The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy

234 Pages·2008·8.3 MB·English

by  Sven Spieker

THE BIG ARCHIVE

THE BIG ARCHIVE
art from bureaucracy
sven spieker
THE MIT PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
© 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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This book was set in Filosofi a and Helvetica Neue
by Graphic Composition. Printed and bound in Spain.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Spieker, Sven.
The big archive : art from bureaucracy / Sven Spieker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 262- 19570- 6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Art, Modern—20th century. 2. Collective memory.
3. Art and history.
I. Title.
N6490.S646 2008
709.04—dc22
2007039872
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
1
Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION 1
2
SIXTEEN ROPES ix 1881 17
Ilya Kabakov MATTERS OF PROVENANCE
(PICKING UP AFTER HEGEL)
3
FREUD’S FILES 35
Sigmund Freud
4
1913 51
“DU HASARD EN CONSERVE”:
DUCHAMP’S ANEMIC ARCHIVES
Marcel Duchamp
5
1924 85
THE BUREAUCRACY OF THE
UNCONSCIOUS (EARLY SURREALISM)
André Breton
Max Ernst
Le Corbusier
6
AROUND 1925 105
THE BODY IN THE MUSEUM
El Lissitzky
Sergei Eisenstein
7
1970–2000 131
ARCHIVE, DATABASE, PHOTOGRAPHY
Hans- Peter Feldmann
Susan Hiller
Gerhard Richter
Walid Raad
Boris Mikhailov
Epilogue 193
8
Thomas Demand THE ARCHIVE AT PLAY 173
Michael Fehr
Notes 195 Andrea Fraser
Susan Hiller
Index 217 Sophie Calle

Acknowledgments
Over the years this project has been in the making, I have incurred debt of all
sorts with many friends and colleagues. Finally, I want to thank at least some of
them. Russell Coon, Martha Buskirk, Michael Fehr, Maria Gough, and Walid Raad
kindly read portions of the book and shared their opinions. I thank Elisabeth
Weber, Ann Adams, Bruce Robertson, Laurie Monahan, Hans-C hristian von
Herrmann, Mai Wegener, Richard Polt, Bernhard Dotzler, Louis-P hilippe
Martim, Wolf Kittler, Michael Molnar, Jackie SpaVord, Igor Smirnov, Wolfgang
Ernst, Marco Codebò, and my colleagues on the ARTMargins editorial board who
shared their knowledge and time. At the MIT Press, Roger Conover saw merit
in this project at an early stage and accompanied its completion with warmth
and critical curiosity. Also at the Press, Marc Lowenthal answered my e-m ails
faster than I could even send them, and Paula Woolley and Matthew Abbate ed-
ited the manuscript with great precision. I thank Margarita Encomienda for her
masterful design of this book. Two anonymous reviewers helped me rethink
parts of the book in unexpected ways. (I now know that they were Ulrich Baer
and Rubén Gallo, and I thank them warmly.) My students in two graduate semi-
nars on archives in twentieth- century art put my ideas to a rigorous test at an
early stage, and an international conference on art and archives at the University
of California, Santa Barbara (“Packrats and Bureaucrats: Study in the Archive”)
brought together artists and scholars whose work was crucial to the project. Ilya
and Emilia Kabakov, Boris and Vita Mikhailov, Andrea Fraser, Susan Hiller,
Walid Raad, Michael Fehr, Markus Krajewski, James Putnam, Richard Polt, and
Sally Smith kindly shared reproductions of their work or opened their collec-
tions. For his dedication to securing images and the rights to their reproduction
I thank Will Scilacci. My project benefi ted greatly from two fellowships, one at
the Stanford Humanities Center and the other at Berlin’s Literaturzentrum. I am
grateful to the staV of ucsb’s History of Art and Architecture department and
the Comparative Literature Program / Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic
Studies for their help with many critical tasks. Without a grant from ucsb’s
Academic Senate I would not have been able to recover the considerable cost of
image reproduction. As always, thanks go to Russell E. Coon for his unwavering
support and sustained aVection.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

SIXTEEN ROPES
Ilya Kabakov
IN ILYA KABAKOV’S INSTALLATION SIXTEEN ROPES (1984), NUMEROUS PIECES OF GARBAGE
DANGLE AT REGULAR INTERVALS, ROUGHLY AT EYE LEVEL, FROM SIXTEEN PARALLEL ROPES
THAT ARE SUSPENDED A METER AND A HALF FROM EACH OTHER AND THE SAME DISTANCE
FROM THE FLOOR. Written labels attached to the objects by pieces of string contain
text and fragments of phrases. (“Look what we took out of the library!” “We’ll
read it this evening.”) Although it may not be immediately apparent, Sixteen Ropes
represents an archive. In fact, such “stringing up” of objects was one of the most
ancient forms of fi ling, and the English word “fi le,” which is derived from the
French fi l (string), originally meant “to line something up on a piece of string.”
The question posed by Sixteen Ropes, then, is whether its strings can deliver what
archives promise us, a sense of (and in) time.
Archives contain paperwork that no longer circulates in the bureaucracy,
paperwork that has lapsed and become garbage. The crux of Sixteen Ropes is the way
in which it provides garbage in a literal sense—from cigarette butts to wrappers,
SIXTEEN ROPES ix
scraps of paper, and railway tickets—with the archive’s formal trappings, such as
strings, labels, ropes, knots, and written words, all functioning to tame the trash
by turning it into documents of culture and history. The most important of the
tools designed to bring about this conversion, the horizontal ropes and the ver-
tical strings to which the labels are attached, form a three- dimensional grid on
which the suspended garbage is caught. But can this formal grid suYciently re-
duce the heterogeneity of the trash, its utter diVerence, so that a coherent story,
and hence history, can emerge?
0.1
Ilya Kabakov, Sixteen Ropes
(1984 installation). Watercolor and
pen on paper (1993). Courtesy
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. © 2007
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York.
x THE BIG ARCHIVE