part, the author takes stock of how the archive has been rearticulated in artistic practices that deal with some of the most pressing concerns of the present moment such as the socio-political climate of post-truth; engagement with microhistories and local knowledges; looming environmental catastrophe; and current conditions of AI assisted online surveillance.

Akal/Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid, 2011

INDEX Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction 1. THE GENESIS OF THE ARCHIVAL PARADIGM The archive’s two “machines” - The provenance archive - Freud’s psychoanalytic theory as a model of the archival system. 2. THE PROTO-ARCHIVE IN LITERARY, HISTORIOGRAPHIC AND ARTISTIC PRACTICES: 1920-1939 A first approximation to the archive: Walter Benjamin’s Passages The epistemological model of Aby Warburg´s Mnemosyne-Atlas The photographic archives - Eugène Atget, pioneer in archival photography - August Sander’s photographic archives. Art and the archive: first uses -Hannah Höch: from the photomontage to the archival album. - Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp: two versions of the proto-type. 3. THE ARCHIVE, MEMORY AND CONCEPTUAL ART:1960-1989 The conceptualisation of the archive The archive and archeology: Michel Foucault The archive and reality: memory, industry, trauma. - Bernd & Hillary Becher: archive and series - Gerhard Richter: archive and atlas - Christian Boltanski: archive and trauma - Annette Messager: archive and album From the conceptual tautology to the archive as an accumulation of data - Robert Morris and Art & Language: the archive as a tautological structure. - Hanne Darboven : the encyclopedic archive - On Kawara: archiving time - Stanley Brown: the archive as measurement 4.THE ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ACCUMULATIONS: 1969-1989 Repetitive structures, inventories and classifications - John Baldessari: the archive as a montage - Douglas Huebler: the absurd archive - Ed Ruscha: the book-archive - Hans Peter Feldmann: the imaginary archive Archive and accumulation -Andy Warhol: the time capsules - Dieter Roth: an archive of waste 5. DECONSTRUCTION, CORRELATIONS AND TECHNO-CULTURAL NETWORKS:1990-2010 Jacques Derrida and “the archive fever” - The archive’s material nature - The archive’s immaterial nature Archival theories derived from Derrida - Allan Sekula: the photographic archive - Benjamin Buchloh : the anomic archive - Hal Foster: the archival impulse - Arjun Appadurai: the archive as aspiration Exhibitions on the archive - Deep Storage. Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. - Voilà. Le monde dans la tête - Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists -Archive Fever. Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art 6. THE ARCHIVE AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY: 1989-2010 Initial contributions: Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Antoni Muntadas, Vera Frenkel, Thomas Demand, Andrea Fraser Artistic typologies under the “archive fever” - Archive and ethnography: Mark Dion -Archive, archeology and photography: Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky , Zoe Leonard, Peter Piller, Joachim Schmid - The archive as text: Isidoro Valcárcel Medina - The archive, halfway between the thesaurus and the index: Pedro G. Romero, Ignasi Aballí, David Bunn - The infinite archive. The digital and virtual image: Arnold Dreyblatt, Daniel García Andújar - The meta-archive and the archive of archives: Montserrat Soto The archive´s political use and the “local memories”: Fernando Bryce, Rosangela Rennò, The Atlas Group, Francesc Abad EPILOGUE THE FUTURE ARCHIVE