The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy
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THE BIG ARCHIVE THE BIG ARCHIVE art from bureaucracy sven spieker THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Filosofi a and Helvetica Neue by Graphic Composition. Printed and bound in Spain. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Spieker, Sven. The big archive : art from bureaucracy / Sven Spieker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 262- 19570- 6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Art, Modern—20th century. 2. Collective memory. 3. Art and history. I. Title. N6490.S646 2008 709.04—dc22 2007039872 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii 1 INTRODUCTION 1 SIXTEEN ROPES ix 2 1881 17 Ilya Kabakov MATTERS OF PROVENANCE (PICKING UP AFTER HEGEL) 3 FREUD’S FILES 35 Sigmund Freud 4 1913 51 “DU HASARD EN CONSERVE”: DUCHAMP’S ANEMIC ARCHIVES Marcel Duchamp 5 1924 85 THE BUREAUCRACY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS (EARLY SURREALISM) André Breton Max Ernst Le Corbusier 6 AROUND 1925 105 THE BODY IN THE MUSEUM El Lissitzky Sergei Eisenstein 7 1970–2000 131 ARCHIVE, DATABASE, PHOTOGRAPHY Hans- Peter Feldmann Susan Hiller Gerhard Richter Walid Raad Boris Mikhailov Epilogue 193 Thomas Demand 8 THE ARCHIVE AT PLAY 173 Michael Fehr Notes 195 Andrea Fraser Susan Hiller Index 217 Sophie Calle Acknowledgments Over the years this project has been in the making, I have incurred debt of all sorts with many friends and colleagues. Finally, I want to thank at least some of them. Russell Coon, Martha Buskirk, Michael Fehr, Maria Gough, and Walid Raad kindly read portions of the book and shared their opinions. I thank Elisabeth Weber, Ann Adams, Bruce Robertson, Laurie Monahan, Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Mai Wegener, Richard Polt, Bernhard Dotzler, Louis- Philippe Martim, Wolf Kittler, Michael Molnar, Jackie SpaVord, Igor Smirnov, Wolfgang Ernst, Marco Codebò, and my colleagues on the ARTMargins editorial board who shared their knowledge and time. At the MIT Press, Roger Conover saw merit in this project at an early stage and accompanied its completion with warmth and critical curiosity. Also at the Press, Marc Lowenthal answered my e- mails faster than I could even send them, and Paula Woolley and Matthew Abbate ed- ited the manuscript with great precision. I thank Margarita Encomienda for her masterful design of this book. Two anonymous reviewers helped me rethink parts of the book in unexpected ways. (I now know that they were Ulrich Baer and Rubén Gallo, and I thank them warmly.) My students in two graduate semi- nars on archives in twentieth- century art put my ideas to a rigorous test at an early stage, and an international conference on art and archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara (“Packrats and Bureaucrats: Study in the Archive”) brought together artists and scholars whose work was crucial to the project. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris and Vita Mikhailov, Andrea Fraser, Susan Hiller, Walid Raad, Michael Fehr, Markus Krajewski, James Putnam, Richard Polt, and Sally Smith kindly shared reproductions of their work or opened their collec- tions. For his dedication to securing images and the rights to their reproduction I thank Will Scilacci. My project benefi ted greatly from two fellowships, one at the Stanford Humanities Center and the other at Berlin’s Literaturzentrum. I am grateful to the staV of ucsb’s History of Art and Architecture department and the Comparative Literature Program / Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies for their help with many critical tasks. Without a grant from ucsb’s Academic Senate I would not have been able to recover the considerable cost of image reproduction. As always, thanks go to Russell E. Coon for his unwavering support and sustained aVection. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii SIXTEEN ROPES Ilya Kabakov IN ILYA KABAKOV’S INSTALLATION SIXTEEN ROPES (1984), NUMEROUS PIECES OF GARBAGE DANGLE AT REGULAR INTERVALS, ROUGHLY AT EYE LEVEL, FROM SIXTEEN PARALLEL ROPES THAT ARE SUSPENDED A METER AND A HALF FROM EACH OTHER AND THE SAME DISTANCE FROM THE FLOOR. Written labels attached to the objects by pieces of string contain text and fragments of phrases. (“Look what we took out of the library!” “We’ll read it this evening.”) Although it may not be immediately apparent, Sixteen Ropes represents an archive. In fact, such “stringing up” of objects was one of the most ancient forms of fi ling, and the English word “fi le,” which is derived from the French fi l (string), originally meant “to line something up on a piece of string.” The question posed by Sixteen Ropes, then, is whether its strings can deliver what archives promise us, a sense of (and in) time. Archives contain paperwork that no longer circulates in the bureaucracy, paperwork that has lapsed and become garbage. The crux of Sixteen Ropes is the way in which it provides garbage in a literal sense—from cigarette butts to wrappers, SIXTEEN ROPES ix scraps of paper, and railway tickets—with the archive’s formal trappings, such as strings, labels, ropes, knots, and written words, all functioning to tame the trash by turning it into documents of culture and history. The most important of the tools designed to bring about this conversion, the horizontal ropes and the ver- tical strings to which the labels are attached, form a three- dimensional grid on which the suspended garbage is caught. But can this formal grid suYciently re- duce the heterogeneity of the trash, its utter diVerence, so that a coherent story, and hence history, can emerge? 0.1 Ilya Kabakov, Sixteen Ropes (1984 installation). Watercolor and pen on paper (1993). Courtesy Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. x THE BIG ARCHIVE The other question Kabakov’s installation poses, a question that is perhaps even more insistent than the fi rst and even more diYcult to answer, is whether we ought to think of this grid, ideally empty and exempt from time, as preceding the trash that is caught in it, or conversely whether the garbage dangling from the ropes precedes the grid that organizes it. A third possibility, the one explored in this book, is that the grid and its trash, the archive and what it stores, emerge at the same time so that one cannot easily be subtracted from the other. In this archive, the objects stored and the principles that organize them are exempt neither from time nor from the presence of the spectator. Never quite selfsame, the archive oscillates between embodiment and disembodiment, composition and decomposition, organization and chaos. Using a term from cybernetics, we could describe Kabakov’s overlaying of 1 trash with a grid as a form of feedback. “Feedback” describes a self-regulating system’s ability to control its output through internal control mechanisms with- out interrupting its activity. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, famously (and problematically) extended the term to contexts that had little or nothing to do with machines, especially to the problem of historical awareness. While the East Coast American Wiener believed that the historical consciousness of New Englanders took the form of class consciousness, he thought that in more recently settled areas such as the Midwest historical consciousness could result only from feedback: When a Yankee basketmaker will show you in his shed the tools which his great grandfather forged from bog iron and which he learned to use after the custom of the Indian to split the annual rings of the red ash and make his splints, he will do so with a guileless sense of the contemporaneity of the past, which is very far removed from the pride of the New England aris- tocrat in his genealogy. His past lies in his barn with its bins, its tools and 2 its baskets. In this example, the basketmaker derives feedback from the collection of family tools that alleviates his lack of historical (class) consciousness, allowing him to extend his life in a backward direction. However, crucially (and unnoticed by Wiener), this feedback has as its prerequisite not only the collected objects themselves but also the living voice of the basketmaker who shows the visitor his SIXTEEN ROPES xi ancestors’ tools, matching words with things, and who guarantees the authenticity of this match through his presence in the barn. In Sixteen Ropes, the living voice has been replaced by the written labels, in 3 themselves nothing but trash, that are attached to the pieces of garbage. These labels may imitate living voices, but they fail to connect with their objects in any meaningful way. On some labels we read what sounds like written voice record- ings (“and I thought he would call before leaving”), sometimes in the form of an 4 obscenity. Where in Wiener’s example successful feedback is predicated upon the presence of the basketmaker- collector who authoritatively connects the objects in the barn with the daily practice of which they were once a part, in Kabakov’s installation the archive itself takes over the function of the basket- maker’s voice, refracting it into myriads of more or less incoherent written labels that fail resoundingly to connect words with things. The switch inherent in this operation—from the living voice to the archival medium of writing—makes all the diVer ence.