Some Reading

An Archival Impulse

Hal Foster’s essay originally published in October Magazine Fall 2004, No. 110, Pages 3-22, in which he identifies a desire to retrieve and materialise historical material, often in the production of new archives. These practices may follow the model of artist as curator, and play on the categorisation and knowledge sets, but they are not necessarily concerned with institutional or representational critique. Yet these private archives do question and pervert orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large. Foster argues that in making connections between things that cannot be connected, these archives tend to underscore the nature of all archival materials as found and constructed, factual and fictive. For Foster, there is within certain forms of archival artwork a redemptive aspect: within the suggestion of possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations is an inherent possibility of transforming the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia. Foster asks how useful are critical negotiations of archival forms as they intersect strata of social, institutional and psychic space? 

Seth Price's Dispersion is an eccentrically designed and illustrated treatise on media, distribution, and the future status of the work of art is both precise and open-ended. Taking up examples that range from Marcel Broodthaers and Dan Graham to Linux, Alexander Kluge, and the Daniel Pearl video, Price forges a complex and prophetic art history, even as he appropriates and recasts the traditional roles of writer and designer. "Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur? The art system usually corrals errant works, but how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks?" (Kelly Walker Artforum April 2004)

Archive Fever

Derrida's seminal essay articulates the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes. It forges a blunt institutional critique of the archive as a place of origin and perpetuity; a place of stasis and order. The archive has potential for discovery of diverse and disparate meanings through power, politics and technology. First presented at a conference on memory in London on June 5, 1994, Derrida notes the archival impulse is riddled with contradictory purposes found in individual and collective minds, historically and fictionally. Indeed, history and fiction may blur in the haunted selves that suffer from "archive fever" (mal d'archive).