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The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy
The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art.
The typewriter, the card index, and the filing 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.
Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.
Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies -- the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.
The typewriter, the card index, and the filing 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.
Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.
Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies -- the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.
- GenresArt
219 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2008
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November 18, 2008Yum!
November 20, 2010
Rodchenko put in his essay titled "Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot" (1928) that:
"The best medium for a monument to Lenin would be a papka, an office file, filled with photographic snapshots and other bureaucratic records from Lenin's file"
I know Rodchenko was one of the most genius artists in that era, but he was much more brilliant than I thought. He brought in "monumental files" of Lenin, comprised of the newspaper, the catalogue of articles, brochures and directories; and he though that's no other than Lenin. For him, that's just Lenin.
At the era of popular photography - the rise of Leica, mass amateur photos, photo-travels, amateur exhibitions etc - it seems that the aesthetic of photomontage (estrangement, shock, and intellectual alertness) showed distinct signs of exhaustion. But what about 1930 Japan, where amateur aesthetics and graphic montage came up almost coincidently as a sort of struggle to look for a new vision and visiuality? Were they incompatible, or sort of the flip side of one another? just come up with many ideas.
"The best medium for a monument to Lenin would be a papka, an office file, filled with photographic snapshots and other bureaucratic records from Lenin's file"
I know Rodchenko was one of the most genius artists in that era, but he was much more brilliant than I thought. He brought in "monumental files" of Lenin, comprised of the newspaper, the catalogue of articles, brochures and directories; and he though that's no other than Lenin. For him, that's just Lenin.
At the era of popular photography - the rise of Leica, mass amateur photos, photo-travels, amateur exhibitions etc - it seems that the aesthetic of photomontage (estrangement, shock, and intellectual alertness) showed distinct signs of exhaustion. But what about 1930 Japan, where amateur aesthetics and graphic montage came up almost coincidently as a sort of struggle to look for a new vision and visiuality? Were they incompatible, or sort of the flip side of one another? just come up with many ideas.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews