'The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the "living" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's "anemic archive" of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.

Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.' (Front flap)
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Onsite

author
Location code
REF.SPS
Language

English

Keyword
Publication/Creation date

2008

No of pages

228

ISBN / ISSN

9780262195706

No of copies

1

Content type

monograph

Chapter headings

Sixteen Ropes

Introduction

1881: Matters of Provenance (Picking Up After Hegel)

Freud's Files

1913: 'Du hasard en conserve': Duchamp's Anemic Archives

1924: The Bureaucracy of the Unconscious (Early Surrealism)

Around 1925: The Body in the Museum

1970-2000: Archive, Database, Photography

The Archive at Play

Epilogue

The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy
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The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy

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