An archival impulse

October

Volumn , Issue 110, 2004, Pages 3-22

  Foster, Hal ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746665203     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0162287042379847     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. At least it is to my way of thinking at a time when - artistically as much as politically - almost anything goes and almost nothing sticks. (For example, one would hardly know from the recent Whitney Biennial that there was an outrageous war abroad and a political debacle at home.) But this relative disconnection from the present might be a distinctive mode of connection to it: a "whatever" artistic culture in keeping with a "whatever" political culture. My title echoes Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Notes toward a Theory of Postmodernism," October 12 and 13 (Spring and Summer 1980)
2. as well as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive," October 88 (Spring 1999). Yet the archival impulse here is not quite allegorical à la Owens or anomic à la Buchloh; in some respects it assumes both conditions (more on which below). I want to thank the research group on archives convened by the Getty and the Clark Institutes in 2003-04, as well as audiences in Mexico City, Stanford, Berkeley, and London
3. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, vol. 1 (Milan: Charta, 2003), p. 322
4. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002)
5. Lev Manovich discusses the tension between database and narrative in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). 233-36
6. I owe the notion of "promissory notes" to Malcolm Bull. Liam Gillick describes his work as "scenario-based"; positioned in "the gap between presentation and narration," it might also be called archival. See Gillick, The Woodway (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2002)
7. Jacques Derrida uses the first pair of terms to describe opposed drives at work in the concept of the archive in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
8. Dean discusses "collection" in Tacita Dean (Barcelona: Muscu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001), and "bad combination" is the title of a 1995 work by Durant. The classic text on "the rhizome" is, of course, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), where they underscore its "principles of connection and heterogeneity": "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order" (p. 7)
9. Thomas Hirschhorn, "Interview with Okwui Enwezor," in James Rondeau and Suzanne Ghez, eds., Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), p. 32. Again, many other artists could be considered here as well, and the archival is only one aspect of the work that I do discuss
10. Indeed, its lively motivation of sources contrasts with the morbid citationality of much post-modern pastiche. See Mario Perniola, Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, trans. Christopher Woodall (London: Verso, 1995)
11. "I can say that I love them and their work unconditionally," Hirschhorn says of his commemorated figures (Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, p. 30)
12. Benjamin Buchloh provides an incisive genealogy of his work in "Cargo and Cult: The Display of Thomas Hirschhorn," Artforum (November 2001)
13. Bice Curinger, Short Guide: Into the Work of Thomas Hirschhorn (New York: Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 2002), is also helpful
14. Hirschhorn in Obrist, Interviews. 396-99
15. Hirschhorn in Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, p. 31
16. Buchloh, "Cargo and Cult," p. 114
17. I mean "minor" in the sense given the term by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). The minor is an intensive, often vernacular use of a language or form, which disrupts its official or institutional functions. Opposed to the major but not content with the marginal, it invites "collective arrangements of utterance."
18. Hirschhorn in Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, p. 32
19. Buchloh alludes to "a new type of cultural value" in "Cult and Cargo," p. 110
20. This is how Jürgen Habermas glosses the story in "Modernity - An Incomplete Project," in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 13
21. On this strategy see my "Dada Mime," October 105 (Summer 2003)
22. See Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace," October 100 (Spring 2002). Der kapitalistische Abfallkübel is the title of a 2000 work by Hirschhorn that consists of a huge wastebasket stuffed with glossy magazines. Kübel is also the word for the toilet in a prison cell (thanks to Michael Jennings for this apposite point). In a world of finance-flow and information-capital, reification is hardly opposed to liquefaction. "The sickness that the world manifests today differs from that manifested during the 1920s," André Breton already remarked over fifty years ago
23. for his recent reflections on the subject see "Politics of Utopia," New Left Review (January/February 2004). In a well-known statement Theodor Adorno once remarked of modernism and mass culture: "Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. ... Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up
24. See Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Bloch might also be an instructive reference here for his concepts of the nonsynchronous and the Utopian
25. Singular lives, those which have become, through I know not what accidents, strange poems: that is what I wanted to gather together in a sort of herbarium" (in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, eds., Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy [Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979]. 76-91)
26. Renée Green has also produced a video on Partially Buried Woodshed; see "Partially Buried," October 80 (Spring 1997). Like some of the figures commemorated by Hirschhorn, Smithson represents another unfulfilled beginning for these artists. "His work allows me a conceptual space where I can often reside," Dean comments. "It's like an incredible excitement and attraction across time; a personal repartee with another's thinking and energy communicated through their work" (ibid., p. 61). She has also cited other artists from this same general archive: Marcel Broodthaers, Bas Jan Ader, Mario Merz
27. Also helpful are the texts included in Tacita Dean: Seven Books (Paris: Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2003). "Failed futuristic visions" provide a principle of dis/connection in Hirschhorn too: "I opened possible doorways between them," he remarks of the disparate subjects honored in Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake
28. See Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940)
29. and "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1928), in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)
30. and Peter Demetz, ed., Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). "Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie," Benjamin wrote in "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (expose of 1935)
31. Sec Tacita Dean, "W. G. Sebald," October 106 (Fall 2003)
32. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998). 237, 187, 234. Dean seems closest to the Sebald of this book
33. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 1
34. On this point see Mark M. Anderson, "The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald," October 106 (Fall 2003)
35. Tacita Dean: Location (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2000), p. 25. Also romantic is the implication of a partial doubling of her failed figures with the figure of the artist
36. Michael Darling, "Sam Durant's Riddling Zones," in Darling, ed., Sam Durant (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), p. 11. Darling notes the adjacency of this universe to the subcultural worlds explored by Mike Kelley and John Miller
37. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), esp. pp. 126-31. As with the models of repression and entropy, Durant borders on parody here; in any case his archives are hardly as systematic (or high-cultural) as the ones discussed by Foucault
38. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. 130-31. "So often I am attracted to things conceived in the decade of my own birth," Dean (born in 1965) has commented; the same often holds for Durant and others of this generation
39. Darling in Sam Durant, p. 14
40. Durant: "My models are poorly built, vandalized, and fucked up. This is meant as an allegory for the damage done to architecture simply by occupying it" (ibid., p. 57)
41. See James Meyer, "Impure Thoughts: The Art of Sam Durant," Artforum (April 2000). In related pieces Durant features the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Nirvana
42. Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979). 56-57
43. Durant in Sam Durant, p. 58. Smithson also alludes to his sandbox as a grave
44. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," October 8 (Spring 1979)
45. and my Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004)
46. Two further speculations: 1. Even as archival art cannot be separated from "the memory industry" that pervades contemporary culture (state funerals, memorials, monuments ...), it suggests that this industry is amnesiac in its own way ("and the last remnants memory destroys"), and so calls out for a practice of counter-memory. 2. Archival art might also be bound up, ambiguously, even deconstructively, with an "archive reason" at large, that is, with a "society of control" in which our past actions are archived (medical records, border crossings, political involvement...) so that our present activities can be surveilled and our future behaviors predicted. This networked world docs appear both disconnected and connected - a paradoxical appearance that archival art sometimes seems to mimic (Hirschhorn displays can resemble mock World Wide Webs of information), which might also bear on its paranoia vis-à-vis an order that seems both incoherent and systemic in its power. For different accounts of different stages of such "archive reason," see Allan Sekula, "The Body as Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986)
47. and Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October 59 (Winter 1992)