2006 Edited by Amy R. Miller Dina The/eritis Graduate/Undergraduate Journal of the Department of Art Contrapposto 5 Editors' Note Contrapposto © 2006 Production of this year's edition of Contrapposto would not have been possible without the support ofThe Department of Art, The Graduate History of Art Students' Union, and the Fine Art Stu­ Graduate Editor: Amy R. Miller dent Union. Thank you to the editorial committee members, who Undergraduate Editor: Dina Theleritis worked individually with contributors and without them this pub­ Editorial Committee: Leanne Dawkins, Anna Fischer, lication would not be possible. Candice Hamelin, Minna Lee, Amara Magloghim, Ashley Raghubir, and Karen Whaley Contrapposto seeks to public a wide variety of subject matter Design: Alexis Cohen and Amy Miller from a broad represtation of the student body of the University Layout: Amy Miller ofToronto on the subject of Art History. This year's contributions span almost five thousand years of history, and reflect a balance of graduate and undergraduate work. Contrapposto is the annual academic student journal of the Fine Art Department of the University of Toronto. The journal endeav­ ors to publish outstanding essays written by both graduate and Amy R. Miller and Dina Theleritis undergraduate students in the Department. The publication is funded by various student and administrative organizations at the University, and is produced entirely by students. The 2006 edition is the fifthvolume of Contrapposto. On the cover: Derain, Andre, Standing Nude (Nu debout), winter 1907, limestone, 95 x 33 x 17 em. Musee National d'Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (photograph provided by FADIS, Unviersity ofToronto) ISSN 1715-846X Published March, 2007 Each essay in this publication is copyright of its respective author. Printed in Canada by The Learning Achievement Centre, www.tlac.ca Contents 1 Remembering in Kind: Memory and the Archive in the work of Christian Remembering in Kind: Memory and Boltanski, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Rachel Whiteread the Archive in the work of Christian Alexis Cohen Boltanski, Bernd and Hilla Becher 19 Joan Mir6: Dreams of Catalonia and Rachel Whiteread Celina Sinisterra Alexis Cohen 51 Fouquet and the Absent Frame: Pictorial and Textual Relationships in the Hours In conjunction with "the culture of memory"1 that of Etienne Chevalier continues to pervade political and cultural thought in the Nick Herman West, much of latter twentieth-century art reveals a deep concern for the expression of issues related to the 73 Alfredo Lam's Uncatalogued Oil on acts of documentation and preservation. While these Paper: An Examination of its Surrealist acts are in many respects inherent aspects of art and Influences artistic practice, as any physical mark becomes an Ady Gruner enduring manifestation of some thought, emotion or image, the overt exploration of these facets of art 89 Antoine Plamondon, Portraits of the making and their expressive implications have been tied Clergy in Nineteenth Century Lower to the memory discourses currently taking place. The Canada: Conquest, Church and archive, along with other forms of institutionalized Canadiens remembering such as monuments and museums, has Elizabeth Peden emerged as an expressive form in and of itself. The archive, in current artistic practice, stands as both a 121 A Study of Cycladic Figures or Marketing literal and metaphoric from; it operates simultaneously Illegal Antiquties? Ethics in Twentieth­ as a functional structure and as a mode of Century Art Historical Scholarship representation. Our cultural obsession with Danielle Cornacchia remembering and forgetting has frequently been played out through the image and concept of the archive as 135 Triumphant and Sacred: The Chapel of many contemporary artists have used some literal or the Archangel Michael at Lorsch conceptual manifestation of its form to express their Linda Stone ideas. The work of the multimedia French artist 1 2 3 Alexis Cohen Alexis Cohen Christian Boltanski, the German objectivist photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the post­ offers a sense of refuge from the flux of time and space minimalist British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, all in the modern world and allows us to remember the past incorporate aspects of the archive as a means of in concrete terms through the documents and objects it addressing issues about memory, time and their houses. As Huyssen writes: "Some have turned to the preservation. idea of the archive as counterweight to the ever­ While it is undeniable that the last twenty years increasing pace of change, as a site of temporal and have been dominated by a widespread concern for the spatial preservation."4 politics of memory, it is less certain how and why this The capacity for the archive to act as a cultural obsession emerged in the West. One possible stabilizing force is highlighted in Jacques Derrida's explanation for this trend is the general volatility of the etymological deconstruction of the word 'archive' itself. social, political and technological context of our times, a In his book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, context which leaves us yearning for the stability of Derrida reveals the archive as a starting point for the forms such as the archive, museum and monument, dissemination of order and thereby highlights a which in many ways have a static existence outside the traditional understanding of the archive as a rationally vicissitudes of time and history. In Present Pasts: organized collection of material culture. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Arkhr;, we recall, names at once the commence­ Huyssen argues that our obsession with memory is, in ment and the commandment. This name ap­ part, the product of the unstable relationship between parently coordinates two principles in one: the the past and the present that exists today and our principle according to nature or history, there reactionary desire to somehow stabilize this new and where things commence ... but also the prin­ unsettling relationship. 2 He also suggests that the ciple according to the law, there where men and instability caused by rapid technological change leaves god command, there where authority, social or­ us without a fixed sense of the present and therefore we der are exercised, in this place from which or­ must turn to images and concepts of the past to anchor der is given ...5 ourselves in the face of a world constantly in flux. " ... [M]emory and musealization together are called upon to However, the archive also has a distinctly irrational provide a bulwark against obsolescence and overtone since its contents, files, correspondence, disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety about the photographs, and objects are not inherently ordered. speed of change and the ever-shrinking horizons of The very function of an archive is to order and preserve time and space."3 The archive, a place where otherwise the physical facets of society that, if left 'un-kept', might perishable documents and objects of historical interest not be recognized as important nor survive through the are institutionally preserved for posterity, therefore generations. This preservationalpreservation capacity is also reflected in the external appearance of the archive, Contrapposto 2006 4 5 Alexis Cohen Alexis Cohen which projects a monumental order that is designed to push against the effects of time, all the while containing otherwise access, either because they are his own the organic and fragile documents of human life and which he has forgotten, or because they are the activity now decontextualized and hidden from public memories of others which are inherently inaccessible. view. It is this contrast between the rational and While Boltanski's method of investigation is propelled irrational aspects of the archive, however, that makes it by a desire for catharsis, this process and its artistic an effective means of addressing ideas about time and products are always shrouded in a sense of loss, as he memory. If there were no traces of human imperfection, is looking for something that can never truly be 'found' the austerity and institutionalized order of most archives or archived. The futility of this search is also could not be used to comment on such human themes, consciously exacerbated by the fact that Boltanski not nor would it offer us the reassurance of stability in the only works with his own lack of memory, 8 but also face of the destabilized relationship between the past incorporates fictional evidence of the lives of others, and present discussed by Huyssen. thereby engaging with the opacity of the very subject he The French multimedia artist, Christian Boltanski is attempting to explore. addresses these ideas through the exploration of In his 1971 work Photo Album of the Family D., memory and how it is constructed in the context of a 1939-1964 (figure 1), Boltanski assembled a massive post-Enlightenment industrial culture "committed to grid of one hundred and fifty family photographs from rationality."6 Born in Paris in 1944 to a Jewish family, the archives of Michel Durand-Dessert.9 Boltanski then Boltanski grew up in both the chaos and destruction of "rearranged memories which were not his own"10 in an the aftermath of the Second World War and the order that seemingly documented the life of this family desolation of having lost both his parents before the as it evolved over a course of several years. This work age of six. This environment had a lasting impact on embodies the inherent contradictions at work in any Boltanki's art and his corresponding desire to archive - the competing qualities of a rational investigate his own past. While he began as a painter, organization and irrational content. Here the rationality Boltanski soon probed the expressive possibilities of a of the grid system and the repetition of the pristine glass variety of other media as a means of exploring the ideas and tin frames stand in contrast to the organic nature of of memory and its potential reconstruction.