Between Memory and Document: the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art UNTITLED N.º 6

Ruth Rosengarten Between Memory and Document: The Archival Turn in Contemporary Art UNTITLED N.º 6

Between Memory and Document: The Archival Turn in Contemporary Art Author Ruth Rosengarten Artistic Director Pedro Lapa Editorial Coordination Clara Távora Vilar Nuno Ferreira de Carvalho Graphic Design R2

Digital book. 1st edition: May, 2012 ISBN 978-989-8239-34-1

Museu Coleção Berardo Praça do Império. 1449-003 Lisboa. Portugal + 351 213 612 878 [email protected]

Contents

Foreword Prologue The Photograph and the Archive: Theory in Practice The Archive and the Photograph The Archival Turn The Archival Turn: Specimen Cases from the Berardo Collection The Mobile Archive: The Artist as Travelling Salesman The Archive of Anonymous Structures A Metonymic Relic and Objects of Attention Closely Lavished The Archive of Intimate and Historical Knowledge Selected Works from the Berardo Collection Marcel Duchamp Vito Acconci Helena Almeida Bernd e Hilla Becher Christian Boltanski Anselm Kiefer Hiroshi Sugimoto Tracy Moffat Daniel Blaufuks

There is a story told about the war criminal Ratko Mladic, who spent months shelling Sarajevo from the surrounding hills. Once he noticed an acquaintance’s house in the next target. The general telephoned his acquaintance and informed him that he was giving him five minutes to collect his ‘albums’, because he had decided to blow the house up. When he said ‘albums’, the murderer meant the albums of family photographs. The general, who had been destroying the city for months, knew precisely how to annihilate memory. That is why he ‘generously’ bestowed on his acquaintance life with the right to remembrance. Bare life and a few family photographs. Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

He orders Gapka to bring two melons, and immediately cuts them himself, collects the seeds in a paper, and beings to eat. Then he orders Gapka to fetch the ink-bottle, and with his own hand, writes this inscription on the paper of seeds: ‘These melons were eaten on such and such a date.’ If there was a guest present, then it reads: ‘Such and such a person assisted.’ Nikolai Gogol, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikoforovich. Prologue

The invitation to participate in the series Untitled organised by the Museu Coleção Berardo, was a welcome one. Being given, so to speak, the freedom of the collection, I was delighted to be able to pick my way through works accumu- lated over the years. The delight was not unrelated to a form of laziness, for such curatorship of a virtual exhibition bears none of the practical burdens and pains, not to mention the expenses, of curating an exhibition in a real location. But if, by dint of these advantages and limitations, I have not been granted the pleasure of experiencing these works in dialogue with one another, I have also been curtailed by a further condition: I live in England, I am writing this at home, and therefore cannot nip out to see the works I will have considered for selection. Because of this handicap, I am not able to entertain that form of close observation that would be afforded me with a material and temporal exposure to the works. Painting – of which some exuberant practices of the 1990s tempted me – was of course immediately ruled out, photography quickly presenting itself as the most obvious choice of topic, for being more easily reproduced and potentially infinitely reproducible. The practical reasons for the obviousness of such a topic were supported, too, by the vagaries of my own practice, in which I have been veering towards the photographic (and its reinventions in other media) over the past few years, both in theory and in practice. I have been particularly interested in the earlier deploy- ments of photography both as mnemonic triggers and as testimonials of presence. Digital photography, with all the advantages it offers, has nevertheless put paid to these initial uses of photographs, artefacts that are now as wrapped in nostalgia as any obsolete, handcrafted relic. But of course, other than presenting themselves as photographic images, the works were given to me in a particular order, the various strands of the collection being laid out as an online archive, where works could be accessed either through the broader category of ‘artistic movement,’ or by consulting the name of the artist in an alphabetic listing. In the best possible way, curating this hypothetical exhibition would also be a form of mining an already existent archive. So although the two are always interlinked in museological contexts, in this virtual form, collection and archive had been seamlessly and effortless elided, the one collapsed into the other. Now, I have always been obsessed with matters archival: the question of how to sort, file, keep and access information, and what form that material might take when it was consulted in the future, has seemed to me of primordial import. It so affects how material might avail itself to the forgetful mind grappling for the right word, or the related concept, that sometimes it seems to me that much of what I do occurs in the undergrowth of visible production. For each essay written, or body of work produced in the studio, there has been a desk cleared; a new method of tidying and sorting essayed; some box files purchased or, latterly, a computer application taken on board. Moreover, believing inherently in the subliminal work that occurs in the prepara- tion for the writing of a text, it was with the clarity of the obvious that something that linked ‘the photographic’ and ‘the archival’ should have presented itself to me, not only as the means of writing this text, but also as its subject. There were numerous works in the collection that presented themselves as candidates, and those included photographic works made as quasi-archival records of, or studies for, actions (Vito Acconci [fig. 2], Helena Almeida [fig. 3], Hamish Fulton, Ana Mendieta), as well as archivally based work that manifestly contested the notion of photography as unmediated evidence (Tracy Moffat [fig. 12], Vivan Sundaram, John Hilliard), some of it stretching the photographic beyond the certainties offered by recognisability (José Luís Neto). The works I have selected are few, and they plot a particular trajectory, beginning with Marcel Duchamp, whose Boîte en valise [Box in a Suitcase] (1935-1941), though standing out as an odd inclusion in relation to the other works I have chosen, provides a necessary structural and art- historical foundation. The inclusion of a single non-photographic work by Anselm Kiefer serves as a counterpoint that, I hope, will prove meaningful in context. THE PHOTOGRAPH AND THE ARCHIVE:

THEORY IN PRACTICE The Archive and the Photograph

The historical links between photography and the archive have not only been widely and critically chron- icled, they have also been embodied and performed in various practices, often visionary enterprises of early and late (or post) modernism in art, literature, and their areas of overlap: from Aby Warburg’s prescient Mne- mosyne-Atlas (1924-1929), through the monumental and incomplete project of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades (1927-1940), W.G. Sebald’s archival imaginary and his use of photography as the site of commerce with the dead, to Gerhard Richter’s heterogeneous Atlas (begun in 1964), with its aspiration towards ‘comprehensive totality’1 and its (definitional) ‘devastation of that promise.’2 The edges that are blurred, in Richter’s work, between the catalogue, the archive and the encyclopaedia are similarly undone in the work of another German conceptual artist whose output has great material richness, Hanne Darboven. Her Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 [Cultural History] (1980-1983) is a vast collection of photographs, postcards and documents tracing a century of history and displayed in grids, suggesting, yet refusing to allow, a synthesis between the vernacular and the universal, history and the everyday, the documentary and the aesthetic.3 Such a tension between the historical and the personal is at the very centre of the field I am briefly exploring here. It is worth noting that photographic images establish a hinge between public and private spheres in specific ways. The term ‘postmemory’ was coined by Marianne Hirsch4 to capture that particular intersection as it manifests itself in the trans-generational reverberation of an event. In material terms, postmemory is embodied as the after-image that certain photographs provoke, photographs that seem to hover between an individual’s memory and impersonal history. It is possible that one might not have lived through such events oneself, but an image of them pervades the culture one inhabits. Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ is akin to the theory developed in the field of psychoanalysis by Nicholas Abraham and Marina Torok, who expanded the Freudian system of individual analysis to explore the pathological outcome, in certain individuals, of the traumatic secrets harboured by their parents and grandparents. For Abra- ham and Torok, the falsification or erasure of the past practiced by people who lived through the Holocaust (for example) and wished to protect the next generation from such horrors, becomes the breeding ground for depression, anxiety and possibly shame in individuals, families, communities and even nations.5 For Hirsch, collective experiences of trauma may be distilled in torn or faded individual photographs of someone or something lost though unknown. Exposure to such photographic images intertwines with the stories of those who did live through the events, together penetrating by various cultural means into the very fabric of the self. Such a notion of course relies on the status of witness held by that form of photography that preceded the inception of digital technologies, with the novel – and newly problematic – relationship that these new technologies establish between the real and the fictional; between historical time and narrative time. In the products of the ‘old’ analogue technology, the indexicality of the photograph – the fact that, as the capture of

1 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,’ in October, vol. 88 (Spring 1999), pp. 117-145. Reprinted in Gerhard Richter Atlas: The Reader, London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2003, pp. 99-114. 2 Lynne Cooke, introduction to the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Atlas, Dia Foundation, New York (27 April 1995 – 25 February 1996), text available online: http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/54 (consulted on 6 October 2011). 3 Cf. Dan Adler, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880-1983, London: Afterall Books, 2009. 4 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 5 Cf. Nicholas Abraham, Maria Torok and Nicholas Thomas Rand, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Surprisingly, Hirsch makes no mention of Abraham and Torok in her erudite study. a real event on a surface that is sensitive to light, a photograph is a trace, a vestigial record of something that occurred – makes the traditional photographic image itself an archival object. ‘The capacity for mechanical inscription,’ Okwui Enwezor writes in his excellent introduction to an exhibition covering just this topic, ‘the order of direct reference that links the photograph with the indisputable fact of its subject’s existence’ and that serves as the bedrock of analogue photography, grants this medium a hitherto unknown status with regard to the real, so that as a medium, such photography is able – and seen to be able – to give a phenomenological account of the world as image. Thus, ‘[p]hotography is simultaneously the documentary evidence and the archival record of such transactions.’6 It must be said, as an essential aside, that digital technologies do not abscond from the testimonial status they have inherited from the older technologies whose effects they simulate, but that they effect this indexicality in different ways, in particular in the strength of their exhortation, as Mary Ann Doane notes, to ‘Look here!’ or ‘See this’, acting as ‘a pointing finger […]. The “liveness” [of such images] ensures its adhesion to the referent just as the index adheres to its object, and the website makes that “liveness” relivable at the touch of a finger,’7 calling attention, as did their forebears, to the singular instant. If, historically, the capacity of the photograph to capture the extraordinary or the contingent produced wonder, effecting the magic of embalm- ing time, ‘rescuing it simply from its proper corruption,’8 this also brings about a certain epistemological anxiety, for such capture of the fleeting moment is not only a preservation, it also paradoxically serves as a reminder of death, of the corruption that is proper to time. In the archive, we see writ large what the photograph performs on a modest scale: a dialogue with posterity, a projection into a time to come when that same artefact will be ancient, a souvenir; and contrariwise, a bleak reminder that in the past, death was in the future. The imbrication of past and future in the objects of historical study has a broader political sweep than does a similar interpenetration in the objects of archaeology: Peter Gay once admonished against the dangers of treating all nineteenth-century ideas and institutions in Germany as simply ‘clues of crimes to come,’9 in other words as the pre-history of Nazism. The archive shares with the photograph, then, its status as memento mori: acting as distillations of time and embodiments of memory, they both possess an elegiac, nostalgic dimension together with a dose of inherent anachronism, and while adding to a fund of knowledge, they also readily become sites of devotion to the past. In the case of the individual photograph, the knowledge offered is always fragmentary and partial, but in the case of the archive, in providing amassed (yet indexical) testimony as documentary proof, the offer seems to be one of plenitude, completion. ‘Archive fever’ is the expression coined by Jacques Derrida to express the impulse to accumulate and store in such a way: to collect, categorise and order, in a bid not only to remember and keep, but also to animate, to revivify. Derrida explores Sigmund Freud’s fascination with the German writer Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, published in 1903. This tells the story of an archaeologist, Hanold, whose desire is ignited by an ancient bas- relief of a young woman walking (the meaning of the word gradiva). Hanold returns to Pompeii to search

6 Okwui Enwezor, ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument,’ in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, (exhibition catalogue), New York: International Center of Photography, 2008, p. 12. 7 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 208. 8 André Bazin, What is Cinema?, (ed. and trans. Hugh Gray), vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, p. 14. 9 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 8. The idea of ‘foreshadow- ing’ is immanent in the attempts of German historians to tease out the polemics of a ‘history of everyday life’ in Germany between the wars, asking whether the ‘historical’ and the ‘pathological’ were intrinsically bound up. for her footprint; returns, in short, hot on the trail of the indexical. For Derrida, the condition of archive fever suffered by Hanold is governed by what Freud called the death drive, which is as much a motion towards destruction and annihilation as an awareness of the limits that time puts on us, its objects. Archival desire strives to halt the ineluctability of time’s passage, of destruction and death, through an erasure of the difference between the index as sign, and its referent: [Hanold] dreams this irreplaceable place, the very ash, where the singular imprint, like a signature, barely distinguishes itself from the impression. And this is the condition of singularity, the idiom, the secret, testimony. It is the condition of the uniqueness of the printer-printed, of the impression and the imprint, of the pressure and its trace in the unique instant where they are not yet distinguished the one from the other […] the trace no longer distinguishes itself from its substrate.10 Indexicality – the trace of the unique, the differentiating imprint – not only governs the formation of an archive, it also determines that which is archivable. But in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, photography and film changed people’s notions of what they could record and store, transforming ideas about memory and knowledge alike under the burden of empirical evidence. The indexical vestiges attesting to a past that is perceived as lost, emerge as traces in the present: this notion lies at the core of the then burgeoning sciences of phrenology and forensics, and was also at the heart of Freud’s endeavour to mine the human psyche and to explore how, in it, the past lives in the present. (A symptom is, after all, a trace left over from the past, unconsciously excavated, like Hanold’s bas-relief, and somatised.) Those traces that are frozen in the photograph and folded into the archive also hold out the offer of a history for the future: time is at once sectioned, abstracted, rationalised, promised. Yet quite clearly, time cannot be entirely controlled. The archive ultimately withholds its promise of completion, simply because life can only be in excess of the representations of life: hence Pierre Nora’s cry – ‘archive as much as you like: something will always be left out’11 – which also serves Benjamin, or Richter for that matter. Pierre Nora12 gives voice, as indeed do Derrida, Paul Ricoeur and Giorgio Agamben, to the destabilisation of the archive as a complete, secure, scientific and objective source of knowledge, not least because the relationship between the archive and memory itself – or what Agamben calls ‘the archive and the witness’13 – has never been either fixed or entirely reliable. Contrariwise, not all documents are testimonies.14 The engagement of both individuals and groups with the past in recollection is famously inconsistent. That an archive contains remnants of the past – indexical traces of something that has taken place – supports certain historical events, but it says nothing of how these events are remembered.

10 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, (trans. Eric Prenowitz), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 99. 11 Pierre Nora, ‘Archivez, archivez, il en restera toujours chelque chose!’, quoted by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting, (transl. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 203. 12 For Pierre Nora’s own brief précis of his massive academic study on memory work, Lieux de Mémoire, see Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, (trans. Marc Roudebusch), in Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7-25. 13 It is this distinction that forms the core of Giorgio Agamben’s seminal Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen), New York: Zone Books, 1999. 14 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, op. cit., p. 161. The Archival Turn

The trope of ‘the turn’ has coloured the history of the humanities for over half a century: we’ve had quan- titative, linguistic, cultural and spatial turns in the academy. The figure of a corporeal change of position and orientation is used, then, to make intelligible a structure of reflexivity, and importantly, with it, a shift in aesthetic and cognitive direction, if not paradigm. The moves from art object to event to post-production were such turning points. Conceptual, performance and land art, as well as art as institutional and museological critique, and art that prods and vexes identity formation and gender politics might all be framed as such moments of rotation. Such practices have been variously buttressed by significant and influential theory (Thierry de Duve, Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Nicolas Bourriaud are some of the names conjured). From the 1960s on, the uncontaminated, idealist and idealised, pure spaces of modernism were radically displaced by different forms and procedures, including the materiality of the landscape at the one extreme, and the deconstruction of the institutions that defined, stored and displayed art at the other extreme.Temporal and sound-based art; video and performance art in their various expressions in the gallery and outside of it; site specificity – whether in architectural spaces, in the landscape or the city – or works that depend in their essence on an interactive relationship with the public, all these have presented themselves as paradigmatic turns. Increasingly, we witnessed the appearance of works that infiltrated, and were infiltrated by, other epistemological and disciplinary fields. The ‘ethnographic turn’ that Foster tapped in the 1990s,15 based in part on an earlier formulation by James Clifford,16 and also positioned in the context of burgeoning postcolonial studies, described a crisis of boundaries in the history and theory of art, as much as in its practice. The fashioning of artist as ethnographer accommodated work that spanned a vast range of material practices, grounded on the values of relativity promulgated by the (then newly fashionable) discipline of social anthropology: Jim- mie Durham, Mark Dion, Susan Hiller, Lothar Baumgarten, Mary Kelly, Renée Green, Dan Graham, Sophie Calle, Allan Sekula, Phil Collins and Kutlug Ataman are only some of the artists whose names might spring to mind here. The shift from ethnographic turn to curatorial and then archival turn is neither groundbreaking, nor, strictly speaking, paradigmatic: it is a question of emphasis and degree, with the collection and the archive being at times indiscriminately combined as categories, though perhaps with a greater emphasis on the status of the document in archival art: on what it is that constitutes a document. There is also a vexed definitional question about archive as form or content. Foster uses the metaphor not of a turn but of an impulse, thus paying implicit homage first to Freud, and then more specifically to Craig Owens’ early discussion of postmodernism in terms of an allegorical impulse.17 Although, as Foster acknowledges, an ‘archival impulse’ is hardly new, he finds archival art with its own character sufficiently pervasive in the early years of the twenty first century as to warrant consideration in its own right. He cites the work of artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick, as well as Dion and Renée Green, who were also, of course, significant

15 Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996. See also, Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, (ed. Alex Coles), London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000. 16 The anthropologist James Clifford broke through a disciplinary divide in his study of Surrealism as a form of ethnography, and became de rigueur reading for art historians if not artists in the early 1990s. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 17 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Notes toward a Theory of Postmodernism,’ in October, vols. 12-13 (Spring-Summer 1980). for the ‘ethnographic turn,’ while Sam Durant, Thomas Hirschhorn and the subtle work of Tacita Dean warrant special and detailed attention. Others that he does not mention but might well have, include Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, João Penalva, Francis Alÿs, Vivan Sundaram, Zoe Leonard and Taryn Simon, to name but a handful. The features of archival art to which Foster draws attention are the favouring of the installation format in which the artists present found material (image, object, text), with sources at times familiar and drawn from mass culture, and at other times arcane, works ‘retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter- memory’. Archival sampling may be based on the Internet, but these artists tend to work with archives that are not properly speaking data bases, calling for ‘human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing.’18 They are, consequently, often museum or gallery based works. The interest in collection and categorisation, as inherited from eighteenth and nineteenth century epistemologies and quests for ordering and understanding the empirical world, is now skewed in favour of narrative and history. With theories of the merging of the realms of the political and the personal imported from feminism and identity politics, and with an increased interest in the history and semiotics of everyday life, every subject becomes, of necessity, a historical subject, and the task of remembering and archiving makes everyone his or her own historian: hence Kelly’s charting of the development of her infant in Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995 (1995), Jef Geys’ Day and Night and Day and… (2002), or Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself (2007). The pitfalls faced by such endeavours are clear: like the photograph, the archive itself may become a fetish when it ceases to be a repository of traces ‘in the inferential reconstruction of historical processes,’ becoming instead a ‘surrogate for the missing thing itself.’19 This is particularly a danger when, rather than using the work of art as the platform on which to construct a kind of meta-archive, as do Anette Messager, Ilya Kaba- kov or Christian Boltanski, the artist merely takes on board the re-production of an already given array of archival material (I would put Hirschhorn, with whose work I experience an almost visceral conceptual and material antipathy, in this category). The pervasive ‘anything goes’ mood unfortunately encourages lazy work to piggyback on interesting conceptual structures, for it provides a particularly warm and welcoming environ- ment for the culture of narcissism (and here I use the word ‘culture’ in its microbial sense). In his discussion of such a phenomenon in site-specific art, Miwon Kwon puts it clearly, in a way that is equally applicable to the traps confronting artists who are moved to document their own lives: The intricate orchestration of literal and discursive sites that make up a nomadic narrative requires the artist as a narrator-protagonist. In some cases, this renewed focus on the artist in the name of authorial self- reflexivity leads to a hermetic implosion of (auto) biographical and subjective indulgences.20 The perils of narcissism and self indulgence have long posed a problem for twentieth- and twenty-first century art, and I would venture to recommend the necessity of some form of mediation between a confessional, personal history and its adaptation into archive / document based art, with all the narrative or anti-narrative strategies that such an art might enlist. The uses and transformation of the evidentiary, documentary photographic material in contemporary art, whether those materials are the artist’s own prior work (as in Marcel

18 Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse,’ in October, vol. 110 (Autumn 2004), pp. 4-5. 19 Dominick LaCapra, ‘History and Psychoanalysis,’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2 (Winter 1987). Reprinted in Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 55. 20 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004, p. 51. Duchamp), or structures in the external world (Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hiroshi Sugimoto); whether they are images that probe the fuzzy boundary between the fictional and the historical (Boltanski); or whether they position themselves as ‘historic agents of memory’21 (Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Blaufuks) is the topic to which I will dedicate the rest of this short book.

21 Okwui Enwezor, op. cit. p. 46. THE ARCHIVAL TURN:

SPECIMEN CASES FROM

THE BERARDO COLLECTION The Mobile Archive: The Artist as Travelling Salesman

The discovery that Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte (Série C) [Box (Series C)] (1958) [fig. 4] is included in the Be- rardo Collection was, for me, serendipitous in the writing of this text, for this is the perfect theoretical point at which to begin a practical exploration of the archival turn in contemporary art. The photographic archive, as one of the principle (though not unique) ways in which archival production has been explored in art, forms the backbone of any discussion of the archival turn. Duchamp’s Boîte en valise was intended as a comprehensive compendium or anthology of his own works in reproduction, and evolved between 1935 and 1941, but the entire edition had not been completed by the time he died in 1968, putting an ironic twist on the concept of ‘delay’ that Duchamp liked to explore in his work. The present work is, one might say, a belated album edition and an archival reproduction of an oxymoron, an original multiple. This initial edition consisted of a leather valise containing miniature replicas – both photographs and colour reproductions – of works by Duch- amp, and one diminutive ‘original,’ or, more accurately, a handmade copy of one of Duchamp’s works in each box. The Boîte en valise conflates various metaphors, all of them pertinent to Duchamp’s wish to break down the institutional and conceptual walls delimiting the definition of both a work of art and its maker. These metaphors include that of the ‘vanity case’ (the idea of the artist as self fashioner and self champion); the ‘travelling salesman’ with his bag of samples (the idea of sampler as art – and the concomitant exploration of the transformation of art into merchandise22 – being particularly prescient); and that of the ‘portable museum’, a collection in a suitcase. ‘Duchamp’s miniaturisation of his entire corpus into a deluxe edition of reproductions organised and codified in an archival system cum mobile museum’, Okwui Enwezor notes, ‘is not the first of such programmatic engagements of the work of art as archive, but it remains one of the most vigorous’.23 Duchamp’s idea arguably served as a wellspring for contemporary ‘mining’ of the museum, not only as institutional frame, but also as archive, a notion researched variously in art theory and practice from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twenty first century, but prior to that, already explored more startlingly in the 1950s and 1960s, again in theory and in practice, from André Malraux’s Musée imaginaire (1951), through the writings of Leo Steinberg, the Silkscreen Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg (1962-1964) and his Centennial Certificate, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1969), to Marcel Broodthaers Musée d’art moderne, département des aigles (1968), a collection of photographic images of eagles and related objects arranged non-hierarchically, as in an archive, and exhibited in the artist’s own home, an installation that Rosalind Krauss saw as ushering in the ‘non-medium condition’ as the foundation underlying contemporary art practice.24 Despite the insistence on medium specificity in works historically defined as ‘modernist’ and bearing the stamp of approval of American formalist critics, especially Clement Greenberg, the eruption of a crisis in medium-based arts can be tracked back to Duchamp, and so can be seen to run in tandem, chronologically, with the golden epoch of modernism itself. With characteristic drollness, in 1922 Duchamp wrote, in response to a survey, to photographer Alfred Stieglitz: ‘You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to

22 The transformation of art into merchandise was one of the cornerstone concerns of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers in the 1960s. Cf. Marcel Broodthaers, ‘To Be Bien Pensant… or Not To Be. To be Blind’, (trans. Paul Schmidt), in October, no. 42 (Fall 1987), p. 35. 23 Okwui Enwezor, op. cit., p. 14. 24 Cf. Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are.’25 From as early as 1912, Duchamp clearly and systematically launched an assault on the idea of the artist as a unique and individual creator. But as the Boîte en valise materially affirms, in the cultural arena at large, that assault had in fact already begun earlier, with the coincidence of the founding moments of modernism and the invention of photography. Photography brought in its wake not only the loss of the aura that linked a work of art to the autographic touch of its maker’s hand (that loss of aura famously formulated and theorised by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), but also the idea of infinite reproducibility, so that later, in the works, say, of Andy Warhol or Richard Hamilton, we find the proliferation of screen prints as reproductions without an original. The immediate predecessor of Duchamp’s Boîte en valise is an earlier archive, Duchamp’s own La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Boîte verte) [The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box)], which he published in 1934. This was produced in an edition of 300 boxes covered in green felt, each containing ninety four loose notes relating to the evolution of his Le Grand Verre (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même) [Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even)] (1915-1923). Referring to his concern to haul painting and drawing from their old modes of manual production – with their veneration for the hand crafted mark and its aura – and comparing such veneration to the standstill in which writing had found itself before Gutenberg, Duchamp was already distinguishing himself from other creators of artists’ fine print publications. With theBoîte verte, ‘we step into a Gutenberg space of seeing and representing,’26 a space of mechanical reproduction. Duchamp pioneered the use of photomechanical means of reproduction, using collotype (a photographic process employing light-sensitive gelatin, also employed by Alfred Stieglitz), which he was to put to use again in the Boîte en valise. So, the Boîte verte is, essentially, both a facsimile photo album and a book in box-file form. Here we have, then, book as both commodity and knowledge, but also, importantly, book as object, and reproduction as art (albeit dressed as ‘anti-art’). For Duchamp, there is but a short conceptual step between such an album / book and the Boîte en valise as a physical object. In 1935, shortly after publishing the Boîte verte, he wrote to arts patron Katherine Dreier that he was now thinking of making an album of approximately all the things he had produced until then.27 The irony, of course, is that in its inclusion of an ‘original copy’ in the deluxe edition of the Boîte en valise – an item ‘of a highly personal character intended for the owner of that box’ – Duchamp was covertly leaving the album behind and reclaiming the role of artist as maker, even though at the time, the Boîte en valise was ‘simply not recognized as a “work of art” at all, and, indeed, was even regarded as proof that [Duchamp] had ceased to be an artist.’28 The Boîte en valise is, indeed, an archive of Duchamp’s work; archive as mimetic elaboration and archive as mnemonic tool. As a miniature copy of all he had made, Boîte en valise is a kind of material curriculum vitae. But Enwezor, for one, sees in Duchamp’s Boîte en valise something more than this: a materialisation of Michel Foucault’s notion that the archive mediates between tradition and oblivion. Foucault’s exposition on how the archive might achieve such mediation is not, predictably, what we get from empiricist notions of

25 Marcel Duchamp, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, (ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson), London: Thames & Hudson, 1975, p. 165. 26 The reference to Gutenberg is from a comment made by Duchamp to André Breton, published in ‘Phare de la Mariée’, in Minotaur, no. 6 (Winter 1935), pp. 45-49, quoted by Sarat Maharaj, ‘“A Monster of Veracity, a Crystalline Transubstantiation”: Typotranslating the Green Box,’ in The Duchamp Effect, (ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 61. 27 Cf. Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 175. 28 Ibid., p. 174. the archive as a site of storage and preservation. Enwezor, reading the Duchampian archive through Foucault, sees the Boîte en valise as revealing not so much the contents of that CV, as the rules that govern the making of those contents: ‘the rules of a practice that enable statements both to survive and to undergo regular modi- fication. It [the archive] isthe general system of the formation and transformation of statements.’29 It is the ‘formation and transformation of statements’ that shifts the archive from mimesis to symbolic construction. Foucault’s comments on the archive are importantly enabling, rendering it more dynamic than the positivist definitions that see the archive a passive receptacle of historic facts ‘simply’ documented. Crucially, Foucault distinguishes between method and system, and this distinction is useful to the understanding of the archival turn in art from Duchamp onwards. In classifying knowledge, ‘there can be only one method; but one can invent and apply a considerable number of systems’, Foucault tell us. The method ‘tran- scribes perception into discourse’ and is, in its point of departure, ‘very close to description; but it is always possible to apply to the general character it has defined empirically such modifications as may be imposed.’ The system, however, is ‘arbitrary throughout its development, but once the system of variables – the character – has been defined at the outset, it is no longer possible to modify it.’30 This is crucial: the system may be quirkily or idiosyncratically defined, needing only to be coherent in itself, self-consistent. In this sense, the archive is not simply reactive; not merely a repository, a storage unit for future consultation. Rather, it is a systematic means of actively grouping together items ‘in accordance with multiple relations,’31 playing a significant role in the very constitution of a method. Acknowledging the important fact that every archive contains a phantom counter-archive of trash, things it has omitted or thrown away, Sven Spieker puts it crisply: [T]he 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.32 The mutual definition of objects stored and those excluded with the principles that govern the systematisation of that storage, is differently essayed in the work of German duo, Bernd and Hilla Becher.

29 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, [transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith], New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 129. Stress in the original. 30 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, [trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith], London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. Re- printed 1989, p. 143. 31 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, loc. cit. 32 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008, p. xi. The Archive of Anonymous Structures

For fifty years, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed – assiduously, systematically and with a gritty rigour set on evacuating the works of any trace of subjectivity – hundreds of structures of the industrial age. Poised between architecture and industrial design, these include mine heads, compressors, cooling towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, storage silos, grain elevators, and much more. Watertowers (1988) [fig. 5], functions as a subcategory – perhaps a small file – in this encyclopaedic archive. Such an archive fits neatly with the Bechers’ own notion of typology – a conceptual grid fitted over a collection of similar items within a given field – with all that that such a method also implies of anachronism and built-in obsolescence: the innovation of today is the ruin of tomorrow. For such an archive is not only the site of rational storage, offering the possibility of future retrieval; nor simply the evidentiary proof of a drive to knowledge (the conceptual / taxonomic organisation, say, of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae or Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos), it is also at once the paean to, and cemetery of, bureaucratic reason. In the Bechers’ work, the Enlightenment promise of progress is pitched against the catastrophic events of German history, the question being how one could speak of modernisation in Germany without this being overshadowed by the ideology of Nazism and the ‘technologies with which [it] made its utopian appeal’33 – a catastrophe whose memory was both irremovable from (and suppressed in) the period when the Bechers’ working method evolved. Famously, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published their groundbreaking study, The Inability to Mourn, in 1967 as a meditation on the evasion of history expressed by the population of the German Federal Republic in the 1950s and 1960s, an erasure of the Nazi past and a collective failure of Trauerarbeit, Freud’s term for the labour of mourning through which the wounds of trauma, loss and guilt might be healed. As the cultural historian Eric Santner has pointed out, since the publication of the Mitscherlichs’ book, a corpus of critical discourses has emerged addressing questions of public mourning. Santner is thinking particularly of ‘the rhetoric of mourning which has come to occupy the semantic field of so much critical theory’34 in the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. Such rhetoric has also found its way into the works of artists exploring the historical and moral underpinnings of their own cultures. It is performed with some irony in the work of Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, or with profound metaphoric resonance in the work of Colombian sculp- tor Doris Salcedo and – as we shall see – it forms the very backbone of the work of French artist Christian Boltanski. The issues facing postwar Germans in coming to terms with their own history also impacted upon the methodologies deployed in the discipline of history more generally. As Anson Rabinbach notes, one of the tasks that German historians in the 1960s took on board was ‘to identify the ways that certain metaphoric pasts can be cathected to contemporary events.’35 In using the Freudian term ‘cathect’, Rabinbach is referring to that form of libidinal connection – that desire – that impels us to want to know the past, to understand how it continues to reside in contemporaneity. Again we are reminded of how the question of temporalities and their complex mutual projections plays out in the idea of the archival. The question of how the past may be cathected to contemporary events underlies the Bechers’ dogged project, for underpinning it is an interroga-

33 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990, p. 133. 34 Ibid., p. 7. 35 Anson Rabinbach, ‘Response to Karen Brecht, “In the Aftermath of Nazi Germany: Alexander Mitscherlich and Psychoanalysis – Legend and Legacy”’, in American Imago, vol. 52, no. 3 (Fall 1995), pp. 322–323. tion of the relationship between continuity and rupture, and an exploration of the promises – and the waning of those promises in the light of new ones – that progress holds out to industry and technology. Working together until Bernd’s death in 2007, the Bechers first collaborated in 1958, beginning as freelance documentary photographers of modern industrial buildings and old factories. While they also photographed each building in the context of the whole site in which it is located, their better known work consists of hundreds of gridded arrangements of black and white photographs of individual structures, each centred in its frame as a conventional portrait subject might be, and frontally captured. Moreover, they provided a similar scale for each photograph, so doing away with the relative size of each building, and with it, with a bundle of informative contextual co-ordinates. This, then, is an open ended series of structures imaged with frank Sachlichkeit [objectivity] – structures di- verse yet similar, non-identical yet uniform. The overall ‘scientific’ arrangement of these photographic prints accords with serial production in minimalism, but also reaches forward to the procedural protocols of conceptual art, for which the Bechers have been heralded as forerunners. Their work thus exists as ‘both a pre-history to much of the critical photographic seriality that dominated the conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s, and as a never-ending afterword to that period.’36 They consequently became idols and icons to a generation of younger artists, including those realist, ‘objective’ German photographers sometimes known collectively as Strufsky: Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, and one would also have to include Candida Höfer’s breathtaking and aestheticised archive of grand architectural interiors. The Bechers’ deadpan, documentary style touched a chord in the national psyche in Germany for its singular articulation of past, present and future at a time when Germans, numbly unable to form a positive image of themselves, found themselves stuck between the impossibility of both subjectivism and aestheticism (the post-Auschwitz, post-Adorno taboo on beauty). They took on board the failure – or collapse of the possibility – of symbolic representation with their detachment, simultaneously turning against both Edward Stei- chen’s humanist universalism and the seamier, alienation-realism of Robert Frank’s series, The Americans (1955-1956). The German photographer August Sander, who had compiled an encyclopaedic archive – a collective portrait (over 600 photographs) of German society – People of the Twentieth Century (a first section was presented to the public in 1927), might be seen as a forebear, for the Bechers share with Sander the fascination with the cool reach of taxonomy. In his project, a social atlas of the human figure – an ‘exercise atlas’ (Übungsatlas) as Walter Benjamin called it – Sander establishes a series of typologies, arguably more sensitive to the genre of Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] portrait painting that had emerged during the Weimar Republic, than to the nuances of history. Sven Spieker puts it succinctly: Sander’s archive of photographic portraits ‘not unlike portrait painting, resolves the tension between historical specificity and typological universality.’37 For the Bechers, the aim was similar, though devoid of human presence: to create what they called ‘families of motifs’ or ‘families of objects’, with the humanism of Steichen’s ‘family of man’38 removed from the

36 Sarah E. James, ‘Subject, Object, Mimesis: The Aesthetic World of the Bechers’ Photography,’ in Photography After Conceptual Art, (ed. Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen), Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010, p. 55. 37 Sven Spieker, op. cit., p. 135. 38 Photographer Edward Steichen saw as the culmination of his career his curatorship of the exhibition The Family of Man at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, gathering and grouping 503 photographs thematically around universal subjects that bind people together despite their cultural differences; themes such as children, love, and death. After its initial showing, the exhibition continued its ideological mission by travelling around the world for eight years. formulation. The idea was to set forth a classificatory system, a taxonomy of industrial forms. ‘The Bechers are interested in the character implicit in a façade, just the way Sander was in the character implicit in a face,’ writes Donald Kuspit, but adds critically ‘I cannot help regarding these pictures as macabre monuments to human self-distortion in the name of social reason – all-too human structures that are ridiculously social.’39 Rather than a critique of the collateral damage wreaked by the Enlightenment promise of reason – the incin- eration of that promise, so to speak, at Auschwitz – Kuspit implies that the Bechers’ work itself falls prey to the hubris of a culture of control hyperbolised by the project of the Enlightenment, the sheer optimism of its belief in truth, rationality, and the mastery of nature. Kuspit here also puts his finger on one of the problems posed by the uses of photography in art: between the idea of art’s autonomous value and photography’s ability to record social and historical value, the deploy- ment of photographs by conceptual artists treads a fine and often ambivalent line. It could be argued that the ‘archaeological’ or ’historical’ function of the Bechers’ photographs is more a product of marketing than of the artists’ own intentions: there is no analysis of socio-political or geographic context in their portraits of buildings as ‘anonymous sculptures’ (the term was theirs); no portrayal of workers, or of conditions of labour; not even any product. If there is a self-conscious concern with history – that the Bechers focus on countries that had undergone early industrialisation cannot be unintentional or random – the overriding, manifest mission of their work is, as they themselves declare, to concern themselves with typology. This typology is as much functional as formal, to be sure, and it is one that underlines modernisation per se, but in rather abstract terms, dare one say in aesthetic terms. (In this, it differs fundamentally from the anti-aestheticism of conceptual art). Asked, then, why they their work is shown in an art context rather than being made available in public archives for research purposes, they replied: ‘[w]e did offer it to the government but they weren’t interested. The work is about visual considerations, therefore it was only natural to show it in art galleries.’40 The industrial history in their work is pared down to formal affinity: under cover of the archival model, the Bechers’ photographic work eschews the taxonomic information (however obsolete it might eventually prove to be) provided by similar approaches in the natural sciences, imaging not knowledge, but the cumulative power of a desolate anonymity.

A Metonymic Relic and Objects of Attention Closely Lavished

I wish to play off the Bechers’ work with that of two other artists represented in the Berardo Collection: firstly, as a different kind of exploration of the relationship of a younger generation of Germans to the tainted context of German historicity, Anselm Kiefer’s Elisabeth von Österreich (1991) [fig. 6]; and secondly, with a very different employment of seriality, the group of four photographs of American drive-in cinemas (1993- 1994), part of a larger series by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Kiefer’s Elisabeth von Österreich [Elizabeth of Austria] (1991) is the exception in my discussion, for it is

39 Donald Kuspit, in Artforum, vol. 28 (April 1990), p. 170. 40 Quoted in Angela Grauerholz and Anne Ramsden, ‘Photographing Industrial Architecture: An Interview with Hilla and Bernd Becher,’ Parachute 22, 1981, p.18. See also Blake Stimson, ‘The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher,’ in Tate Papers, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/ tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm#edn9. (consulted on 17 October, 2011.) not an instance of turning towards, or even vexing, the precepts of the archive, but it shares with the archival turn the obsession with shoring up physical remnants in a bid to ward off oblivion. Kiefer’s remnant, however, is not so much a trace as a metonymic relic, inviting uneasy contemplation, if not devotion. The Empress Elizabeth of Austria was renowned during her lifetime for her incredible thinness, her excessive regimes of diet and exercise and her habit of wearing tightly laced corsets to underline further her slenderness. She was also famous for her sumptuous, long, braided hair, the dressing of which was the most arduous and elaborate ritual of her toilette. Here, her narcissism, the almost religious cult of the body to which she devoted herself, is represented, by way of analogy with a saint’s reliquary, by a messy tuft of black hair. This hair is attached onto sheets of lead that are roughly affixed onto a wooden board.The appearance, as in all of Kiefer’s work, is of a distressed surface, with gnarled and battered materials standing in for the corrosion and disintegration caused by an exposure to the elements over time. The idea of a ‘natural history of destruction’ is as integral a part of Kiefer’s work as it is of W. G. Sebald’s, expressed not only in the image, but also in the work’s materiality, his use of materials freighted with allegorical connotation: straw, ash, lead, burlap, sand. Where the Bechers’ work is restrained and dry, Kiefer’s is flamboyant and bombastic, assaulting the viewer with its brutal scale and aggressive facture. Kiefer also never banishes a romantic (and arguably, Germanic) celebration of the figure of the artist as a hero. He is no friend of the throwaway irony nor of the unassuming- ly intimate: the minute gesture, the affecting detail, these are alien to him. Rather, his work translates nineteenth century history painting into a post-Holocaust epic. His early work (notably, the series Occupations of 1969, where he placed himself in vast landscapes or monumental architectural settings, once making the Heil Hitler salute) incorporates photography. Indeed, like Gerhard Richter, Kiefer’s career began with a dialogue with the photo-conceptualist practices of the 1960s. However, his use of photography is the antithesis of the documentary style beloved of conceptual artists; it is, as some would have it, as ‘anti-photographic’ as his use of non-painterly materials (straw, earth, hair, ash) is anti-painterly, for ‘Kiefer consistently treats the photograph as a hybrid’, the one tool of representation that, in post-Holocaust Germany, ‘is just as discredited as painting.’41 In line with his romanticism, Kiefer has remained captivated by certain female figures, whether biblical, mythical or historical: Lilith, Shulamith, Brunhilde, Isis, Osiris, Bérenice, among others. Elizabeth of Aus- tria, the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, is woven into the iconography of a tragic and repentant Deutschland, of which early examples are Kiefer’s seared and suffocating paintings of the early 1980s, alluding to the Romanian poet Paul Celan’s concentration camp poem, Death Fugue (1945). In this famous poem, blonde Aryan tresses are contrasted with the ashen – the charred – hair of Jewish Shulamith: ‘death is a master from Germany, his eyes are blue [...] your golden hair Margarethe, your ashen hair, Shulamith.’42 The use of ash as a material in Kiefer’s work partakes of a poetics of recantation among a generation of Germans: Kiefer was born in 1945, while the Bechers were both born before the War had begun, Bernd in 1931 and Hilla in 1934. Here we have, then, a rampaging offensive, in one breast-beating sweep, against both amnesia and good taste; here we have anamnesis, the dredging up of the ruins of a censored and obliterated past, the desire to recollect and repent for what a previous generation had forgotten or repressed. To speak thus of recantation and anamnesis is also, however, to take sides in the bitter division that Kiefer’s work has provoked. Although

41 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900, London: Thames & Hudson, 2004, p. 615. 42 Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue,’ in Paul Celan: Poems, (trans. Michael Hamburger), New York: Persea Books, 1980, p. 51. from early on, it has been purchased by Jewish and Israeli collectors, initially it often met with silence in the pricklier atmosphere of his native Germany, where his reticence about his father’s activities during World War II and his use of Nazi imagery were seen by some as apologias, expressions of nostalgia for the Nazi past. Others, however, saw in Kiefer’s work an expiatory return, so to speak, to the scene of the crime. Like Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s film Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, Kiefer’s dramatic rhetoric screams against the silence shrouding the Holocaust for that earlier generation of Germans discussed by Alexander and Mar- garete Mitscherlich. Arguably, then, Kiefer’s work ruptures taboos by rhetorically and histrionically invok- ing the ghosts of Germany’s historic past, not in order to make heroes of them, but in a necessary attempt ‘to open up the repressive apparatus that German culture has internalized and imposed upon itself in the postwar period.’43 In Margarethe (1981), the name of Goethe’s heroine is scribbled in black across the surface. Straw metonymically invokes the powerful sentiments stirred by the image of ‘the land’ in German history. But it also stands metaphorically for the golden hair of the Aryan maiden. Strands of straw curl upwards like smoke from the individual flames, at once memorial candles and the chimney stacks of the death camps. In the context of Kiefer’s wish to disinter the links between myths and history – indeed to sound the myth of history – a strand of matted hair, whether Margarethe’s or that of the Empress Elizabeth – is also never far from the piles of shorn hair found at Auschwitz. Like the Bechers, though far more obviously than them, Kiefer’s work has to be seen in terms of its specifically German historical character. If my inclusion of him in this exploration of the archival in contemporary art seems far-fetched, the justification for this is that the role of testimony in his work touches upon the themes of memory and loss that underpin archivally inspired work. In this context, we shall soon look at works by Daniel Blaufuks and Christian Boltanski. But first, and still bearing the Bechers in mind: the series of four black and white photographs ofAmerican drive in cinema screens by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (Southbay Drive In, San Diego; Stadium Drive In, Orange; and Studio Drive In, Culder City, 1993; and Compton Drive In, 1994) [figs. 7–10] are apparently explorations of a similar region of typology as that of the Bechers. But while the Bechers’ encyclopaedic range of structures arranged in grids containing fairly small images allows the observer to sample similarity and difference, Sugimoto’s use of the largest format possible, without losing clarity to graininess, is a bid to enlist the viewer’s desire for detail. More than this, his larger formats are designed to immerse the viewer in a magically illuminated and hauntingly unreal ambience. The decision to produce each image as an isolated, exquisitely printed artefact, larger in scale than the documentary-type images that appear in the Bechers’ grids, casts these photographs into a different archival mould: uninhabited by visible human presence, they are pervaded by a sense strangeness and melancholy. The detail, albeit softened and almost painterly, is essential for another reason too: in sharing with minimal painting and sculpture an obsession with reiteration (almost identical motifs photographed many times over) Sugimoto understands that it is through reprises of the apparently similar that the viewer’s attention is sharpened to the nuance of difference. The necessity of slowing down the pace of observation, revealing the workings of our vision, is pressed at the service of one of the principal underlying concerns of Sugimoto’s work: an engagement with time, its passing and the subjective means of experiencing and registering it. Itself (if now in theory only) a trace of a lost moment, the photograph has always been a potent vehicle for a meditation on the temporal. Sugimoto’s

43 Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh, loc. cit. Dioramas are images of ‘nature’ as represented through the artifice of staged scenes in museums of natural history. Each scene, already immanently archival, is a synthetic and compacted construct representing changes that occur, perhaps over millennia, to the wildlife of a particular geographic terrain. A similar com- pression occurs in his Wax Museums, which represent relations of social hierarchy (secular, religious, political, criminal) through the staged dramatisations of simulacra. As tableaus, both Dioramas and Wax Museums mimic the function of photography, for in the verisimilitude of constructed scenes, they give the illusion of snatching a moment, as fictional in its distillation as it is compelling in its stasis. In their fixity, the objects ranged within these museum displays suggest not life but death: forever static, forever embalmed in a state of sustained but unrealisable potential. And in their capture of such images, Sugimoto’s photographs touch upon the fragile distinction between the ephemeral and the enduring, holding both in mnemonic aspic. Sugimoto’s photographs, then, could be said to hyperbolise, in their content, the indexical character of photography as a medium: ‘I don’t want to have any human image in my pictures,’ he has observed; ‘people are present through the traces they leave behind.’44 The blank screens of the drive-ins, like those in his earlier series of old movie palaces, are bathed in pure light, glimmering almost as mirages against the enveloping dark- ness. But this glare is the outcome of accumulation rather than an evacuation or erasure. For Sugimoto has adjusted the time exposure on his camera to the length of each film, arriving at the final white screen through the aggregation of light entering the camera. Like the compressed time of the Dioramas, the long exposure squeezes and abridges time, for what we are given on the apparently empty surface is the fictive projection of the film in its entirety. Capturing such duration, the artist nevertheless leaves us with the imprint of absence. Like the Bechers, Sugimoto’s work combines the pared down aesthetic of minimalism with the procedural rigour of conceptual art. However, for Sugimoto, there is a stronger sense of an emotion cathected onto the objects upon which he has chosen to lavish his attention. The focus on content in Sugimoto’s work, as well as on its qualities of production and display, show the artist to be exploring a haunting, an intense sense of loss captured with the poise and stillness of the purest classicism. With the Drive Ins, he quietly collects and casts light on objects at their point of obsolescence: in 1958, there were more than 4000 drive in screens in the United States of America; by the time Sugimoto took these photographs, there were only 837 drive in screens still in use,45 and if the information on Wikipedia is at all reliable, there are only 400 of them in existence today, in 2011. Sugimoto freezes the flux of both life and its representations (film screenings, the mimetic, paralysed displays of natural history or wax museums) into a world of appearances, theatrical yet immobile. In doing so, he captures, so to speak, the readymades of history; or, put otherwise, a space where nature, culture and history collide in tableaus of uncanny arrest, an apparently unchanging givenness.

44 Hiroshi Sugimoto in Helena Tatay Huici, ‘A Conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto’, in Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lisbon: Centro Cultural de Belém, 1998, p. 16. 45 William Grimes, ‘Still Showing life in the heart of America. Drive-In Theatres,’ The New York Times (19 July 1994), cited by Peter Hay Halpert, ‘The Blank Screens of Hiroshi Sugimoto’, in Hiroshi Sugimoto, ibid., p. 22. The Archive of Intimate and Historical Knowledge

I have tried to show, through my focus on a few selected works, how the archival turn in contemporary art throws light on certain characteristics of the archival promise, the offer that the notion of the archive seems to hold out. Of these, I have underlined two in particular. The first is a mnemonic drive based on mimesis and a positivist belief in the plenitude and transparency of empirical evidence; otherwise put, an impulsion to gather and shore up fragments of historical evidence against a tide of forgetfulness. The second is the faith in a taxonomic system, an instrument of systematisation, subjecting the potentially nostalgic or haphazardly re-collected to bureaucratic reason. The inclusion of Marcel Duchamp and Anselm Kiefer – the proverbial chalk and cheese – together throws light on the way in which, in archivally driven works of art, materials are arranged ‘in a matrix of citation and juxtaposition.’46 The archive’s own indifference to items garnered from the public or private sphere has made it a particularly rich terrain of metaphoric exploration, in art (Ilya Kabakov, Georges Adeagbo, Susan Hiller, Hanne Darboven) as in literature (Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, Dubravka Ugresic, Orhan Pamuk). In ephemera and discarded remnants, these two spheres become intertwined; trivial mementos such as a train ticket bridge public systems (the railways), styles of graphic design that later become obsolete, and private experience of passage or exile. Paperwork hovers between the filing cabinet and the dustbin, a memorial to the undeclared editing that underpins historical fact gathering. Implicit in my observations of Duchamp’s self- archiving, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s commitment to typology, or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s melancholy icons, are questions about the relationship of subjectivity to history, and the tenuous and not always direct link between witnessing and archiving.47 The question that the archive poses is a particularly acute one. Jessica Dubow and Richard Steadman-Jones tap its urgency: ‘[d]oes it merely contain the empty iterations of previous utterances – the parrot’s mimetic cries – or can it be made to speak in a way that is commensurate with the experience of history?’48 The last two artists whose work I shall examine position themselves in different ways in relation to this question, both exploring the relationship between memory, history, narrative and fiction. In works that extend their reach from photography and video through film, books and installation, Daniel Blaufuks scrutinises the notion of the incomplete or fallible archive. Here, with its capacity for being both dramatic and prosaic, photography is at once the medium and the subject. It is mobilised for its mnemonic richness, but also mistrusted as an inaccurate record, at best a fragmentary register of what ‘really’ took place. In his book of texts, The Archive, Blaufuks quotes John Berger’s observation that photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. But Blaufuks also uses photography for the sweep of its conceptual implica- tions with regard to questions of identity, exile, and forgetfulness itself: his photographs remind us not only of what we might never again remember, but also of what we might be able to (re)invent through photography. This is best described by purloining a quotation from Benjamin Buchloh, who speaking of Gerhard Richter’s ‘anomic’ Atlas, comments on the ways in which memory is constituted as an ‘archaeology of pictorial and photographic registers.’ These registers, Buchloh argues, function separately ‘in the perceptual and the mnemonic apparatus of the subject,’ but they all intersect,‘ constituting precisely that complex field of disavowals

46 Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse,’ op. cit., p. 5. 47 Cf. Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, op. cit. 48 Jessica Dubow and Richard Steadman-Jones, ‘Sebald’s Parrot: Speaking the Archive’, publication forthcoming. and displacements, the field of repression and cover images within which memory is constituted in the register of the photographic order.’49 The photographs that make up Daniel Blaufuks’ Exile Series (1999-2005) [fig. 12] are arranged in a grid, but unlike those of either the Bechers or Sugimoto, these images are not typological, but narrative. Such work makes detectives of us all. Steeped in literary allusion, and borrowing the idiom of various other artefacts – the scrapbook, the photograph album, film noir – Blaufuks creates an archive of fragments that loosely col- lage together personal half-memories with shards of collective memory. Here we have, then, the past as seen in films, in albums, postcards and musty files, in weathered stone graves.The forgetfulness that creeps up on each act of mnemonic retrieval, Blaufuks’ work suggests, is not restricted to the realm of the individual, but also applies to the representational taboos – the conventions – that exist in the culture at large. But while his work explores the resuscitation of memory occasioned by photographic images in the public sphere, Blaufuks is particularly adept at reflecting upon an intimate and private labour of remembering occasioned by photography itself: of these nine photographs, three depict another photograph. Here we have then: a hand holding a photograph (we can see that there is writing on the back, a dedication, or description of the place and date); a cemetery; a clock in a railway station; a torn piece of an old document in German – the reference to ‘Platz’ and words ‘Hamburg-Südamerikanischer’ suggest transit, perhaps a ship…; the table of contents of a book; an old postcard with an illustration of an ocean liner stuck into a pho- to album; a row of passport photographs; a close-up of an index filing box; and a black and white photograph of two people silhouetted against an open space, perhaps a railway platform. Lit in the moody chiaroscuro of memory itself, these works construct a sense of departure and loss through their more or less obvious cues to transit, passage, and the universal future that is death itself. The book at the centre of the work is also its key. Although Blaufuks frames it without its author’s name, a look at the contents (‘Arrival, The Present, The Past, The Future, Departure’) reveals it to be Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure (1943). This is a story of a Communist rebel on the run, first tortured by Nazi-supporting authorities in an unnamed East European country, and then taking refuge in a country called, not surprisingly, ‘Neutralia.’ Blaufuks’ allusion to this story of escape is adumbrated in images of flight and exile that bring together the bureaucratic and the intimate. ‘All my exhibitions, my films and my books,’ writes Blaufuks, ‘equate these connections, between the literature of exile and travel photography, personal memory and collective memory, between the memory of the journey and the journey through the memory.’50 Of all the works I have selected, Blaufuks’ is the most overtly autobiographic and personal, for in its narrative fragments exist pieces of the story of his own Jewish German grandparents, who escaped to neutral Lisbon from Nazi Germany. We know that thousands of refugees came through Lisbon at that time, but only a few remained, for whom ‘the transit harbor became the final destination.’51 The photograph of the German document in the Exile Series is the ticket for the boat that brought Blaufuks’ grandparents from Germany to Portugal. The photograph of the graves was taken in the Jewish cemetery in Lisbon: ‘When I walk among the graves of the Jewish graveyard in Lisbon, I recognize the names on the stones, as in a village cemetery. Some are of my grandparents’ closest friends, those who were part of the canasta group, others of people who at-

49 Benjamin Buchloh, op. cit., p. 111. 50 Daniel Blaufuks, ‘September’, in http://danielblaufuks.com/webmac/text/september.html (consulted on 19 October, 2011). 51 Ibid., ‘Notes on Under Strange Skies’, in http://www.danielblaufuks.com/webnew/film/strangeskies/english.html (consulted on 19 October, 2011). tended, as we did, the synagogue on holy days or the community center on Saturday afternoons. Other names are older than these. Grandparents, uncles or parents, who also managed to escape.’52 The Exile Series constitutes a small sub-section of a much larger, ambitious, multi-media project on exile, including a book of photographs and a DVD, altogether broader in its archival scope: Under Strange Skies (2007).53 The film / book weaves together two distinct narrative threads, one personal, the other more socio- logical, based on the status of Lisbon during World War II as a ‘corridor’ between Hitler’s occupied Europe and America. The ache of longing, the loss of a mother tongue, the sense of always being in the wrong place, the comfort of also being in the right place: with Blaufuks, we are often reminded of the etymology of the word ‘nostalgia’ in the pain of homesickness. Such a sense of displacement, tinged no doubt with both guilt and relief, are captured in evocative snippets, in what appears to be a bid for some kind of reconciliation with a historic past that is embedded in the artist’s own family history. Here, we have the workings of postmemory, to invoke again that useful term coined by Marianne Hirsch. Or, otherwise put: how to heal the wounds of my grandparents, to tell their story, which is my story? The ‘post’ of this term does not designate something that is beyond the reach of memory, nor does it allude to a matter conciliatory and reconciled, consigned – in that famous formulation of Jean Améry’s – to the ‘cold storage of history.’54 ‘In my reading,’ writes Hirsch, ‘postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.’ Postmemory characterises, as Hirsch further writes, the experience of people who grow up under the shadow of narratives of a previous generation, ‘shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.’55 Hirsch developed the notion of postmemory in relation to children of Holocaust victims and survivors, but recognised that it equally described second-generation memories in the culture at large. If a sense of these collectively experienced traumatic events affecting succeeding generations is iterated with apocalyptic rhetoric in the work of Kiefer, it is with elegiac reserve that Christian Boltanski invokes it. Like Kiefer, Boltanski was born after the Holocaust; born in Paris shortly after the city was liberated in 1944. His father, who was a Polish Jew converted to Catholicism, had spent the entire time of the German occupation in hiding under the floorboards in his flat in Paris. Boltanski’s mother was a Catholic; but it is clearly his father’s story that Boltanski’s work disinters and mourns. (Boltanski’s name contains a history of his parents’ desires for their son’s life: Christian Liberté…). Like Blaufuks, Boltanski summons ‘a lost world of parental origin.’56 Yet unlike Blaufuks’ work, Boltanski’s is impersonal in its invocation of recent history: history as ‘that time when I was not yet born,’to modify a felicitous phrase by Roland Barthes.57 For while so many of Boltanski’s works allude to the Nazis’ bureaucratisation of death, at the same time harking to the repetitive structure of memory itself, for the most part, his work is not directly autobiographical and performs a kind of homeopathic magic on personal memory. ‘I have very few memories of childhood,’ he observes, noting that the apparently autobiographic in his work was undertaken precisely to ‘blot out my memory and to protect myself. I have invent-

52 Loc. cit. 53 For a flavour of this project, see http://www.danielblaufuks.com/webmac/uss/index.htm (consulted on 19 October, 2011). 54 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and its Realities, Minneapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980, p. xi. 55 Marianne Hirsch, op. cit., p. 22. 56 Ibid., p. 257. 57 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,(trans. Richard Howard), New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 64. ‘Is History not simply that time we were not born? I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her.’ ed so many false memories, which were collective memories, that my true childhood has disappeared.’58 Boltanski’s work also throws light upon the instability of the role of both the photograph and the archive in the articulation of history with memory. With his use of found objects and, especially, found photographs, he brings to Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ paradigm the deadpan facticity of a Duchampian readymade. In obses- sively fabricated iterations and reiterations of the question of authentication, he asks what kind of evidence a photograph can supply and what kind of history an archive store. The ways in which Boltanski elicits first the curiosity, and then the participation of his viewers (for instance handing out photographs in public places) sounds his desire not to permit remembering (organic, alive) to collapse into the inert and deadening weight of the memorial, to probe their distinction. Again, Holocaust victim, Jean Améry comes to mind: ‘Clarifica- tion would amount to dismissal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history […] nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no remembering has become mere memory.’59 364 Suisses Morts (1990) [fig. 9] is one from a series that Boltanski began making in 1990.This version consists of 364 black and white photographs intended to be hung in a grid and lit with bulbs connected by visible wires, in the manner of a reliquary or shrine. As in many of his earlier works (Les Ombres, 1984; Les Enfants de Dijon, 1985-1986; Le Lycée chases, 1986-1987) Boltanski simulates the hushed drama of a vo- tive religious setting (more Catholic than Jewish, to be sure), as if to push to a crisis the problematic nature of the concept of memorialisation, the dangers of conceiving the past as placid memoriam. The memento mori aspect of the work could not be more direct: you too, the work tells us, will one day be whittled down to a bulb-lit memorial photograph. As I have stressed, few artists have so consistently laboured to challenge the notion of photography as reliable evidence and the archive as a source of incontestable truth. Most of Boltanski’s work consists of re-photographed photographs; images whose source is seldom what it appears to be. Harnessing our propen- sity to find meaning in connection, Boltanski obliges us to see as itemised victims of the Holocaust, or some other, unnamed catastrophe, the frontal mug shots of anonymous citizens in actuality culled from the obituary pages of contemporary newspapers in Switzerland. What could more blandly evoke neutrality than the notion of ‘the Swiss,’ and what, therefore, could more readily give itself over as a metaphor of universality? Here is manipulation and drama of the highest order, channelled at the service of a truth that, if not tied to the ap- parent, is of a moral order. What does a victim look like, Boltanski’s 364 Suisses Morts asks us? Boltanski’s found photographs tell us nothing of either perpetrators or victims, probing deeply held beliefs and prejudices about the relationship between countenance and character. In doing so, he disables both physiognomy and phrenology, scientific expressions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century belief that the surface of the body bore the signs of character. In muting and morally neutralising appearance (Klaus Barbie, he once observed, has the face of a Nobel Prize winner), Boltanski is turning against the modes of instrumental realism that, as Allan Sekula has so brilliantly demonstrated, operated ‘according to an expressive deterrent or repressive logic.’ Criminal identification photographs are a case in point, ‘designed quite literally to facilitate thearrest of their referent.’60

58 Delphine Renard, ‘Entretien avec Christian Boltanski’, 1984, translated and quoted by Marjorie Perloff, ‘What has occurred only once,’ in The Photography Reader, (ed. Liz Wells), London and New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 38 59 Jean Améry, loc. cit. 60 See Allan Sekula’s nuanced Foucaultian reading of the inscription of the body in the photographic archive, with particular reference to the notion of the criminal archive, ‘The Body and the Archive’, in October, vol. 39 (Winter 1986), pp. 6-7. But as Sekula also points out, the photographic archive is compromised, its testimony fallible from the start: compromised by the ‘messy contingency’ of photographs, and also by the fact that, importantly, the components of the photographic archive are ‘not conventional lexical units,’ but rather, are subject to ‘the cir- cumstantial character of all that is photographable.’61 The photographic archive cannot, in short, be subjected to the same taxonomic, systemic rigour as the filing cabinet. Anyone who has undertaken a Google search for an image will know that, without verbal tags, it is impossible to consult an archive of images, and that there is no hard and fast rule – no science – determining the relationship of image to tag. Doubtlessly, the rhetoric of mourning with which critical theory has concerned itself touches upon broader public preoccupations with remembering and forgetting, as well as the definition of the nature of ‘history’ itself as a discipline. ‘I continue to be troubled,’ writes Paul Ricouer, ‘by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of com- memorations and abuses of memory – and of forgetting.’62 Ricouer calls attention not only to the problems arising from competing testimonies, but also to the fact that the archive is only one of the possible destinies of testimony.63 Contrariwise, no archive can contain the full complement of testimony, hence Pierre Nora’s exhortation quoted near the beginning of this essay, ‘archive as much as you like: something will always be left out.’ Historical accounts are partial; memory can be fickle. And so it is that a young character in Julian Barnes’ short novel of ideas, The Sense of an Ending, precociously declares: ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’64 History is at the heart of the archival project, and the intersection of history and memory is the place where the archival turn in art begins. I have attempted to show instances of how the conditions of the archive, particularly where it meets photography, have been diversely explored in contemporary artistic practice. The limits of the preconditions of the archive – that no item be identical to any other item – are tested by the photographic predicament of reproducibility, and much work that falls within the arc of the ‘archival turn’ plays upon notions of singularity and difference, along with their cousins, recognisability and strangeness. What all the works I have discussed share with other archivally inspired work is a concern with the past, and with it, an idea of the future. I have argued that beyond its emphasis on collection, taxonomy or typology, the archival turn in art places itself at the juncture between history, memory and imagination. As such, it is ideally positioned to play an important part in both artistic practice and in art history as a discipline. For in vexing teleologies, in disabling facile accounts of the relationship between origins and outcome, the archival turn in art allows us to explore the ways in which historical memory might be enlivened and performed for succeeding generations.

61 Ibid., p. 17. 62 Paul Ricouer, op. cit. p. xv. 63 Ibid., p. 161. 64 Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, London: Jonathan Cape, 2011, p. 17. SELECTED WORKS FROM

THE BERARDO COLLECTION Marcel Duchamp Boîte (Série C), 1958 Box with exterior covering in linen, lined with grey-blue Ingres paper, and with several objects 40 x 38 x 9 cm

Vito Acconci Public Domain, L’Attico, Roma, December 2-10,1972, 7pm-9pm, 1972 Photographs and chalk on cardboard 10 elements; 78,5 x 104 cm each

Helena Almeida Estudo para dois espaços [Study for Two Spaces], 1977 Gelatin silver prints 8 elements; 60 x 40 cm each

Bernd e Hilla Becher Watertowers, 1988 Gelatin silver prints 16 elements; 40,5 x 30,5 each

Christian Boltanski 364 Suisses morts [364 Dead Swiss], 1990 Black and white photographs, light bulbs and electric wire Variable dimensions

Anselm Kiefer Elisabeth von Osterreich [Elizabeth of Austria], 1991 Mixed media and lead objects mounted on wood 195 x 301 cm

Hiroshi Sugimoto Southbay Drive In, San Diego, 1993 Gelatin silver print 42,5 x 54 cm

Hiroshi Sugimoto Stadium Drive In, Orange, 1993 Gelatin silver print 42,5 x 54 cm

Hiroshi Sugimoto Studio Drive In, Culder City, 1993 Gelatin silver print 42,5 x 54 cm

Hiroshi Sugimoto Compton Drive In, 1994 Gelatin silver print 42,5 x 54 cm

Tracy Moffat Up in the Sky, 1997 Offset prints 25 elements; 61 x 76 cm each

Daniel Blaufuks Untitled, Exile Series, 1999-2005 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) 16 elements; 123 x 153,5 cm each

Fundação de Arte Moderna e Contemporânea — Coleção Berardo Honorary President José Berardo Founding Board Estado Português Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém José Berardo Associação Colecção Berardo Conselho de Administração / Board of Trustees José Berardo, Presidente / President Ana Isabel Trigo Morais André Luiz Gomes Dalila Rodrigues João Miguel Barros Renato Berardo

Museu Coleção Berardo Artistic Director Pedro Lapa Managing Director Pedro Bernardes Curator Rita Lougares Exhibition Management Ricardo Custódio David Rato Collection Manager Isabel Soares Alves Registration António Pedro Mendes Francisca Sousa Exhibition Designer Maria João Mântua Restoration Rodrigo Bettencourt da Câmara Publications Clara Távora Vilar Nuno Ferreira de Carvalho Education Department Cristina Gameiro, coordination Cátia Bonito Filipa Gordo Press Office Namalimba Coelho Marketing Ana Casaca Tiago Bueso Front Office Management Cristina Sequeira Accounting and Finance Maria José Mâncio Bruno Mitelo Secretary Ana Sampaio