Staging the Archive : Art and Photography in the Age of New Media [1 ed.] 9781780234144, 9781780233727

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Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Staging the Archive : Art and Photography in the Age of New Media, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Staging the Archive : Art and Photography in the Age of New Media, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

staging the archive

Staging the Archive : Art and Photography in the Age of New Media, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Staging the Archive : Art and Photography in the Age of New Media, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Staging the Archive Art and Photography in the Age of New Media

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Ernst van Alphen

reaktion books

Staging the Archive : Art and Photography in the Age of New Media, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2014 Copyright © Ernst van Alphen 2014 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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isbn 978 1 78023 372 7

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Contents

Introduction

7

one

Emergence

21

two

Storage

53

three

Listing

91

four

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Classification

137

five

Administration

163

six

Depletion

187

seven

Reanimation

225

References 267 Bibliography 279 Acknowledgements 289 List of Illustrations 291 Index 299

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Introduction

This book is dedicated to art practices that, in a variety of ways, mobilize the model of the archive. These ‘archival artworks’ probe the possibilities of what art is and can do. But also, the other way around, they explore and challenge the principles on which archival organizations are built. Such an exploration of the archive through art is timely. The reason for the current relevance of an exploration of ‘archival thinking’ is a generally cultural one. Whereas the role of narrative is declining, the role of archive, in a variety of forms, is increasing. As the artworks discussed here suggest, the archive has become the dominant symbolic and cultural form. The role of narrative in Western cultures has been, and still is, fundamental. Over thousands of years, mythical and religious stories have provided frameworks that enabled human subjects to understand and direct their lives. Narrative can be seen as an existential response to the world and to the experience of that world. This response is based on the temporal dimension of life; it assumes continuity between events, most of them in the past or the present, but usually future orientated. Although future events still have to happen, narrative frameworks often provide clear-cut expectations of them. It is from the perspective of a closure that will take place in the future that past and present events are understood and represented. Narratives that end with a life beyond the life we are living, but also apocalyptic narratives, are prime examples of how narrativity has been 7

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and still is a necessary mode of signification for making human existence liveable.1 When, with the rise of modernity, mythical and religious stories lost their credibility, it did not at all erode the crucial role of narrativity. Mythical and religious stories were replaced by, or translated into, stories that reflected more modern political, moral or scientific points of view. Narratives of liberation, emancipation or progression (or their apocalyptic opposites) became the new versions of old stories. Different as they were in their worldview, their functioning as narrative frameworks providing sense to the world and to human existence remained the same. Postmodern French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, however, has argued that the contemporary culture defined by the postmodern condition is characterized by the decline of narrative.2 It is, however, not narrative as such, or in general, that is under siege. Postmodernity manifests itself through scepticism toward what he calls meta-narratives. In fact, the mythical, religious, political and scientific narratives to which I just referred are nothing else than such meta-narratives. Metanarratives are conclusive stories that strive to signify the whole world in one single account. Lyotard’s examples of such meta-narratives are the Enlightenment narratives in which knowledge is no goal in itself, but serves human subjects in their pursuit of progress in the moral, political and economic sense. The validity of knowledge functions within an epic story about emancipation and fulfilment; it is a means to a narrative end. Postmodernism is then defined as a radical incredulity toward such meta-narratives. According to Lyotard, the place of narrative within contemporary culture is a modest one. What is left is a multiplicity of contending smaller narratives. No single one of these is superior and has the status of being conclusive or overarching (meta-). Narratives are no longer able to legitimize the pursuit of knowledge, economic growth or social and moral emancipation. They only work as expressions of a point of view and of specific interests; those points of view can only become paramount by being convincing or not. To be more 8

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precise, they work rhetorically: not on the basis of their truth value, but performatively. Lyotard’s account of the transformation of the condition of modernity into postmodernity does not pay much attention to what has led to this transformation. He elaborates its results and implications. He explicates only one cause, namely the rise of a computerized society. The explosive dissemination of computer technology has replaced narrative as dominant symbolic form with the database. Lyotard is not the only one who stages narrative and the database as competitive symbolic forms and who argues for the diminishing importance of narrative in favour of the database. In his work about new media, Lev Manovich also argues that narrative as a key form of cultural expression of the modern age has been replaced in the postmodern age by the database.3 Both narrative and the database are competing for the same territory in human culture; as symbolic, cultural forms they each claim an exclusive right to make meaning about the world. Manovich sees narrative and the database as two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, or two existential responses to the world. They differ in how they do this. The database represents the world as a list or collection of items, whereas narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory for representing the world.4 The kind of imagination proposed by the database appears to be spatial, whereas narrative organizes experience first of all on a temporal basis. They both give efficient access to information, albeit in very different ways. But in our computer age it is the database that becomes the predominant centre of creative processes that are deployed to make sense of human experience, cultural memory and the world in general. Of course, the database is a rather technical notion and in that sense hard to compare with narrative, which is a symbolic form that can be recognized in all modes of making sense of experience and memory. But Manovich’s claim is that the computer-based form of the database has migrated back into culture at large, both literally and 9

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conceptually.5 The database has become a new metaphor that we use to conceptualize lists and collections of whatever kind: collections of documents, of objects, of individual as well as collective memory. The computer database and 3-d computer-based virtual space ‘have become true cultural forms – general ways used by the culture to represent human experience, the world, and human existence in this world’.6 To further understand how the rise of computerized society has redistributed the role of narrative and of the database as competing creative impulses, Manovich brings in the semiotic notions of syntagm and paradigm. Originally introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure to describe the structure of natural languages, and applied by Roland Barthes to describe signs systems like fashion or food, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic are two structural dimensions of all sign systems. A syntagm consists of a combination of signs. To use the example of natural language, an utterance is produced by combining or stringing together one word after another, in a linear sequence. The paradigmatic dimension is the result of selecting: a language user selects each new element from a group of related elements with the same meaning or function. S/he selects a noun from the group, set or collection of nouns, or a particular expression from the set of expressions that are synonyms of that expression. Roland Barthes’ example of fashion results in the following example: a complete outfit from socks and shoes to hat is a syntagm. But shoes are selected from the paradigm of those objects that cover the feet and that one uses to walk outside in the street, to which boots and sandals also belong. De Saussure describes the paradigmatic dimension as associations that are made ‘in theory’. This means that the elements that belong to a paradigm are related to each other in absentia. Elements that belong to the syntagmatic dimension are related to each other in praesentia: they are articulated into a sentence or into an outfit. Manovich adds to this difference between paradigm and syntagm that paradigm is implicit and imagined, 10

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whereas syntagm is explicit.7 These characteristics of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions can also be recognized in novels and in cinema: Literary and cinematic narratives work in the same way. Particular words, sentences, shots, and scenes that make up the narrative have a material existence; other elements that form the imaginary world of an author or a particular literary or cinematic style, and that could have appeared instead, exist only virtually.8

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Manovich’s claim about new media is that they reverse this relationship between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. ‘Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialized. Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real; syntagm, virtual.’9 He illustrates this privileging of paradigm over syntagm by describing what typical interfaces do: For instance, a screen may contain a few icons; clicking on each icon leads the user to a different screen. On the level of an individual screen, these choices form a paradigm of their own that is explicitly presented to the user. On the level of the whole object, the user is made aware that she is following one possible trajectory among many others. In other words, she is selecting one trajectory from the paradigm of all trajectories that are defined.10 Interactive interfaces present the complete paradigm to the user by an explicit menu of all available choices. This does not imply that the syntagmatic dimension is cancelled out. Although the user of a computer is making choices or selections at each new screen, the end result is a syntagmatic, linear sequence of screens that have been 11

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followed. But it is important that the paradigm is more present than the syntagm, which is less visible and present and embedded within an overall paradigmatic structure. Outside of the special realm of structuralist thought, we have another term for paradigm: archive. The structuralist discourse exemplifies yet another dimension of the fundamental changes brought about by the rise of computerized society. But, as already argued, these changes are not limited to computer technology. Ultimately, it concerns a change in creative processes that are deployed for making sense of life and memory. It is the paradigmatic dimension of the database, in other words of the archive, that becomes the predominant centre of those processes. As a result of this cultural change the symbolic form of (syntagmatic) narrativity has a more modest role to play. It is no longer the encompassing framework in which all kinds of information is embedded, but the other way around. It is in the encompassing framework of archival organizations that (small) narratives are embedded.

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Passive Guardians of Memory versus Active Agents Shaping Memory Reflection on the archive takes place first of all, as it should do, in the discipline that has the archive as its object: archival science. Since about 2000 there has been a lively debate that can be considered to have been stimulated by, first of all, Michel Foucault’s fundamental work about ‘the order of things’ and the role of archives in that ordering; and secondly by Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever. In the work of both philosophers the archive is first and foremost a metaphorical construct that helps them to articulate their ideas about human knowledge, thinking, memory and power. For Foucault, the archive is not an institution, not a material site (a building filled with documents and objects) or a set or collection of documents. But, as he argues in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the archive consists of ‘the law of what can be said’; in other words a set 12

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of discursive rules. It is the ‘system of enunciabilities’, which means that it is a ‘system that establishes statements as events and things’.11 The archive is that ‘system of statements’ that shape the specific regularities of what can and cannot be said. So, a system of discursive rules entails not only a set of specific conceptual distinctions but also exclusions – that which cannot be said. For Derrida the archive is not just a material place where knowledge is stored, but it is also a general feature of our mental lives. This aspect can be examined, most obviously, through the work of Freud. All human beings suffer from mal d’archive, from archive fever or an archive sickness, which is the compulsion towards archiving. Derrida uses the psychoanalytic topography of consciousness and the unconscious in order to demonstrate his argument that psychoanalysis is in fact an archival practice as much as an archaeological excavation of repressed memories. He sees the unconscious as an archive that is established by the ‘archive drive’. To understand the archive drive and archive fever as reflections of real, material archives is helpful. And, conversely, in order to understand archival organizations, Derrida’s psychoanalytically inspired understanding of archive fever is very useful, too. For the archive as metaphor has repercussions for real, material archives. That is why these two philosophers have compelled a socalled ‘postmodern turn’ in archival science. Many publications in this field write about the implications of postmodern thinking for the institution of the archive. The role of archival science in a postmodern world challenges archivists everywhere to rethink their discipline and practice. As Terry Cook formulates it: A profession rooted in nineteenth century positivism, let alone in earlier diplomatics, may now be adhering to concepts, and thus resulting strategies and methodologies, that are no longer viable in a postmodern and computerized world.12 13

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This paradigm shift steps away from viewing archival records as static physical objects or passive products of human or administrative activity. It understands such records now as having radical consequences for the self-image of archivists. They are no longer the passive guardians of an inherited legacy. They are now seen as active agents who shape cultural and social memory. Whereas archivists were until recently information technologists embracing the notion of the archive as a neutral, even mechanical accumulation of information, now they have become cultural analysts conceiving the archive as storage of information as well as a source of knowledge and power essential for social and personal identity.13 But what exactly does it mean that archives are no longer considered to be passive guardians of an inherited legacy but instead active agents that shape personal identity and social and cultural memory? This is the central question of this book. I will elaborate different aspects of the archive and demonstrate how they produce specific meanings in specific ways. In that respect the archive is far from a neutral guardian. Although the archive is in many cases a place where facts can be found, or, in the words of Jeffrey Wallen, ‘a place where secrets are revealed or where one can now find truths that had been hidden’, the archive is also a place that ‘actively shapes and produces the identities of those it registers’.14 The archive is responsible for significations that differ fundamentally from meaning produced by narratives. Wallen describes how contacts with archiving mechanisms shape our identities. Who we are is always also now produced by archival machines that register, observe, and record our passage through the apparatuses of society . . . The driver’s license, the school report card, the credit card receipt, the medical report are the artifacts we receive from our interactions with the gigantic bureaucracies of the state, the school, the financial system, 14

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and the medical-insurance complex. Our identities are woven for us, and the archive is the loom.15

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A very strong example of the shaping power of archival organization is Wallen’s case study of the Stasi archives in former East Germany. Although it stems from a totalitarian society that is utterly bureaucratic in obsessive ways, the point is that the way the Stasi does the archiving, the way it performs as an active agent in creating the identities of those whom they register, is not fundamentally different from what any archival organization does: In almost all instances the Stasi manage to create something akin to the ‘biographical illusion’ through the techniques of surveillance and its arsenal of policing measures. Thus, in many cases, the Stasi’s tales of dissidence converged with the lived experiences of the critical writers the Stasi pursued. Many of the individuals the Stasi branded as hostile or dissident were forced, sooner or later, to act out their Stasi-engineered destinies . . . Invariably the two ‘stories’ merged – that of the Stasi and the individual’s own life story – and these individuals were forced to live out the fiction that state apparatus and the Stasi had fabricated for them.16 The moment that an individual finds out about the fictional record the Stasi has archived of her or him, s/he will begin to think critically and antagonistically about the East German state apparatus. By doing this they begin to behave according to the accusations the Stasi made against her or him. Ultimately, this results in an internalization of an archival portrait that others have constructed. This true portrayal was not found in the archive, but produced by the archive. Although this example is extreme in the sense that it comes from an archival practice in a totalitarian society, it demonstrates well how the archive is not just a neutral guardian but also an active agent. 15

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Archival science reflects more and more on the shaping power of the archive. Of course, archival theoretical discourse should not be conflated with the dominant ideas that archivists and historians still believe in. Yet this current discourse seems to be symptomatic for a shift that emphasizes process instead of product, function instead of structure, archiving instead of archives, recording context instead of record, actively mediated ‘archivalization’ of social memory instead of natural residue or passive by-product of social memory.17 As a result, archives are no longer passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested or confirmed. And by extension, in the words of Cook and Schwartz, memory is not something found and collected in the archives, but something that is made in the archive, and continually remade.18

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Staging the Archive in Modern Art Such a rethinking of the archive within archival science had already been initiated some time before the introduction of the immaterial archive system of databases necessitated it. This reflection on and through the archive took place in the domain of modern art and it still continues there. The interest in the archive in twentieth-century art was not at first motivated by the digital revolution. Instead it concerns a use of the archive as genre or model, which shapes the coordinates of the work of art. This use of the archive does not only imply a reflection on the nature of art, however, but also on the nature of the archive. These artworks modelled on the archive probe the possibilities of what art is and can do, but also the other way around: they use, explore and foreground the principles on which archival organizations of recollection are built. Such artworks are usually transgressive performances of archival principles. They do not just follow or obey these principles. Retrospectively, these reflections on the archival unconscious can be seen as a prophetic intuition of the digital revolution with all its radical implications for archival organization. But 16

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such a reading would be rather anachronistic. Some, but not all, artistic reflections on archives focus on rational uses and abuses of the archive more than on its labyrinthine potential. In the former cases it is the dark potential of the archive that attracts attention, rather than its creative and constructive aspects. Nevertheless, the labyrinthine potential of the archive will certainly be central in some of the archival practices by artists discussed in this book. The surprises but also the frustrations evoked by their archival explorations can be illustrated by means of a text by a literary writer who is as intrigued by archival organization as these artists. Georges Perec, author of the famous archival novel Life, a User’s Manual (1978), also wrote a short text entitled ‘Think/Classify’. This text, structured along the letters of the alphabet, includes a chapter P, entitled ‘How I Classify’. It runs as follows: My problem with classifications is that they don’t last; hardly have I finished putting things into an order before that order is obsolete. Like everyone else, I presume, I am sometimes seized by a mania for arranging things. The sheer number of the things needing to be arranged and the near-impossibility of distributing them according to any truly satisfactory criteria mean that I never finally manage it, that the arrangements I end up with are temporary and vague, and hardly any more effective than the original anarchy. The outcome of all this leads to truly strange categories. A folder full of miscellaneous papers, for example, on which is written ‘To be classified’; or a drawer labelled ‘Urgent 1’ with nothing in it (in the drawer ‘Urgent 2’ there are a few old photographs, in ‘Urgent 3’ some new exercise books). In short, I muddle along.19 It is clear that Perec is familiar with archiving in all respects. He uses archival tools like folders and drawers and he has the real archivist 17

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spirit: drawers contain the label ‘urgent’. But as this short text makes clear, the aimed control is not easily achieved. This explains why Perec regularly practises the simplest form of archival organization, namely the list. In his text ‘Notes Concerning the Objects That Are on My Work-table’, which contains many enumerations, he complains about the fact that with some exceptions, such as the work of Michel Butor, contemporary writing has lost the art of enumeration practised in: ‘the catalogues of Rabelais, the Linnaean list of fish in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, the list of Geographers who’ve explored Australia in Captain Grant’s Children’.20 Perec himself is one of only a few authors left in modern literature who make use of lists and enumerations as a mode of writing.21 This decline of the list in modern literature is, however, compensated by an increasing deployment of archival organizations such as lists, inventories and storages in modern and contemporary visual art. In this book I will discuss these archival practices in modern and contemporary art. Although the earliest examples of such archival artworks go back to the 1930s, it is since the 1960s that archival principles have increasingly been used by visual artists to inform, structure and shape their works. Their aesthetic practices consist of archival enquiry or construction, and the works are built out of archival materials. This use of the archive for artworks does not, however, imply an unreflective instrumentalization of the archive as artistic medium. On the contrary, these artworks interrogate the principles, claims, potentials and effects of the archive. They usually interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against the grain. The interrogation by these artists may take aim at the structural and functional principles underlying the use of the archival record; or it may result in the creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an archaeological relationship to history, evidence, information and data – a structure that gives rise to its own interpretative categories. Contemporary art practices modelled on the archive tend to make use of either one of two media, art forms or genres in order 18

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to investigate the principles and effects of the archive. The first one is the medium of installation, the second one the artist’s book. Although the archive as institution is not usually associated with the medium of the book, books quite often contain archival organizations. Administrative records, for instance, can be found not only in filing cabinets but also in book form. Books and tablets are perhaps the earliest media for the organization of recollection. In that sense certain art practices that make use of the book can also be seen as archival.22 Photography occupies a central place in this discussion. Many contemporary archival installations are installations of photographs and many of the artists’ books consist of collections of photographs. This preference for photographic archives in either book form or in the form of an installation can be understood as informed by the intimate mutual relation between the archival medium and the medium of photography. This mutual relationship between photography and the archive will be a recurring issue throughout this book. The format of this book about archival practices in modern and contemporary art is not thematic (chapters devoted to themes raised by archival artworks), monographic (chapters devoted to individual artists) or historical (describing the developments of archival art practice from the 1960s until the present). Instead it will be systematic. After an introductory section about the historical origins of the archival impulse in modern times, six chapters follow, each addressing a principle or effect that defines the medium of the modern archive. In other words, in the chapters I describe the various conditions of the archive as pertaining to contemporary art practices and vice versa. Usually artists foreground one principle (or a limited number) of the complex of principles and effects that defines the archive. It is through this foregrounding and magnifying of one defining principle that those artists diagnose the rationale of the archive. Hence, within the framework of these systematic chapters, archival practices of individual artists are discussed as emblematic for the exploration and deployment of those principles. 19

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Before discussing the complex of principles underlying the archive, I will first describe the rise of the modern archive in the nineteenth century. In those days the archive was modernized by an increased rationalization of its categorizations and an explosive instrumentalization for scientific or quasi-scientific purposes. Due to these modernizations the archive became of central importance in many domains. In two of these domains the archive is really needed because of the specific problems of control that are encountered in these domains. The invention of photography and its expansion in nineteenth-century scientific and popular culture is the first major stimulus to the nineteenth-century archival impulse, which I will discuss in the first chapter. Another important stimulus I will discuss there is the expansion of European colonialism in that century into colonial empires. I will present both expansions as important contributions to the need to develop modern and efficient archival organizations. As a whole, then, this book offers an itinerary through the variegated landscape of modern and contemporary archival practices. While it focuses on artistic practices that mobilize the archive, it situates these practices firmly in the cultural history from which they emerged, as well as in the contemporary cultural context within which they can abduct the idea of the archive for critical and creative purposes that matter in that context.

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one

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Emergence

The archival impulse in modern and contemporary art is best understood against the background of the rise of the modern archive in the nineteenth century.1 The nineteenth-century archive should be called modern because of the increased rationalization of its categorizations and its instrumentalization for scientific or quasi-scientific purposes, both taking place in that century. The central place of the archive in the culture of the nineteenth century manifests itself in two different domains: one medial and the other cultural-political. The first concerns the invention of photography and its expansion in nineteenth-century scientific and popular culture; the second is the expansion in the nineteenth century of European colonialism into colonial empires. At first sight these two expansions are unrelated, but, as will become clear, they come together in their need for archival organization. It is in the archive that photography and imperialism meet and collaborate. In this chapter I will discuss both domains from the perspective of the special role of archival organizations in those domains. The emergence of an archival impulse can first be located in the invention of the medium of photography in 1826 by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce. This brought with it an increasing need for the archive and archival principles, which stems from the fact that photography has a double relationship of mutuality with the archive. First, the photographic image itself can be seen as an archival record. Second, in order to restrain the sheer number of photographic images, their 21

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ungainly dispersion and the pictorial multiplicity of the photographic image, photography also needs archives. Archives, in turn, are thoroughly fed by photographs – items that justify the archives’ existence and make it visible and meaningful. It is through the ordering, the principles of classification, in other words of archival principles, that the proliferation of photographic images can be held in check. But there is more to it, leading to the emergence of a second mutual relationship. The photograph is not only an archival record, it is also an archive in itself. The photographic image is a spatial configuration of one moment, a configuration that consists of a great number of details. All these details or elements are stored in the image in order to be ordered or classified, leading to one reading or another. Conversely, such use of photographs further illuminates the archive and makes its principles more widely visible and thus common. Acknowledging this double, mutual relationship between photography and the archive, one can say that, in the words of Philip Monk, photographs are lodged and lodging at the same time.2

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Photographic Archives The medium of the archive is, of course, much older than the medium of photography. In the form of lists, inventories and administrative records, archives have a history that is almost as old as that of human history. In the nineteenth century, however, and in intimate interaction with the various photographic practices to which the invention of the photographic medium had given rise, the archive underwent a fundamental transformation. It was compelled to rationalize its classifications along principles introduced by modernity, especially modern science. Those principles were most powerfully elaborated and formulated in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte’s philosophical positivism. Positivism stimulated the emergence of many (quasi)-scientific archival-photographic endeavours. Some of the most significant ones have been described at length by Allan Sekula in his seminal essay ‘The 22

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Body and the Archive’. One of these is Alphonse Bertillon’s police archives in Paris. In this photographic archive Bertillon elaborates a series of standardized tests and measurements to decipher the socalled ‘criminal type’. Another example is the Englishman Francis Galton, who as a statistician and practitioner of eugenics built a photographic archive to improve the hereditary qualities of race. These nineteenth-century photographic archives have in common that they are all used as instruments of social control and differentiation. The stored and classified photographs operated as images of scientific truth. The archives document the criminal (Bertillon) and the supposedly racially inferior (Galton) on the basis of dubious scientific principles, in order to illuminate their differences from the rest of society. They are positivist attempts to ‘define and regulate social deviance’.3 The photographic archives of Bertillon and Galton are conventional, literal archives; they have the form of filing cabinets. The archive has also, however, structured and organized early photography less literally. On the basis of a photograph of American photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, Rosalind Krauss has argued that early photography was not part of the genres of aesthetic discourses, but that its discursive space was that of the archive.4 O’Sullivan’s photograph of 1867, titled Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, has an important place in the art-historical construction of nineteenth-century landscape photography (illus. 1). Krauss demonstrates, however, that this image is organized according to the principles of the descriptive category of the view, not of the aesthetic category of nineteenth-century landscape. Its composition derives from the special sensations of the view, which is characterized by a dramatic insistence on perspectivally organized depth. Views were the images used by the medium and practice of stereoscopy. O’Sullivan spoke about his photographs as views, not as landscapes. Views were singular moments in a complex representation of the world, ‘a kind of complete topographical atlas’.5 The physical space in which these kinds of views were kept was not 23

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the aesthetic space of an exhibition room (on a wall or an easel), but a filing cabinet. A geographical system was stored and catalogued in the drawers of such a filing cabinet. Krauss argues something similar for the photographs of French photographer Eugène Atget. Between 1895 and 1927 Atget produced a vast body of work, which he sold to various historical collections, such as the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Musée de la Ville de Paris and the Monuments Historiques, as well as to commercial builders and artists. Nowadays his documentary photographs are shown in art museums as part of an aesthetic register (illus. 2). This assimilation of his work into aesthetic discourse had already begun in the 1920s, however, when the Surrealists declared him one of their sources of inspiration. Atget was seen as a fellow Surrealist 24

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1 Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, 1867, albumen print from collodion negative. 2 Eugène Atget, Coiffeur, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Paris, 1912, albumen silver print.

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artist. As a result, the whole range of aesthetic categories of description was applied to his work – from intention to self-expression, apprenticeship versus maturity, and more. It was long believed that in order to really understand Atget’s elusive intentions it was necessary to decipher the code provided by his negative numbers. Each of the thousand plates was numbered by Atget, yet not strictly in successive order. They are not organized chronologically, but sometimes double back on each other. The code consists of a systematization of a catalogue of topographic subjects, divided into five major series and many smaller subseries or groups.6 His classifications are socio-anthropological and categorize the collective picture of French culture. His coding system was derived from the card files of the topographic collections and libraries to which he sold his photographs. This suggests that Atget’s body of work should not be considered as an oeuvre, as an aesthetic totality and unity, but as an archival endeavour.

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The Photographic Image as Archive The use of rational, systematic, positivist classification as practised by Bertillon and Galton became especially necessary when photographic documents had to be stored and classified. This argument needs explanation, which requires some discussion of the ontology of the photographic image. Although the ontological status of the photographic image is complex and variegated, in its relation to the archive it is especially the photographic image seen as archival record that is relevant. From that perspective photographs are dealt with as pictorial testimonies of the existence of a recorded fact. The camera is in this respect a kind of archiving machine: every image it produces is a priori an archival object. Accordingly, over time the photographic image has become an object of archival ordering and has thus been appropriated for a myriad of institutional, industrial and cultural purposes. 26

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Within the archive, photographs seem at first to be one kind of document among many. Still they differ, in particular, from other written documents. Documents are older than photographs and therefore command more status; they record acts and transactions and have a legal status. The document’s archival status is the performance and record of its act. Photographs, on the contrary, do not possess the status of an act in that sense: they are considered more passive – reserve more than record. It is this status of the photograph as passive and as reserve that posed a problem for the archive and for archival classification and regulation. The photograph is inherently unstable. It unsettles the grounds of archival classification. In contrast to other kind of documents, photographs are never just established records of the past; once severed from their referents they can always be read differently. This is how the status of the photograph morphs from a record to an archive in and of itself. This unstable status of the photographic image is best explained through the ideas of the German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer. In 1927 Kracauer published an essay with the short title ‘Photography’, in which he makes a distinction between the photographic image and the memory image.7 Whereas, according to commonsense ideas, the two are more or less the same or in continuity with each other, in the sense that photographic images support memory images, according to Kracauer the two are actually opposed. The main stakes or meanings of these different kinds of images are at odds with each other. Whereas the memory image is highly selective and focuses only on what is significant, the photographic image is not at all selective. The memory image retains only what is significant, whereas the photographic image grasps everything that is present in the spatial continuum of a moment. It includes all spatial elements in front of the camera. As a result a photograph reveals nothing of a subject: ‘a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow’.8 To demonstrate that viewers do not relate in the same way to old photographs as to new photographs, Kracauer describes a 60-year-old 27

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photograph of his grandmother when she was still young. The image of the grandmother is pulled from a family album – that is, from an archival context. When Kracauer looks at the photograph of his stillyoung grandmother she disappears behind details; as a result, she disintegrates into a multitude of particulars. The photograph conveys information but no likeness. He notices, for instance, the particulars of her dress, the fashion of those past days, and a hairstyle that now looks dated. But it is the archival context of the family album that enables Kracauer to see the photograph as an image of his grandmother. It must be her, otherwise the image would not have been in the family album: ‘All right, so it’s grandmother, but in reality it’s any young girl in 1864.’9 Especially old photographs demonstrate that, over time, the photographic image becomes severed from its referent. It is only in old images that the main function of the medium of photography can be assessed. In the words of Kracauer: ‘if photography is a function of the flow of time, then its substantive meaning will change depending on whether it belongs to the domain of the present or to some phase of the past’.10 Philip Monk explains this change over time as follows: A photograph, it seems, is only interesting when it ages. When an image is current, we understand it for all the wrong reasons, referred by its mediating role as an ‘optical sign’ to other functions of identification (i.e. recognition) in which the memory image plays a determining role . . . As an image ages, its semiotic value deteriorates, revealing it to be the empty cipher it essentially is.11 This deterioration of semiotic value implies more than just that meaning changes over time. It changes the photograph itself in some fundamental way, because it is based on the severance from the referent. Kracauer formulates this transformation of the photograph as follows: 28

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The images of the stock of nature disintegrated into its elements are offered up to unconsciousness to deal with as it pleases. Their original order is lost; they no longer cling to the spatial context that linked them with an original out of which the memory image was selected. But if the remnants of nature are not oriented toward the memory image, then the order they assume through the images is necessarily provisional.12 And when there is no longer a referent to direct and channel our look at the photographic image, a great variety of details strike the eye and a great variety of possible meanings proliferate. In order to restrict this expansion of possibilities, the classifications of the modern archive are needed: the modern archive provides a ‘provisional order’ to the photograph, which is needed after ‘the original order’ (of the referent) is lost. This is how a photograph changes from a record to a potential archive. But in order to really become one, the archival principle has to come into play. Earlier I pointed out the sense in which a photographic image can be seen as an archive in itself. Photographs are dealt with as recorded facts, as pictorial testimonies of the existence of recorded facts. The camera then has the status of an archiving machine. But the implication of Kracauer’s view for this notion of photography is that after its severance of the referent the photographic image is the messiest archive one can imagine. Because ultimately it lacks any kind of order, it will depend on the classifications of an imposed archival order. Philip Monk explains this dependency as follows: all contingency that we think natural to photography’s indexical registrations dissolved as if in a reversal of an image’s chemical apparition. All contingency was severed. This, I think, proves an archival problem to classify and house all these now homeless images, photographs suddenly severed from their referents. Severing contingency instituted the archive.13 29

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In the history of early photography it is the archive that functions as the solution for photography’s severance of its indexical contingency and the resulting ‘messy archive’. The archive as institution, then, absorbs the photograph’s original status as potentially but incompletely archival itself. Although the archive is needed as a new home for photographswithout-referent, this solution works only provisionally and partly. It does not mean that within the archive photographs finally find or rediscover their true meaning. A second photograph described by Kracauer demonstrates this. It is an image of a film diva that comes from an illustrated newspaper, another kind of archival context. For Kracauer this photograph of the diva refers not to the woman herself, but to the original referent he watched on the screen. Without the archival context of the illustrated newspaper in which it has an orderly place, the image of the diva has, however, much in common with the other image, the one of Kracauer’s grandmother, which he describes ultimately as follows: ‘All right, so it’s grandmother, but in reality it’s any young girl in 1864 . . . This mannequin does not belong to our time; it could be standing with others of its kind in a museum, in a glass case labelled “Traditional Costumes, 1864”.’ Pulled out of the archival context of the family album, Kracauer places his grandmother immediately in another archive. It is this other archive that bestows a new identity on her, namely that of fashion model. Although the diva belongs to Kracauer’s own time, represented in her photograph she has probably much in common with his grandmother’s image: both look like mannequins, and both could be standing in a glass case in a fashion museum. Kracauer does not read the diva as mannequin but as diva, because in his account she remains embedded in the archival context of the illustrated newspaper, in his days more interested in film stars than in fashion. But that does not mean that in this original archival context the image has a true or authentic meaning. What Kracauer saw happening to the old image of his grandmother repeated itself in the daily archives of 30

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contemporary illustrated newspapers, where a ‘blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference towards what the things mean’. The problem he first encountered with old photographs repeats itself at the level of the archive. Both were alike in the ‘detritus they shored up against meaning’.14 In his book on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes notices the same problem concerning the meaning of photography as Kracauer does. In Barthes’ case it is images of his mother instead of his grandmother that frustrate him in recognizing her in the image. After his mother died he went through photographs of her, probably in an album. None of the images seemed right to him, neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face. He concludes: ‘With regard to many of these photographs, it was History which separated me from them.’15

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Here, around 1913, is my mother dressed up – hat with a feather, gloves, delicate linen at wrists and throat, her ‘chic’ belied by the sweetness and simplicity of her expression. This is the only time I have seen her like this, caught in a History (of tastes, fashions, fabrics): my attention is distracted from her by accessories which have perished; for clothing is perishable, it makes a second grave for the loved being.16 Whereas we hope and believe that archives as well as photographs enable us to keep in touch with the past, Barthes experiences the opposite. The archival photographs of his mother separate him from her and he feels excluded from the historical dimension in which the mother is portrayed: History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it – and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history.17 31

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The ambiguous status of the photograph, poignantly articulated by Kracauer and Barthes, is still a bone of contention for photo archivists today. Photographic archives continue to struggle with it because of the difficulties that photography as an elusive medium presents. Tim Schlak describes the dilemmas of archivists dealing with photographs thoroughly. First quoting Barthes’ words ‘photography evades us’, he goes on as follows:

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These words get to the crux of the difficulty archivists have writing about (and by extension, working with) photographs. Simply put, photographs are very difficult objects to talk about, let alone classify, describe, and essentially ‘own’ as archival evidence. Photographs compel us with their capacity to evoke rather than tell, to suggest rather than explain, so that they simultaneously allure and frustrate us with what we naively perceive in their content to be history and fact.18 The problem is that, like archival texts and documents, most photographs have the status of non-fictional testaments to what once was. But as images they do not articulate their content, opening up to a plurality of readings. As testimonies of the past they do not translate easily into words. One solution for the dilemma is, of course, to ignore it and to favour the content of a photograph as historical fact rather than as representation. Until recently this solution was frequently chosen. In order to deal with archival photographs as representations, one needs the semiotic capacity of reading images. But archivists suffer from visual illiteracy, according to Joan Schwartz: ‘Visual illiteracy, therefore, not just outside but more importantly within the profession, has relegated photographs to the margins of archivy.’19 Although they are perceived as testimonies of the past, their place in the archive seems to be decreasing rather than increasing. A growing awareness of the 32

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necessity that photographs have to be read, just like any semiotic artefact, has not stimulated the acquiring of visual literacy, but has instead intensified mistrust toward photography’s otherwise innocent appearance as a reliable witness of history.

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Art and the Archive The archival paradigm described so far applied to the domain of science. In nineteenth-century science, positivism became the new, dominant point of view. Art and aesthetic discourse were separated from that domain and the archival paradigm had no real influence on them. This is not only true of the archive, but also of photography. Whereas since the second half of the twentieth century early photography is discussed in terms of art, collected and exhibited by art museums, in the nineteenth century its discursive status was primarily non-aesthetic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, some modernist artists and photographers embraced the paradigm of the modern archive as developed in the nineteenth century. August Sander, the German portrait and documentary photographer, is probably the best-known example. Sander had his first photo studio in Linz, Austria, and later moved to Cologne, where he joined the Group of Progressive Artists in 1920. It is important to notice that as a photographer he had the ambition to profile himself as a ‘progressive artist’ and that he was accepted by that group. Although his work includes many different genres, such as architecture, landscape and street photography, he is best known for his portraits. As an artist he had plans to document contemporary German society in a portrait series. This resulted in his series People of the Twentieth Century, in which he intended to show a cross-section of German society during the Weimar Republic (illus. 3, 4). As in a modern archive, he used a classificatory system to order the series, divided into seven categories: the Farmer, the Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, Artists, the City and The Last People 33

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3 August Sander, People of the Twentieth Century: National Socialist, 1938.

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4 August Sander, People of the Twentieth Century: Navvy, Ruhr, c. 1928/9.

(meaning homeless people, veterans and so on). Sander’s archive finally contained more than 40,000 images. Most of the images show the subjects full length. They are always facing and acknowledging the camera. The space in which their portrait was taken is usually their ‘natural context’, the space in which they live or work: the pastry cook, for example, is portrayed in his kitchen, road workers in the street, a widower with his two children in the living room, circus artists in front of their circus wagon. This supplementary role of the spatial context is crucial, because otherwise the identity of the classified subjects would still be too ambiguous. In 1929 Sander published 60 images from his People of the Twentieth Century in a book titled Face of Our Time. Under the Nazi regime his 34

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work was seen as entartet (degenerate) and in 1936 Face of Our Time was seized and the photographic plates destroyed. We can only speculate which aspects of Sander’s work provided reasons for the Nazis to condemn it as degenerate and have it destroyed. From a certain perspective, however, it is amazing that they did, because Sander’s archival art project and the political project of Nazism have key elements in common. Whereas Sander’s archival project classifies on the basis of occupational categories, the politics of Nazism used racial categories (Germanic, Jewish, Slavic, Gipsy and so on). In both cases a specific identity, considered to be essential, is projected on human beings on the basis of a classificatory system. With his classifications Sander, too, pursued the goal of pinning down the identity of human beings, in his case on the basis of their occupations or professions. The archival structure of his project, however, removed any identity he tried to institute on the basis of these categories.20 The identity we are supposed to see in those images is not the result of who or what these subjects are, but principally of the classificatory system imposed on them. Within this system, the individual subjects are supposed to express their unique identity in relation to other similarly unique subjects belonging to the same category. Ultimately, the individual subjects are deemed to be only another expression of the other subjects that surround it. His project was doomed from the start, though, not from an aesthetic point of view, but from his epistemological pursuit of pinning down the identities of the photographed subjects. In Sander’s project the signifying devices of the archive (classifications) and of the still image of photography collaborate. Although the photographs have the status of non-fictional testimonies to what these people are (what their identity is), they do not articulate their content unambiguously. That is why their problematic status of factual testimony needs to be reinforced by the classifications of an archival system. The complex role of the photographic medium in this collaboration between photography and archive is exposed in the work of the 36

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contemporary artist Fiona Tan. In her video installation Countenance of 2002, first shown at Documenta in Kassel in the same year, she re-enacts Sander’s photographic taxonomies of Germany from the 1920s and ’30s (illus. 5, 6). In this re-enactment of Sander’s project, photographic portraits are replaced by video portraits that Tan made during a stay in Berlin. She explored the city of Berlin through the portrayal of its people. Like Sander, she did not approach the people of Germany, or in this case of Berlin, as a homogeneous group, but as a collection of people who distinguish themselves through their professions. Again like Sander, the categories Tan employed were from professional and everyday life: a doctor, a carpenter, an architect, a supplier of small supermarkets, a postman, a prostitute, a barkeeper, children in the street, a field labourer, a train driver, a beggar and more. Like Sander’s project, Tan’s project is clearly archival, but the medium she used for archiving the people of Berlin is different: a video portrait instead of a photographed portrait. Each person whom Tan approached for her project was asked to stand motionless in front of the camera for an entire minute. In this difference between the media used by these two artists it becomes clear to what degree the medium specificity of photography enables the archival classification to do its work: or, to put it more strongly, to what degree it reinforces it. The statuses of the photographic still image and of archival organizations are very similar. They are supposed to be factual (non-fictional) testaments to what once was, or to what life is. But as I have explained above, in the case of the photographic still image it is hard to sustain this status, because photographs usually open up to a plurality of readings and hence in that respect they are not very ‘factual’. The video portraits of Fiona Tan are, however, far from ‘still’ and they escape any fixed meaning or signification. In the description by Doris von Drathen: The people stare at her. One minute is a long time. As each second passes, the mask of their everyday activities slowly 37

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5 Fiona Tan, Countenance, 2002, still, youth.

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6 Fiona Tan, Countenance, 2002, still, basket weaver.

begins to slip and fall away, as if an eggshell were gradually metamorphosing back into a soft membrane. In turn, the faces interrogate the one scrutinising them.’21 The filmed portraits give those portrayed an uncanny presence, compressing time to the moment of shared duration.22 Within this shared duration, the look into the camera initiates ‘an open, dynamic, sometimes disturbing and discomfiting relay of points of address between 38

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maker, subject and viewer, each aware of the other’s burden in the exchange yet neither able nor required to share this burden in equal measure’.23 In the photographed portrait, the person portrayed is suggested as absent, belonging to the past, and only its illusionary shadow is made present in the photographic image. The effect of ‘shared duration’ of the filmic image results in an almost opposite experience of the portrait. In an interview, Fiona Tan has described the difference as follows:

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I am more aware of . . . the artificiality of the encounter and simultaneously (in-) voluntary resistance against it. It is as though as a viewer, I cannot own and cannot pocket the image in the same way I imagine I could if it were only a still photograph hanging on the wall. When looking at a video portrait, I am looking at something which is constantly escaping me.24 The collaboration of photography and the archive in Sander’s work seems to be successful because the archival classification compensates for the ‘weakness’ of photography. The status of the photographic still image as factual testament, de facto problematic, is reinforced, that is, made unproblematic, by the imposition of archival classification. In the case of Tan’s video portraits in Countenance, the collaboration between archive and video portrait falls apart. Whereas the archival classification of the portraits promises to produce fixed categories and meanings, the video portraits produce an opposite effect. The portrayed professionals escape us. We don’t know what to think of what these people are. It is only clear that what they are not is ‘still’ or stable.

40

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The Archival Organization of Imperialism A second influential cause that stimulated the archival impulse in the nineteenth century can be located in the heyday of European imperialism. Nineteenth-century colonialism stimulated the drive towards the acquisition and control of information, with the goal of comprehensive knowledge. The colonial empires were an enormous administrative challenge. Since military power was not enough to ensure control over the colonial territory, information and knowledge of the territory was also needed. A link was established between control over the territory and a hermeneutics of information as it was understood that the search for knowledge is in the vanguard, not the rear, of the pursuit of colonial power. The increasing awareness of the necessity to acquire and order information about the new territories led to the establishment of a great variety of archival institutions. This can be seen happening in all the colonial empires – French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese – but the most ambitious, and perhaps also the most successful in this respect, was probably the British Empire. In The Imperial Archive, Thomas Richards gives a powerful description of how nineteenth-century Victorian England was induced into a fever of knowledge accumulation and intelligence gathering. The Victorian archival industry began a process whereby information concerning the known world was synchronized and unified. With the establishment of such institutions as the British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Photographic Society, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Colonial Office, Victorian Britain initiated one of the most prodigious archive-making periods in modern history. Such typical nineteenth-century endeavours as Britain’s Great Exhibition – along with other World’s Fairs elsewhere – should also be seen as part of the archival quest to gather and order a comprehensive knowledge of the world. The Crystal Palace constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was in a sense an enormous showcase or 41

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vitrine for the storage of objects, material information and knowledge collected from all corners of the Empire. Richards describes the British fever for accumulating knowledge:

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People in the Foreign Office were painfully aware of the gaps in their knowledge and did their best to fill them. The filler they liked best was information. From all over the globe the British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map. They surveyed and they mapped. They took censuses, produced statistics. They made vast lists of birds. Then they shoved the data they had collected into a shifting series of classifications. In fact they often could do little other than collect and collate information. For any exact civil control, of the kind possible in England, was out of the question. The Empire was too far away, and the bureaucrats of Empire had to be content to shuffle papers.25 The nineteenth-century ideology of positivism had also led most people to believe that the best and most certain kind of knowledge was the fact. The fact was many things to many people, but generally it was thought of as raw knowledge. The hegemonic historiography of those days designated archives as repositories of factual knowledge. This knowledge was not waiting to be read or interpreted, but ordered.26 A fact was a piece of knowledge asserted as certain, and positive knowledge was considered to be the sum of objectively verifiable facts. The various civil bureaucracies sharing the administration of the Empire were desperate for these manageable pieces of knowledge. They were light and movable. They pared the whole of the Empire down to filing cabinet size. Together, the multiplicity of archival institutions and societies were expected to contribute to the attainment of the ideal of comprehensive positive knowledge. This notion of comprehensive knowledge envisioned knowledge as an enormous but well-ordered storage of positive facts: 42

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Comprehensive knowledge was the sense that knowledge was singular and not plural, complete and not partial, global and not local, that all knowledge would ultimately turn out to be concordant in one great system of knowledge.27 Gayatri Spivak has argued convincingly in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, however, that these colonial archives did not so much archive the facts of the colonial Empire, but rather the other way around: the soldiers and the administrators of the East India Company constructed objects of representation that became the reality of India. In this sense, there is no fundamental difference between literature and the archive. They are both constructed fictions whose task it was to produce a whole collection of ‘effects of the real’. It is the misreading of this fiction that produced the proper name ‘India’: ‘The colonizer constructs himself as he constructs the colony. The relationship is intimate, an open secret that cannot be part of official knowledge.’28 The ideal of a well-ordered, unified system of knowledge is at the same time an image of a well-ordered and unified empire. By means of this archive one had the illusion of overseeing the Empire and having control over it at a distance. The various parts of the territory were held together by this unified system of knowledge. But although it looked easier to unify an archive composed of texts than to unify an empire of territory, this archival pursuit, too, was ultimately utopian, because most of the time people were unable to unify the knowledge they were collecting. Utopian or mythical as this pursuit of comprehensive knowledge or the archive as unified system of knowledge may have been, the archival fever that it stimulated resulted in the establishment of a great number of museums, libraries and other kinds of archival institutions. Rather, the unified archive was a utopian ideal and as such a fantasy. But though a fantasy, it was shared widely and actually had an impact on policy-making. Its impact can best be illustrated by the way the meaning of the word ‘classification’ changed in the second 43

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half of the nineteenth century: ‘At mid-century it meant ordering information in taxonomies. By century’s end “classified” had come to mean knowledge “placed under the special jurisdiction of the state”.’29 Although the number of archival institutions to which the colonial archival impulse gave rise is enormous, it is important to emphasize that the unified archive was a discursive construction; it was ‘the operational field of projected total knowledge’. It is less a building, or even a collection of texts or objects, but ‘the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable’. It is a utopian space of comprehensive knowledge in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Archives are now usually seen as repositories of the past and as memory resources. They collect the temporal. Colonial archives, however, are first of all spatial. They collect and order an elsewhere, namely factual knowledge of the colonies. But in traditional anthropological thinking ‘other’ cultures (other, that is, than Western) are usually seen as less developed. This implies that they are ‘behind in time’ and belong to a past that Western culture has already left behind.30 In that respect the knowledge of colonial space collected and ordered by colonial archives is also temporal knowledge of the past. It is space displaced onto the temporal past. Factual knowledge of the colonies comprises traces of the past, even if that past is still present. In most cases, however, the colonial empire also now belongs to the past. We live in postcolonial times. But most of the colonial archives still continue to exist as residues of a colonial past, no longer of a colonial empire. The ‘mystique’ of the archive, though, can make us believe that colonial times still continue. American historian Dominick LaCapra has described the indiscriminate mystique of uncritical ‘archivism’: The archive as fetish is a literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian. When it is fetishized, the archive is more than the repository of traces of the past which may be used in its inferential reconstruction. 44

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It is a stand-in for the past that brings the mystified experience of the thing itself – an experience that is always open to question when one deals with writings or other inscriptions.31 In the case of colonial archives, the fetishized archive can function as ‘the mystified experience of the thing itself’, as if colonial times still continue in our present. This function of the archive is nostalgic. In our postcolonial times the former colonies no longer contribute to the grandeur of the modern nation state. However, the colonial archives or institutions still exist in most cases and can now function as nostalgic, memorative signs of the nation and former empire. The temporary, elusive existence of colonial empires has been fixed in card catalogues and display cases. The colonies were ‘encased and classified in a multitude of archival drawers’ that now continue to exist in order to stimulate nostalgic sentiments.32 Fiona Tan refutes such a mystifying or nostalgic attitude towards (colonial) archives. She was born in Indonesia, grew up in Australia and currently lives in the Netherlands. Usually she works with, or on the basis of, historical images that she finds in archives: August Sander’s taxonomies of German people from the 1920s and ’30s for her video installation Countenance; historical Japanese school pictures for her digital installation The Changeling (2006); family snapshots for the photographic installation Vox Populi (2004–7); and ethnographic film found in the archives of the Film Museum in Amsterdam for her video installation Facing Forward (1999) and the video News from the Near Future (2003). What all these works have in common is not only that they are based on archival photographs or film, but also that they all belong to the genre of portraiture. Her works, and the archival images she uses, portray faces or people who mostly look into the camera, addressing the viewer. As Thomas Elsaesser explains, in her appropriation of the archival images, the look into the camera initiates awareness in both the subject and the viewer of each other’s 45

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position.33 The discomforting result is that those involved experience their look as well as being the object of the other’s look. The effect that Elsaesser describes, and which foregrounds the openness and uncertainty of points of address, contrasts with the objectifying effect of original archival footage or images. This is especially the case in the video installation Facing Forward, for which Tan used ethnographic and colonial footage made in the Dutch East Indies.34 The footage shows faces, bodies and postures displayed before the camera. In weaving together fragments from different genres, the video exposes the heterogeneity of the histories each of these genres claims to record. The work opens with footage of a colonial group portrait, with rows of military officials, white hunters and civilians, surrounded by their ‘native’ subordinates. They all hold a 46

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7, 8 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward, 1999, video installation.

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pose, standing for the camera, to be appropriated visually. The next archival extract belongs to another genre, the ethnographic film. A single line of male tribesmen poses for the camera. The video consists of many extracts from this genre of film, showing ‘natives’ from a broad variety of colonized cultures (illus. 7, 8, 9). The scientific pretext for this film genre is most explicitly and painfully enacted when the posing ‘natives’ turn around on request, showing front, back and both sides of their bodies, inaudibly answering to the person behind the camera. A third genre of film that Tan inserts into her video is more touristic. Archival footage shows images of an Indonesian city with pedestrians, cyclists and cars – in short, colonial street life. Nobody poses for the camera; the subjects are shot at random. However, the video also contains footage of a fundamentally different nature: twice we suddenly see archival footage of a cameraman filming (illus. 10). In relation to the other footage, this footage functions as a countershot, as suture.35 This footage is also archival.

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9 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward.

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10 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward.

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As viewers of Tan’s films, we are, however, not led to identify with the subject position of this cameraman: Whether capturing moments of the colonialists’ pride or documenting ethnographic ‘specimens’, the camera’s look now strikes us as obscene to the degree that it makes visible too many of the hidden motives that frame the colonial gaze.36 To recall Roland Barthes’ phrase, it is ‘history that separates’ our look from the colonial gaze of the original footage. This temporal gap even results in a reversal. Those who were once objectified by the colonial gaze now look back at us. This results in discomfort and even shame in the present viewer. Tan’s works based on footage and images from colonial archives lay bare the classifying and objectifying mechanisms of colonial archives. These mechanisms were not just side-effects of a scientific project that aimed to be objective and neutral. Instead, objectification 49

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by means of classification was the ultimate goal and secured control over the colonized parts of the empire. Archival organization was instrumental in establishing this control.

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It is as if these gazes take their revenge, precisely by looking at us the same way they did then, seemingly untouched by the knowledge we now have, and thus unable to either absolve us or to forgive. The faces that here look at us have a gaze so naked that it is almost as if such a face is more naked than a naked body. And faced by such unprotected looking and being looked at, it makes us more naked than these naked bodies ever were.37 In Facing Forward Tan uses two strategies to complicate a naive, nostalgic use of archival footage showing the colonial other. I previously mentioned the insertion of so-called counter-shots: we see the footage of a cameraman, followed by the footage of what the cameraman is filming. A second reflexive level is introduced by a voice-over quoting from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities.38 The voice-over narrates hypothetical conversations between the traveller Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan. The emperor asks his guest whether his understanding of his self, of the world and of his place within the world is inevitably predicated on his own history. The questions to Marco Polo are emblematic of the migrant’s puzzled way of relating to images or stories of the homeland in the past: Possibly, in a conversation with Kublai Khan, Marco Polo said: ‘The more he was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more he understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.’ At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him to ask: ‘You advance always with your head turned back? Is what you see always behind you? Does your journey take place only in the past?’ And Marco Polo explained that what 50

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he sought was always something lying ahead, even if it was a matter of the past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are, or no longer possess, lies in wait for you in foreign unpossessed places. According to this doubly recycled historical figure, past, present and future no longer form a linear continuity. The past is something that can only be reached in the present or the future. Thus, Tan indicates that the status of places visited in the past is no longer real but by definition imagined. This also has repercussions for colonial archives: using the material and documents in those archives does not give access to that colonial past, but to documents on the basis of which we imagine that past. Places from the past are re-enacted in the places where Marco Polo arrives in the present. But not only the status of places in the past has changed; the present and the future are also transformed into screens onto which the imagined places from the past are projected. Hence, even the present receives a constructed, imagined quality. Marco Polo is not only excluded from the past, but also from the present. This becomes clear when the voice-over quotes for a second time from Calvino’s novel: By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, Marco Polo is excluded. He cannot stop; he must go on to another city where another of his pasts awaits him . . . ‘Journeys to relive your past?’ was Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover your future?’ Past and future are inextricably entangled within the subject, who relates to the present by imagining past as well as future cities. But in order to imagine past or future cities, Marco Polo becomes dependent 51

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on the city where he arrives or dwells in the present. It is within the quality of the present city that the past city is ‘relived’ or ‘recovered’. Tan’s work based on footage and images from colonial archives radically complicates the mystique of uncritical, positivist ‘archivism’. She uses material that stems from the emergence of the modern archival organization: photographic and filmic images and colonial archives. But in her artistic practice the archival images used are no longer stand-ins for the colonial past; they do not convey the ‘mystified experience of the thing itself’.39 On the contrary, as the voice-over, imposed on the archived images, suggests, the archived past is something that can only be reached in the present or the future. Such an awareness of the temporal processing of the past was, however, not at all at stake when modern archival organizations emerged. Confidence in positivistic expectations then really trusted the capacity of the archive to store and control the past.

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two

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Storage

In his book Archive Fever, French philosopher Jacques Derrida points out the etymological background of the word ‘archive’. The Greek root arkh¯e has a double meaning: commencement as well as commandment. Two different principles seem to be brought together in this single expression. The first one is ontological and concerns nature or history as well as place, that is, there where things commence or begin. The second one is nomological and concerns the law, there where ‘men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised’.1 Derrida emphasizes the fact that according to both meanings the archive has a spatial dimension. It is a place of beginnings or a place of authority. The root arkh¯e returns in the Greek word arkheion and the Latin words archivum or archium. These expressions mean first of all a house, a domicile, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. Those magistrates possess the right to make or to represent the law. ‘On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house . . . that official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians.’2 Although the archive is this intersection of a place and the law, in this chapter I will focus on the archive as place, as a home or domicile. This marks an institutional passage from the private to the public, this magistrate’s home where official public documents are filed. In chapter Four I will elaborate on that other element of the 53

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archive, its relation to the law and how it exercises authority and social order by means of the categories that it imposes on the recorded and archived items. The archive as place is an uncommon phenomenon. It marks a transition from private to public. Even private archives, such as family archives, demonstrate this, not in being publicly accessible, but in what they store, and they usually store that which is storable and worth storing in the eyes of the public or the culture at large.3 It is in the archive that the singularity of stored objects and documents is or, better, becomes at the same time representative of the category under which the objects have been classified. The status of the archive as a place of transition from private to public, and a place where the general (the rules or laws of classification) and the singular intersect, has fundamental consequences for the nature of that place. It implies that not everything can be sheltered in such an archive. The archive is a selective place. It should be more than a storage place of heterogeneous items or objects; it is not an arbitrary collection. But it remains to be seen in which sense archives are like storage facilities, or like collections, and in which sense they are not. Because it intersects with the public and with the law, the archive is ruled by the functions of unification, consignation and classification. The acts of unification and consignation imply that the archive is not passive; it is not a place that stores uncritically. These acts imply the distinction between archivable content and non-archivable content, and on the basis of that distinction one can even say that the archive produces its own content. It is not just a passive receiver of content but an active producer of it. This active, regulatory force is implied in the functions of unification as well as consignation. That implication explains why, according to Derrida, consignation is a power: By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so 54

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as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs . . . Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.4

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The storing and gathering together in an archive pursues the formation of a unity, a planned unity that decides what is archivable and what is not. The objects stored are the result of ‘gathering together signs’, which means that each object is not just stored because of its singularity, but because of what it means and does in relation to the other stored objects. This notion of the archive implies that we have to distinguish between the archive as storage of documents and/or objects and the archive as collection of documents and/or objects. A collection is dependent on principles of organization and categorization, whereas storage is not. The lack of organization of storage is a negative principle; it results in accumulation. Baudrillard distinguishes accumulation from collection as follows: First of all, a distinction must be drawn between the concept of collection (Latin colligere, to choose and gather together) and the concept of accumulation. At the simplest level, matter of one kind or another is accumulated: old papers are piled up, or quantities of food are stored . . . At a somewhat higher level lies the serial accumulation of identical objects. As for collecting proper, it has a door open onto culture, being concerned with differentiated objects which often have exchange value, which may also be ‘objects’ of preservation, trade, social ritual, exhibition – perhaps even generators of profit.5 Even if the accumulation of storage consists of heterogeneous objects instead of similar, comparable objects, the differences between the 55

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accumulated objects are irrelevant. They are all treated as if they were identical. Each element within a collection, however, is considered to be different as well as representative. On the basis of articulated principles of organization each element works in combination with the other elements toward the creation of the specific identity of the collection. Depending on the presence of such principles of organization, archives can be considered as collection or just as storage. In this distinction between storage and collection lies the difference between the collecting behaviour of human beings and that of animals. When a magpie collects pieces of glass, tools or jewellery, it collects them as objects that are complete in themselves, as intrinsic objects. These objects are ‘complete’ because of the sensory qualities that make them attractive to the magpie. This practice of collecting is a form of storage. The collections of human hobbyists or professionals depend on an internal structure. The objects in these collections have significance only in relation to one other and to the seriality that such a relation implies. American psychologist William James recognized the compulsion to accumulate also among ‘misers’ in psychiatric hospitals – he called them lunatic asylums: ‘His [the miser’s] intellect may in many matters be clear, but his instincts, especially that of ownership, are insane.’6 James concludes that these misers are hoarders who have an uncontrollable impulse to take and keep. This impulse is like an urge toward incorporation in the storage for its own sake. As cultural critic Susan Stewart indicates, the miser’s collection depends on the refusal of differentiation while the hobbyist’s collection depends on an acceptance of differentiation as its very basis for existence.7 In other words, storage refuses any organization of objects; it is a collection for its own sake. It still remains to be seen in which respect archives are more like storage or like collections. Or, put differently, when, on the basis of what kind of archival practice is involved, an archive approaches either storage or collection. The suggested distinction between storage and collection seems to imply that archives are definitely collections. But 56

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it is ultimately the role that principles of organization play within an archive that decides if such a characterization is justified. In what follows, this question will guide my analysis of a number of artistic practices.

Archiving the Oeuvre Such a ‘gathering together of signs’ (Derrida) is certainly at stake in one of the early programmatic engagements of art with the archive. In fact, this example identifies art with archive. In 1934 Marcel Duchamp made his first ‘Box’, the work that is now usually called The Green Box (illus. 11). To call this work a box is already an indication of its relation to the archive, because, like filing cabinets, boxes are essential elements

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11 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), 1934, box containing 94 collotype reproductions on various papers.

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of archives. They determine the idea of the conventional archive as a place full of drawers, filing cabinets and shelves laden with boxes, which are in their turn filled with documents. The original title of Duchamp’s box was not The Green Box, however, but The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. The later title, referring to its green flocked paper, was coined in order to distinguish it from one of Duchamp’s most famous works with the same title, a sculpture made between 1915 and 1923 that is now usually 58

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12 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box).

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known as The Large Glass. The Green Box contains 94 photographic reproductions of his works, drawings, sketches and handwritten notes from the years 1911 to 1923 (illus. 12). Duchamp issued the box in 1934 in Paris. It was a way of informing the French public of the works he had made since moving to New York in 1915 and which were then in American private collections. Most of the contents of The Green Box, however, are not reproductions of these works, but of notes. And notes are usually seen as especially archivable, as documents that belong in an archive, whereas reproductions do not. The reproductions function rather as reference points for the notes, instead of as the heart of the archive. The notes consist of fragmentary records referring in different ways to the works Duchamp had produced throughout his career. To give an example, the notes that relate to The Large Glass discuss the concept for the construction of a complex, erotic undressing machine, complete with pseudo-chemical and physical processes and parts that shake, signal and gyrate. These notes should, however, not be seen as the background of The Large Glass, as the original intentions of the artist that were then materialized in The Large Glass. They are rather extensions of that work, providing additional ideas and concepts by means of another medium, namely notes. Therefore, one could say that The Large Glass and The Green Box are twin works of art. As a result, although shaped like an archive, The Green Box is not dealt with as an object that belongs in a museum’s archive or library, but it is exhibited as a work of art in an exhibition case in the museum itself. This status of the archival Green Box as a work of art is also telling as regards the status of the archive seen as collection rather than storage. Although it seems completely self-evident that archives relate to the past because they consist of traces of the past, to see archives as collections seems to counter this relationship to the past. The past lends authenticity to a collection and is in that sense at the service of the collection. But the collection seeks a form of self-enclosure – its 59

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unity. In the case of Duchamp’s Green Box, this self-enclosure is the notion of the artist’s oeuvre. This self-enclosure comes at a price: a-historicism. According to Stewart:

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The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world.8 This means that collections are like works of art, because the function of a collection is not the restoration of the context of origin but the creation of a new context. This new context stands in a metaphorical, rather than a contiguous, metonymical relation to the world outside the collection. This is how works of art, but also collections, establish their status as autonomous. When we consider archives to be collections, it has paradoxical implications for their relation to history. The archival collection can become self-enclosed, thanks to which its relation to the past is severed. This severing from the past also takes place in what, according to Stewart, is the archetypal collection, namely Noah’s Ark. Noah’s Ark is a world that is representative yet erases its context of origin. The world of the ark is a world not of nostalgia but of anticipation. While the earth and its redundancies are destroyed, the collection of animals that the ark contains maintains its integrity and boundary. Once the collection is completely severed from its origin it is possible to generate a new world that is framed by the selectivity of Noah the collector.9 Noah’s selectivity brilliantly demonstrates principles of organization as applied by professional archivists. According to the narrator of Genesis, God dictated to Noah the principles of organization by which he should populate the ark: And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they 60

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shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive. (Genesis 7:2–3) The principles that organize the population of the ark are not intended to provide a memory of the world that is being destroyed. On the contrary, its purpose is to forget that world and start a new one. Although the ark’s population is dependent on the prior creation, it is focused on the future. It is organized and put together in such a way that a finite number of elements create, by virtue of their combination, an infinite reverie. Read as an allegory of the nature of collections, Noah’s Ark demonstrates that a collection becomes self-enclosed through its principles of organization and the way this self-enclosure leads to a severing of the past. An uncanny repercussion of the case is that the collection is archival. Duchamp’s Green Box is such an archival collection. Its contents are diverse: reproductions of his artworks, drawings, sketches and handwritten notes. If not included in an archival context, these diverse documents would be organized according to a temporal logic. The notes and the sketches embody the intentions and designs for the ultimate, later works of art. They are the past or origin of these works. But within the archival collection, organized as the oeuvre of an artist, the notes and sketches lose their temporal status of origin and, like the reproductions of Duchamp’s works, they all become examples of the artist’s oeuvre. Duchamp made two other boxes: Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise), 1941, and À l’Infinitive (In the Infinitive [The White Box]), 1967. The Box in a Valise takes the form of a box inside a suitcase and was also issued as an edition (illus. 13). Opening the box reveals a compilation of Duchamp’s works reproduced in miniature in the form of blackand-white and colour reproductions and miniature 3-d models. On 61

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13 Marcel Duchamp, Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), 1935–41, leather valise containing miniature replicas, photographs, colour reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one ‘original’ drawing (The Large Glass, collotype on celluloid).

the inside of the lid there is a detailed reproduction of The Large Glass printed on celluloid. The other models and reproductions can be grouped around The Large Glass in different constellations by raising or shifting the flaps. With this box Duchamp has made a kind of portable museum of his own works that can be rearranged at will. The White Box is a facsimile edition of all the notes that were not already included in The Green Box. The notes in both The Green Box and The White Box open up a treasure of topics and possible references beyond Duchamp’s realized works. But they do not form a coherent whole: realized works plus notes do not form the conventional unity of what is called an artist’s oeuvre. On first impression, the boxes seem to create the conditions for their organization and reception as an oeuvre and an archive, or better, as the archive of a monographic oeuvre. But the moment one tries to realize that impulse it is less than self-evident how that could be done: 62

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Given that the notes were compiled in a highly ambiguous, even contradictory, manner, it is possible to select and compose them into innumerable constellations. Such inherent possibilities give rise to the paradoxical situation that on the one hand Duchamp supplied basis information – the notes – for the observer to order, systematize and interrelate so as to grasp the full meaning of the work, The Large Glass. On the other hand, this information is presented in such a way as to reduce the endeavour of ordering, systematizing and interrelating it to an absurd pastime: The Box constantly presents new possibilities for finding the meaning of the Glass.10 Although Duchamp’s boxes seem to be the result of an archival impulse, ultimately they frustrate the expectation to find any kind of order in it. The notes and miniature objects are not positioned in a logical, homogeneous unity; rather, they form a non-hierarchical heterogeneity. They are more storage than collection, because the collection of items or signs gathered together seems to be arbitrary, that is, lacking system or structure. This has consequences, of course, for what we expect of the idea of an artist’s oeuvre (and of the museum as shelter for such an oeuvre). The boxes are portable museums of an artist’s oeuvre. Museums, oeuvres and archives have in common that one expects them to be coherent and express, in one way or another, a unity of some kind. In this sense they are collections. Museums and oeuvres are, in particular, metaphors for what collections are about: coherent representational universes. It is their representativeness that strives for closure of all space and temporality within the context at hand.11 Archives are also collections and it is the coherency of an archival organization, in other words, of a collection, that decides what can be sheltered in it and what should remain outside of it. Duchamp’s archival boxes can be seen as sites of reflection of the museum as an archival collection and of an oeuvre as archive, and the various 63

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taxonomies that govern the relation between the images and objects in it (museum as well as oeuvre). His boxes are the embodiments of an archival impulse that ultimately, however, is not satisfied. The archival impulse is frustrated because the coherence of the archival collection remains enigmatic. The result is storage. But it is precisely by frustrating the archival impulse that Duchamp makes us aware of the unconscious, unwritten principle that underlies archival organizations – in this case, the artist’s oeuvre and the institution that houses it, the museum. The coherence of the artist’s oeuvre is not constituted by the producer or artist. In other words, a collection is not constructed by its elements. It comes to exist by means of its principle of organization. Duchamp’s oeuvre is the result of what has been brought together in the archival collection. Oeuvres are selective places. There are items that should be included in them and those that should be excluded. It is this ongoing process of inclusion and exclusion that defines archival collecting. But because Duchamp’s organizing principle remains ambiguous, his archival boxes are ultimately just storages.

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Archiving Art in the Museum Duchamp interrogated the artist’s identity as defined by a monographic oeuvre through structuring it as an archival storage. Some decades later Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers did something similar in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, section XIXème siècle (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 19th-century Section, 1968, illus. 14). In Broodthaers’s case, however, it is less the artist’s oeuvre but rather the institution of the museum that is presented as an archival endeavour and organization. The title of this work immediately foregrounds the archival principle of using subdivisions within an encompassing taxonomy – from museum to department to section. It was first installed for one complete calendar year, from 27 September 1968 to 27 September 1969, in his apartment in Brussels. Broodthaers’s 64

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14 Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 19th-century Section, 1968, installation view, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1972.

so-called museum consisted of crates of the type used for shipping art, postcards of well-known nineteenth-century French paintings, a slide projector and, for the occasion of the opening and closing, a truck used for transporting artworks parked outside the building. When exhibited in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1972, the Museum included a Section des Figures (der Adler vom Oligozän bis Heute) (Figural Section [The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today], illus. 15). This section consisted of more than 300 objects representing eagles, borrowed from all kind of museums and private collections in Europe and elsewhere. The subdivision in sections suggests that this museum is not just storage of similar objects, but that it is a collection. There is an organizing principle. The collection of eagles surveyed the historical period spanning the Oligocene era to the present. The installation showed a great diversity of objects of material culture, including a taxidermied eagle and an early sixteenth-century suit of armour from northern Germany resembling an eagle. It contained a great number of display cases showing objects labelled with ‘Fig.’ and the statement ‘This is not a work of art’ (illus. 16). This statement was, of course, inspired by the statement on a painting by fellow Belgian artist René Magritte: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is Not a Pipe).

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But what does Broodthaers’s reiterated statement ‘This is not a work of art’ mean in the context of his museum-like organization? The traditional museum that has its origin in the nineteenth century usually has departments defined in terms of the specific media that are distinguished within art: painting, sculpture, prints and drawings and applied arts, to mention the most common ones. Since modernism, art is especially understood and valued in terms of its medium-specific characteristics. The enormous diversity of objects of material culture in Broodthaers’s museum does not respect the categorizations on which these traditional departments are based. The motif of the eagle is not at all medium-specific; on the contrary, it can be recognized in all media and materials and in that respect it stands for radical hybridity, or what 66

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15 Marcel Broodthaers, Figural Section (The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today), 1972, installation detail.

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16 Marcel Broodthaers, Figural Section (The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today), installation detail.

is often called the intermedia condition of contemporary art. In ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss formulates this condition even as ‘post-medium’: ‘The triumph of the eagle announces not the end of Art but the termination of the individual arts as medium-specific; and it does so by enacting the form that this loss of specificity will now take.’12 She calls it post-medium because this kind of installation art refutes the idea of medium-based art completely. In Broodthaers’s Museum objects of material culture are combined with worthless reproductions of artworks. Within the display everything is granted equal importance. Enforced by the statement ‘This is not a work of art’, the installation discourages viewers from fetishizing the objects as they might do with oil paintings in a museum. The objects do not seem to have any artistic value. Instead they have archival value. Within the displayed collection of eagle items everything becomes levelled or reduced to a system of pure equivalency.

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The objects and artefacts are organized according to morphological correspondences. As an installation it foregrounds the museological conventions of display, including framing, vitrines and wall texts, which all contribute to the ‘education’, instruction and indoctrination of the public. Whereas the cultural (financial) value is downplayed, the objects and representations are presented as an archival conglomeration that is systematic (because of morphological correspondences) and non-hierarchical (everything of equal value). We see the process of reduction to a system of pure equivalence happening before our eyes. Broodthaers’s systematic labelling of random sets of objects with the tags that assign them as ‘Fig. 1’, ‘Fig. 2’, ‘Fig. 3’ and so on, makes everything equivalent, as figures or signs of one and the same encompassing category.13 In his fictional museum installation Broodthaers subjected more than 300 eagle items to this process of levelling and making equivalent. But being equivalent is not the same as being identical. The morphological organization of the eagles implies that they are all different within an overall similarity. From the perspective of a mediumbased traditional museum, however, the established equivalence seems to be impossible and not making any sense. But the point is that Broodthaers’s museum is the beginning of a museum that houses art in the age of the post-medium condition. This post-medium museum is in fact an archival organization in which all items are equivalent; but by means of the tags ‘Fig. 1’, ‘Fig. 2’ and so on, all these equivalent objects can be traced within the collection. Broodthaers’s installation suggests that the principle (or law, in Derrida’s words) that determines which objects can be housed by a museum or an archive is not inherent to the museum or archive. Although all items represent eagles, this collection is not constructed by its elements. Its coherence is, in fact, imposed on it. This act of imposition is performed by Broodthaers in the most explicit way: by labelling the collected objects with their ‘Fig.’ tags. These tags play a decisive role in making Broodthaers’s fictional museum into a 68

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coherent collection. Although that coherence is no longer mediumbased, his post-medium figure of the eagle is the newly imposed principle that makes the collection coherent.

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Archiving the Index French artist Christian Boltanski has been modelling his work on archival principles since the early 1970s and he has been doing that in a very consistent way. The two main genres in which he works are installations and artists’ books. In both cases, he adopts those genres in such a way that they demonstrate archival qualities, principles and effects. Whereas early practitioners of an archival aesthetics, such as Duchamp and Broodthaers, deployed the archive as a means for an institutional critique of the museum and of art discourse, respectively, Boltanski’s use of the archive interrogates the archival organization as such. His books and installations are storages, inventories, catalogues, ‘reference vitrines’, as if he systematically used devices that make the modern archive into what it is. And he also gives his works the explicit title of storage or inventory. A second consistent element in Boltanski’s work is photography: many of his books and installations are not only archival, they are also photographic, consisting of archival installations of photographic portraits. In 1973 and 1974 Boltanski made several installations, generically called Inventories, which consisted of the belongings of an arbitrarily selected person. In his Inventory of Objects that Belonged to a Woman of New York, for instance, shown at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1973, he presented the furniture of a woman who had just died. These belongings had the function of witnessing the existence of the woman who had died. Semiotically speaking, these Inventories are fundamentally different from his installations with photographs. While the photographs refer iconically, the inventories refer indexically. The pieces of furniture represent the woman, not by means of similarity or likeness, but by contiguity. The woman and her belongings 69

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have been adjacent to her, since she owned them. Or rather, these belongings pretend to be, and thus represent the idea of having been, contiguous to the woman; later Boltanski admitted that he had ‘cheated’ the audience by exhibiting furniture that he had borrowed from personal acquaintances. This cheating only enhances the semiotic status of his work, in its distinction from the reality status of the work. The sign, according to Umberto Eco’s definition of it, is ‘everything which can be used in order to lie’.14 The installations are not ‘real’ indexes but ‘look like’ them; just like fake signatures, they are icons parading as indexes. The point here, however, is the semiotic status of the index.15 The difference between icon and index is a matter of pretension. A photographic portrait, for example, claims, by convention, to refer to somebody and to make that person present. Indexical works like Boltanski’s Inventories, however, don’t claim presence: they show somebody’s belongings, not the person her/himself. And strangely enough, they seem to be successful as acts of referring to the person to whom the objects belonged; this person is evoked even in her absence (illus. 17). 70

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17 Christian Boltanski, Inventory of Objects that Belonged to a Woman of Bois-Colombes, 1974, installation view, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris.

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18 Christian Boltanski, The Clothes of François C., 1972, black-and-white photographs, tin frames, glass.

Although referentiality is successfully pursued in the installations of indexical objects, it is only so to a certain degree. It does not imply that a positive presence of the referred-to subject is established. In Inventory of Objects that Belonged to a Woman of New York the deceased woman is evoked in her absence. What one is made aware of is that the former owner of these pieces of furniture has died, whereas her belongings continue to exist. The suggestion of presence in these works is, thus, foregrounded as failure. In The Clothes of François C. (1972), for instance, we see blackand-white, tin-framed photographs of children’s clothing (illus. 18). The photographs immediately raise the question of the identity and whereabouts of the clothes’ owners. It is the title of this so-called inventory that suggests that these disparate pieces of clothing form a unity because they belonged to one single person. But because we cannot be sure about this and have to rely on how this archive has been named and classified as monographic, the precise status of the stored documents or objects is put in question at the same time. This is not a case of the storage of positive facts, of objective traces of a person;

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instead these are objects functioning as signs. Those signs pretend to refer to that person and in that sense make her present, but it is doubtful how successful that pretension is. It is clear that for Boltanski it is not success but failure that is at stake in these archival installations. When Boltanski, like many other artists in the 1960s and ’70s, became interested in anthropological museums, it was the feeling of absence and loss there that overwhelmed him, for example at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris: It was . . . the age of technological discoveries, of the Musée de l’Homme and of beauty, no longer just African art, but an entire series of everyday objects: eskimo fishhooks, arrows from the Amazon Indians . . . The Musée de l’Homme was of tremendous importance to me; it was there that I saw large metal and glass vitrines in which were placed small, fragile, and insignificant objects. A yellowed photograph showing a ‘savage’ handling his little objects was often placed in the corner of the vitrine. Each vitrine presented a lost world: the savage in the photograph was most likely dead; the objects had become useless – anyway there’s no one left who knows how to use them. The Musée de l’Homme seemed like a big morgue to me.16 While Boltanski expected to find ‘beauty’ in the museum, an expectation that seemed to be inspired by the kind of eye Cubist artists had for the objects of African cultures, he found instead lost worlds in the vitrines. In the inventories of the museum he encounters absence instead of presence. The anthropological museum did not become a fine arts museum; it was transformed into a morgue of useless objects. One can say that the difference between the eyes of Picasso and those of Boltanski as they visited the same museum constitutes the key difference between two major movements in twentieth-century art. 72

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19 Christian Boltanski, Reference Vitrines, 1969–70, various objects in wooden vitrine with Plexiglas.

In the early 1970s Boltanski made two series of works in which he made use of the museological vitrine, Attempt to Reconstruct Objects that Belonged to Christian Boltanski between 1948 and 1954 and Reference Vitrines (1970–73, illus. 19). The latter series, generically titled Reference Vitrines, consisted of museum-type vitrines in which Boltanski displayed a sampling of the work he had made since 1969. Both series have a clear organizing principle (belongings of Boltanski and works made by Boltanski), so they should be seen as collections rather than storage. In the Reference Vitrines he showed small piles of the dirt balls he had been working with, some of his self-made knives and traps and some of the carved sugar cubes, pages from his books and parts of his mail-art. Each item in the vitrines had a label that usually listed the title and date of the work. With this series of works Boltanski turned himself into the archivist of his own work, in a similar way to 73

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Duchamp’s approach when making his boxes. But whereas Duchamp made use of the idea of the archival box, Boltanski made use of the museum vitrine. In the earlier series, Attempt to Reconstruct, he made himself into the archivist of his childhood instead of his artistic career. In his site-specific work Missing House (1990) in Berlin, Boltanski has turned himself into the archivist of a vacant lot between other houses in a former Jewish neighbourhood. The Missing House consists of name plates attached to the fire walls of houses adjacent to the empty lot created by the destruction of a house in the Second World War. The plates included the name, dates of residence and professions of the last inhabitants of the missing house. These alleged reconstructions, however, fail utterly as reconstructions. They are not able to reconstruct either his childhood or his artistic career. Instead we see useless objects. The frame of the museological vitrine or the archaeological museum, in short the archival mode of representation, withdraws objects from the contexts in which they were originally present. This becomes especially clear in the case of the Reference Vitrines storing examples of works of art Boltanski had made in earlier days. These small piles of dirt balls, the self-made knives and traps and the carved sugar cubes were the result of conceptual art practices of the 1960s. They could be understood as such when represented in a gallery or museum context. When presented as part of the storage in a museum vitrine, however, they function in a different way. They are no longer the objects that they are, performing their presence in the present, but they have become referential signs, referring to an elsewhere in the past. As such they fail utterly. What we see instead are useless objects without either any use value or semiotic value, in either the strict or the artistic sense of the word. It is impossible to recognize any kind of conceptual artworks in them. In the vitrine, the collection of objects becomes subjected to principles that define the objects as useless and meaningless. These principles are inherent to the nature of collections. As explained 74

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earlier, a collection is self-enclosed and severs relationships to the past. So, it becomes almost impossible to see these objects as artworks that were once made by Boltanski. Their temporal dimension is lost within the collection. When Duchamp archived his oeuvre in boxes, it was the coherence of the archive’s content that was at stake. In Boltanski’s efforts to reconstruct his artistic career, it is less the unity or coherence of his oeuvre or career that is questioned, and more the indexical potency of the archived items. Are these archived items able to evoke his artistic career or his childhood? Not at all; in this respect they utterly fail. In the framework of the museological vitrine their semiotic value is decreased instead of increased. This failure to be significant seems already to be announced in the title of the other series in which he tries to reconstruct his childhood, Attempt to Reconstruct. It is no more than an attempt, suggesting that the failure of the attempt is the most plausible outcome. Boltanski’s Inventories, Reference Vitrines and Attempts to Reconstruct are all presented in the mode of archival storage. The collected objects are not ordered on the basis of a taxonomy or typology; they are presented as an arbitrary, heterogeneous collection. The unity of these archival collections can be inferred from their titles. It is the title that tells us to which subject these objects belonged, or what the nature of these objects is – for example, art objects in the case of the Reference Vitrines. Boltanski has also made some archival works that do not present heterogeneous collections of objects, but storages that are utterly homogeneous. And this difference, too, is very significant. In 1988 he made some installations to which he gave the title Canada (illus. 20). This title refers to the euphemistic name the Nazis gave to the warehouses in which all the personal belongings of those who were killed in the gas chambers or interned in the labour camps were stored. ‘Canada’ here stands for the country of excess and exuberance to which one wants to emigrate, because it can offer a living to 75

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everybody. In the works with the title Canada, Boltanski showed piles of second-hand garments. For the first version of this installation, at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto, Canada, he used 6,000 garments probably obtained from the Salvation Army in Toronto. The brightly coloured clothes were hung by nails on all four walls. Every inch of the room was covered by them. This installation not only brought to mind the warehouses in the concentration camps, but the sheer number of garments also evoked the incredible number of people who died in the camps and whose possessions were stored in ‘Canada’. A series of archival installations similar to Canada is Storage Area of the Children’s Museum from 1989, which consists of racks 76

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20 Christian Boltanski, Canada, 1988, second-hand clothing, installation view, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto.

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with clothing. The piles of clothes stored on the shelves refer to the incomprehensible numbers who died in the concentration camps. In contrast to the series of works entitled Canada, however, these works do not refer to the Holocaust; they have a Holocaust effect because they re-enact a principle that defines the Holocaust.17 They enact a Holocaust principle to the extent that there the deprivation of individuality was applied in the most extreme and radical way. Deprived of their individuality, the victims of the Holocaust were treated impersonally as specimens of a race that first had to be collected and inventoried before they could be used (in the labour camps) or destroyed (in the gas chambers). The Nazis not only inventoried the possessions of their victims; the same principles were in fact applied to the victims themselves. (I will return to this in chapter Six.) The Storage Area and Canada series are storages in the most basic way. They collect one specific item, in both cases clothing, without sorting it out and without making distinctions. No system of differentiating or classification is used to order the storages. It is again the failure of the indexical significance of these archived items that confronts us. If these pieces of clothing were successful as indexical signs, then their owners would be evoked. A suggestion of their presence would be made. But the opposite effect is created. The individuality and specificity of each owner is dissolved. We are struck by their absence instead of their presence. These archival storages do not enable the viewers to envision the owners and wearers of these items of clothing in their unique individuality. Instead, we are overwhelmed by the anonymity of this storage. Ultimately it is the failure of the indexical sign to make present that which is responsible for this effect.

Collecting the Overlooked: Annette Messager Artistic archiving is often a violation of the idea of the archive as transition of private to public and as intersection of the general and the 77

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singular. Artists usually collect and archive the trivial, that is, objects that are not acknowledged by the public or the culture at large as important, or valuable in whatever respect. In other words, the trivial is not considered as archivable. Artists collect objects that are usually overlooked: not worth keeping in storage, collecting or archiving. As soon as artists begin to collect the overlooked, however, its status changes. The individual object changes through its adoption and absorption into the collection. The overlooked and worthless is rendered exceptional.18 This upgrading of the overlooked is also called ‘archivalization’. This neologism refers to the conscious or unconscious choice to consider something worth archiving.19 French artist Annette Messager has dedicated half of her artistic projects to collecting the banal, the quotidian – in other words, the overlooked. She considers collecting as one of the basic artistic practices. She divides artistic practices into the realm of the artist and the realm of the collector. These practices are located in different sites of production: in the studio and in the bedroom. The work performed in the bedroom is devoted to storage and the conservation of her collections. When she works in her studio she calls herself Annette Messager Artist; when she works in the bedroom she is Annette Messager Collector. This division does not imply that she does not consider her collecting as an art practice. But because her collecting organizes the overlooked and takes place in the domestic space of the bedroom, it is at first not recognized as ‘art’. Her distinction between artist and collector deconstructs the notion of art by specifying the two professions as dealing with the unique and the authentic versus the banal, the quotidian and the overlooked. It will become clear that this distinction, which is in fact an opposition, does not work and that her collecting is an integral part of her artistic projects. This is so because the moment that the banal and overlooked is being collected it is transformed into something that attracts attention (and so is no longer overlooked). Within the collection it becomes special and unique. 78

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In her bedroom Messager sorts, gathers, organizes, sifts through and condenses everything into her so-called Collection Albums (illus. 21). Between 1972 and 1974 she put together more than 60 of these, modelled on different archival genres such as the diary, the photoalbum and the cookbook. Some of the albums are finished objects, in the sense that they are bound and have well-ordered plates and mounted images. Others are loose albums that consist of unbound plates, piles of photographs or newspaper clippings. The albums are fabricated out of grey cardboard and look like notebooks. They are covered with green or brown wrapping paper bearing a label inscribed with the title, the number of the album and the name of the collector (Annette Messager Collector, Annette Messager Practical Woman, Annette Messager Trickster, Annette Messager Tinkerer). Although the albums have the appearance of institutional tools of the archive, they are personalized by their titles. Most of the titles are preceded by the possessive pronoun ‘my’ or use the first person. This suggests the autobiographical status of these archival albums. Some examples are: My Illustrated Life My Knitting Manual My Evidence Snapshots My Collection of Good Mushrooms and Deadly Mushrooms My Mailings My Handwritten Envelopes The Men I Love The Men I Don’t Love The Books that Make Me Tremble My Idol Claude François The images collected in these albums may be photographs taken by the artist, newspaper clippings or precise drawings made after models. These drawings are also supposed to document. Sometimes she draws on the photographs or clippings. 79

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21 Annette Messager, Collection Album: Terms Used for Women, 1972–3, text on 49 pieces of cardboard, cardboard album with a string closure.

Messager’s albums collect the quotidian, which in this case concerns the banal quotidian of a young woman in the 1970s. The topics documented in her albums are like those you can find in the diary of almost any girl or young woman: relationships between men and women, the men she loves and the men she doesn’t love, marriage, babies, pregnancy, notions of femininity as illustrated by proverbs about women. When she starts collecting different examples relating to those topics, though, the banality of these topics is transformed. The practice of collecting creates an unexpected distance towards the object of collecting. An ironic attitude towards what she has collected is the result. For instance, in The Men I Love she comments on images of men as follows: 80

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I love his smile and his bare forehead I love his profile and his sweater I love his air of being an old, slightly wilted adolescent I love his rich and comfortable manner I love his serious and simultaneously ironic air I love his sad appearance and his bright eyes I love his round and child-like face I love his air of being a mildly fraudulent adventurer I love his ear and his hard lips I love his aged student look I love his worried manner I love his relaxed appearance I love his very wide shoulders, just a little The reasons why she loves these men are very different. In that respect this album is a collection of loved men, it does not just store them. One can wonder, however, if this collection of loved men has an underlying system. Sometimes the reasons why she loves them look rather contradictory: ‘I love his worried manner’ versus ‘I love his relaxed appearance’. But the sheer abundance of different reasons why she loves specific men explodes any underlying structure or system. The collection transforms into storage. Even more importantly, the practice of collecting reflects back on its subject. It is not so much the difference between the collected loved men that strikes the eye, but the greediness of the woman who collects these men. It is in this moment when greediness shows up that the collection transforms into storage. Exactly the same transformation takes place in Messager’s album The Men I Don’t Love (illus. 22), in which she comments on the collected images: I don’t love his air of being a young dynamic man who is sure of himself 81

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22 Annette Messager, Collection Album no. 10: The Men I Don’t Love, 1972, ink on black-andwhite photograph.

I don’t love his seductive smile I don’t love his tie, I don’t love his hair I don’t love his protective manner I don’t love his bistro intellectual air I don’t love his fat red earlobes I don’t love his tie, I don’t love his signet ring I don’t love his little dimple I don’t love his piercing eyes that are ready to convince you of just about anything I don’t love his military jacket I don’t love his too beautiful, too perfect, too fine profile, his beauty is abnormal, it makes me uncomfortable I don’t love his smile and his green tie 82

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Although one gets the impression that Messager does not like men to wear ties, overall this list of reasons why she doesn’t like men reflects back on the subject who is not able to love these men. This album does not provide a systematicity underlying what is not likeable in men; it is solely the storage of her responses towards men. The object of irony is, however, not the species of men or the appalled subject, but the archival mode of collecting these men. It is the representation of these men within an archival order that fails to bring to light what Messager cannot like in men. As a means of representation it exposes the subject of collecting instead of the object. In that unexpected exposure differences don’t count any longer and the collection becomes storage. In the album My Evidence Snapshots she shows photographs of couples. Alongside the images she writes title phrases describing different phases of a love relationship. The images are supposed to show symptomatic gestures or attitudes: the secret, the goodbyes, the separation, the outburst and the reconciliation. This collection of snapshots is far from successful as an archival representation of the temporal ordering of love relationships. The problem is that not only is the topic itself, the love relationship, banal, but also the underlying system that is supposed to give deeper insight into it. Again, an ironic exposure of the failing archival mode, this time of representing love relationships, is the result. In making these collection albums Messager highlights the acts of appropriation that underlie archival collecting. Objects or documents of whatever kind are appropriated from their original context (where they were unnoticed) and brought together in a collection album. It is the subject responsible for the appropriating act (in this case Messager) who is also responsible for the new context into which the appropriated objects are stored and differently framed. This framing by means of storage or collection changes the meaning or identity of the object. What she does is more than just making visible what is usually overlooked. The agency of the collector is emphasized by Messager, for example through her use of the possessive pronoun 83

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‘my’ in the titles of collections, for example in My Evidence Snapshots and My Illustrated Life. But in some albums she is even more outspoken about her agency in appropriating documents for her albums. Sometimes she rewrites sentences in the appropriated documents. At these moments she is violating the rules of the professional archivist, for this professional is supposed to be neutral and not to intervene in what she or he collects. In the album Everything about My Child she collected found sentences alluding to the pride a mother feels for her child. She cut these sentences out of existing texts, but rewrote the sentences, changing a word here and there. For instance, father is replaced by mother or she replaces an adjective with a possessive pronoun. The sentences then refer to her own child. By these inscriptions and interventions in the collected sentences she foregrounds the idea that collecting is for her a way to appropriate the world. Same examples of her rewritings in Everything about My Child are:

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The birth of a child is a celebration, an event that is prepared for long in advance The birth of my child is my celebration, an event that is prepared for long in advance A child is raised by two parents A child is raised by the mother Your child is growing so fast My child is growing so fast A baby soon My baby soon To amaze daddy To amaze mommy 84

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The good mother I am the good mother

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By means of these rewritings Messager foregrounds an aspect of archiving that is already implied in the album’s title Everything about My Child. The possessive pronoun indicates the personal interest of the collecting archivist. It is that interest that becomes the new frame in which the appropriated sentences are being stored. This transportation from an original context to the new framing of the collection does more, however, to the transported objects. This becomes clear in a group of collection albums that focus on the issue of feminine identity. In albums like My Collection of Proverbs, Terms Used for Women, My Job Applications, My Jealousies and Voluntary Tortures, Messager explores stereotypical, sexist notions of femininity. In My Collection of Proverbs she meticulously embroiders received notions of the inferiority of women (illus. 23). Again, she does more than just collect these proverbs. She intensifies the topic of these proverbs, femininity, by transcribing them through the craft of embroidery, a so-called typically feminine practice. This results in the following selection: The most praised woman is the one we do not mention Women’s skirts are long, their senses short The devil swallowed a woman but cannot digest her If women were good, God would have one too You must take men as they are and women as they want to be Women are a race all unto their own If you give a woman your heart she will kill you Where woman is, silence isn’t Women and idiots never pardon Messager collected 102 proverbs and embroidered them all. The act of collecting them is, however, far from a neutral activity. When you are 85

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23 Annette Messager, My Collection of Proverbs, 1974, 120 pieces of embroidered fabric.

confronted with such an abundance of proverbs about the inferiority of women, it produces a distance towards the meaning and the alleged wisdom these individual proverbs are supposed to convey. The collection becomes a parody of what is collected. The fact that Messager embroidered the collected proverbs increases the distance: this timeconsuming practice stands for the mindless activities women are doomed to perform. But the self-reflexivity of Messager’s embroidery 86

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bespeaks the opposite of mindlessness. She knows what she is doing: she does what, according to the proverbs, she is supposed to do; a mindless self-reflexivity, so to speak. The album My Job Applications also becomes a parody of the careers women could have in the 1970s. It is again the fact that all these possible jobs are part of this collection that creates the distance and transforms the collection into a parody:

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The 1,000 feminine careers that await me: I can become a medical secretary, executive secretary, stenographer, flight attendant, hostess, window dresser, hairdresser, nurse, decorator, beautician, social worker, cashier, salesperson, dietician, dressmaker, accountant, receptionist, masseuse, billing secretary, playground aide, operator, advertising designer, script-girl, medical lab assistant, teacher, archivist, news announcer, punch-card checker, tourist-information agent, etc. . . . Just mentioning a single job opportunity would not have the same effect as this collection of job opportunities. It is the genre of collection that creates distance towards what it collects and produces the effect of parody.

Conclusion The starting point of this chapter about the archive as storage was that the archive is the place of transition from private to public. It embodies such a transition because it is a place where the general (the rules or laws of classification, which stem from the public domain) and the singular intersect. As I have explained, this has a fundamental consequence for the nature of that place, for it implies that not everything can be sheltered in an archive. The archive is selective. The archive is not a storage place of heterogeneous items or objects. 87

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The four artists whose work with the archive as medium I have discussed here undermine the principles of the archive precisely in this respect. They each store items in archival organizations that blur the coherence of the archive as collection: a coherence that is, of course, not inherent to the archive, but which was imposed on it. In fact, what happens in the archival works of all four artists is that the archival collection tends to dissolve into archival storage. Marcel Duchamp laid bare the conventional coherence underlying the artist’s oeuvre by not respecting the rules and inserting elements that are not equally equivalent. This transforms the archival collection into archival storage. Broodthaers’s archival installation concerned another kind of storage, not of the artist’s oeuvre, but of the museum; it proposed the museum itself as storage. Whereas the conventional museum is divided into medium-specific departments, in Broodthaers’s museum all items are made equivalent within the post-medium condition in which they are presented. His motif of the eagle deconstructs the medium-based departments of the conventional museum. His idiosyncratic practice does not lead to an incoherent storage; indeed, his Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles is radically consistent. It demonstrates, however, that the coherence of the museum is not necessarily mediumbased; other coherences can be imposed on it. Christian Boltanski’s storages and inventories demonstrate the imposition of coherence from the outside in yet another way. When the oeuvre of an artist is supposed to be a unity, then all items belonging to that oeuvre refer indexically to that artist. Boltanski is not the only artist who attempted to reconstruct his own artistic career by means of this indexical procedure. Duchamp did that, too, but whereas Duchamp foregrounds the illusion of coherence, Boltanski confronts the viewer with the failure of the indexical sign to make something present. He makes us aware of the illusion on which this semiotic principle is based. The implication is then that archival collections lose their referential meanings and become self-contained, autonomous collections. They are meaningful on the basis of their internal 88

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organization, not because of how they document the world outside the archive. Annette Messager, finally, foregrounds yet another aspect of archival collections. Her collection albums are prime examples of artistic archiving in the sense that she collects that which tends to be overlooked and is not supposed to be archivable. But her collecting does more than just making noticeable what is usually overlooked. Her collecting is explicitly based on acts of appropriation. Those acts transform the identity of what is collected because the frame of the collection is by definition not the same as the original context from which it was appropriated. The different ways in which these artists use the archival principle, and the distinction between collecting and storage as artistic medium, demonstrate precisely that status of archiving as a medium. In the next chapter I will further reflect on that other element of the archive, its relation to the law and how it exercises authority and social order by means of the categories that it imposes on the recorded and archived items.

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three

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Listing

24 Christian Boltanski, cover of Les Habitants de Malmö, 1993.

Storage is based on the accumulation of objects. Those objects are each complete in themselves. Objects that are part of a collection do not have that completeness. They only have significance in relation to each other; each object is different from the other objects in the collection as well as representative of the collection as such. Because each element is representative of the collection it is part of, the principle of organization of a collection is inherent to it. However, when the objects in a collection are listed, the resulting ordered structure is no longer inherent to the collection but imposed on it. This is why listing deserves an analysis in itself. Listing is a fundamental topic in mathematics, statistics and computer science. In those fields listing usually takes the form of an enumeration. One can make a distinction between the imposition of a conventional ordering and the imposition of an arbitrary, nonconventional ordering. An example of a conventional ordering is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . but an alphabetical ordering is also conventional. Telephone numbers in a telephone directory are listed on the basis of an alphabetical list of the names of those to whom the numbers belong. This results in a well-ordered list of numbers that can easily be consulted. The listing of lots in an auction catalogue lacks such a conventional ordering. Although all the items or lots are listed one after the other, the imposed order is arbitrary. In the case of an auction of artworks, 91

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one imposes an order that is more or less chronological (from old to new or contemporary). But the order can also be based on a distinction of genres such as portraits, landscapes or still-lifes. All such ordered listings are, however loosely, imposed; the resulting structure is far from perfect in the sense of fulfilling the standard of an imposed ideal. That is why one has to consult the index if one wants to find a specific lot, or browse through the catalogue. We can recognize a list on the basis of its formal features. A formal principle has been applied to a sequential presentation of items. When items are arranged alphabetically, numerically, chronologically or geographically, just to mention some widely used principles, we recognize such arrangements immediately as lists. Such an application of a formal principle results in a rhetoric of listing. An example of a numerical pattern of listing can be found in Georges Perec’s short story ‘Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die’. Although the listing is interrupted by comments, those sentences that make up the list can be recognized because of their rhetorical presentation:

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First of all there are things very easily done, things I could do as from today, for example 1. Take a trip on a bateau-mouche Then things a tiny bit more significant, things that involve decisions, things which I tell myself that, were I to do them, would perhaps make my life easier, for example 2. Make up my mind to throw out a certain number of things that I keep without knowing why I keep them Or else 92

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3. Arrange my bookshelves once and for all 4. Acquire various household appliances Or again 5. Stop myself smoking (before being forced to)1

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But rhetorical patterns of listing are not always used in presenting a list. When listing is not visually recognizable on the basis of such formal, rhetorical principles, listing can only be identified on the basis of a repetition of the same syntactical function. For example, in the following sentence from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the narrator describes all the vegetables and fruits that could be bought at a Dublin market in the form of a compilation. The passage stems from the chapter ‘Cyclops’: Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.2 All vegetables and fruits are presented one after another as objects of description. And they are not just named; they are each qualified by one special feature. This results in a listing that is formally diverse, but syntactically based on repetition. The listing consists of a repetition of the same function. These are just two examples of the rhetoric of listing and both examples are linguistic. But especially when we consider listing as 93

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based on the repetition of the same syntactical function, many presentations of visual images can be seen as lists. When Christian Boltanski presents portraits in his little book Archives (1989), portraits he has cut out of a weekly magazine about crime, we get to see one image after another. There are no captions: we are not informed about the identity of those portrayed. Perpetrators and victims cannot be distinguished from one another because all the images are presented as further examples of people involved in one way or another in situations of crime. Such a visual listing is not recognizable on the basis of, for example, enumeration or alphabetical or chronological listing; yet such a collection of images can also be seen as a list, because it is the result of a repetition of the same syntactical function. Although we are perhaps inclined to associate lists first of all with written texts, it is important also to consider collections of images as lists. These can be or become lists on the condition that a repetition of the same syntactical function can be identified.

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The Infinite Nature of Lists Another distinction made in mathematics is that between finite and infinite lists. Finite lists are countable, whereas infinite lists are not. In the anthology of lists Umberto Eco put together in the context of his collaboration with the Louvre in Paris, he made a distinction between practical or pragmatic lists and poetic lists, meaning listing in literary texts and visual art. Practical lists, for example shopping lists, lists of dinner-party guests, restaurant menus, lists of assets in a will or inventories, are usually finite. Lists in literary texts, on the contrary, are often meant to evoke the infinite. The writer of those lists relies on the etcetera of the list. According to Eco, this invocation of the infinite is the most important function of the list. Listing is not just a practical way of creating order, but it is an attempt to grasp the incomprehensible, in other words, the infinite: 94

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There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, one where we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, where we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large. We cannot provide a definition by essence and so, to be able to talk about it, to make it comprehensible or in some way perceivable, we list its properties – and, as we shall see, the accidental properties of something, from the Greeks to modern times, are thought to be infinite.3 Eco rejects the idea that listing is a more basic or, for some, even ‘primitive’ way of defining or understanding something than the more intellectual forms of understanding. Contrary to what is usually assumed, the list is not typical for ‘primitive cultures that still have an imprecise image of the universe and limit themselves to listing as many of its properties as they can name without trying to establish a hierarchical relationship among them’.4 The alternative for a definition by means of the listing of properties is a definition by essence. The Aristotelian tradition in science privileges definition by essence and is rather condescending about definitions by listing properties. According to Aristotle, listing properties implies definition by accident. Definition by essence, in contrast, is based on substances. This is supposed to be more adequate as a definition because one presumes that we know which and how many these substances are. Definition by listing properties takes into consideration every possible accident, which makes such a listing by definition infinite. But, as Eco argues, the reality is that we seldom give definitions by essence. We usually rely for our understanding on the listing of properties. This is true for ‘primitive cultures’ as well as ‘mature cultures’: We use definition by properties when we don’t have or are not satisfied by a definition by essence; hence it is proper to both a primitive culture that has still to construct a hierarchy 95

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of genera and species, or to a mature culture (maybe even one in crisis) that is bent on casting doubt on all previous definitions.5

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Which of the two kinds of definition is preferred doesn’t matter; there seems to be a consensus that the hierarchical relationships that distinguish essence from arbitrary elements are unable to evoke the infinite the way that listing does. This special quality of listing seems to be confirmed by Jorge Luis Borges in his story ‘The Aleph’. The narrator of this story struggles with the problem of how to describe the ‘Aleph’, the point in space that contains all other points: I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the Gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping of transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I will now write down will be 96

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successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can.6 In this self-reflexive passage the narrator already lists some symbols signifying the aleph: a bird that somehow is all birds, Alanus de Insulis and Ezekiel. But the analogies on which these symbols are based do not effectively embody the limitless nature of the Aleph. Only a list can do that, a list that relies on the principle of etcetera. What follows next is a long, almost endless list of what the narrator saw. This endless list is an articulation of the ‘unimaginable universe’, not by means of analogy or symbolization, but by means of enumeration. One can wonder, however, how strict the distinction is between practical, pragmatic listing and poetic listing. Eco assigns three characteristics to pragmatic lists: They have a purely referential function, which means that they refer to objects in the outside world;

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These lists are finite, since they record things that really exist and are known; These lists may not be altered, meaning that it would be pointless to include in a museum catalogue paintings that are not being kept in that museum. As long as such pragmatic lists concern shopping lists of, say, less than twenty items, the distinction seems to be convincing. In his book on lists in literature Robert Belknap argues, however, that even a grocery list, seen as a prime example of pragmatic lists, is by definition expandable:. A grocery list scrawled on the back of an envelope compiles in one location items the writer wants to buy at a store. This 97

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list serves as a receptacle to hold a set of items. It may have a scheme of organization that gives it form – alphabetical, by location in the store, the sequence in which the writer thought of the items – but it also demonstrates another feature of lists: it has no requisite force of closure. Although there may be a hierarchy apparent in the list (some items may be substituted for others or specific items might be purchased only if the shopper has enough money or an item is on sale), additional items can always be added to the written list itself.7 The principle of expandability can also be applied to the pragmatic compilation of names and numbers of which the telephone directory consists. Although all names in the directory are supposed to refer to real living people and to their telephone numbers, and although the materiality of the directory proves that the list is not endless but finite, it is precisely the telephone directory that demonstrates that the finiteness of pragmatic listing is illusionary. It is the temporary fixation of an ongoing process. The moment that the telephone directory is printed, or is digitally consulted on the Internet, its referential nature is already challenged because dated. Some people who are still listed will have died, will have moved to another city, and new people who are not yet listed will have received a number after being connected to the telephone system.

The Referentiality of Lists An artist’s book by Christian Boltanski demonstrates that the referential function of lists is illusionary. This book consists of the real telephone directory of the Swedish town Malmö. The directory is from the year 1993. All he changed in the number of real copies that he was provided with was the cover of the directory. A white sheet of paper was glued on top of the original cover, printed with the name 98

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of the artist, the name of the museum responsible for this publication (Malmö Konsthall) and the title of this artist’s book: Les Habitants de Malmö (The Inhabitants of Malmö, illus. 24). The telephone directory as artist’s book foregrounds how the referential nature of pragmatic lists is ultimately illusionary. The referentiality begins to evaporate from the moment such a listing is being performed. More and more people off the list will move to other places or they will die. After some time the list only provides the names of people who once lived in Malmö but who are now gone or dead. Boltanski foregrounds the illusionary referentiality of the directory by adding a four-page errata to the directory. A three-page list of names of people is introduced by the following statement: ‘You can’t reach these inhabitants of Malmö on the phone anymore. They died in 1993.’8 Boltanski’s telephone directory creates a Holocaust effect comparable to that of his installations, but this time it is the listing of names that is responsible for it. Over time the directory becomes a memorial of all the former inhabitants of Malmö. Boltanski has made many artist’s books, usually in the context of an exhibition. They are not catalogues, documenting the exhibition; they demonstrate in the material form of the book the issues that are also at stake, but differently, in the framework of the museum exhibition. Those books usually consist of lists. They list photographs, items, names, descriptions of artworks and the like. In order to give some examples of Boltanski’s obsession with listing, here are a few examples: Liste des artistes ayant participé à la Biennale de Venise 1895– 1995 (1995): the names of artists who have exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Erwerbungen rheinischer Kunstmuseen in den Jahren 1935– 1945 (1993): all the acquisitions of museums in the Rhineland area in Germany between 1935 and 1945. 99

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Diese Kinder suchen ihre Eltern (1994): posters printed by the Red Cross of children who were left displaced or homeless in devastated post-war Germany. Each poster has a portrait of the child and information on their special characteristics in an attempt to find a family for them again. Archives (1989): photographs cut in 1972 from a weekly about crime. The listing shows the faces of perpetrators and victims, without indicating the difference. Liste des Suisses morts dans le canton du Valais en 1991 (1993): all the inhabitants of the Swiss canton of Valais who died in the year 1991. The list is organized on the basis of showing who died on which day in 1991.

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Archive of the Carnegie International, 1896–1991 (1992): an alphabetical listing of the names of the artists who were included in the Carnegie International shows between 1896 and 1991, indicating in each case in which year they were presented. Boltanski is himself included in the list: his work was shown in 1991. Les Suisses morts (1991): portraits of people who died in the Swiss canton of Valais, taken from obituary notices of the deceased cut from the regional Swiss newspaper Le Nouveliste du Valais in the 1980s. Similarly to what Boltanski did with the Malmö telephone directory, the referential function of these lists is challenged. But the way he undermines the referential function is now different. These lists stand for human beings or objects in the real world. Like arrows they refer to them. But in small remarks in the introductions to these artist’s books Boltanski redirects their representational function. In the case 100

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of Diese Kinder suchen ihre Eltern he introduces the Red Cross posters in the following way:

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Now fifty years have passed, and when I look at the faces of these lost children I find myself trying to imagine what has become of them. They have become part of the postwar history of Germany with all its changes. Has fate brought them happy or unhappy lives, made them rich or poor? I should like to find them again. They are about my own age, and their history is similar in some ways to mine, to ours. We too, are in search of our parents.9 The referential reading of the list transforms into a metaphorical reading of it. Whereas the portraits in combination with the added information first referred to specific children, now grown up, Boltanski reads the listed portraits for what they have in common with himself, or with anybody: in one way or another we are all looking for our parents. Whereas the enumeration of lists is usually seen as an alternative for articulation by means of analogy or symbolization, Boltanski creates analogies on the basis of enumeration. His reading of the list is metaphorical. The same semiotic transformation takes place in the presentation of his book Les Suisses morts. Explaining why this book exclusively focuses on Swiss people, he states: Previously I made works concerned with dead Jews. But ‘Jew’ and ‘dead’ go too well together, the combination is too illuminating. By contrast, there is nothing more normal than the Swiss. There is really no reason at all why they should die; in a certain sense they are more frightening, because they are like us.10 Boltanski reads the list of dead Swiss as a memento mori, as a warning that we should all remember our mortality. The referentiality of 101

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the list is not completely cancelled but it is overruled by the analogy with the fact that the mortality of these Swiss people is no different from ‘our’ mortality. What exactly enables Boltanski’s reading of lists as metaphorical rather than as referential? Although each item in the list has a referent, the fact that the list as such gives the impression of being endless makes the referentiality lose its specificity. The referentiality becomes general or abstract, which creates a paradox. The gradual evaporation of referentiality is an effect produced by listing: the more endless the list, the less specific its referentiality. When the referential function loses its strength, the symbolic reading of the list imposes itself. Seen from this paradoxical effect of listing, it is not really surprising that since the unveiling in 1982 of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, dc, designed by Maya Lin and consisting of a list of all the

102

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25 List of names on the Vietnam Memorial, Washington, dc.

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u.s. military who died in Vietnam (illus. 25), many other memorials, especially of the Holocaust, have been modelled on this. The listing of individual names seems to make these soldiers referentially present. Each name stands for a soldier who died. Their absence or death is momentarily transcended; referentially they are made present again. But the listing, seemingly endless, of all those names has the opposite effect. These memorials are so effective because the listing results in an overwhelming effect of absence. Ultimately it is the incredible, that is, uncountable, number of people who died that overwhelms us. Whereas each individual soldier can be imagined, made ‘present’ by means of a referential name or portrait, the endlessness of the list cannot be imagined. We are struck by the unimaginable number of people who died, by their absence. This is the moment that the referential function transforms into a metaphorical – or symbolic – one, and the pragmatic list that can be consulted to know who died transforms into a memorial for all those who died. And perhaps also into a memento mori for those who still have to die. The success of such memorials in the form of a list depends entirely on the mass-induced dissolution of referentiality. The obsessive listing of Boltanski in his artist’s books shows another problem with the referentiality of pragmatic lists. At different moments in his career Boltanski published artist’s books that consist of inventories of his own works. Whereas Marcel Duchamp archived his oeuvre by means of the archival genre of storage in his Green and White boxes, Boltanski archives his oeuvre by means of a listing of his works. In 1992 he published a so-called Catalogue, which lists chronologically all his books, printed matter and ‘Ephemera’ of the period 1966 to 1991. His other artworks, installations and exhibitions are not included in this list. All items are numbered; the list consists of 80 items. The Catalogue looks like a real catalogue: it has no image on the cover, only the name of the artist, the title and the names of the publishers (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main). It could be the kind of catalogue that is used in archives or museums (illus. 26). 103

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26 Christian Boltanski, cover of Catalogue: Books, Printed Matter, Ephemera, 1966–1991 (Cologne, 1992).

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27 Christian Boltanski, plastic bag containing Archives 01 (2009).

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28 Christian Boltanski, cover of Archives 01 (2009).

In 2009 Boltanski published a book titled Archives 01 (illus. 27, 28). This book looks like a typical archival cahier as used in archives or libraries for archival recording. It looks administrative, utterly functional and objective. This archival cahier is wrapped in the kind of plastic bag that is also used in archives to protect documents, to keep them acid-free and dust-free. The archival ‘look’ of Boltanski’s books and catalogues is strongest and most convincing in the case of the publication titled Lost, made on the occasion of exhibitions in 1994 in Glasgow, Dublin and Halifax. This publication consists of a cardboard sleeve containing a folder that can be closed with an elastic band (illus. 31). The folder contains several folders with papers and index cards organized in bundles (illus. 29, 30, 32). The form of this publication looks in all details like the folders used in archives for keeping documents. Also, the index cards inescapably evoke archival organization. Archives lists all of his works that were not included in the earlier catalogue of his books and printed matters. It contains a catalogue raisonné, a list of publications about his work, a list of personal exhibitions and a list of collective exhibitions. The catalogue raisonné is organized on the basis of the different ‘genres’ practised by Boltanski: his paintings, his reference vitrines, his inventories, his family albums, his biscuit tins and more. The fact that Boltanski published listings of his own works at different moments in his career demonstrates that those listings are no longer complete the moment they appear. The catalogue that lists all of his books and printed matter is itself not included in the inventory in which this listing is performed. This indicates that listing is a time-bound process: it lists past items, but not present or future items. In the case of a living artist such listing can never be complete. If total control in the sense of complete overview is being intended, then this listing should take the form of an open-ended practice. But the two listings by Boltanski of his own works point also at another characteristic of listing. Listing is the result of distinctions imposed 107

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29, 30, 31, 32 Christian Boltanski, cover (grey folder, above) of Lost and some contents: card folders containing typed text, index cards (1994).

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on the work. One listing concerns his artist’s books and printed matter, the other his other artistic works, his installations and exhibitions. Of course, this is a very conventional distinction because the genre of the book is ambiguous, not only used by artists but also by writers. To make a separate list for this ambiguous genre seems at first sight not arbitrary and imposed on the work but almost ‘natural’ and inherent to the kind of work. Another of Boltanski’s lists makes the arbitrariness of categories imposed on the work more visible. In his Inventaire du Cabinet d’art graphique, 1977–1998 he lists all the acquisitions of the Prints and Drawings department of the Centre Pompidou in Paris between 1977 and 1998. Curator Jonas Storsve explains in the introduction that Boltanski’s listing did not pursue completeness but was the result of strict distinctions and categories imposed on all prints and drawings: aesthetic criteria do not matter;

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the listing concerns the artist who had entered the collection, not his or her works; each artist is going to be presented by one work, arbitrarily chosen; the artists are listed alphabetically; works with the following characteristics will not be included in the list: those that are more than one metre in size, those that consist of oil paint on paper, works that incorporate lamps, architectural drawings, carnets and artist books, the collection of illustrations titled L’Oiseau qui n’existe pas, the first of which was donated before the official opening of the Centre Pompidou 110

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diptychs, works that consist of series of which each part is framed independently, oeuvres that consist of volumes, drawings representing a rhinoceros.11 The rules of exclusion in particular turn Boltanski’s list into a Borgesian list that is the result of arbitrary, incomprehensible distinctions and categories. The first criterion, ‘aesthetic criteria do not matter’, imposes a negative distinction on the prints and drawings collection of a museum that is usually central to art museums. Whereas museums and archives are closely related because they are institutionally dependent on storage, inventories and catalogues, they differ in the imposition of aesthetic criteria. Boltanski’s listing has resulted in a list in which masterworks of a certain artist are excluded and marginal works and marginal artists are incorporated. Boltanski’s listing of works of the Centre Pompidou’s Prints and Drawings department foregrounds the awareness that listings are only partly the result of what they referentially refer to. They are to a great extent the result of the distinctions and categories on the basis of which the listing takes place. What is made present by means of listing is not simply the referential world of objects implied in the list, but the conceptual categories used by the archivist and imposed on the referential world.

The Mnemonic Function of Listing In modern times, the referential function of listing has become dominant. In the rhetorical tradition of the classical period the organization of a list had, instead, an especially mnemonic function. When things are arranged and presented in a given order they help us to remember them by recalling the place they occupied in the image of the world. Listing as a mnemonic device was practised in particular by 111

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means of an architectural walk through a building. Through compiling all the architectural elements one passed by when walking through a specific building, one could remember the elements, or building blocks, of an argumentation, which one wanted to ‘build’ into a speech to be delivered. By remembering the tour through the building, one was able to remember different building blocks of one’s argument in the right order. This mnemonic function of listing seems to have been reactivated in texts by Georges Perec. His books Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces) from 1974 and the well-known La Vie mode d’emploi (Life, a User’s Manual) from 1978 consist of lists. The role of memory is not immediately clear, but minor remarks indicate the crucial function of memory. Species of Spaces is clearly not narrative. Browsing through the book we immediately identify a great number of lists, but in the overall framework of the text we do not immediately recognize a visual pattern of listing; at that level no rhetoric of listing seems to have been used. The table of contents indicates, however, that the sequence of chapters forms a list of spaces, arranged from nearby to spaces further away, which embed the earlier spaces. The very first space is the space that brings about the intimate space of reading and imagination, namely the page. From there we go to the bed (where the writer writes and reads), then to the room, the apartment, the apartment building, the street, the neighbourhood, the town, the countryside, the country, Europe, the World and finally Space. In the last chapter on ‘Space’ the nature of this listing is described in a nutshell by means of an anecdote told by Perec about how, when he was young, probably as all children did, he wrote his address in his calendar: Georges Perec 18, Rue de l’Assomption Staircase A Third Floor 112

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Right-hand door Paris 16e Seine France Europe The World The Universe12

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In each chapter Perec describes from a diversity of angles the space the chapter is about: physically, functionally, activities that take place in that space, memories connected to the space and so on. In the chapter about the bedroom Perec relates memories evoked by this space: My memories are attached to the narrowness of that bed, to the narrowness of that room, to the lingering bitterness of the tea that was too strong and too cold. [Evoked memories follow.] That summer, I drank ‘pink gins’, or glasses of gin improved by a drop of angostura, I flirted, somewhat fruitlessly, with the daughter of a cotton-mill owner who had recently returned from Alexandria, I decided to become a writer . . . It is clear that the bedroom is a privileged space in the sense that it succeeds better than any other space in activating memories: The resurrected space of the bedroom is enough to bring back to life, to recall, to revive memories, the most fleeting and anodyne along with the most essential. The coenesthetic certainty of my body in the bed, the topographical certainty of the bed in the room, these alone reactivate my memory, and give it an acuity and a precision it hardly ever has otherwise. 113

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A little further on he explains the whole project of Espèces d’espaces by presenting it as a Proustian endeavour: It’s no doubt because the space of the bedroom works for me like a Proustian Madeleine (the whole project is of course invoked by this; all it is is nothing more than a rigorous extension of paragraphs 6 and 7 of the first chapter of the first part [Combray] of the first volume [Du côté de chez Swann] of A la recherche du temps perdu) to make an inventory, as exhaustive and as accurate as possible, of all the ‘Places Where I Have Slept’.13

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And indeed, Species of Spaces is a rigorous application of Proust as a method of writing, with the difference that it does not limit itself to the bedroom but also includes a gradual extension of spaces within which the bedroom is embedded. These spaces are real – physical and material. That is especially true for the bedroom, which can be described in great detail. Real and material they may be, but time wears them away. In the final two paragraphs of the last chapter, ‘Space’, Perec reflects on the instability and tangibility of spaces. Places fail as points of reference: My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognizing them. The words ‘Phone directory available within’ or ‘Snacks served at any hour’ will no longer be written up in a semi-circle in white porcelain letters on the window of the little café in the Rue Coquillière.14 It is at this moment that Perec deviates from a Proustian poetics. Also spaces ultimately fail in resurrecting memories, because spaces are 114

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not stable but fragile. Spaces change over time, or even disappear. That is why they cannot be counted upon for storage of memories. The solution for this instability of spaces is mediating them by means of listing them. The transposition from real space to written space safeguards the mnemonic function of space. The very last words of the chapter on ‘Space’ indicate how the mediation of space through writing, or more specifically listing, can guarantee the survival of memories: ‘To write, to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.’15 It is this closure of Species of Spaces that explains the function of the listing of spaces of which this text consists. It is not space as such that performs the mnemonic function. Spaces can only have that function after having been mediated in the form of a remembered or written list. This mnemonic potential of the listing of spaces seems to be negatively confirmed by another of Perec’s experimental lists. In 1975 he published Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu Parisien (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris). This text is in many respects the opposite of Species of Spaces. Like that text it is not narrative. He described the text as the result of a quest for ‘what happens when nothing happens’. But in contrast to Species of Spaces it is not the spatial dimension on which the listing of different chapters and sections is based, but the temporal dimension. From beginning to end the text offers descriptions of only one single space: Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. What he describes during different moments of the day, over a period of three days, is what he records at this Paris square. The only variation in this sequence of observations is the location from where he observes what happens in the square: the Tabac Saint-Sulpice, the Café de la Mairie, the Café La Fontaine Saint-Sulpice and a bench (looking in the direction of the fountain). He returns to the same locations on different days. In every section he lists the sequence of his observations in the square. He does not describe the physical characteristics of the place, but rather what evolves temporally: one observation after the other. 115

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As a reader of these lists we follow Perec the focalizer. This results in lists like the following: (date: 18 October 1974, Time: 12.40 pm, location: Café de la Mairie) ... An 86 passes by. An 87 passes by. A 63 passes by People stumble. Micro-accidents. A 96 passes by. A 70 passes by. It is twenty after one. Return (uncertain) of previously seen individuals: a young boy in a navy blue peacoat holding a plastic bag in his hand passes by the café again An 86 passes by. An 86 passes by. A 63 passes by. The café is full On the plaza a child is taking his dog for a run (looks like Snowy) Right by the café, at the foot of the window and at three different spots, a fairly young man draws a sort of ‘V’ on the sidewalk with chalk, with a kind of question mark inside it (land art?) A 63 passes by16 In this text the writer Perec seems to be imprisoned in the present tense of his observations. He records the sequence of his observations, which does not result in a narrative account of what took place at the Paris square but in a listing of what he saw moment after moment. But there is no temporal coherence, no cause-and-effect relationship, between the sequences of observations. The only coherence is spatial: all these observations were recorded at the same Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. On the second day there is, however, a moment when fatigue undermines his observation. His focalization is momentarily displaced 116

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from the external world of the square to his inner, subjective world. He then lists the following observations:

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A Paris-Vision bus goes by. The tourists have headphones The sky is gray. Fleeting sunny spells. Weary vision: obsessive fear of apple-green 2cvs. Unsatisfied curiosity (what I came here to find, the memory floating in this café . . .)17 The displacement of his focalization to his inner world makes the reader aware of Perec’s fear of apple-green 2cvs. This is indeed a recurring topos in his observations. But having now access to his inner world leads subsequently to the revelation of Perec’s motivation behind the experimental project An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. The project was a systematic procedure for the quest for memories. But taking the listing of time instead of the listing of space as its structural principle, this quest utterly fails. No memories are released by using this structural principle. Yet there is more to this listing of observations, moment after moment. This list of external observations makes the reader aware of the degree to which our perception of the outer world is formulated through categories and classifications that are utterly conventional or even stereotypical. There is no development in Perec’s observations (no narrative), his observations do not show a learning process: no gradual increasing capability to see more, better or more intensely. The only moment that his observations become less formulaic and conventional, the only moment that he can see more, is when his focalization for just a few seconds displaces itself from the external to his inner world. After the experiment of An Attempt, Perec returned in 1978 to another listing of spaces in his Life, a User’s Manual. This is probably his most well-known and successful novel. In it he lists all the different spaces of an apartment block in Paris and in each case he provides 117

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a description of the space. Some of these descriptions are only half a page long; others take ten pages or even more. In contrast with An Attempt, these descriptions are not the result of a temporal sequence of observations; the spaces of the block are presented frozen in time (illus. 33). The precise moment is 23 June, just before 8 pm, in 1975. This is only a few moments after the main ‘protagonist’, Bartlebooth, has died. The address of the apartment block is 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, a fictional address. Although all the descriptions take place at the same moment in time, it does not mean that the temporal dimension of this novel is limited to that moment of 23 June 1975. The descriptions of the listed spaces release a great diversity of memories, most of them related to the resident of the described space. These memories, activated by the description of the different spaces in the block, form storylines. Most of the residents of the apartment block are protagonists in storylines that intersect with each other, as a result of which a considerable number of the ‘small narratives’ form a larger narrative. Many of the narratives are linked to the character Bartlebooth. His name seems to be the result of combining two known literary figures: Melville’s Bartleby and Larbaud’s Barnabooth. Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman living in Paris, has decided to learn to paint. Another resident of the block teaches him how to paint for ten years. After he has more or less mastered the technique of painting, he embarks on a trip around the world that will last twenty years. He is accompanied by his servant Smautf, who also lives in the apartment block. He paints watercolours of the different ports they visit. After some time he has around 500 watercolours of ports, which he sends back to Paris. Another resident of the block, Gaspard Winckler, glues each watercolour to a board and then cuts the board into a jigsaw puzzle. When Bartlebooth finally returns to his apartment in Paris he spends most of his time solving the jigsaw puzzles and recreating the different port scenes. With complicated chemical procedures the wooden board is removed from behind the painted scenes. Next the 118

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33 Georges Perec, map of 11 Rue SimonCrubellier, from Life, a User’s Manual, 2008.

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painting is sent back to the port where it was painted, exactly twenty years after it was painted. Back at its place of origin the painting is treated with a detergent solution that dissolves the colours. The blank paper is then returned to Bartlebooth in Paris. Ultimately, after 50 years, the project would have been invisible in the sense of having left no mark or trace on the world. But the project is not completed as intended by Bartlebooth. At first, this is because the jigsaw puzzles made by Winckler become increasingly difficult and take more and more time to solve. Next, Bartlebooth becomes blind. He then burns the watercolours instead of sending them back to where they came from. Bartlebooth dies when he has almost finished puzzle number 439. In addition, the painter Valène, who taught Bartlebooth to paint, has a strange project that, like Bartlebooth, he fails to complete: he intends to paint the apartment block, without the facade, showing all the residents and the lives they are living in their apartments. What it comes to is that Valène intends to represent the novel as painting, a novel in which he is himself one of the protagonists: ‘He would paint himself painting.’18 He would do that in the manner of those Renaissance painters who reserved for themselves a tiny place in the midst of the crowd of vassals, soldiers, bishops or burghers: Not a central place, not a significant or privileged place at a chosen intersection, along a particular axis, in this or that illuminating perspective, in the line of any deeply meaningful gaze which could give rise to a reinterpretation of the whole painting, but an apparently inoffensive place, as if it had been done just like that, in passing . . .19 What follows next in this chapter is a listing of 179 scenes representing all his characters with their stories, their pasts, their legends. This almost endless listing of scenes to be painted is like an image of an archive: an inexhaustible store of information about a great 120

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diversity of people, practices and events – in many cases, but not all, interconnected. Also, Bartlebooth’s idiosyncratic project of having made jigsaw puzzles of his paintings and then solving the puzzles can be seen as an image of archival research. From this perspective of archival organization it is important to emphasize that Valène as well as Bartlebooth fail in their projects. It is not the final result of their projects that is important, but the working method of Perec, mirrored in Valène’s painting project, in telling the stories of the residents of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. These residents literally occupied a specific place in the world, namely an apartment in this block. Perec tells their stories by listing all the different spaces in the block and by providing descriptions of them. In describing the different rooms and spaces, memories are activated and released. These memories can be used as the building blocks of a narrative, but are as such not yet narrative accounts. A conventional narrative account of these stories would have provided connections between the described events and stories: connections based on continuity between events, or cause-and-effect relations, for example. As far as there are any connections now, these are connections of contiguity as they have taken place in apartments juxtaposed with each other in the same block. In order to transform the contiguous information, events and stories into a narrative based on temporal continuity, a lot of jigsaw-puzzle solving has to take place. When I say that memories are being activated and released in the descriptions of the different spaces, the question that imposes itself, then, is: who do these memories belong to? From a formal, narratological point of view the descriptions and memories are produced by an external narrator, an agent who is not a protagonist in the story that it relates. But from a mnemonic point of view the memories are intimately connected with the described spaces and rooms. Focusing on a specific space activates memories that are connected to that space in one way or another. It is as if the memories belong to the space, instead of to a specific person. The external narrator phrases memories 121

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that belong to the building. This turns the apartment block into a haunted site. Memories and stories hold it in its grip, and the building can only be liberated from its mnemonic ghosts by means of an external narrator who speaks the memories. Such a way of putting it is, of course, just a manner of speaking, because the memories are never presented or told as a subjective rendering of what happened to him/her/it in the past. Again, from a narratological point of view, there is no character-bound focalization. The so-called memories are not only told but also ‘seen’ by the external narrator. This paradoxical situation reveals an unexpected characteristic of lists and listing. In contrast to narrative accounts, lists seem to miss the possibility of rendering subjective vision. That implies that focalization is never character-bound but that it is always the focalization of the external narrator or, in this case, ‘lister’, who imposes his focalization on the listed objects. This imposed vision creates by definition the impression of being ‘all-knowing’ and omniscient in narratological terms – or objective. When we read Life, a User’s Manual like this, which means reading it as an allegory of an archival list being consulted and read by a user of the archive (let’s say a historian) the text demonstrates the paradoxical status of what the user-historian tells us on the basis of his archival work. All archival material is frozen in time. And because of the structure imposed on the material, its subjective dimension is also frozen and transformed into object and objective. We call such objects documents. Documents, like spaces, can be haunted and hold, or are held by, memories and histories. But these memories and stories cannot be told or focalized by the characters that are described in these documents. We need a mediator in order to listen and get access to these stories. This mediator is the historian as external narrator. Thanks to this mediation the stories and memories can be told, although this is at the expense of their subjective dimension and status. That is what is lost in the transition. 122

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How Telling Can Listing Be? In a recent novel by the Canadian writer Leanne Shapton a story is conveyed by means of a listing of objects. This novel in the form of an auction catalogue tells the story of a relationship from the moment two people fall in love, through the zenith of their love affair, the decline in its intensity and finally their break-up. Love affairs seem to be narrative by definition. The existence of the genre of the love story demonstrates that. To tell a love story by means of an archival organization, in this specific case an auction catalogue, seems therefore to be an utter impossibility. How can the story of love or the dissolution of a relationship be listed? It can only be narrated, it seems. The impossibility of telling a love story through listing forms a challenge, and Shapton’s novel is the product of that challenge – which also tells us about what listing can and cannot do. The title of this novel is telling: Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. Saturday, 14 February 2009, New York (illus. 34). It presents itself explicitly as an auction catalogue. The list it contains arranges the 1,332 lots by numbering them. There is no thematic or generic grouping of the different lots. At first sight the listing seems to have no other order than the numbering of the individual items. But then reading the descriptions of each lot, it becomes clear that the different objects are presented in a more or less chronological order. More or less, because many objects don’t let themselves be ordered chronologically because they are objects without a date. But letters or postcards sent by the two lovers, or books given as a present to the other and inscribed, usually carry a date. When Morris gives the book Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills (Museum of Modern Art, 2003) to Doolan, he inscribes it with the following text: ‘She reminds me of you . . . Merry Christmas 2004, love Hal’.20 This inscription enables a chronological arrangement in between lots that also have a date. But this particular 123

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inscription reveals more. When Cindy Sherman reminds Morris of Doolan, it can be read as a hint about an inclination towards masquerading, an inclination that Doolan then shares with Sherman, who has built her whole artistic oeuvre on such a masquerading practice. If this reading of the lot’s inscription is right, then Doolan’s masquerading could have been fuelling the love affair or, the opposite, have become a serious problem within the affair. These are the kind of small pieces of information that can be found in this auction catalogue list, on the basis of which the reader has to reconstruct the story of this love affair. Another lot described in the auction catalogue is more explicit and refers unambiguously to a conflict the couple has had during their affair (illus. 35).

34 Leanne Shapton, page from Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (2009).

Lot 1141 A Group of women’s sunglasses Four pairs of sunglasses. One no label, with heart-shaped white plastic frames and brown lenses. One Yves Saint Laurent cat’s eye style with tortoiseshell frames and brown lenses. One no label, gold wire-framed with green plastic lenses. One no label, round blue-framed with brown lenses. $40–60 Included is a photograph, 6 × 4 in., showing Doolan wearing the blue-framed pair sitting next to a fountain. Also included is a note on a Post-it, 3 × 3 in., in Morris’s script. Reads: ‘I’m sorry it upset you. I totally forgot! But they look better on you! Call me when you’ve calmed down.’ The blueframed pair once belonged to Morris’s ex-girlfriend Juliet Blackwood.21 Reading the auction catalogue and its descriptions of the listed lots, the reader is placed in the position of someone who uses or consults an archive. On the basis of the documents and information 125

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35 Leanne Shapton, page from Important Artefacts and Personal Property . . . of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris.

found in the archive a particular history is reconstructed. But, of course, many pieces that are necessary for a unified reconstruction are missing. In the case of a love story this is not a serious problem, because love stories are usually minor variations on a stereotypical model. The reviews of Shapton’s novel demonstrate this in a rather surprising way. Although they mention the novel’s title and the fact that it has the form of an auction catalogue, a major part of each review is devoted to a summary of the plot, as if this novel provided a narrative account of the story. Because the novel consists of a listing of discontinuous objects, it is the opposite of a narrative account that relates the continuous development of one event after another. If one reads it as a narrative account then it is one that is radically elliptical. But since this auction catalogue offers the objects once owned by a couple that broke up, the narrative model of the love story is activated in order to make sense of the disparate objects in the list. The reviewers of Shapton’s novel succeed in providing a unified account of the love story first of all on the basis of the meanings, events and plot fragments attached to the listed lots. But what those lots have to offer are only fragments of a plot and possibilities for a plot. The coherent, unified plot is ultimately the result of the generic model of the love story not present in the auction catalogue, but activated by reviewers or other readers who try to make sense of the listed objects. Shapton herself, however, seems to deny this active involvement of the reader in the establishment of the coherent love story. In an interview she attributes this power to the objects once owned by the two lovers: ‘I really like the idea of objects being haunted and holding more history than they appear to do.’22 This confession of faith does not only function as a clue regarding the question of how these listed objects can narrate a love story, but it could also serve as an epigraph to a great number of archives, or to the archival as such. Shapton’s claim about telling objects, or ‘objects holding more history than they appear 127

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to do’, seems at first sight completely convincing. The story told is a love story, and also its resolution. The elliptical nature of the story as told on the basis of the auction catalogue is then compensated by the fact that each lot in the catalogue holds more history than it appears to do. It is by means of this surplus of history that the reader can fill in the gaps in this elliptical account of the love story. Perec’s image of how the reader makes sense of listings is very different. In Perec’s Life the agency of storytelling is not assigned to the different rooms and spaces in the apartment block as if they were haunted by the historical information that they contain. It is not the room that tells, but the ‘lister’ who describes one space after another. These descriptions combine to form a narrative that is the product of solving a jigsaw puzzle. This activity of solving a jigsaw puzzle is first of all done by the main protagonist Bartlebooth. But Bartlebooth’s activity is at the same time an image for how the reader struggles with an archival novel like Life, a User’s Manual. This image of solving a jigsaw puzzle is so effective because, in contrast with Shapton’s auction catalogue, the story told is the opposite of conventional. The constructed narrative is totally bizarre. It is so bizarre and complex that it is almost impossible for the reader to solve the puzzle and to construct a coherent plot out of it. But it is precisely this difficulty that confronts the reader with his own activity, his ability or disability to solve the riddle. Shapton’s auction catalogue does not produce such an awareness in the reader because the conventionality of the story allows her to believe in the telling qualities of objects. The difference between Perec’s image of the jigsaw puzzle and Shapton’s image of telling objects is, however, a nice embodiment of the two faces – the Janus head – of the visitor and user of archives. The agency of this person is caught between extremes: between modestly listening to what telling objects and documents have to say and actively constructing a story out of silent objects and documents. This difference mainly concerns the kind and degree of activity that is involved in narrating a story on the basis of listed items. But 128

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what they do have in common is that in both cases the list serves as a starting point for the mnemonic function and for narrative. It is the listing of spaces (Perec) or of lots (Shapton) that activates the narration of past events. One could say that in these cases the list serves as the generator of memories: it fuels the narration of them. Listing is, however, also used as the absolute antipode of narrative and narration. In such cases, to counter the drawbacks of narrative one resources to listing. A prime example of such a listing practice is Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, in which he presents the kind of language we use when we are in love. It is not a spoken or written language but rather an ‘image-repertoire’. This repertoire forms a primary language that can best be compared with stock gestures, ‘scenes of language’ or figures. These figures do not form a specific order: ‘Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident’. Love stories, in contrast, have a specific order, a very conventional one. Barthes calls these stories the ‘narrative Other’. The love story is a subjugation to the general opinion, ‘which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him’.23 The love story is then the price the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it, albeit in violent tension with what the repertoire of love figures and images stands for. Having positioned the narrative of love and the lover’s discourse as polar opposites to each other, Barthes has to find a mode of presenting the lover’s discourse without falling back on narration or without activating narration indirectly, as for example happens in the work of Perec and Shapton. His solution is a listing of the repertoire of figures and images. This listing should, however, be radically arbitrary. It should not imply or suggest any underlying order or meaning. The order of the listing should be ‘absolutely insignificant’ [emphasis in text].24 Each figure of the repertoire of images is named and then 129

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listed in alphabetical order. To give an example, the list begins with the following lemmas:

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s’abîmer / to be engulfed absence / absence adorable / adorable affirmation / affirmation alternation / alternation angoisse / anxiety Barthes counters narrative because a narration of love would turn into a meaningful story or a ‘philosophy of love’. All he wants to do is present an affirmation of love, not a representation or signification of it. By means of the archival organization of listing he hopes to succeed in this pursuit. My final example of an artistic practice based on listing is the work of the French artist Sophie Calle. In contrast with Perec and Shapton, and in line with Barthes, this artist uses lists without activating the mnemonic function. Her projects never have, and never produce, a past time; they are radically positioned in the present and teleologically focused on the future. Her lists consist of an exhausting accumulation of details and situations observed in the present. In the case of most of her projects these lists are presented in two ways: as installations in galleries or museums and as artist’s books. The listing tends to concern photographic images as well as the written text of a reporter or journalist. The lists are always produced on the basis of a self-imposed protocol. A good example is her project The Sleepers, from 1979 (illus. 36). She made this work before she considered herself an artist. She made it, to use her own words, ‘to avoid boredom’ and to fill the emptiness in her life.25 She invited people she did not know to sleep in her bed. Her bed had to be occupied all the time. Each invited person would sleep for eight hours in her bed and then be awakened by 130

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36 Sophie Calle, page from The Sleepers (1979).

the next person who was going to sleep for eight hours in the same bed. This ritual was repeated for eight days. Sophie Calle stayed at the bedside for all eight days, taking a photograph every hour and writing down everything said by these people sleeping in her bed when she interviewed them. It was, however, important to her that these interviews would remain neutral and distant. They should not become personal, although it all took place in the intimacy of her own bedroom. The resulting work is a list of 176 black-and-white photographs and 23 texts. Together they do not form a narrative. There is no contin uity of any kind between the photographed moments: just one after another, one taken every hour. Each photograph and interview registers only the present moment. This sequence of present moments are listed one after another. From a temporal perspective Calle’s project can be compared with Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which is also the result of a radical imprisonment in the present tense, frustrating the mnemonic function in the most absolute way. Another good example of Calle’s listing practice is The Address Book, originally made in 1983 but published in book form in 2009.

131

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The only narrative part of it is the scenario, which is described at the beginning. This is also the only moment where she uses the past tense, which is exchanged after the second sentence for the future tense. The protocol of this project runs as follows: Paris End of June 1983 I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs

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I decided to photocopy the contents before sending it back anonymously to its owner, whose address is inscribed on the endpaper. I will contact the people whose names are noted down. I will tell them, ‘I found an address book on the street by chance. Your number was in it. I would like to meet you.’ I’ll ask them to tell me about the owner of the address book, whose name I’ll only reveal in person, if they agree to meet me.26 On the basis of this scenario Calle will get to know the owner of the address book, named Pierre D., through his friends and acquaintances, without ever meeting him in person. The interviews with his friends and acquaintances result in a portrait of this man. During the interviews she also took photographs of objects or scenes that contribute to this portrait. When one of the interviewees would say, ‘When he comes to my house, he likes to sit in that chair’,27 Calle took a picture of that chair. After the description of the scenario a separate text follows with a description of the address book, of the physical characteristics of the little book, but also of how many names were listed under each letter of the alphabet, and where, in which city or country, those people are located. After these two introductory texts the listing of the interviews with friends and acquaintances begins. Each one starts with the day of 132

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the week and the time of day it took place and the first name and the initial of the last name of the interviewed person. Some of the interviewees say very personal things; others, because they are close friends, refuse to say anything. Some of them haven’t seen Pierre D. for more than five or six years; others saw him only a few days ago. Although the interviews and photographs are presented in the order in which they were taken (and originally published in the daily newspaper Libération from 2 August until 4 September 1983), this does not imply that this presentation produces a chronological narrative. There is never any kind of temporal relationship between the interviews. They do not form separate chapters within a novel; they are just listed one after the other. The coherency is not between events, but in topic: they are all about Pierre D. Some of Calle’s more recent works seem at first sight to go in a different direction by listing memories instead of Calle’s observations as a reporter. But these lists of memories do not together form a narration of a past time, either. These memories are also acts that take place in the present, although the content of each is a moment from the past. No life history is being told by listing these memory acts. It is just a listing of what she remembers at the present moment. Memories are also the central topic of Fantômes (Ghosts) and of Disparitions (Disappearances). In French, when a painting in a museum is on loan, the little note placed on the empty wall in its stead is called a fantôme. In Fantômes Calle investigated these ghosts by asking people who worked in the museum, and who were very familiar with the paintings-on-loan, how they remembered these paintings. Several of these memories of the missing paintings are listed one after another, together forming a mnemonic portrait of the painting. In Disparitions Calle did something similar, but in this case the solicited memories are not of paintings on loan but paintings that are missing because they were stolen, such as the Vermeer and Rembrandt paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In this case she photographed the empty spaces in the museum where the paintings had 133

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hung and asked the guards and other people working in the museum to describe the paintings from their memory.

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Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen listing as a rhetorical form that can serve different purposes, all self-reflexive. In contrast with Perec and Shapton, and in line with Barthes, Sophie Calle makes lists without activating the mnemonic function at all. Her work constitutes a forensic archive. Instead of searching in the archive for the lost past, as if fuelled by a temporal nostalgia, she produces an archival list by probing the transformation of scenarios into a sequence of fictional situations – but fictional situations that subsequently become new realities. Although the activity of listing binds together the artists discussed here, they each invent a specific rhetoric of listing. Boltanski’s listings foreground the awareness that listings are only partly the result of what they referentially refer to. Lists are as much the result of the categories imposed on them by the person who makes the list. On top of this, lists are a temporary result of a process in time, and because of this every list is dated the moment that it is finished. Exploring the rhetoric of listing, Perec and Shapton, in different ways, stage a polemic between storytelling and listing. The difference between their works lies in the kind of activity that is involved in narrating a story on the basis of listed items, and the degree to which the one takes over from the other. In both cases the list serves as a starting point for the mnemonic function and for narrative and suggests reflection on the bond between the two. It is the listing of spaces (Perec) or of lots (Shapton) that activates the narration of past events. Here the list serves to generate memories – it fuels their narration. But Perec’s and Shapton’s use of listing for the generation of memories seems rather exceptional. Distinct from these practices, Barthes searches for a mode of presenting the lover’s discourse without narration, or without activating narration indirectly, as in the 134

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work of Perec and Shapton. His solution is a listing of the repertoire of figures and images. Narration, or the production of memories – is found in Barthes’ use of listing the radical opposite: it is the kind of representation that is countered by making use of listing. In Calle’s case, listing is used as a device for becoming: something not or not yet existing, something nonsensical – you could call it a fiction – that comes to happen, comes into being, or simply, becomes. During the formulation of the scenario the imagined situations were still fictional. But in the realization of the scenario and the listing of one planned situation after another, fictionality has become reality because it has been transformed into it. With the word ‘becoming’, we enter the thought of Gilles Deleuze. This is no coincidence. In his theorization of abstraction as what generates becoming, Deleuze discusses the prose of authors such as Beckett in terms of a ‘stuttering’ (‘and . . . and . . . and’) instead of causal, logical links between elements. This stuttering logic of ‘and . . . and . . . and’ revolves around the problem of expressing something that does not yet exist. It is imbued with the awareness that there is a world of possibilities beyond the existing forms. In this stuttering new and potential forms are introduced. This view of abstraction and stuttering has relevant implications for listing. Listing is not abstract because it lacks complex, causal links between its elements (it is not a renunciation or purification of causality). Listing can be seen as a form of abstraction because, in the formulation of Rajchman, it offers the conditions under which new, singular forms, beyond those that already exist, can be produced.28 According to Deleuze this issue can be regarded as the central issue of modernism. Modernist artists and writers grapple with the issue of how to paint and write about forces and possibilities that (still) linger beyond all existent forms. On the basis of this line of thought, the texts of writers such as Kafka, Joyce and Beckett are also examples of abstraction. Again in the words of Rajchman: 135

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Thus, in the ‘minority’ of Kafka, the ‘chaosmos’ of Joyce, the ‘épuisements’ of Beckett, he [Deleuze] identifies an abstraction quite different from the self-purifying kind – that of those ‘abstract machines’ that push art forms beyond and beside themselves, causing their very languages, as though possessed with the force of other things, to start stuttering ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’. He connects this stuttering abstract ‘and’ not with dying or heroic self-extinction, but with a strange an-organic vitality able to see in ‘dead’ moments other new ways of proceeding. And this sort of vitality, this sort of abstraction, he thinks, is something of which we may still be capable, something still with us and before us.29 With this ‘stuttering’ Rajchman is referring to the moment, in the reasoning of Deleuze, at which language is not yet language. This is not limited to modernism. The disintegration of language, or the inadequacy of it, is not an effect in retrospect but one that points to a language not yet possible but the possibility of which is foreshadowed. This logic of stuttering and of abstraction also seems to apply to the forms of listing discussed in this chapter. It clearly fits Sophie Calle’s use of the rhetorical device of listing. Her listing of programmed situations records moments of transformation, fictional moments that become moments that really took place and happened. Her scenarios result in listings of possibilities beyond existing situations. In her lists as well as those of the other artists discussed here, new and potential situations are introduced and transformed into situations that really exist.

136

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four

Classification

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In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Michel Foucault introduces the notion of heterotopia. He raises it in reference to an essay by Jorge Luis Borges titled ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’. In this essay Borges describes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia’, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which an unorthodox taxonomy is used. This taxonomy divides animals into the following categories: a) those that belong to the Emperor, b) embalmed ones, c) those that are trained, d) suckling pigs, e) mermaids, f) fabulous ones, g) stray dogs, h) those included in the present classification, i) those that tremble as if they were mad, j) innumerable ones, k) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) others, m) those that have just broken a flower vase, n) those that from a long way off look like flies. 137

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37, 38 Ydessa Hendeles, Partners: The Teddy Bear Project, 2002, installation views, Haus der Kunst, Munich.

In order to characterize this bizarre categorization Foucault coins the term ‘heterotopia’. Heterotopias, says Foucault, are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.1 The term heterotopia signifies here first of all a kind of discursive (dis)order. In his essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, however, he uses the term in a more directly spatial sense, as the noun topia, ‘place’, would suggest. Heterotopias are sites ‘that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations designated, mirrored, or reflected by them’. They are places that are ‘outside all places, even though they are localizable’.2 These spaces are linked to all other spaces, which they contradict at the same time. The example of the Chinese encyclopaedia is so disturbing because, although each category can be assigned a precise meaning, the categories together form an order that is impossible to think. ‘What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of those categories to all the others’.3 The example is much more disturbing than a clear case of disorder, that of the incongruous. It is the kind of disorder that suggests a possible order, but one that at the same time cannot be thought. Heterotopia, then, is when ‘the disorder in fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite’.4 The issue Foucault is addressing here is the coherence of the established classification. This coherence (or lack thereof) is the result 139

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of grouping and isolating, of analysing, of matching and pigeonholing concrete contents – in other words of establishing an order among things. But this grouping and isolating is not the result of a ‘spontaneous’ ordering:

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In fact, there is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly untrained perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of the application of a preliminary criterion. A ‘system of elements’ – a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude – is indispensible for the establishment of even the simplest form of order.5 This simplest form of order can be recognized in the fundamental codes of a culture, according to Foucault. He mentions the codes governing a culture’s language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices, as examples of such codes that harbour an order. On the deepest level, Foucault’s entire oeuvre is devoted to the critical analysis of the idea of order and the practices it inspires. This focus explains the wide range of his disciplinary frameworks as well as his enormous historical scope. In The Order of Things, but in fact also in his other works, Foucault attempts to analyse the experience of order and its modes of being. He analyses which modalities of order have been posited and recognized ‘in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology, in natural history and biology, in the study of wealth and political economy’. He is bringing to light the epistemological field, or what he calls the ‘episteme’, in which knowledge grounds its positivity. His ‘archaeological inquiry’ has revealed that the ‘episteme’ or system of positivities was transformed radically at the end of the eighteenth century and the 140

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beginning of the nineteenth. An earlier discontinuity had inaugurated the Classical age; the second discontinuity, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of the Modern age. These transformations of episteme were not a matter of gradual development or progress; it was ‘simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered’.6 In his bringing to light of a specific episteme, either the Classical or the Modern one, he is concerned with a history of resemblance, that is, with the conditions on the basis of which such an episteme was able to reflect relations of similarity or equivalence between things – relations that provide a foundation and justification for the episteme’s words, classifications and systems of exchange. When Foucault writes about episteme (the order of things), or heterotopia as a subversive variation on an episteme, he is not referring to archival organizations in the literal sense. An episteme is a more fundamental or ‘simpler’ form of order than an archival organization. But archives are examples of ‘techniques’ or ‘practices’ in which the operations of an episteme can be recognized easily. The episteme governs the principles according to which archival organizations are structured in such a way that archives can be seen as emblematic examples of the nature of an episteme. Also, archival organization is structured on the basis of resemblance and distinction, on categories to which items belong because they resemble the other items in their category, or do not because they are different. But because of the increasing importance of the archive in the Modern age, Foucault has also written extensively on the role of archives in that period. What changed radically then is the so-called ‘threshold of description’, the minimum importance a piece of information must have to be worthy of archiving. This threshold was lowered dramatically in order to include common people. In the words of Foucault: 141

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For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of everybody – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an interrupted writing was a privilege . . . The disciplinary methods reserved this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. [What is archived] is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use. And this new describability is all the more marked in that the disciplinary framework is a strict one: the child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to become . . . the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts.7 Foucault argues that a variety of new ways of examining and describing individuals was developed. The question that then emerges is in which sense this accumulation and processing of the new data differed from the knowledge production of earlier centuries, since scientists from earlier centuries also had an obsession with classifying objects and archiving the results of these classifications.8 Foucault’s answer is that, while it is true that plants, animals and even human beings had been the subject of study before the examination regime was in place, they entered a field of knowledge as general categories, as a species for example, and not as singular individuals. What was innovative about the new archives was precisely that they objectified individuals not as members of a pre-existing category, but in all their uniqueness and singularity. Far from being archivable in terms of their shared properties, human beings became linked to all the unique series of events (medical, military, educational, penal events) which made them who they are as historical individuals – a history which could now take the form of a file while the individual became a case.9 142

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In other words, whereas in the old archives individuals were used to build or substantiate categories, in the new archive, categories are being used to build or substantiate the individual. This leads to a situation in which human bodies, events and archives interact, and it is this interaction that brings about individual identity. This identity is then not seen as a subjective interiority, but as an objective exteriority. All the facts about people accumulated in the files and dossiers of databases and archives, extracted from us via a variety of examinations, provide people with an identity. This identity is not a matter of interiorized representation, like an ideology, but of an external body of archives within which we are caught and that compulsorily fabricate an objective identity for us. This ‘archival identity’ may perhaps have little to do with our sense of identity, but this may not be the case for an insurance company, for example, for whom archived medical facts are the key to our identity, whether we like it or not.10 One of the radical implications of this new archive is that what, or who, is not in the records does not really exist. This drastic consequence is understandable when we realize that archival administrators do not observe, describe and classify reality, but the other way around: they shape people and events into entities that fit the categorizations and that are recordable. This kind of reification entails that there are virtually no other facts than those that are contained in records and archives.11

An Archival Heterotopia When archival practices in modern art demonstrate the ‘order of things’ by means of categorization, it is usually through presenting the deviant order of a heterotopia that they do so. A prime example of such a heterotopian artwork is Ydessa Hendeles’s archival installation Partners: The Teddy Bear Project.12 The installation consists of thousands of snapshots, each of which includes the image of a teddy bear, arranged according to more than 100 typologies. The installation 143

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is structured like a presentation of natural history or cultural objects in a classic, traditional natural history museum. The meticulously framed snapshots completely and densely cover the walls (illus. 37). In the middle of the space there are several antique museum display cases. Along the wall mezzanines have been built to permit closer inspection of those photographs that hang on the upper halves of the walls (illus. 38). When one enters the installation one wonders what all these images have in common. It takes some time before one becomes aware that there is a teddy bear in every photograph. The next discovery is, however, that the installation does not offer more of the same, just more pictures with teddy bears, but that the photographs have been classified according to specific categories. These categories are completely surprising: the installation, seemingly providing a history of the teddy bear, shows that the most different social and ethnic identities have used the teddy bear as a totem or fetish to identify with. The title of this installation, Partners, seems to refer to the intimate relationship between the owners of teddy bears and their playmate. When the installation was shown as part of a larger exhibition in Hitler’s own former museum, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Hendeles wrote the following about the appeal of the teddy bear in the catalogue:13 The teddy bear has appealed not only to children as playthings and as surrogate playmates, but also to adults as props to express whimsical fantasies at parties, in the workplace, at sports events, and in sexual play. In fact, teddy bears have attended every social function in society. They have been photographed at weddings, in schools, in hospitals, on battlefields, at births, deaths, and memorials.14 Her installation seems to provide evidence of this: when we start recognizing the different typologies, we suddenly see all the different 144

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groups. Soldiers with teddy bears, students with teddy bears, prostitutes with teddy bears, lesbian couples with teddy bears: there is no end to the different identities that have presented themselves with the teddy bear as their emblem and guardian. The thousands of teddy bear snapshots turn out to be extremely diverse. Within this corpus an endless number of distinct categories can be distinguished. The pursuit of specificity, differentiation and categorization leads to amazing results in Partners. At first sight Hendeles’s ‘visual thesis on the history of the teddy bear’ conveys an appearance of absolute trust in thorough, positivistic scholarship. But as she points out in her essay in the catalogue, this reassuring aura of scholarship is deceptive, ‘because the use of documentary materials actually manipulates reality. Creating a world in which everyone had a teddy bear is a fantasy, as well as a commentary on traditional thematic, taxonomic curating’. Hendeles further comments: Because of the relative rarity of photographs that include teddy bears, the resulting multitude of over three thousand pictures provides a curatorial statement that is both true and misleading. Viewers are inclined to trust a curator’s presentation of cultural artefacts. While these systems are not necessarily objective, they can be convincing and therefore of comfort.15 In this statement Hendeles uses the characteristics of the teddy bear as such in a very subtle way to describe the effects of the archive. Earlier in her text she described the teddy bear in terms of a duality: As a mohair-covered, stuffed, jointed toy, with movable arms, legs and head, a teddy bear can be cradled and hugged like a baby. But the wild bear referenced by the toy is an animal that can be threatening to human beings. Having a ferocious guardian at one’s side makes the teddy into a symbol of protective 145

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39, 40 Ydessa Hendeles, Partners: The Teddy Bear Project.

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aggression, which is why, for the past hundred years, it has provided solace to frightened children and later to adults, who carry that comfort with them as a cherished memory.16 The duality of the teddy bear also characterizes the archive: comforting and aggressive at the same time. Comforting because it has the reassuring aura of objectivity and systematicity; aggressive because it subjects reality and individuality to classifications that are more pertinent to the systematic and purifying mindset than to the classified objects. It imposes the ideal of pure order on a reality that is messier and more hybrid than the scholarly device of the archive can live with. The grotesque proportions and effect of Hendeles’s installation turn it into a heterotopia that causes shattering laughter in the same way as Borges’s short story about the Chinese encyclopaedia did for Michel Foucault. But in Foucault’s definition heterotopias are sites in which categories collide and overlap. That is not the case in the archival installation of Hendeles. On the contrary, the categories imposed on the collection of snapshots with teddy bears fit neatly and they are completely understandable and in that respect convincing. The categories do not really overlap, nor do they collide. But ultimately Hendeles’s installation Partners shows the utter arbitrariness of archival typologies. In this respect, it reconceptualizes the modern archive ‘preposterously’. This assessment as preposterous takes its cue from Mieke Bal’s notion of ‘preposterous history’. She elaborates on this notion in her book Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999). Reading contemporary artworks in their relation to Caravaggio or other baroque works, she demonstrates the idea that art’s engagement with what came before it involves an active reworking of the predecessor. The complex ways in which art acts upon the past, on conventional motifs and modes of representation, suggests that it is the past, not the present, that is conditioned by a perpetual flux. In the light of Bal’s argument about preposterous history, Hendeles’s work Partners is preposterous in relation to the archival genre, which it adopts. 148

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It presents a view of its structural formation that might not otherwise be visible. Her excessive differentiation within the corpus of snapshots showing teddy bears ultimately produces in the viewer a feeling of being lost. The rigorous systematicity of the archive suddenly shows its Janus head of total arbitrariness. But what does arbitrariness mean here? The categories are arbitrary not because they do not fit the images that are collected within it. They are arbitrary because they define by categorizing the individual human beings in the snapshots in a way that seems to be utterly irrelevant to their own sense of identity. Hendeles’s archival installation makes us realize how we, our identities, are caught within an external body of archives. These archives compulsorily fabricate an objective identity for us, which cannot be resisted because it is objectively true. In this sense, the snapshots substantiate the used categories most effectively indeed. But by means of a radical and excessive explosion of categories, the archival effect of individual identity construction implodes. Foucault defined heterotopias more by what they do than by what they are: ‘heterotopias desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its sources, they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences’.17 This is ultimately what Partners: The Teddy Bear Project also does and why it can be seen as an archival heterotopia. This heterotopia makes legible the ground on which knowledge and identity are built by complicating that ground through excessiveness. Within the endless series of typologies in this installation, the category of Jews – hence, of possible victims of the Holocaust – and of survivors of the Holocaust, forms an important category. The feeling of melancholia hits you as soon as you enter the room. This excessive and emblematic archive shows us lost worlds in the extreme. Of course, teddy bears do not belong to the past; children and other groups of people still have them and play with them. But because these snapshots are old and are presented as part of an archive, they automatically belong to the past, to a lost world. Within the metaphorical 149

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realm of ‘lost worlds’ the Holocaust figures as the most literal case. That is why within the typology the category of Holocaust victims with teddy bears is central. But Hendeles activated the frame of the Holocaust in yet different ways. After the viewer had spent time in the Teddy Bear installation, she entered a space that, compared to the densely packed archival installation, was almost empty. One only noticed, at the other end of the room, a small boy on his knees. It turned out to be the sculpture Him, by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (illus. 41). It is a puppet-like sculpture of Hitler with the body of a small, innocent boy and Hitler’s adult, moustached face (illus. 42). Whereas the similarity between teddy bears and archives was already suggested, now the awareness

41 Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001, polyester, resin, clothing, leather boots, human hair.

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42 Maurizio Cattelan, Him.

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of the association between teddy bears and Hitler (and archives) is unavoidably also a case of similarity. Hitler, too, was aggressive as well as comforting. He offered a deceptive source of safety to the German people. I quote Hendeles again:

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The system of the teddy bear archive raises the notion of other systems created with strict stipulations, and how they can, because they appear to make sense, persuasively manipulate reality. The purity of race to which Hitler aspired was the application of a system of rules. Like the teddy bear, Hitler shares a duality of origin, where danger is domesticated.18 The framing of the teddy bear archive by a simulacrum of the person of Hitler has especially disenchanting consequences for the archive as such. This framing raises the question of whether the archive – its system and its goal – is complicit in Hitler’s ideal of a purity of race. Is it Hitler’s modelling of the concentration camps on archival principles that makes the archive suspect, or is it intrinsically suspect, no matter what? I will provide more elaborate answers to these questions in chapter Five, but a provisional answer to this question seems to have been given by Hendeles herself when she showed the teddy bear installation for the first time. It was then part of an exhibition entitled SameDIFFERENCE (2002–3) at the Ydessa Hendeles Foundation, Hendeles’s own gallery in Toronto. After the teddy bear installation the viewer entered a relatively narrow corridor, on the left side of which were more framed snapshots of teddy bears. At the end of the same wall one noticed a small text panel, giving the description of an artwork, the name of the artist and the date. It turns out that the viewer had failed to notice an artwork. On the right side of the corridor, on a completely white wall, was a wall text in light grey letters by the artist Douglas Gordon, dated 1989. It ran as follows: rotting from the inside out. After reading this text, 152

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the confined space of the corridor suddenly gave way to a much larger space where the figure of Cattelan’s Him was kneeling. The subtle sequentiality of artworks made each work function as a framing device for the one that came before and after it. ‘Rotting from the Inside Out’ became a chilling comment on the teddy bear and on Hitler, as well as on the archive as such.

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The Anomic Archive In some respects the mediums of the archive and the book have strained relations with each other. Books have a beginning and an end, and the road that leads from one to the other is linear. That explains why the end of the book is usually at the same time a closure or conclusion of the discursive world contained within its pages. Archives, on the contrary, have neither beginning nor end. They have many openings and are open-ended. Archives are not linear. In view of this difference it may be surprising that so many artists present collections or archives in book form. Well-known examples are Gerhard Richter’s Atlas and the many artist’s books by Christian Boltanski. In these cases artistic collecting and archiving is presented within the pages of a book. The work of the Belgian artist Els Vanden Meersch titled Implants also uses this artistic medium of the book-as-archive (illus. 43, 44). This archival book presents a collection of her photographs of architectural spaces and structures. The images are diverse and show a variety of spaces. At the same time the collection of images is far from arbitrary. There is a constant suggestion of coherence, order and systematicity, although the nature of the collection is not immediately clear. Foucault’s notion of the ‘order of things’ seems to be embodied in it. We recognize resemblances between images but also notice differences. Browsing through the book stimulates the search for an inner law or hidden network. We begin to look for relations of similarity or equivalence. What are the categories imposed on these images to order them? It is precisely because of the suggested ordering 153

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that it is appropriate to approach her collection of photographs as artistic archiving. Indeed, there is more to this case of the underlying book-as-archive. Some of the images in this book show archives. There is an image of a long corridor with bookcases filled with filing boxes at either side. Filing cabinets also show up in other images. It looks as if these images reflect on the medium within which they are presented; they are what in rhetoric is called mise en abyme or mirror texts .19 They are emblematic for the rest of the work in which they are embedded. Therefore they are a good starting point for an understanding of Vanden Meersch’s book-as-archive. But they are only a starting point. The filing cabinets cannot be more than starting points because these photographs concern conventional, functional archives, not artistic collecting and

43 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants, 2006, book of photographic works.

154

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44 Vanden Meersch, Implants.

archiving, while the book we have in our hands is an artist’s book. In order to understand the specificity of artistic collecting and archiving, especially Vanden Meersch’s practice in this domain, we must first reflect once more on collecting and archiving as such. Collecting and archiving begin with making distinctions and creating categories. As Foucault has already pointed out, they concern, first, noticing the similar within the dissimilar and then the differences within what is similar. In that respect collecting and archiving are simply general processes of consciousness and meaning production. Collecting, however, is ‘the imaginative process of association turned material’:20 production is no longer performed automatically and unconsciously, but is intentionally externalized and materialized. The ordering of objects collected and archived is ultimately a form of association, that is, a form of connecting and joining together.

155

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Collecting and archiving introduce meaning, order, boundaries, coherence and reason into what is disparate and confused – contingent and without contours. From this perspective they are positive, reassuring practices because the confused and contingent are usually experienced as threatening. But this production of coherence and meaning has a price. The unique, singular object ‘is supposed to express its uniqueness in relation to other, similarly unique objects’.21 This is one of the paradoxical effects of archiving: at a certain point the individual components are deemed to be only another expression of those objects that surround it. Uniqueness, specificity and individuality are destroyed within the process of archiving. Matthias Winzer calls this implication of archiving ‘protective destruction’. The act of protecting something from oblivion or the contingent simultaneously destroys its uniqueness: ‘In many cases, the transplantation of a concrete individual piece into a collection means that this piece partly or completely perishes in favour of its documentality.’22 The deadening suction that all collecting and archiving exerts at some point is all the more obvious when people, not objects, are being collected. If barracks, hospitals and monasteries are based on a systematic order to which the individual temporarily or voluntarily submits himself, then prisons or graveyards are sorting systems that the individual enters against his own volition. The common thread of these places consists in the subject’s transformation into a stored object. Winzer writes in this regard: ‘The moment one drops the point of view of the collecting and observing subject and assumes the perspective of the collected object, the violence inherent in all sorting, re- and devaluing, fixing, and defining becomes apparent.’23 This archival transformation from subject to object can be put to political use with frightening results. On the other hand, however, these political exploitations of the archive and archival principles can also teach us about the archive, its nature and its potentialities. In the next chapter I will discuss the political exploitations of archival organizing at length. 156

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At first sight Vanden Meersch’s archive of architectural photographs seems to affirm this bleak assessment. The general atmosphere that overwhelms you when browsing through it is rather frightening. Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that Vanden Meersch is able to avoid the deadly exertion of so many archives and to open up new directions for the medium. In her book Implants she includes images of archives in her archival montage. The photographs in this archive show a diversity of architectural spaces and structures. Human beings are never included in the image. We see modernist apartment buildings, empty offices, barracks, concentration camps, archives, deserted factories, machine rooms, shower rooms, prison cells and the like: all spaces with a history, empty of people, and thus suggesting obsoleteness (illus. 45, 46, 47). Earlier I characterized collecting and archiving as an associative process turned material. Vanden Meersch’s photo archive, however, is rather the result of free association turned material. It is not immediately clear what kind of rationality is behind Vanden Meersch’s archive: what were the categories imposed on the images, if any? Its ordering is not self-evident, yet the collection of images is coherent. They have something in common that is not stipulated by employed categories, but that is suggested or produced in the process of going from one image to the next. It is, indeed, as a result of free association that similarities pop up. Her archive is not strictly ordered, but is, in the words of Benjamin Buchloh describing Gerhard Richter’s photo archive Atlas, ‘anomic’. The lack of stipulated categories has radical consequences for what happens to the individual images within the archive. In conventional archives, unique objects or subjects become representative of the category within which they are included. They become another expression of those objects that surround it. The images in Vanden Meersch’s archive are not representative, at least not yet, because it is not immediately clear to which category they belong. As long as this doubt continues, they remain individual images. The lingering quality 157

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47 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants.

45, 46 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants.

of Vanden Meersch’s archive can be recognized in many artists’ archives, since artists usually collect and archive the trivial. They collect objects that are usually overlooked – not worth collecting and archiving. Artistic collecting also changes the individual object through its absorption into the collection. But the change apparently takes place in reverse order when artists collect trivia. The worthless and unnoticed is rendered exceptional. It comes into being and becomes visible by virtue of being collected. The images in Vanden Meersch’s archive are prime examples of such objects collected by artists. The architectural spaces and structures represented in her images are not beautiful, not special. On the contrary, they show the kind of architecture that is not just overlooked, but, more extreme, is actively repressed. Her images foreground architectural qualities that radiate feelings of a frightening nature. They are frightening not because they are terrifying. The spaces are not 159

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the opposite of beautiful; they are not ugly or horrendous. They are frightening in the sense of uncanny; they are at once familiar and unfamiliar. The images confront us with architectural spaces that are in a sense too common and too familiar to be noticed. Vanden Meersch makes us see them again. Her images function, one could say, as a return of the repressed. The excessiveness of this too common architecture is not noticed when we see just one single image. It is only noticed as part of the archival montage. After having become part of her archive, Vanden Meersch’s photographs lose their referential meaning. These are not documentary images. It is no longer important where exactly the images were taken. Was it in Brussels or Berlin? Is it the image of a hospital, a sanatorium or a military barrack? These questions are paradoxically no longer of any relevance after we see the images within the montage that her archive creates. But this dissolution of referentiality does not mean that each individual image is objectified and formalized and from now on read metaphorically or symbolically. The process of going from one image to the other produces the psychological and subjective attitude provoked by the images. It is in the images’ association with each other that this realm is released. The archival nature of Vanden Meersch’s work is in that respect indispensable for its effect. We should not see it as a collection of individual images, but as a montage of images. It is in their interrelationship that their collective meaning emerges. Such an archival effect, however, can only be produced by anomic archives, never by rational archives. The strict, rationally distinguished categories of the conventional archive divide categories from each other, and the elements within each category are reduced to the same thing, belonging to the same category. Difference as well as sameness is absolute in that case, whereas in the anomic archive difference is ultimately overruled by sameness and similarity by difference. What kind of subjectivity or psychic mentality is being invoked by this archive of architectural images? All the architectural spaces and structures are relatively empty. Human beings are never present: there 160

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are only pieces of furniture like desks, filing cabinets, meeting tables, rows of washstands and showers. The objects in these spaces never tell us about events or the kind of life that took place there. They don’t seem to have a relationship to the past. Instead, they seem to plan and programme life yet to come. The few images of maps are, in that sense, exemplary for the rest of the archive. The maps map out structurally the architectural framework for future life in it. Another important aspect of most of the architectural spaces represented is that they concern collective life. There seems to be no room for individual life in the programming that is architecturally performed by these spaces. The systematicity and rationality of the programming seems to be absolute and perfect. The function of most spaces is well defined: they are for holding meetings, for doing laboratory research, for collective showering, for archiving or for medical research; there are transit spaces like long corridors, or working spaces like offices. Some of the images show spaces that look like control rooms. From these rooms the activities of a much larger space, such as a prison, factory, hospital or office building, are being controlled. The few images in this archival montage that represent private homes are framed by the photos that exclusively concern collective life. This framing questions the individual nature of the private home. It also suggests that individual life is programmed and controlled on a collective scale. The archive of architectural images connotes a psychic mentality that wants to programme and map out future life (and death, in the case of concentration camps, photographs of which are also included in the archive). But programming alone is not enough. At the moment that activities are going to take place in the designed spaces, these activities should at all times be checked, controlled and reprogrammed if necessary. In this collage of images, architecture does much more than simply provide a material environment. This architecture looks at us, categorizes us, programmes us and controls us. All the mental features evoked by Vanden Meersch’s archive of images can be attributed to the archival organization as medium. 161

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The mentality of modernity does not only manifest itself in a specific kind of architectural space, but also, and perhaps most severely, in the archive as medium. As a medium, the archive is the most privileged historicist tool and, since nineteenth-century historicism is one of the fruits of modernity, the archive is modernist by birth. But the archive is not only a medium, it is also a specific space. The filing cabinets that figure in some of the photographs and the bookshelves with filing boxes lay out the contours of the archive-as-space. As space-medium it is emblematic for the mentality that pursues the ordering and programming of time and life. Vanden Meersch’s montage of architectural spaces demonstrates this in the most subtle but also worrisome way. Vanden Meersch’s own medium is, however, also the archive. Her archive differs from the archival, modernist mentality that her work is about by being anomic instead of well ordered. It is thanks to the loose organization and free-associative structuring of her collection of images that she is able to avoid the deadening suction that collecting and archiving exert at some point. Her archive is anomic because it refrains from stipulation. Like Hendeles’s archival installation Partners: The Teddy Bear Project, it can also be seen as a heterotopian archive. This is not because the imposed categories collide and overlap, as in Borges’s case of the Chinese encyclopaedia, or are excessive, as in Hendeles’s case, but because the suggested order and coherency is not the result of stipulated categories. This is how Vanden Meersch’s archive succeeds in proposing an archival organization that is systematic and ordered without being rigorous. This is what mattered for this chapter. Through different ways of undermining our rationalist expectations concerning archives, the artists whose work I presented here both demonstrate the impossibility of that rationality. They obey the rules in part, while in the other part they demonstrate the aporia of the archival impulse. They deconstruct classification as a fundamental tool of archival organization and demonstrate the arbitrariness, or even the Janus head of irrationality, of that which makes archives into prime examples of rationality. 162

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five

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Administration

The etymology of the word ‘administration’ goes back to the Latin administrare, which means to ‘manage’, to ‘direct’. Our common noun is derived from ministrare and has a less intentional and directional meaning: to ‘attend, serve or furnish’. But together with the prefix ad-, meaning ‘to’, or ‘near’, the word administrare signifies a much stronger activity, stronger because of its powerful intent. This intentionality can also be recognized in some of the meanings of the English expression ‘administration’, namely ‘the act of governing, exercising authority’ and ‘the act of meting out justice according to the law’. As acts, governing and exercising authority are not by definition successful. That is, when the acts are obsessively repeated, they signify the ambition or desire to govern, but don’t necessarily entail a successful result. Such obsessive practices of administration are what will be focused on in this chapter. On 4 January 1966 the Japanese-American artist On Kawara started to make his so-called Today series of horizontal paintings, each of which bears the date on which it was executed. The date is always painted in white in an impersonal typeface on a monochrome canvas. Kawara uses the language of whatever country he is currently residing in. If Latin letters are not used, for example in most Asian countries, he uses the universal language of Esperanto. Within this self-imposed system of production there is one important extra rule: every Date Painting has to be completed within 24 hours after 12.00 midnight, or else it will be 163

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destroyed. He has now been producing the Date Paintings for more than 45 years. These works, however, consist of more than just the painted canvas. Each painting is stored in a matching cardboard box of a type that is typically archival and used in archives. Each box also includes a cutting, selected by Kawara, from a local newspaper dating from the day on which the painting was executed. The combination of Date Painting and newspaper cutting is significant with respect to what they have in common and how they differ. Both are dedicated to a specific day; both are dated and contain text. Jonathan Watkins sums up the differences:

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One is unique and, despite its seamless look, assiduously made by hand, while the other is an obvious product of mechanical reproduction. One has a distinctly high art identity, ironically carrying with it connotations of timelessness, while the other is tomorrow’s proverbial wrapping paper for fish and chips.1 The archival character of the series is intensified by another element. An inventory or, in the words of the artist, a journal accompanies the series. The inventory consists of calendar pages marked with the date of each painting. The inventory also contains information about each painting, such as date of production, site where it was made, size of the canvas and a sample of the background colour. Each painting also has a subtitle, which is usually a headline from a newspaper clipping. But there are also exceptions to this principle: instead of newspaper headlines, the subtitle can occasionally consist of arbitrary activities from Kawara’s personal agenda of that day. These subtitles are typed and recorded in yet another journal. The two inventories or journals are like the catalogues of an archive. Whereas the first inventory lists the factual and formal data of each painting, the second one adds a temporal and historical dimension to the dates – it summarizes in a nutshell (by means of headlines) an event that took place on each date, usually ‘historical’ events or more occasionally personal events. 164

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The subtitles to the Date Paintings are more than just arbitrary headlines from the daily newspaper of that specific day. They have been chosen selectively and show a special fascination with traumatic disaster and wartime history, in the form of accidents, bombings, wars, murders, diseases, suicides and natural disasters. The kinds of headlines that are missing are those describing cultural events, such as the openings of exhibitions or reviews of concerts, or scandalous events. Kawara’s selective attention is focused on war, disaster and death. Examples of the first four months after he started the series include the following: Jan. 4, 1966 Feb. 9, 1966 Mar. 3, 1966 Mar. 4, 1966 Mar. 11, 1966 Mar. 21, 1966

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Apr. 7, 1966 Apr. 12, 1966 Apr. 13, 1966

‘usa began to bomb North Vietnam again.’ ‘Two students shot in Santo Domingo.’ ‘109 Americans were killed last week in Vietnam.’ ‘A Canadian Pacific jetliner crashed in Tokyo.’ ‘The killer of Wendy Sue Wolin, 7, is still hiding somewhere.’ ‘Spring has come and the lost H-bomb in Spain sinks deeper into the sea.’ ‘Rioters in Saigon burned an American jeep and danced around the flames.’ ‘A violent Atlantic storm killed two passengers on Italian liner Michelangelo for New York.’ ‘In New York, a cable explosion in a subway tunnel under the East River killed one maintenance worker.’

Kawara’s fascination with war and disaster, demonstrated by his choice of subtitles, is in sharp contrast to the more randomly chosen subtitles, which refer to personal activities or events of the specific day of the painting. Kawara’s daily life looks extremely insignificant in comparison to the world’s events. Some examples: 165

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Jan. 16, 1966 ‘Janine came to my studio.’ Mar. 13, 1966 ‘Ay-O brought his cat to my apartment.’ Mar. 20, 1966 ‘Taeko kissed me. I asked her “are you all right?”’ The random insertion of personal, biographical information makes little sense in the context of the list of historical events. It can be read as a form of self-absorption in relation to those events. Such a reading seems to be supported by a third kind of subtitle, which is also rare in comparison to the headlines describing war and disaster. This third group, also initiated from the beginning, when he started to make the series, is utterly self-referential and refers to the activity of making the paintings.

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Jan. 18, 1966 Jan. 28, 1966 July 25, 1966 Nov. 18, 1966

‘I am painting this painting.’ ‘I am dating here.’ ‘I make love to the days.’ ‘I collect the painted days.’

The context of the Date Paintings designated by the subtitles becomes smaller and smaller: from world events, to personal events, to the activity of making the paintings. In October 1972 On Kawara stopped adding information in the subtitles about what had happened on the painted date. The only detail that he provided from then on was the name of the day (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and so on). The days of the week become the paintings’ subtitles. The reduction of each day’s context that we have already noticed – from world events to personal events and the activity of making the paintings – is then definitive. Besides the clippings, the name of the day is the only fact to which the date still refers. The activity of making these works – not only the paintings but also the archival boxes with clipping and subtitle, and the two inventories related to this series of works – creates an impression of utter 166

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insignificance. It concerns a daily labour that is repeated without any variation, producing objects and documents that are stored and listed in a rigidly defined order. According to Jung-Ah Woo,

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despite the tightly regulated labour or, rather because of such stringent organization, Kawara’s daily activity is essentially meaningless, unlike production in a real workplace. His labour is meticulous but unproductive, as his actions actually produce nothing other than a series of almost identical canvases.2 It seems to be less the production of specific products that counts and more the performance of punctuality and order. It demonstrates a ‘pure articulation of punctuality’, according to Woo.3 Although the recorded days are not identical, which is made clear by the subtitles and clippings, the repetition of the same daily activity diminishes the differences between the days and abstracts the meaning of the individual days into sameness. This abstraction of the specific meaning of each day also takes place in how Kawara’s Date Paintings tend to be exhibited. The subtitles and the boxes with clippings are not usually displayed. The explicit archival elements are hidden and the Date Paintings are presented on the wall in a manner comparable, for example, to the series of paintings Monet made of Rouen Cathedral, or of haystacks, at different times of the day.4 One could argue that this way of exhibiting Kawara’s work is just wrong because it reduces it to one element, namely the canvas. But the reduction that underlies this mode of exhibition is also what the work as a whole is about: a reduction of difference to sameness, of chaos to order, of a diversity of activities to a strict repetition of the same activity. In those more exceptional cases when the canvases are displayed along with the subtitles and the boxes, the same process of reduction in fact takes place, but then in front of our eyes. The calendar dates fail utterly in conveying the specificity of each day, often consisting of an event of horror or disaster. Although the referents of 167

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the dates are spelled out, it is not the events that have taken place on each day that strike the eye, but the repetition of the same canvases and of the kind of activity from which these works resulted. This reduction of life, history and life history to numbers and dates also occurs in the exhibition catalogues devoted to On Kawara’s work, namely in the section that provides the artist’s biography. In most catalogues the biography consists only of the number of days he had lived prior to the date of publication. His biography in the catalogue published on the occasion of a 1991 exhibition in the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main was presented as follows:

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biography on kawara (6. Juni 1991) 21 348 Tage (6 juin 1991) 21 348 jours (June 6, 1991) 21,348 days His biography or life history has been reduced to numbers. The narrative of the life that provides it with coherence and significance has dissolved. This dissolution of the life of the artist is also accomplished by another aspect of Kawara’s works. His works have a beginning, a certain date, but they remain in progress and the end is undetermined. His serial works end with the death of the artist. But from the perspective of the work of art this logic has uncanny consequences for the artist. The completion of the work implies necessarily the death of the artist. The artist’s life history will come, but in fact already has come, to an end in this archival work of art. There is, however, one work in Kawara’s oeuvre that differs at first sight in this respect from his serial works that mean the end of his life. This exceptional work is titled the One Million Years project and has been executed in book format. Like the other projects this project has a beginning, but in contrast with the others it also has a definite ending. In 1969 he completed the book project One Million Years (Past). In the ten-volume set he typed out the one million calendar years descending 168

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backwards from the year 1969 ce to 998031 bce. The books have 500 years on each page and each volume has 200 pages. In 1980 this book project was supplemented by a second, similar project titled One Million Years (Future). This has the same rigorous format, presenting the years ascending from 1981 to 1001980 ce. But although these two works have definite beginnings and endings, the accumulated years are so enormous in number that they have become incomprehensible. These dates cannot be envisioned any more and in that respect no longer have a referent in time. They are also just numbers without any other significance. Although this work differs from the serial works with undetermined endings, ultimately it has the same effect. In One Million Years (Past) and One Million Years (Future), the numbers referring to specific years in the past or future also stop having these temporal referents and become abstract numbers. One other kind of archival project must still be mentioned. This project is also serial, repetitious and concerns a series of related activities or projects. Around the time that Kawara began the Date Paintings, he also started some related projects that collect and archive the mundane facts of his daily activities, such as reading and walking. He meticulously and obsessively documented these rather banal activities in the I Read series (1966–79), the I Got Up At series (1968–79), the I Went series (1968–79) and the I Met series (1968–79). I Met consists of the typed names of the people he had met during the day, while I Went consists of maps on which Kawara has traced his daily movements in the location where he lived in red ink. The I Got Up At series consists of postcards that he had sent to two selected recipients, stamped with the exact time he got up that day, usually in the morning but sometimes in the afternoon. In all these projects the artist On Kawara models himself on the image of the archivist. He is the archivist of passing time, of personal time as well as historical time. This makes it understandable that his work, especially the Date Paintings, have been compared to that of a history painter. One observer who has done this is Jeff Wall, the 169

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photographer who models his own images on the tradition of history painting.5 While it is relevant to make such a comparison, Kawara’s work demonstrates an important ontological difference between the work of the archivist and the work of the historian. Although his inventories consist of fragmented clippings of newspapers and of records of his own daily activities, the temporal dimension of history is not preserved by this archival practice. The small, fragmented pieces of plot structure do not, together, form a unified plot. On the contrary, they do not show change or development as consistent historical narratives do. Instead, all the historical events and personal activities, despite their diversity, become abstracted into an ongoing repetition of the same. This archival practice seems to be unable to preserve temporal moments in their uniqueness. To make matters worse, not only does the uniqueness of temporal moments seem to dissolve, but also the different moments seem to lose their referentiality. Ultimately the different dates, at first each referring to a specific moment in history on which specific events took place, historical as well as personal, are reduced to just numbers in this process of archiving. The point seems to be that the archivist, in contrast with the historian, is not able to tell narratives. The practice of the archivist is a practice of record keeping and making inventories. As a goal in itself such a practice, if persistently performed, does not preserve or bring to light the meaning of history; its movement goes in the opposite direction, towards the abstraction of meaning and ultimately its dissolution. The increasing self-referential quality of Kawara’s Date Paintings makes this conclusion almost inescapable. This self-referentiality is first of all established by means of subtitles such as ‘I am painting this painting’ or ‘I collect the painted days’. The referential meaning of these subtitles does not leave the painting and points back to where the titles belong, the paintings. But in fact the dates painted on the canvases do not do anything else. Within an archive, dates are auxiliary tools by means of which events or items are stored. In the case 170

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of Kawara’s archival practice, the dates become utterly tautological: they are auxiliary means within the archive as well as its content. Jung-Ah Woo has argued that Kawara’s ‘seemingly “meaningless” practices of administrative aesthetics turn out to be an urgent response to historical trauma’. In this reading Kawara’s archival administration of time is the tool or weapon by which the historical trauma of war and disaster is being countered. The fragmentary or abstracted memories and events within the archive are a kind of barrage against the collective narrative of death and disaster: ‘He is an everyman who bears the burden of horror and the boredom of the everyday through his endless daily labour.’6 Appropriate and convincing as this reading may be, it leaves open the question as to how it is that the archival organization of events can be so effective in this respect. The effectiveness of the archive as a barrage against historical trauma seems to reverse the conventional belief in the institution of the archive. The administrative procedures on which archival organizations rely are now, according to Kawara’s consistent practice, not providing access to the historical past but rather distance it towards a non-specific abstraction. The real experience provoked by On Kawara’s archival projects is not the historical experience, but the experience of the process of administration. This becomes clear when we compare his work to other artworks that deploy the administrative impulse to different effect.

An Aesthetic of Administrative Principles An artist of the same generation as On Kawara, also affiliated with conceptual art and obsessed by the registration of time, is the German artist Hanne Darboven. Archival principles shape her work differently, however, and its recording of time also has different ramifications for the archive as institution. Most of her installations consist of framed panels containing a great number of sheets of paper. These sheets are covered with numbers or words and they form serial arrangements. In later works the sheets may also contain photographic images. The 171

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numbers and words may be handwritten, typed or printed. What the numbers and words refer to is not always clear; they form cryptic formulations. Because of their endless repetition on all the sheets of paper their proliferation can be overwhelming. The sequences of sheets with numbers and words clearly do not form a narrative. It is a serial repetition of the same principles, which allow only slight variations and permutations, that is immediately striking when a viewer encounters a work by Darboven. Besides this kind of installation, Darboven has also made a great number of artist’s books, usually documenting the material that is also presented in the form of an installation. These books make the same impression as the installations. They are not narrative either; the principle that governs their structure is serial repetition. In their structure and in the procedures that result in those structures these works look like archives, for they seem to be based on archival principles. Darboven’s working method is not simply obsessive, it is also utterly systematic. Although it is not always immediately clear what the underlying system is, her work overwhelms by its systematic nature. It is not only the serial repetition of her work that expresses her fascination with systems and systematicity, but also the historical personae to whom she dedicates her works. These personae are often system makers of the past. A work from 1975 is dedicated to Johann Jacob Moser, inventor of the modern filing system. Ansichten 85 is a tribute to Alexander von Humboldt, a prolific taxonomist. Between 1799 and 1804 Humboldt and A.J.A. Bonpland explored South America, leaving with a vast collection of fauna and mineral specimens. Humboldt established the interconnection of the Orinoco and Amazon river systems. He recorded meteorologic and magnetic phenomena. The classifications he and Bonpland designed fill 30 volumes.7 What remains to be seen, however, is whether Darboven’s fascination with these system makers is triggered by their systematic working method or by the systems of classifying structures that produced their working method. If Darboven’s projects pursued the design of complex ordering or classifying systems, it would be surprising that her ‘systems’ are so 172

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very enigmatic and difficult to decipher at first sight. But in many catalogues of her work this is precisely what critics or curators of her work try to do: decipher the riddle of her systems. They explain, for instance, that she records time on the basis of the Gregorian calendar arrangement. The sequences of numbers are the result of following a set of rules. The first rule is that one leaves out those numbers that indicate the century: 8 November (11) 1974 becomes 8.11.’74. Next, these numbers are added together: 8 + 11 + 7 + 4 = 30. To indicate that the outcome 30 is the result of addition, a ‘K’ is added, standing for Konstruktion (construction).8 Although it might be true that Darboven used rules of this kind when making her sequences of numbers, this does not mean that her numbers refer cryptically to specific moments in time. In other words, it does not mean that Darboven proposes an alternative calendar system to order the components of time: days, weeks, months and years. As an alternative proposition, the ordering system does not seem to be effective, because it is too complex to grasp. In the words of Briony Fer: The more you try to figure it out, the more the spectator becomes aware of losing the thread. The sequences are not to be understood if that suggests following its rational logic, or only up to the point where it is necessary to see its deviant meanderings departing from the system we are all too familiar with. There is a deliberate opacity which calls upon a different mode of attention to the work, one which is slow and cumulative.9 Fer’s description of the required attention to the work as cumulative refers to the fact that a work by Darboven never consists of simply one series. Each series necessarily implies another one. The numeral figures and the writing of Darboven’s works become a web of interwoven and entangled sequences, where a number of different series tend to be overlaid. 173

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There may be the number of the page, the number of the grid overlaid on the page, the date, different numerical systems threading through, some digits, some written in words, others not. Some series are written in ink, some overlaid in pencil, some cancelled, some not. Series run simultaneously and become entangled one with the other.10 This multiplicity of series contributes to the impossibility of understanding Darboven’s work in terms of the communication of an underlying message or information. Her use of numbers, language and images does not intend to communicate. Ultimately, it does not give access to a world other than its own. Her use of numbers is emblematic for how she also uses words or images. She has stressed that she only used numbers because ‘it is a way of writing without describing’. She adds that numbers for her have nothing to do with mathematics.11 Her ‘writing without describing’ implies that not only her numbers, but also her writing and images, have no referential object; they do not aim to describe or refer to another world. If description or reference is not the issue, another possibility is that her serial repetitions should be appreciated as visual patterns. This formalistic approach to Darboven’s work is, for instance, adopted by Mario Kramer in his essay ‘Hanne Darboven’s “Mathematical Literature”’. He describes her artwork One Century – Dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (illus. 48) as follows: A Century, which consists of nearly 900 mainly typewritten a4 pages, was created in 1971, with additions made in 1982. The main section, taking up 833 pages, is a purely mathematical visualization of a century, starting from the year 00 through to the year 99. The whole century is divided up into twelve months of a year, and each corresponds to the twelve real months of 1971 during which Darboven actually worked on the project. For example, all the January days in the century are 174

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48 Hanne Darboven, One Century – Dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1971–82, 899 sheets, typewriter, ink, ballpoint pen, postcards, wooden frames, felt pen, bust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (plaster cast after Christian Daniel Rauch).

listed in blocks of decades, from 1.1.00/1.1.09 to 31.1.90/ 31.1.99, and thus appear to take the form of an inventory. As 29 February occurs only in the century’s 25 leap years, these 25 February days are listed in a separate appendix headed ii*. The sum of the figures reading across each date line, e.g. 31.1.99-50 (31 + 1 + 9 + 9 = 50) has been inscribed using pen and ink in the margin and written out in full, in words from ‘eins’ (one) to ‘fünfzig’ (fifty). (The date calculations function here as a decorative graphic border for the blocks of numbers.) The pure columns of numbers were typed out literally line by line with the loving care of a craftsman.12 Kramer reads the serial sequences as decorative and rhythmic. Although Darboven’s work certainly has rhythmic and decorative 175

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qualities, especially from a formalist aesthetic point of view, it is not so much ‘the loving care of a craftsman’ that the viewer encounters when viewing her work, but, as some have noted, ‘Prussian austerity and self-discipline’. Her work has been described as embodying ‘an aesthetic of bureaucratic principles’ or ‘an aesthetic of administration’, which seems to express the near-opposite of the loving care of a craftsman.13 The term ‘aesthetic of administration’ has been introduced by Benjamin Buchloh as a characterization of conceptual art of the 1960s. Although Buchloh does not mention Darboven’s work, it certainly fits his descriptions. According to Buchloh, conceptual art confronts the full range of the implications of Marcel Duchamp’s legacy. It reflects upon the role of author (or the author’s death) just as much as it redefined the conditions of reception. Whereas minimalism and Pop had already begun this kind of reflection, working through the legacy of Duchamp, conceptual art draws different implications from it: Just as the readymade had negated not only figurative representation, authenticity, and authorship while introducing repetition and the series (i.e. the law of institutional production) to replace the studio aesthetic of the handcrafted original, Conceptual Art came to displace even that image of the mass-produced object and its aestheticized forms in Pop Art, replacing an aesthetic of industrial production and consumption with an aesthetic of administrative and legal organization and institutional validation.14 Buchloh presents conceptual art as a radicalization of minimalism’s critique of traditional artistic categories, by eroding them with modes of industrial, serial production. Conceptual artists went further in the critique of the discourse of the studio versus the discourse of production/ consumption by establishing an aesthetic of administration.15 176

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The minimalist artist Sol LeWitt articulated this radicalization of the conceptualists’ position in relation to the minimalists’ one quite precisely:

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The aim of the artist would be to give viewers information . . . He would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.16 In this programmatic statement the role of the artist is displaced from producing beautiful or mysterious objects to giving information, to functioning as a clerk. It is precisely the ambiguity between ‘giving information’ and ‘functioning as a clerk’ that characterizes Darboven’s position in relation to the works she makes. But taking into consideration that in some of her works, as in Card Index: Filing Cabinet (1975), the intention to provide information has evaporated into empty gestures without giving any kind of information, the ambiguity seems to dissolve and the role of functioning as a clerk remains: an archival clerk (illus. 49). The information or the patterns in which it results are less important than the process or attitude by which they are generated. An alternative reading of her work, which is ultimately a kind of compromise, is that the information provided is the statement that artists are clerks performing institutionalized gestures and practices. The lack of any referential object is then the message or information; the ritualized performance of an administrative practice is a demonstration of that pseudo information. In her article ‘Deep in Numbers’ Lucy Lippard argues that on encountering the work of Hanne Darboven, one is absorbed into the activity that underlies it. This absorption into the underlying activity is much stronger than the impulse to decipher the logic of the 177

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suggested system. This activity strikes the viewer as systematic, as repetitive, as utterly time-consuming, as subjecting the performer of the activity to a ritualized process, as a goal in itself which is not necessarily intended to result in a product. Ultimately the activity gives the impression of being intransitive: although we see the sheets of paper with words, numbers and images that result from the activity, what the sheets seem to convey is the time that went into the activity, not the products that came out of it. This intransitivity of Darboven’s work is also expressed in one of her famous statements about her own work: ‘Ich schreibe, aber ich lese nicht’ (I write, but I do not read).17 The writing and marking of which her artistic activity consists has no 178

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49 Hanne Darboven, Card Index: Filing Cabinet, Part 2, 1975, 600 works on paper, ink, on 10 panels.

object, is not intended to communicate a meaning that can be read in the work. Darboven’s working practice has been compared with that of medieval copyists in a scriptorium or with that of the industrial labourer ‘with his or her goal of fulfilling an hourly quota or shift of labour and nothing more’.18 Both comparisons highlight Darboven’s chosen obedience to a system that has no objective other than to fulfil the task set out before her. The notion of labour implied by this obedience is one that asks no questions about its usefulness; the issue is rather a ritualized habit.

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Cultural History One of Darboven’s most ambitious and elaborate works is probably Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983 (Cultural History, 1880–1983, illus. 50, 51, 52). At first sight this installation is not really intransitive or nonreferential because of the many picture postcards, pin-ups of movie stars, photos of artists and news magazine covers it includes. Each image seems to have its own referent. That is also the case for the nineteen sculptures that are positioned within the installation. I use the original German title, Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, because the German connotes more intensely than the English ‘Cultural History’ the seriousness and heaviness of the nineteenth-century historiographic paradigm that is evoked by this installation. Listing all the elements of this installation will never convey its impact, and perhaps this is also the point the installation wants to make. What is being presented within the installation is also structured as a list: many lists, one after another, and woven together. Listing all those lists would itself be a rather powerless attempt to describe the installation. So, in order to convey this impact of futility and powerlessness, I will describe the installation. In Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983 Darboven models her work on historical, archival methods as a compilation of words, numbers, 179

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objects and images that have been taken out of their original contexts and presented as a spatial configuration. Its title suggests that this configuration is going to yield the potential of historical insight, an insight into the cultural history of, probably, Germany. A general overview of the contents included seems to confirm this suggestion. Several hundred identical wooden frames are hung in rows and cover the gallery walls. The total installation comprises 1,590 works on paper and nineteen sculptural objects. Not just one, but several gallery spaces are filled with these framed compilations of words, numbers and images. The images shown in these compilations are grouped around certain themes of subject-matter. There are groups with pre-Second World War postcards showing tourist sites, landscapes or city views; illustrated covers from German news magazines such as Der Spiegel and Stern; sheets of musical scores; photographs of doorways; geometric diagrams for textile weaving; the contents of an exhibition catalogue of post-war European and American art; greetings cards; German 180

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50 Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, 1980–83, installation view, Dia: Beacon, Beacon, ny.

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51, 52 Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, installation view, Dia: Beacon.

cigarette cards from the First World War; pages featuring numerical calculations and a form of repetitive cursive writing; and imagery from Darboven’s earlier work. The sculptural objects include a teddy bear, a ceramic bust of a moustached man, a couple of shop-window mannequins wearing jogging attire, a book placed on a pedestal, a robot. The presented objects and material is clearly historical and shows signs of age and wear. Many of the pictorial images have handwritten

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notations, like the notations on archival material by an archivist. Importantly, the work also includes a framed panel known as the ‘Index’. An index functions as the catalogue of an archive. It raises the expectation that this index will help the viewer to understand the structure of the whole work, so that wandering around in it will become a more meaningful and satisfying experience. But its explanatory power is limited: it lists many of the contents we have already seen, but without providing deeper insight into its overall structure. Explanatory power is not provided either by a specific group of panels that could be read as a metaphorical key to the work as a whole, a so-called mise en abyme, or mirror text. All apparent themes seem to be equally important or unimportant; there is no hierarchy suggesting that from the perspective of one specific theme the others will fall into their rightful structural place. The groupings of panels are structured serially, one after another. Another interpretative possibility that can help to keep us from drowning in this installation is to look for an identity shared by the great variety of themes and events presented. The German title Kulturgeschichte, for instance, could be read as a suggestion that the coherence of the presented materials can be found in the synthesizing concept of German national identity. In that case, all the themes and events express, in one way or another, Germanness. But this option, too, is ultimately frustrated: it is far from clear, for example, how geometric diagrams for textile weaving can be read as expressions of Germanness. The dates provided for this Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, seem to be arbitrary, because they do not stand for significant dates in German or world history. But the history includes content from the entire period: the fin de siècle, the First and Second World Wars, the post-war reconstruction period. It ends on the year the work itself was finished, 1983. From the perspective of the historical periods and events covered the dates are adequate: it is exactly this period that is documented in this compilation of historical materials. The cultural history of these 103 years is being portrayed, however, without 182

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providing any interpretative synthesis of this collection of historical material. The arbitrariness of the time frame suggests that a Rankean notion of historiography, a progressive account of monumental events such as revolutions, wars and natural or economic disasters, is kept at bay. But it is not only a progressive account that is kept at bay; a linear conception of history also seems to be irrelevant. The historical materials presented are much too fragmented in order for a linear history to be reconstructed from them. The notion of history enabled by this archival enterprise is far more diffuse. One aspect of Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983 demonstrates in a subtle but most fundamental way the procedures of the archival clerk. Darboven has equalized the collected materials consistently and rigorously. Whatever the source of the material, original or reproduced, handmade or readymade, everything is mounted on paper showing paper borders in red, black or white and is framed in standardized wooden frames of the same size (except, of course, the sculptural objects). Everything that entered this collection is subjected to the same ritualized process of framing; a process that creates order and suggests systematicity but refrains from signification. It is this refraining from signification that is ultimately the most puzzling aspect of this and Darboven’s other works. One could argue that it is precisely this consistent refusal to create a meaningful order that makes this installation into an ideal archive – a model archive. According to standard notions, the archive is a repository of documents and objects that are rigorously and objectively preserved, categorized and processed and made accessible to and serviceable for a public.19 In order to preserve ‘objectively’, signification of the collected material should be avoided, because signification imposes meaning on the materials, meaning that it is not necessarily part of, or embodied in, those materials. Signification puts the objectivity of the archive at risk. Categorization automatically implies signification. The categorizations of the archive impose meaningful orderings on the collected documents and objects. It is thanks to those categories that collected 183

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materials begin to make sense and that users of the archive can find their way into or through it. However, the strived-for objectivity of the archive and the necessity to order and categorize are in conflict with each other. The highly valued ideal of objectivity is enacted by the procedures of the archival clerk, whereas at the same time it is precluded by the more concrete and specific procedures of ordering and categorization. The fact that the categorizing system of Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983 seems to fail as a display of systemized knowledge that makes sense – of the distinguished categories – suggests that the classification is arbitrary and not really important. What is important is the activity of documenting and archiving as an end in itself.

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The Space of the Archive is the Time of the Archive Darboven’s non-referential procedure paradoxically results in a deluge of numbers, words or digits. It ends up in big, sometimes enormous, installations of mainly framed sheets of paper, installed as series of panels. These occupy a lot of space, as conventional modern archives tend to do. The question, however, is whether this spatial, serial organization of her work into overwhelming space-occupying installations is a statement about archival space. Such an impression would be superficial, though, because too much is based on its literal spatial dimensions and not enough on working through its effect on the viewer. As Briony Fer has argued, Darboven’s systems and series don’t work on the basis of their spatial dimensions; her systems ‘have the effect of squeezing out space and so make temporality do the work’.20 In her work we see the spatial topography of the grid emptied out of spatial content, to refocus attention on an endless cadence of loops of writing, legible or not, and of crossings out, which simply resists a series.21 It is a temporal procedure of copying words, numbers or digits, of writing out numbers in words, in which the viewer is immersed. Seen as foregrounding, and being modelled on archival principles, it is not so much archival space that is being reflected upon in Darboven’s 184

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work, for example as systematized, serial space, but its temporal object: the recording of time. It is time put to work in the work, which is experienced within the spatial coordinates of the work. The systematic practice of writing, counting and copying words or numbers is, however, not fulfilling its promise as a record of time. Encountering her works the viewer does not get a well-defined sense of a specific past, or of the past as such, or of the present or the future. Paradoxically, the notion of time that is being evoked is as concrete as the dimension of space can be. Time is literally and materially embodied in these works. But the seriality and systematicity of the performed procedure also shows its Janus head. Although it demonstrates the pursuit of a complete and total record of time, the endlessness of the procedure also points to its failure. The endlessly repeated procedure also draws one to the point that escapes the procedure and its resulting system. It draws one to a point that cannot be materialized in traces of a material procedure. This has disenchanting repercussions for the archival procedures performed by Darboven, as well as for the archival institution as such. Seen as an institution that pursues the representation of time and history, Darboven’s work presents the archive as a place of obsessive, endless administrative procedures that necessarily fail in what they pursue. Although the dimension of time is intensely embodied in spatial and material coordinates, this embodiment is at the same time highly abstract. The time embodied is not the time of history, but the time it takes to perform archival activities. As representations of time and history Darboven’s archival installations seem to fail radically. The documenting and marking of time of which her installations and books consist are always, by definition, unfinished. This activity is performed as procedures that will be repeated endlessly and in that sense continue to fail to capture what they pursue.

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Conclusion In order to convey the nature of the failure demonstrated by Darboven’s work, Briony Fer evokes the figure of Dürer’s Melencolia I in order to argue that there is also a sense of interminable loss that haunts Darboven’s project. In Dürer’s etching the figure of Melancholia sits, looming monumentally, before a grid of numbers carved in stone. Through the lens of this Melancholia figure Darboven’s project ‘comes to seem more like the interminable weaving of a death shroud, warding off death, but also nurturing it through repetition’.22 However, it is not a lost decade or century that is nostalgically being mourned. For, as argued, it is not the representation of history that is at stake in the counting, copying and writing of her work. These activities perform the time of mourning and loss as a temporal dimension that can never be resolved by or in the spatial coordinates of the archive. If the archive is not able to represent time and history, than it will continue to function in Darboven’s works as a melancholic institution that can only and simply mark time. Nothing else. It is this element of melancholia that distinguishes Darboven’s practice of archival administration from On Kawara’s. Both seem to displace interest in the retrieval of historical experience to interest in the process and activity of administration as such. Darboven’s endlessly repeated procedures of administration draw one to the point that escapes the procedure and its resulting system. Her practice confronts us ultimately with the impotence of obsessive administration. Her administrative acts fail at the end because they become more and more intransitive and the loss of their intended objects, historical data, is the result. On Kawara’s obsessive administrative practices seem less melancholic and more confident in what they are supposed to pursue. His utterly consistent practice of administration transforms the historical past into a non-specific abstraction. Yet this abstraction is not experienced as a loss of that past, but rather as a kind of sublime allusion to it. 186

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six

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Depletion

The film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), directed by Alain Resnais, immediately made an enormous impression when it appeared in 1955. Although many accounts of the Holocaust had circulated in different media, this, ten years after the end of the Second World War, was the first film about the Holocaust, the deportations and the extermination camps. This relatively short documentary of 32 minutes features the abandoned sites of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Resnais made the film in collaboration with survivors of the Holocaust, including the writer Jean Cayrol and composer Hanns Eisler. Night and Fog alternates between past and present and features both black-and-white and colour footage. The first part shows the remains of Auschwitz while Michel Bouquet describes in voiceover the rise of Nazi ideology (illus. 53). Next, footage of the starving prisoners in the camps is shown and the voice-over then addresses the sadism inflicted upon the inmates, including torture, scientific and medical ‘experiments’, executions and enforced prostitution. The next image is completely in black and white and depicts images of gas chambers, piles of bodies and the sorted belongings of the inmates. The end of the film shows the liberation and the discovery of the horror of the camps. The footage showing the camps after the liberation is in colour. The camera moves but nobody is moving: all we get to see are the empty, 187

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53 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955), still, remnants of Auschwitz. 54 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, overgrown railway tracks.

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55 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, book of administration.

deserted barracks and overgrown railway tracks (illus. 54). The blackand-white footage shows the camps before the liberation. Most of it, but not all, consists of photographs. In the moving black-and-white footage we see human beings, alive or dead. The conventional connotations of photography (this belongs to the past) and of black and white versus colour (pastness versus presentness) are evoked. This has the frightening implication that all human life has disappeared in the present. In the present we see just the architectural remains of the barracks, overgrown by nature. All the life and movement belongs to the black-and-white past. The first half of Night and Fog represents the extermination camps as factories. The rational and industrial organization of the camps is foregrounded. The buildings and the life within them is presented as intended for a most efficient mode of production. Not only the extermination of inmates, but also the pretence of organized labour (Arbeit macht frei) is represented as highly efficient. But another element is introduced with moving images of a book. The camera leafs through the pages of that book. It is a book of administration and recording 189

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(illus. 55). We see numbers and lists, endless lists. The voice-over tells us the following: The administration photographs these men and women. As soon as they arrive. Names are also noted. The names of twenty-two nations, filling hundreds of registers, thousands of indexes. The dead have a red stroke through their names. Deportees keep these mad, always inaccurate books, watched by the ss and privileged Kapos.1

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Soon after we have seen this administrative record of the book, footage is shown of different storage areas in the camps. First we see heaps of dead bodies, filling the whole frame (illus. 56). After that, a photograph just of glasses (illus. 57); then an image just of combs (illus. 58); then just of garments; then just shoes (illus. 59). This series or list of collected and sorted belongings of the inmates ends with a long shot just of hair, shaven hair (illus. 60). The heap of hair looks enormous.

56 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, heaps of dead bodies.

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57 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, glasses.

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58 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, combs.

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After this very long-lasting shot, images of bales of fabric are shown, suggesting that this fabric is made out of the hair that we saw just before. The footage that follows suggests a similar logic. First we get to see heaps of dead bodies again, then images of pieces of soap. The voice-over informs us about how to understand the sequence of images: Nothing is lost. Here are the reserves of the Nazis at war, here are their attics: women’s hair, at fifteen pfennigs a kilo, it’s used for making cloth. Bones, they’re intended for manure. Bodies, there’s nothing left to say, the bodies are meant for soap. As for skin . . .2

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This footage of the storage areas produces an image of the extermination camps that is unexpected for that moment in history. Whereas the first half of the film presents the camps as factories, the second half presents the camps as monstrous archives and storage. Of course, in Night and Fog the archive and the factory are not presented as completely different, but as intimately related. The camps are presented as factory-like archives, or as archive-like factories. What the factory

59 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, shoes.

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60 Alain Resnais, Night and Fog, still, shaven hair.

and the archive in this film have in common is that in both institutions efficiency is the highest value. Within the archival organization a complete depletion of individual identity has taken place. As the voice-over told us, upon arrival all the inmates had to leave their names behind. Instead they became numbers, not only in the administrative records of the camps but also tattooed on their arms. After having seen Night and Fog the intimate relationship between archival organization and the depletion of identity has been established. The film ends with colour footage showing nature overgrowing the camps and the remains of the camps. There is no trace of human life. Life and identity have been depleted efficiently, or so it seems. 193

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Installations of Photographic Archives Night and Fog seems to have initiated the now almost unavoidable association of archival organizations with the depletion of identity. In that respect it is not surprising that in the 1960s artists started to become more and more interested in the archive. This interest is not only understandable because of its relationship to identity or its depletion, but also because in Resnais’ film the archival storage areas had looked uncannily minimalistic, hence, modern. The serial glass-framed storage works of the French artist Arman from 1959, titled Accumulations, filled with glasses, violins or any other kind of object, now remind us immediately of the footage from the second half of Resnais’ film showing shots of property plundered from the victims at the killing centres and sorted into categories (illus. 61). Although his work is now usually read as provoked by the rising commodity culture in the late 1950s and ’60s (and in that respect more related to Pop art), it seems that his archival storages are related as well to the Holocaust imagery in Resnais’ film. The shots of the sorted property look like visual templates for Arman’s Accumulations. As Gene Ray argues, the work of Arman is not the only artistic work that found its inspiration in these images of the storage areas in Night and Fog. Working in 1957 on a proposal for a Holocaust memorial, the German artist Joseph Beuys had certainly seen Resnais’ film: Of special relevance to readings of Beuys are the film’s images of women’s hair shorn and collected at the killing centres and images of the rolls of felt . . . that were manufactured from this hair. The next sequence of images shows ‘soap’ being collected in a pail – ‘From the bodies’, reads the narrator, ‘one makes soap’. And brick-like bars of soap; Beuys’s fat boxes and corners of 1963/64 appear to be belated but precise visual echoes of those images.3 194

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61 Arman, Massacre of the Innocents II (Accumulations series), 1961, dolls’ parts in wooden box.

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Ray does not claim that Arman or Beuys consciously remember the images of Night and Fog in their work, but that these archival images made such deep impressions on the artists that they would emerge later in their sculptures and installations. The work of Christian Boltanski is, however, more explicitly related to Holocaust places of storage and the depletion of identity in which that results. Boltanski (see chapter Two) started working in the 1960s and was certainly familiar with Resnais’ film and with Arman’s Accumulations series. It is remarkable that Boltanski so consistently presents his works as the products of an archivist. His so-called inventories failed in reconstructing a specific past on the basis of the indexical significance of the stored objects. These objects did not make the past present again, but, on the contrary, confronted the viewer with its absence. Boltanski has also made archival installations that are not storages or inventories of objects, but present collections of photographic portraits. In these works the effects of the archival organization are increased and intensified by the photographic nature of the archived objects. In contrast to his Inventories 195

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and Reference Vitrines, these installations with photographic portraits do not have indexicality as their basic semiotic way of functioning. Instead, photographic portraits are icons, which function on the basis of similarity with the portrayed subject. For the present discussion one can wonder, then, what the medium of the archive, the medium of photography and the genre of portraiture have in common that enhances their qualities and effects? It is clear that both modes of representing reality can be seen as having a privileged relationship to historical reality. Photography and archives seem to share an ability to represent historical reality in seemingly objective ways. Compared to other media, there appears to be a minimum of intrusion or ‘present-ness’ of the subject or medium of representation in their production of representation. It is this feature, as well as the presumed likeness and, hence, memorial value of the photographic portrait that is at stake in Boltanski’s installations. Chases High School (1988) is a good example of his archival installations of photographic portraits (illus. 62). For this work Boltanski used a photograph of the graduating class of a private Jewish high school that he found in a book on the Jews of Vienna. The installation consisted of eighteen blurry black-and-white close-ups of each of the students. He rephotographed the students individually, enlarging their faces until they had lost their individual features. As an effect their eyes became transformed into empty black sockets while their smiling mouths turned into grimaces of death. Instead of memorials of the dead person when still alive, they thus become photographs of death already in place. This idea of death already in place is further enhanced by the mode of installation. The photographs, presented in tin frames perched on top of a double stack of rusty biscuit tins, are overlit by extendable desk lamps. In their aggressive over-exposing of the images, the lamps evoked those used in interrogation rooms. Instead of being illuminating they are blinding, obscuring the enlarged faces even further. 196

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The exhibition catalogue, published by the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf, had a reproduction of the original photograph, to which Boltanski gave the following caption: ‘All we know about them is that they were students at the Chases High School in Vienna in 1931.’ This caption stresses the fact that the remaining picture no longer corresponds to a present reality. The faces of the children as

62 Christian Boltanski, Chases High School, 1988, detail of installation: black-and-white photographs, photomechanical prints, metal lamps.

197

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we see them in the photograph have disappeared. This disappearance is enacted, or we can even say performed, in enlarged close-ups. What we get to see there is no longer the realistic illusion of the presence of a living subjectivity, as the standard views on photography and the portrait would have it, but empty, blinded faces. And the blinding of a face is a figurative way of objectifying or even killing someone. It is more than likely that most, or even all, of the Jewish students represented did not survive the Holocaust. Chases High School is in that sense an explicit and direct reference to the Holocaust. Thanks to this quality of referring to a factual reality, Boltanski the artist qualifies himself as a historian, or better as an archivist, because the work is presented as an archival organization. He has traced some victims of the Holocaust and now shows them to us. But in the process, he questions what showing is, and how one can show a person – alive or dead. In these installations the Holocaust is evoked not only by means of reference to its victims, but also by means of the connotative effects of the photographic signifiers. The enlarged images that transform the faces into skeletal vestiges remind us of the photographs published after the Second World War had come to an end. Resnais also used images of emaciated survivors of the Holocaust in Night and Fog. Because of their emaciation they had lost all their individual features and had begun to look like skeletons, because their skin barely covered their bones. These images showed the depletion of subjectivity. In addition, one notices that the archival nature of this installation as such also evokes the Holocaust by recalling images of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It reminds us of the lists of names of people who had died in the camps that were put together after the war by the Red Cross so that relatives could find out if their family members had survived. Seen in this light, the number of pictures evokes the incomprehensible numbers who died in the concentration camps. It 198

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reminds us also of the footage in Resnais’ film showing the book that was the administrative record of the camp. But the object of this representation is the archive as institution, not the ‘archived’ subjects. In this way, Boltanski’s use of the archive reveals the consequences of the archival mode for our understanding of the Holocaust itself. In the case of Chases High School it was clear that the portrayed subjects are Jewish and that they were probably victimized in the Holocaust. But the referential aspect must not be over-estimated, or isolated, when considering the artistic endeavour of Boltanski’s archival works. In distinction from the works that carry such explicit references, Boltanski’s other works based on the same archival, inventory principle do not refer to the Holocaust by naming a specific element of it. This distancing from reference is foregrounded in many of his archival installations that use photographs of unknown or non-Jewish people. These installations, however, still make us think of the Holocaust. Elsewhere I coined the term ‘Holocaust effect’ for this kind of non-referential evocation.4 When I say ‘Holocaust effect’ I use that expression in contrast to a ‘Holocaust representation’, in which the Holocaust is referred to by means of a mediated account or representation of it. A Holocaust effect, in contrast, is not brought about by means of representing the Holocaust, but by means of the re-enactment of a certain principle that defines the Holocaust. It is performatively re-enacted, producing an effect. This production of Holocaust effects explains why Boltanski’s archival installations, which have no referential relationship to the Holocaust and do not contain objects or representations of Jewish victims, still evoke the idea of the Holocaust. It is the depletion of subjectivity, which is at stake in so many of Boltanski’s archival installations, that causes this Holocaust effect. In some of his later works the artist intensifies the effect by enlarging the photographs so much that most of the details disappear. The eyes, noses and mouths become dark holes, the faces white sheets. The Holocaust effect these blow-ups produce is inescapable. They 199

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remind us of pictures of survivors of the Holocaust just after they were released. In these works the Holocaust is not referred to by selecting images of Jewish children, as he did for his Chases High School and Reserves: The Purim Holiday. Boltanski’s best-known but also most provocative archival installation dealing with the Holocaust in a non-referential or non-historical way is his work The Dead Swiss (illus. 63). For this work he cut out illustrated obituaries from a Swiss newspaper. The photographs of the recently deceased were usually snapshots or studio portraits taken in order to commemorate events such as a wedding or a graduation. Just as in his other works in which he used photographs, Boltanski reshot the already grainy images, enlarging them to slightly over life-size. The near life-size portraits, as well as his decision to present portraits of Swiss people instead of Jews, were intended to evoke normality. These portraits did not refer to humans who were victimized in an unimaginable way, nor did they refer to the absoluteness or overwhelming power of death, as he explained: ‘Before, I did pieces with dead Jews but “dead” and “Jew” go too well together. There is nothing more normal than the Swiss. There is no reason for them to die, so they are more terrifying in a way. They are us.’5 Although the Swiss are dead, in the images they are represented as alive. Nevertheless, two features of this work make the Holocaust effect inevitable. Again, the sheer number of similar portraits evokes the dehumanization of the Holocaust. While the portrait as genre evokes the idea of individual identity, the number of portraits transforms the evoked idea of individuality into anonymity. The subjectivity of each individual is depleted. It is precisely this transformation that happens while watching the work. Therefore the work can be seen as a re-enactment of one of the principles that defines the Holocaust: the transformation of subjects into objects. Seeing the first image, one is still able to activate the traditional beliefs in the capacities of portraiture: one is in touch with the presence of a unique individual being. Seeing more of them within this archival installation, all similar, or ultimately, all the same, one realizes that 200

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63 Christian Boltanski, The Dead Swiss, 1991, black-and-white photographs, glass, metal lamps. Installation view, Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

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the opposite effect has taken over. The sameness of all the faces is enforced by the fact that the photographs have been enlarged: individual features disappear in that process. One is confronted with the absence of the presence of unique human beings. One sees an archival collection of exchangeable objects. It is precisely this transformation in one’s experience as a spectator that re-enacts the Holocaust. This re-enactment is an effect, not a representation; it does something instead of showing it; it is, in the profound sense of that concept, performative. About his Monuments: The Children of Dijon (illus. 64), for which he used a photograph of himself and seventeen classmates, Boltanski says:

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Of all these children, among whom I found myself, one of whom was probably the girl I loved, I don’t remember any of their names, I don’t remember anything more than the faces on the photograph. It could be said that they disappeared from my memory, that this period of time was dead. Because now these children must be adults, about whom I know nothing. This is why I felt the need to pay homage to these ‘dead’, who in this image, all look more or less the same, like cadavers.6 The photographs don’t help him to bring back the memories of his classmates. He calls his classmates ‘cadavers’, not because they are dead but because the portraits of them are dead. The portraits are dead becuse they don’t provide presence or reference. He only remembers that which the picture offers in its plain materiality as a signifier: faces. He clearly denies any increase of being as a result of their portrayal. The dead portraits are in tension with another important element of his archival works. These archival installations are often at the same time framed as monuments, as memorials, as altars or as shrines, for example as Monuments (1985), Monument (1986), Monuments: The Children of Dijon (1986), Monument (Odessa) (1991) and The Dead 202

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64 Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, 1986, black-and-white photograph, lights with wire. Installation detail, Le Consortium, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Dijon, France.

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Swiss (1991). The portraits are in many cases lit by naked bulbs as if to suggest, but displace, candles, to emphasize the work’s status as memorial or shrine while at the same time invoking the naked bulbs of cellars and other kinds of storage spaces. The framings make the performative thrust of the installation explicit. These works want to remember, to memorize or to keep in touch with the subjects portrayed, and they endeavour to do so in the face of its impossibility. It is not only their archival status that conveys that intention, but also the fact that these archival organizations are explicitly presented as monuments or memorials. The photographs, however, are in conflict with this stated intention. They are not able to make the portrayed subject present. They evoke absence instead. That is why the memorials are not so much memorials of a dead person or, already less ambitiously, of a past phase of somebody’s life, but of a dead pictorial genre.

204

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65, 66 Christian Boltanski, pages from Sans-Souci (Frankfurt and Cologne, 1991).

The portrait is memorized in its failure to fulfil its traditional promises. The archival nature of these installations does not compensate for the failure of the photographic portrait to make the subject present. On the contrary, it increases the depletion that was already set in motion by the medium of photography. A similar effect is reached in works for which the artist used snapshots from German family photo albums he found at a flea market. Family albums also belong, of course, to the archival genre. They archive images of a family or a person. Instead of being national or municipal, they are archival representations of the family. Art critic Lynn Gumpert says that these family albums ‘documented the lives of ordinary people during extraordinary times. Among the ritualized shots of birthdays and anniversaries were uniformed Nazi soldiers 205

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– smiling and holding babies, happy, it seems, to have a respite from their duties.’7 Boltanski used these photographs, for example, in his work Conversation Piece (1991) and also for his book SansSouci (1991), in which found snapshots of several Nazi families have been reproduced (illus. 65, 66). Although the people represented probably did not know each other, the book presents itself as a photo album of one family. As in real photo albums, a sheet of tissue paper is inserted between the pages. The intriguing and disturbing effect of Sans-Souci is caused by the fact that traditional meanings of the family photo album overrule the subjectivities that are supposed to be represented in the snapshots. The Nazi soldiers in these photographs do not show any signs or symptoms of the ideology and destruction in which they participate. We only see affectionate friends, lovers, husbands and fathers. Gumpert reads the impossibility of recognizing the Nazi character or Nazi subjectivity in these pieces as Boltanski’s disinterest in ascribing blame to the Nazis. He is presumed to ‘underscore the potential evil that resides in us all’.8 Boltanski’s works, then, would make a general claim about humankind. Gumpert’s reading seems implausible to me because of its neglect of the mode of this artistic practice itself. She ignores the fact that these works all consist of photographic portraits and that they are presented within the framework of an archive, namely as family album. In an interview with Delphine Renard, Boltanski gives an explanation for this transformation of a subject into something else when a person is being portrayed photographically. He provides this explanation in the context of discussing his photographic works in general, hence, not only those with images of murderers or Nazi soldiers: ‘In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies – that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.’9 In the case of Sans-Souci, it is very clear which set of cultural codes blocks access to the Nazis as subjects. It 206

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is the family album as a traditional archival medium bound up with a fixed set of meanings. This implies that the snapshots that fill family albums do the opposite of capturing and representing the reality of a family.10 In Boltanski’s own words: ‘I had become aware that in photography, and particularly in amateur photography, the photographer no longer attempts to capture reality: he attempts to reproduce a preexisting and culturally imposed image.’11 The photographic portrait fails to fulfil its promises now in another way. As I recalled before, according to traditional views, the photographic portrait captures the reality and truth of someone’s subjectivity; it makes the portrayed subject present. Most of Boltanski’s photographic works confront their viewers, instead, with absence, not presence; with objects instead of subjects; with cadavers instead of living human beings. But the photographic pieces with images of murderers or Nazi soldiers do not confront us with absence, but rather with lies, for the presumed truth about these subjects has been depleted within their archival, photographic representation. With these works Boltanski does not make the point that Nazi soldiers were also loving husbands or fathers, but that we are not able to capture the reality of the Nazi subject by means of the photographic medium or by means of an archival family album. We end up with lies when we try to do it that way. Boltanski’s use of portraits and of an archival organization of those portraits repeatedly produces the same disturbing effect. Together, they do not evoke the illusion of the presence of a human being in all her or his individuality. They only evoke the idea of plain absence or of the projection of lies, because the individual subjectivities of the archived, photographed persons are depleted.

Nazism and the Archive In Boltanski’s archival installations, the archivist’s ambition to make history present in its remains is foregrounded as a failure. In addition, 207

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his installations create an effect of reminding us of the Holocaust, producing a ‘Holocaust effect’. These works, however, do not refer to the Holocaust as an event; instead, they have a Holocaust effect because they re-enact a principle that defines the Holocaust as a method. Boltanski reminds us, provocatively one could say, of the fact that the Nazis were master archivists and that the most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz, the name of which has become synonymous with the Holocaust as such, was modelled on archival principles. Resnais’ film Night and Fog had already suggested the idea that the camps were organized as monstrous archives, but it is in Boltanski’s works that the depletion that takes place within the archive is analysed as a representational process. The principles responsible for this depletion are disentangled and subsequently each one of them relentlessly foregrounded. These principles can be recognized in his work but also in extermination practices in the camps. Such archival principles were crucial to the way the Nazis ruled Germany and the occupied territories, but also in the organization of the concentration camps in their execution of the ‘final solution’. The Nazis pursued what they called a ‘restlose Erfassing’, which means a total registering, without loose ends – an expression that also connotes an ‘all-embracing seizure’. This ambition led to a fanatical policy of counting, making lists and conducting censuses.12 Keeping the registry of the inhabitants of the German Reich up-to-date was the main task of the Bureau for Publications of the ss intelligence agency, the so-called Sicherheitsdienst. But the total registering did not stop with the registration of all inhabitants of the Reich: it was also performed in the camps, where those who ended up there were no longer seen as fellow inhabitants. Let me explain in more detail which structural principles of the camps can be characterized as archival. In many concentration camps the Nazis were fanatical about making lists of all those who entered the camps, whether they went to the labour camps or directly to the gas chambers. These lists are not unlike the catalogues that enable

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.

208

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the visitor of an archive or museum to find out what is in the collection. It is thanks to the existence of these lists that, after the liberation, in many cases it was possible to find out if the detainees had survived the Holocaust and, if not, in which camp and when they had been killed. On arrival, new detainees would get a number tattooed on their arm. They were transformed into archived objects. They were no longer individuals with a name, but objects with a number. Like objects in an archive or museum, the inscription classified them as traceable elements within a collection. On entering the camps they were also sorted into groups: men with men, women with women; children, old people and pregnant women to the gas chambers. Political prisoners and resistance fighters were not mixed with Jews. Artists, musicians and architects were usually sent to camps like Theresienstadt. Selecting and sorting on the basis of a fixed set of categories are basic archival activities. As we have seen in Resnais’ documentary Night and Fog, not only were the people who entered the camps selected and sorted, the same happened with their belongings, which were sorted and stored in the warehouses called Canada. Not only do the photographs of emaciated bodies bear witness to the truth of the Holocaust but they also testify to some of the categories used within these warehouses. As well as heaps of bodies, there are heaps of suitcases, spectacles, shaven hair and other categories of objects. In these photographs the camps appear to be monstrous archives. This archiving of belongings was primarily done so that they could be reused by the German population. But Hitler also had other purposes in mind: after liquidating the Jewish people, he intended to build a museum of the Jewish people, the so-called ‘Central Museum of the Extinguished Jewish Race’.13 For this museum he needed objects selected from, among other places, the warehouses in the camps. I will return to this. In his artistic use of the archive, Boltanski ‘preposterously’ evokes the objectifying and killing potential of the archive as exploited by Nazism. Hence, if most Holocaust scholars and students privilege 209

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archival modes of research, they seem to be unaware of the fact that their privileged medium at the same time creates Holocaust effects. Their archival practices do not only have the Holocaust as object, they also uncannily re-enact the Holocaust in its deadly, objectifying technologies. Through their performativity, they paradoxically bring the deadly principles back to life, as a felt, experienced effect. This effect is a tool for the somewhat hopeless endeavour of teaching the Holocaust, of enabling people to learn from the past. In this sense, such art is more effective than the rigid documentary mode advocated by many Holocaust historians. At the heart of these ‘concentrationary’ archival principles is the notion of use value. The notions of usability and uselessness are of crucial importance for an understanding of how Boltanski’s archival works produce Holocaust effects. The inventories or selections performed upon entering the camps, which also returned almost daily when one had the good luck to be allowed into the labour camps, were based on the distinction between usable and useless. The mechanisms of the Holocaust were such that ultimately everybody had to end up in the category ‘useless’. As already discussed earlier in chapter Two, it was precisely this idea of uselessness that overwhelmed Boltanski when, like many other artists in the 1960s and ’70s, he became interested in anthropological museums. To him the Musée de l’Homme in Paris appeared to be an enormous morgue. The exhibited cultures did not come to life in their exhibitions. Instead, Boltanski found useless objects and lost worlds in the vitrines. He sees absence instead of presence. The frame of the museological vitrine or the archaeological museum, in short the archival mode of representation, withdraws objects from the contexts in which they were originally present. In the vitrine, museum or archive they become subjected to principles that not only define the objects as useless, but which were defining for the Holocaust practice. This brings us to the Jewish museum that Hitler intended to establish after the liquidation of the Jewish people. One could wonder 210

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why he wanted to do this. Why would he not have reached his goal once all European Jews had been killed? The museum project suggests that liquidation was not enough. Even after their destruction, the Jewish people could live on, not among the living but in memory – in living memory. The remains of Jewish people, in the form of memory, had to be dealt with effectively so that their possible continued existence in memory was also eradicated. It was only then that the past tense or preterite (in French passé défini) of European Jewish culture was transformed into the past perfect of that culture. Boltanski helps us understand why the museum can be such an effective tool, or perhaps I should now say weapon, in killing memories. Like archives, museums, especially historical museums, confront the viewer with decontextualized objects. In this decontextualization the objects become useless and they evoke the absence of the world of which they were originally part. It is in this respect that the archival museum can become a morgue of useless objects. We can only speculate that Hitler’s museum for the Jewish people would probably have looked like such a morgue. It would have objectified, killed and liquidated the Jewish people for a second and more definite time. Their remains would not have evoked their presence. They would not have kept their memories alive. Instead, the represented objects would have penetrated the viewer with a sense of absence and lost time. It is Boltanski’s archival art practice that demonstrates most uncannily how archives and museums do not by definition preserve memories or the past, but certain practices can also use the archive or the museum for the murder or depletion of memory.

Installing the Tuol Sleng Mug Shots Although the Holocaust was amazingly consistent and persistent in organizing deadly practices according to archival principles, in this respect it is certainly not unique. Other genocides have adopted an archival organization in order to achieve a greater rationality and 211

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67 Tuol Sleng Mug Shot, black-andwhite photograph.

systematization of their deadly practices. One of the most infamous ones is probably the killing that took place in the Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh, under the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. During those years more than 14,000 Cambodians were killed in this torture and execution centre. Quite extraordinarily, though, as soon as the inmates were brought in, they were first photographed before being interrogated and executed. Their pictures were attached to their confession file. In the black-and-white photographs the inmates look frontally into the camera with their arms held next to their body, whose upper part only is shown, in the form of a bust (illus. 67). Most of the inmates wear a tag with a number on it (illus. 68, 69). Those 212

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68 Tuol Sleng Mug Shot.

tags remind us of the tattoos on the arms of inmates in the Nazi camps. They were transformed into traceable items within a collection. As in the Nazi concentration camps, this systematic photographing of the prisoners who entered Tuol Sleng was not the only practice of administrative recording. When the Vietnamese army put an end to the Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, they also found at Tuol Sleng thousands of entrance forms, torture reports, execution orders, daily execution logs and alleged confessions.14 This archival material is the product of a fixed procedure followed when prisoners entered Tuol Sleng. They arrived blindfolded, handcuffed, roped or chained together. First, they were numbered by means of a tag pinned on 213

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69 Tuol Sleng Mug Shot.

their clothing, then photographed and made to fill in or dictate forms listing their vital statistics and outlining their careers. The interrogations only began after these administrative records had been made. Questioning took place three times a day in brightly lit rooms equipped with desks, lamps and instruments of torture.15 A crucial question is, of course, why a regime like that of the Khmer Rouge was so obsessive in the administrative recording of its genocidal practices? It is precisely this question that American archive specialist Michelle Caswell ignores in her essay ‘Khmer Rouge Archives’. The author discusses at length how the Khmer Rouge archives were used in the trials after the regime had fallen. It was, for instance, on 214

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the basis of its own archives that, after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, it was possible to form an image of how many people had been killed in Tuol Sleng. The entry records indicated that some 14,000 men, women and children were incarcerated there between 1975 and 1979: roughly 400 in 1975, 270 in 1976, 6,500 in 1977 and 5,000 in 1978. On the basis of the records it is also known that some inmates stayed only a few days before they were killed, others for several weeks and a few important figures for several months. All but seven known survivors were put to death.16 The archives also played a crucial role in holding the regime accountable for the genocide, since, quoting another American archive specialist Bruce Montgomery, ‘archives meant to serve the powerful may serve to indict them for their crimes’.17 But this leaves the question open as to how these archives served the powerful Khmer Rouge. It is not very plausible that the regime felt it necessary to document its atrocities. The making of these archives was certainly not idiosyncratic either, a bizarre practice performed by this regime alone. As just described, totalitarian regimes like that of the Nazis did exactly the same.18 In what sense is this kind of archival administration functional in the context of genocide? It has little to do with the ambition of keeping a record of the effectiveness of the genocide, in other words of the number of victims. In that case, just counting them would be enough. Instead, complex archival procedures and systems were developed. David Chandler argues that the archive may have been kept and the photographs taken to provide evidence for a narrative history of Cambodia and the Communist Party that suited the suspicions, vanity and political requirements of those in charge: These prisoners were the ‘microbes’ who had sought to destroy the Party. Thousands of photographs and hundreds of thousands of words were needed to document Pol Pot’s conviction that treason, rather than policy or malpractice, had undermined the revolution, and that Vietnamese or cia agents had masterminded the attack. The confessions and 215

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photographs supposedly documented Pol Pot’s omniscience. In fact, they indicate that he may have been almost as frightened, uncertain, and insecure as the thousands of Cambodians he ordered put to death.19 Chandler’s explanation for the archival frenzy of the Khmer Rouge implies that the archives served the role of justification. The killing of thousands of people had to be justified by demonstrating that they were all traitors of the revolution. This necessity of justification is felt by those in charge, especially the leader Pol Pot. It is his anxiety that ultimately explains the compulsion to archive. Convincing as this may be at first sight in the individual case of Pol Pot, it remains bizarre that he was already planning the narrative history of his struggle to be written after his victory while he was still in the middle of the revolution. It does not explain either why, since the twentieth century, totalitarian regimes seem to share this archival impulse. Mass killings of totalitarian regimes systematically go hand in hand with an archival organization of these killings. There seems to be more at stake than the retrospective justification of their destructive practices. Archival organizations also seem to be instrumental in facilitating the mass killings, since implementing such an organization facilitates means of persuading the perpetrators to do their job. The human beings who are going to be their victims are first transformed into numbers, lists, categories – in short, into archival records. After that has been done efficiently the perpetrators are, in fact, no longer dealing with human beings, but with abstract figures and categories. The decision to execute does not have repercussions for fellow humans, but for administrative records. An archival organization of genocide is almost a precondition for genocide, because it depletes human subjectivity before the actual killing takes place. Tuol Sleng was not the Khmer Rouge’s only centre of interrogation and execution. There were several such centres throughout the country, but Tuol Sleng is by far the most infamous, not only because 216

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of the enormous number of people killed there but also because of the systematic archiving by photography and other means that took place there. In both respects, Tuol Sleng excelled. The story of the photographer demonstrates the usefulness of such archival practices to reach this level of excellence in killing. The photographer who took the pictures, Nhem Ein, is alive and free and still makes his living as a photographer. As Thierry de Duve explains in ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, his important discussion of these photographs, Nhem Ein learned his profession when he was only fifteen years old and as a member of the Khmer Rouge was sent to Shanghai to learn photography.20 A year later he was promoted to the rank of ‘photographer in chief’ at Tuol Sleng and had a staff of five people working for him. Together with his staff he took up to 600 photos a day of people who he knew were innocent and were going to be executed. In an interview on the occasion of a show of a selection of these portraits in Arles, he said that he worked like an automaton; he had blinded himself to the sufferings of these innocent people to the point of pretending not to recognize a cousin who appeared before his camera.21 Since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 the mug shots have become icons of the Cambodian genocide, comparable to the way that heaps of dead bodies, shaven hair, glasses and other sorted belongings of victims have become icons of the Holocaust. In 1980, when Tuol Sleng was transformed into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the photographs were put on display. The creation of this museum and of the displays was carried out under the guidance of Mai Lam, a Vietnamese officer who was also an expert in museology. One of the motivations behind displaying the photographs was that the victims could be identified by relatives who recognized them. The displays consist of freestanding large frames that can be viewed from both sides (illus. 70). Most of the photographs are in small format and each frame contains 65 pictures (five rows of thirteen images). The archival organization of the images was, indeed, effective for those 217

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in Cambodia who were looking for their relatives or friends and could recognize them in these displays. Visitors come to recognize and subsequently mourn their loved ones. The displays in this museum function as a memorial. But the images are not only displayed in the Museum for Genocidal Crimes in Cambodia. In 1993 two American photographers, Christopher Riley and Douglas Niven, took it upon themselves to preserve the more than 6,000 original negatives. In order to do that, they set up the Archive Project Group. It was after their discovery and the establishment of the archive that the administrative record of the Cambodian extermination was circulated globally in all kinds of media. Several exhibitions of the archival records have been held in museums all over the world and they also published a book with the photographs, entitled The Killing Fields (1996). These exhibition practices raise further questions regarding the aesthetic use of images of horror and invoke the spectre of a certain complicity. To show these images outside Tuol Sleng without the function of identification or commemoration is problematic, because it is highly plausible that at other places, and in other contexts, an aestheticizing approach to these images will be evoked. Niven and Riley, who made the travelling exhibition Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia’s Killing Fields, did not see an aesthetic appreciation of these images as problematic. On the contrary, without answering the Adornian objection that their exhibition made beauty out of horror and pleasure out of pain, when asked whether their project evolved out of photographic or historical concern they declared in an interview in The Village Voice: ‘Our initial concern was purely photographic’. About their selection of images for the exhibition they said: ‘Even though they were of horrible subject matter, with horrible stories, we saw the possibility of making beautiful photographs.’22 They explain the beauty of the photographs mainly in terms of the materiality of the prints: ‘When we saw the original six-by-six negatives, we knew that we could make very good prints . . . And with this quality we 218

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70 Display of Tuol Sleng Mug Shots in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

could get them into publications, galleries, and museums, so as to reach a wider audience.’23 Thus, Niven and Riley eluded the deeper question of aesthetics by a narrow focus on beauty. One of the objections to these exhibitions, however, was not the photographs’ beauty. It concerned, rather, the agency of the photographer; the fact that the viewer’s empathy for the victims stems from images taken by their executioners. The conventional association of the camera (and the medium of photography) as a weapon that kills has become true in these images, and almost literally so. The photographed subjects look their murderers in the eyes. When viewing installations of these images is it possible to escape the conflation between camera and weapon and to place the viewer in a less disturbing position? This issue concerns the kind of gaze 219

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that is presumed by each individual image and is not necessarily aestheticizing (only). If one argues that it is not legitimate to place viewers in this position, these photographs cannot be shown in any way. But if one decides that these issues should be seen, the question remains, how should they be installed? It is clear that exhibiting these images faces us with all kinds of problems and dilemmas. In the article already mentioned de Duve argues that these mug shots open a new aesthetic category, which he calls ‘genocidal images’. Although he does not really define this new category, it is clear that they pose an aesthetic problem because, although these genocidal images were never meant to be art, they are often presented as art.24 It is especially the medium of photography, according to de Duve, that initiates this kind of problem:

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Now unanimously acknowledged as an art form, but also practiced by professionals with no interest in claiming the title of artist, photography has become in the last forty years a vast grey zone where the boundary between art and non-art is constantly shifting and being renegotiated, on aesthetic, ideological, and institutional levels.25 Because the genocidal images of Tuol Sleng are photographs, the question about their artistic status is even more complex. Not only because they were not meant to be art, but also because of the photographic medium they belong to, their aesthetic status is unclear. How did the curators who made shows of this material deal with this problem? One of the first exhibitions was held during the 1997 photography festival at Arles in southern France. Curated by Christian Caujolle, artistic director of the festival, the exhibition was titled S-21, after the name of the school in Tuol Sleng, which was later turned into the torture and execution centre. The show consisted of 100 of the identity photographs. 220

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A selection of the negatives was also presented in a travelling exhibition first shown in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997. It may be surprising that an art museum was interested in showing this archival material, but the travelling exhibition’s other venues were also associated with art, photography or art photography, including the Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, the Museum for Design in Zurich, the Brandts Museet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark, and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. The moma in New York and museums in San Francisco and Los Angeles not only displayed the photographs – they also acquired some. One could speculate about the function of the archival displays when exhibited outside Cambodia, where the original motivation of providing an opportunity to recognize relatives was no longer at stake. To give an answer to this question one should look into how they were installed. In Arles, at the Photographs from S-21 exhibition, the curator Caujolle completely covered one wall of a rather simple, inhospitable room. The images were arranged in a grid. The photo with a boy wearing the number one was placed at the top left corner of the grid, suggesting that this was the beginning of a serial organization. The room was poorly lit. Altogether the installation and the room looked more like an archival than a museum space. Archival principles could be recognized in the way the images had been installed. The moma display contained the eight images the museum had purchased together with fourteen others. The images were enlarged, but modestly so. The images had no individual labels but there was a text panel summarizing the history of Tuol Sleng and providing information about the discovery of the negatives by Niven and Riley, as well as the production of the prints on exhibit. There was no contextual information about the history of the Khmer Rouge regime or about the involvement of the United States. This lack of historical information framed the images in a very specific way, which stimulated equally specific modes of looking. According to Stéphanie Benzaquen, 221

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one mode of looking was formal or aesthetic, while the other was a ‘kind of heroic, allegorical reading’, conveying our human condition.26 The allegorical reading was based on the similarity between the subjects portrayed, and subsequently between the subjects and the viewers: they were all human beings, subject to the human condition. The allegorical reading is, however, also enabled or suggested by the formal, aesthetic one. To understand how these different modes of looking relate to each other, one should first consider which aspects (formal, contextual) of the displayed photographs bring about an aesthetic reading. The display in Arles did not foreground the aesthetic beauty of the individual images and prints. On the contrary, it did what it could to downplay an aesthetic appreciation of the images. It did that especially by means of an archival installation of the works in a room that did not have the aura of a museum space. The show at moma, although much more modest because showing fewer images, also downplayed the aesthetic beauty of the images and the prints. The space in which it was exhibited was Gallery 3 of the photography wing, a regular museum space. The exhibition design was sober. But the serial quality of the installation of similar images evoked the idea of an archival organization.

Conclusion Presenting the photographs according to archival principles, the exhibition started to look like a Boltanski installation. French visitors, familiar with Boltanski’s work, have made that observation in both Arles and, according to Stéphanie Benzaquen, at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.27 The effect of such an archival organization is the opposite of what the display in Tuol Sleng explicitly intends: recognition of individual victims and mourning their deaths. Now the archival organization takes over. The power of each individual image is weakened by the power of the archive. The specificity of each 222

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image and of the represented individual subjectivity is depleted in this process. The number of images, the number of people that were killed in the Cambodian genocide, is the impression the archival installation leaves on the viewer. Although the portrayed subjects each have a different number on the tag they are carrying, ultimately all these victims of the Khmer Rouge regime become similar, or even identical. It is the nature of the display that makes them into anonymous representatives of the genocide as such. This is not to say that an archival presentation of these images should have been avoided. Outside Cambodia it was probably the most pertinent way of presenting these images. There, the message or effect of these archives of photographs concerns the enormity of the genocide that took place in Cambodia, the unimaginable number of victims. In these contexts the effect of depletion of subjectivity is desirable because it signifies allegorically the genocide as such. But it remains unexpected that an archival organization of these photographs is able to produce that effect. We can learn from Boltanski’s work why that is so. Whereas archival displays in Tuol Sleng are able to recover the individual identities of the unimaginable number of people who were killed there, in other contexts the archival organization works with the opposite effect. It is not aesthetization that results, then, but rather depletion.

223

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seven

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Reanimation

71 Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, c. 2011.

The notion of the archive is used literally as well as figuratively. Literally it refers to the institution or material site, in short a building filled with documents and objects. Figuratively, it concerns a much more general and ungraspable notion of knowledge and memory practices not bound by or located in an institutional organization. Michel Foucault’s notion of the archive seems to be particularly responsible for this figurative use of ‘archive’. He uses the term archive for ‘the law of what can be said’, or a set of discursive rules. Such a set of discursive rules consists of specific conceptual distinctions that determine what can be said and what cannot be said. In that sense, discursive rules always imply exclusions at the same time. Those exclusions concern memories, documents and practices of knowledge production that are overlooked, not taken seriously, considered unimportant or as without value. Exclusions from the archive are inherent to any archival organization. This explains why memories and knowledge ‘outside the archive’ are also part of the archive, in the sense of being produced by archival rules of exclusion. ‘Archive’ covers then two kinds of knowledge: knowledge that can be articulated and objectified by convergent discursive rules and knowledge that remains overlooked because of the same discursive rules, now working as rules of exclusion. As a consequence an archival organization has by definition an inside as well as an outside. 225

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Many contemporary art practices foreground these exclusions from the archive by presenting them as ‘yet another’ archive. Artists highlight this residue of the archive by collecting images that until then were not considered to be ‘archivable’, that is, of any value or importance. These images excluded from the archive are still there but cannot be looked at because, according to the accepted discursive rules, they do not show or articulate anything worth knowing. An example of such an artistic practice transforming exclusions from the archive into an archive in its own right is the Black Photo Album by South African photographer Santu Mofokeng (illus. 71, 72). The Black Photo Album is the result of an investigation of images commissioned by black working- and middle-class families in South Africa in the period between 1890 and 1950. It was in this period that South Africa developed and implemented a racist political system. It was then still common practice to depict African people in the same visual language as animals, as part of the fauna in their own natural habitat. In the ideologies of authoritative knowledge, they were considered as ‘natives’ and the official ‘archivable’ images had to confirm such a notion of African people. The photographs commissioned by black people and representing them as bourgeois families did not fit this ideology and were excluded from the archives of official knowledge. These images remain scattered in the private domain and are largely invisible. In the words of Santu Mofokeng:

72 Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, c. 2011.

They have been left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes hang on obscure parlour walls in the townships. In some families they are coveted as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narratives about identity, lineage and personality. And because, to some people, photographs contain the ‘shadow’ of the subject, they are carefully guarded from the ill-will of witches and enemies. In other families they are being destroyed as rubbish during spring-cleans because of interruptions in continuity or disaffection with the encapsulated meanings 227

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and history of the images. Most often they lie hidden to rot through neglect in kists, cupboards, cardboard boxes and plastic bags.1 Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album reverses the exclusion of these images from the authorative public domain. He collects these images and the stories about the subjects of the photographs. Within the context of the gallery and the museum he presents them in a new format in combination with the stories. By doing this the neglected memories and images are inserted into the public domain and form the archive from which until now they had been excluded. This reanimation of the invisible exclusions from the archive implies much more than bringing to life almost forgotten memories. By making these images into archival objects, the ideology that subjected African people to the lower orders in the ‘family of men’ is rewritten. Another example of an artistic practice compensating earlier exclusions is the work of Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. In 1997 he co-founded the Arab Image Foundation (aif). Based in Beirut, this archival foundation has collected thousands of photographs and negatives from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Zaatari himself has conducted research in photographic practices in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria and has also collected images from those countries. Zaatari envisions his collecting of images not as appropriation of overlooked material but ‘as an intervention in the social life of waning photographic images’.2 Because of civil and other kinds of wars in the Middle East, it is a matter of urgency to preserve these images from destruction. In Beirut, for instance, most commercial photo studios, which were located in the downtown area, were destroyed in the civil war and the only remnants of their production are prints collected from Beirut families. The collections of commercial studios, not only in Beirut but throughout the Middle East, have been threatened as part of their commercial decline. Many studios have sold off their negatives because of the value of the silver content. As destructive 228

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as wars and commercial decline, however, has been the fact that, until aif started to collect these images and negatives, the photographic practices of these commercial studios was largely invisible because they were not included in the public register of archivable knowledge. Zaatari’s efforts to preserve the photographic heritage of the Middle East has resulted in a variety of projects. He made a documentary about the studio photographer Van Leo from Cairo, titled Her + Him: Van Leo (2001). Van Leo was professionally active in the 1950s and ’60s and had an eroticized relationship with his amateur models, who would make secret appointments at the studio to explore different identities, also in the form of pornographic images. Another book by Zaatari is about Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer from Beirut, who also used the studio as a site where clients could explore new identities through portraiture. Cross-dressing, dressing up, dressing down and pornographic self-images belonged to an almost standard repertoire of imaginary identities. His archival research also resulted in The Vehicle (1999), in which Zaatari has collected images of studio clients posing with their recently acquired car (illus. 73). In new modern lifestyles identity is often constructed by means of the portrayal of the ownership of a car. Yet another strategy to reanimate forgotten images was chosen by Zaatari in tracing the history of a set of images back to the people photographed.3 He interviewed the people about the context and situation in which the photo was taken, but also asked them to pose again in exactly the same pose as in the photos taken so many years earlier. A variation of this strategy was deployed for the series of images titled Another Resolution (1998, illus. 74). For these photos he asked Lebanese artists to pose in the same way that photographers had asked children to pose a generation earlier). The original photograph and the re-enacted photograph were installed together. The re-enactments were not made by Zaatari in order to recreate an original moment but ‘to measure the limits of accepted behaviour in age and gender’.4 It is through the comparison of original and re-enacted 229

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73 Akram Zaatari, Another Resolution, 1998, Lara Baladi, photograph.

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74 Akram Zaatari, Another Resolution, 1998, Jean-Pierre Zahar, photograph.

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images that this social dimension of the images is revealed. When the re-enacting adult artists stick out their tongues, recline in the nude or drop their pants, one becomes aware of the fact that this kind of behaviour in front of the camera is acceptable when it concerns children, but not for adults. Also this social knowledge was so far invisible. Yet another Lebanese artist has had a great impact on the rethinking of the archive: Walid Raad and his fictional collaborators of ‘The Atlas Group’. These collaborators donated work to the Archive of The Atlas Group. Missing Lebanese Wars, consisting of plates and a notebook, for example, was deposited in The Atlas Group Archive by a well-known (but fictional) Lebanese historian, Dr Fadl Fakhouri. Other fictive legatees of the archive are Asma Taffan (Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped, 1992) and Habib Fathallah (I Might Die before I Get a Rifle, 1993). Walid Raad himself also donated work to the archive (We Decided to Let Them Say, ‘We Are Convinced’, Twice). The project of The Atlas Group unfolded between 1989 and 2004, when Raad decided to end this ‘collaborative’ project. In 2006 a retrospective exhibition was organized that showed the complete Atlas Group Archive in one single place, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.5 By means of the works in The Atlas Group Archive, Raad questions the mediation and archiving of information. The artistic, fictional archive enables the exploration of new epistemic and cognitive models. This new knowledge challenges the kind of knowledge that is disseminated by the dominant mass media and by Western discourses about terrorism, colonialism and orientalism. The presentation of artistic works as belonging to an archive directs the attention to the cognitive conflicts and problems thematized by these works. Walid Raad explains why the archive as place is the necessary framework for his cognitive project: I like to think that I always work from facts. But I always proceed from the understanding that there are different kinds 232

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of facts; some facts are historical, some are sociological, some are emotional, some are economic, and some are aesthetic. And some of these facts can sometimes only be experienced in a place we call fiction. I tend to think in terms of different kinds of facts and the places that permit their emergence.6 Besides fiction, the other place in the work of Raad that permits these facts to emerge and become visible and knowable is the archive. The documents and images presented by The Atlas Group are not inherently fake or fictional. The texts and photographs were not manipulated. But it is their montage and assembling into a narrative or specific historical situation that propels them into fiction. The montage of image and text or of different images is a specific mode of producing knowledge. The texts and images are never presented at face value, but they always ‘trouble each other’.7 A good example of this use of montage is Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, donated to The Atlas Group Archive by Dr Fadl Fakhouri (illus. 75, 76). This file contains 145 photographic images of cars of the same make, model and colour as those used in carbomb attacks during the Lebanese wars of 1975 to 1991. Notes and annotations made by Fakhouri are attached to the images. They specify such information as the number of casualties, the location and time of the explosion and the type of explosives used. The documentary information is all true. What is fictional however, is the bringing together of these different elements in the notebook of the imaginary character of Dr Fakhouri. And, of course, the notebook is an archival genre. By using the notebook as the framework where factual images and notes are presented, a cognitive status is assigned to them. It is thanks to this archival genre that the images and notes are no longer disparate elements without any cognitive value. They become knowable and visible objects through the newly acquired status as archivable objects. The fictional archive of The Atlas Group presents, in the words of Chouteau-Matikan, ‘latency, lapse, and 233

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75 Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, plate 57: ‘Volvo, b20 or b30, blue, June 19, 1985, 21:09, Corniche of the Sea, Tripoli, 79 killed, 150 injured, 150 kg of tnt, Hexogen’, 2003.

speculation as vectors for historical truth equal to those of verification, authenticity and proof’.8 In the case of Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, however, the ultimate goal of this artistic project is not conveying knowledge about the kind of cars that were used in car-bomb attacks during the Lebanese wars. What is much more important are the layers of transmission due to which this kind of knowledge was lost and, subsequently, the archival framework thanks to which this knowledge can be retrieved. What is important is that the documents in The Atlas Group Archive, whether they are photographs, 234

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76 Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, plate 58: ‘Mercedes, 200, beige, August 14, 1985, 10:30, Beirut, Mar Takla, 13 killed, 109 injured, 150 kg of tnt’.

texts or videos, are never authentic or original, but always digital reproductions. They are always scanned, usually increased but often also decreased in size and multiplied. The point is that ‘their original state is lost in the layers of transmissions, exhibitions and repetitions, and metaphorically in the rumours of history.’9 After the cognitive impulse has been installed by means of these inauthentic reproductions, what should be verified is not the materiality of these artefacts but the structures through which knowledge is lost or transmitted. The works of Santu Mofokeng, Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad are examples of artistic archival practices that pertain to a larger category 235

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of memory practices, meant to reanimate excised histories. Since the 1990s the spread of memory practices in art and literature has been enormous. These manifest themselves around issues such as trauma, war, the Holocaust and other genocides and migration, but also in the increasing use of archival organizations combined with media and genres like photography, documentary film and video. The primary question raised by this flourishing of memory practices, intended to reanimate lost or invisible knowledge and memories, is whether we should see this as a celebration of memory, as a fin de siècle, and in the meantime a debut de siècle, as an expression of the desire to look backwards, or, in contrast, as a symptom of a severe memory crisis or a fear of forgetting? The answer will depend on how these memory practices are articulated. As we have seen, they also converge in a specific aesthetics. It is on the basis of this aesthetics that we can evaluate the nature but also the effectiveness of these memory practices. Either way, the interest in the art practices presented here, like the other memory practices that are so typical of our moment, may point to the meaning of the present itself. In order to approach an answer to this question of the meaning of the present through art practices, I will finish by focusing in the rest of this chapter on the work of the Hungarian film-maker and artist Péter Forgács and the Polish filmmaker Dariusz Jabło´nski. Different as their works are, both have in common the use of old, almost forgotten archival images for their films. Forgács’s films exclusively comprise historical material that he finds in archives of home movies. As a consequence of this self-imposed limitation, it is clear that memory practices are at stake in his work in two respects: his work is archival and the material selected from the archives consists exclusively of home movies. Jabło´nski based his film Fotoamator (Photographer, 1998) on a collection of colour slides of the Jewish ghetto of Łód´z, which were found in a Viennese antique shop in 1987. The fact that these film-makers use presumably authentic material for their films does not, however, guarantee the efficiency of their 236

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work as reanimations. Both have to frame and even manipulate the material profoundly in order to convey the historical dimension of this material effectively. In this respect their work is congenial to that of the three artists discussed above, especially to Zaatari and Raad. Zaatari’s re-enactments and Raad’s montage of authentic material and facts within fictional archival frameworks were necessary devices in order to foreground the imaginary structures responsible for losing as well as transmitting historical knowledge. But, I contend, it is precisely their explicit work on this authentic material that safeguards this historical material from oblivion. Forgács and Jabło´nski highlight their manipulative work on the authentic material even more than Zaatari and Raad. But it is in the tension between the authenticity and manipulation of material that the social life of the knowledge it contains becomes prominently visible.

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Home Movies and Personal Time Since 1988 Forgács has assembled the Private Hungary Documentary Series from an archival collection of home movie stock dating from the 1930s to the present. These films draw upon the Private Film and Photo Archives, which Forgács himself established in Budapest. Forgács’s archive is motivated by the same impulse as Mofokeng’s Black Photography Album, Zaatari’s Arab Image Foundation and Raad’s Atlas Group Archive: without the creation of these archives the documents and knowledge collected in them would be invisible or lost. Forgács’s archive comprises more than 300 hours of home movies and an additional 40 hours of interviews with the relatives of the amateur film-makers who shot the footage. For most of the films Forgács collaborated with Hungarian minimalist composer Tibor Szemz´o. ´ All of his montage films have in common that they deal with the Hungarian bourgeoisie under two totalitarian regimes, first Nazism, then communism. Forgács, however, also made some films that do not specifically focus on Hungary. One of these is the film The Maelstrom: 237

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A Family Chronicle (1997, illus. 77–81). This film is archival as well, drawing upon found home movies of varied origin. For Maelstrom two sources are predominant. The first of these are the home movies of the Dutch-Jewish Peereboom family, filmed by the oldest son Max. These home movies cover the period from the early 1930s to 1943, when the family was transported to Auschwitz. The second, smaller source consists of the home movies of the Austrian Nazi Arthur SeyssInquart, who was appointed Reichskommissar of the Netherlands in 1940 as Hitler’s representative. A third source that Forgács used more sparsely in this film consists of the home movies of a Dutch member of the ss. Like his other films, this is also about the bourgeoisie under a totalitarian regime, in this case Nazism. The overall structure of Maelstrom is more conventionally narrative than in most of his other films. It begins with the oldest footage in 1933 in Amsterdam, where Max Peereboom’s father is editor of the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad. Max himself lives in Middelburg, where he works for his future father-in-law. When the chronology reaches the late 1930s we get to see some of the footage of the Dutch ss man. Having arrived in 1940 the home footage of Reichskommissar SeyssInquart is introduced. We see him mainly on his estate Clingendael in The Hague (illus. 77). In 1942 Max and Annie Peereboom and his family-in-law are forced to move to Amsterdam. Seyss-Inquart has ordered all Dutch Jews to move to Amsterdam in order to facilitate their deportation to Auschwitz and other camps. The reason was that their deportation was going to be much more efficient if all Jews were concentrated in one city. The film stops abruptly. When Max Peereboom family is transported and then killed (with the rest of his family and extended family), the family narrative comes to an end. The only member of this family who will survive is Max’s youngest brother Simon. Home movies, out of which Forgács’s films are made, form a particular genre that has specific properties in relation to memory. The genre focuses almost exclusively on the personal. The societal dimension of human life only figures obliquely, if at all. We get to see anniversaries, 238

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77 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, 1997, still, wives of Himmler and Seyss-Inquart at Estate Clingendael.

weddings, family outings, births and children growing up. These personal moments in the life of families are restricted because they are selective on the basis of a specific criterion: they consist of memories of happy moments. But as Forgács points out in an interview, the home movie is personal in yet another way.10 It is structured like a dream. In the case of old home movies it is exclusively visual. There are no words spoken, there is no voice-over. Visual communication is the only medium. Moreover, it contains many strange ellipses. Thus Freud’s explanation of dream work is also relevant for an understanding of home movies. Although the macro-structure of Maelstrom is narrative, the fragments of footage that form the building blocks of this narrative are not so much telling as showing. Although the subtitle of Maelstrom is ‘A Family Chronicle’, the footage does not take the form of a family chronicle, but of externalized memory. Whereas home movies are almost exclusively concerned with personal time, Forgács’s montage edits the key moments of history 239

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78 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, still, celebration of Queen Wilhelmina.

into this personal temporality. In Maelstrom history is present, for instance, albeit necessarily in a decentred way. Some Peereboom footage shows a visit of Queen Wilhelmina with Princess Juliana to the town of Middelburg, or the celebration in Middelburg of Queen Wilhelmina’s 40th anniversary (illus. 78). The fact that the family filmed this can be read as symptomatic of their assimilation into Dutch culture. They identified with the Dutch interest in and affection for the royal family. But most of the insertions of history are performed by the hand of the director. Sometimes we hear a radio broadcast or there are titles or texts on the screen pointing out the historical moment in which the filmed family footage is embedded. At other times, a disembodied voice-over explains the historical moment. A voice chants in the mode of a traditional Jewish song the laws, rules or articles proclaimed by Seyss-Inquart stipulating how to kill warm-blooded animals, regulating who is considered Jewish and who is not, stipulating what Jews who were going to be deported were allowed to take with them, and 240

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so on. Whatever device Forgács uses to insert history, historical time is never seamlessly part of the personal time of the home footage but always superimposed, imposed on it. Characteristically, however, the imposition of history on personal time never works smoothly. As a result, the completely different temporal dimension of the home footage strikes the viewer again and again. Personal time and historical time are in radical tension with each other. We expect to see traces or symptoms of the dramatic history of those days in the home-movie footage. But we do not. While the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust progresses, the home movies continue to show happy family memories. That ‘happy’ is a slippery notion becomes clear when Max Peereboom films the moment that his family prepares for deportation to Auschwitz. First of all, it is remarkable that he decided to film this at all. We see his wife Annie and her stepmother around the table repairing the clothes they want to wear or take with them on deportation. They drink coffee and Max smokes a pipe (illus. 79). The footage does not convey what they are doing (preparing themselves for deportation), but instead this is explained by a written text imposed on the footage. What we see is a happy family situation. Nothing of the events that will victimize them in such a horrific way is able to enter the personal realm of the home movie. This separation of the two domains is visible because the temporal dimension of the home movie does not unfold as a collective narrative but persistently as a personal narrative. In Maelstrom personal history is not represented as part of collective history, as synecdoche of historical time; it is in radical tension with it. This has important consequences for the question I raised earlier: is there a future for the archive? Or is it rotten through and through – ‘from the inside out’, as Hendes put it in her act of curating Douglas Gordon – because of its objectifying mechanisms and its imposition of categories and pure order on a reality that is hybrid? As we saw in the case of Boltanski’s pseudo-archives, as well as the archival 241

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79 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, still, preparation before deportation.

concentration camp, the imposition of the binary opposition useful versus useless seems to define the rationale of the archive. Everything that is archived seems to become subjected to this distinction. Although Holocaust archives are also seen as memorials of the Holocaust, the memories stored in it are ultimately judged on the basis of what we learn from them – in other words, by how useful they are. The Spielberg Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies and The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies are good examples. Geoffrey Hartman, director of the latter, describes the function of the Fortunoff Archive first of all in terms of the process of conducting the interviews and not in terms of the products collected in the archive. To testify, he intimates, leads to a kind of rehumanization and reconstitution of subjectivity of the Holocaust victim. But the moment that the Holocaust survivor has given his testimony, the taped results become the objects that are stored in the archive. It is almost impossible for the visitors of this kind of archive not to impose the distinction between useful versus useless on this material. The visitors 242

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are looking for something, they are usually scholars or students who want to learn something or hope that watching these tapes will be helpful in getting an idea about what the Holocaust experience was. In this respect the kind of categories used to make the archive accessible are significant. The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education indexes the archive by city and country of birth, religious identity and wartime experiences. The Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University indexes it by geographic names and topics discussed in the testimony. Forgács’s use of the archive of home movies, however, resists the imposition of the useful/useless dichotomy completely. His archival films do not provide information, they do not tell history, but they show us that the experience of time in personal history cannot be integrated or translated into collective or official history. As Kaja Silverman argues in her essay on Forgács’s work, his films are based on strategies of repersonalization instead of objectification or categorization.11 His films evoke the phenomenal world; they are about vitality, enjoyment, about activities such as dancing and playing. Whereas the archival mechanisms of objectification and categorization strip images of their singularity, Forgács’s archival footage keeps insisting on the private and the affective. Silverman writes that this is first of all done through the many direct looks with which people face the camera (illus. 80). This seems to be a defining feature of home movies as such. When people face the camera in a fiction film, this kind of look is self-reflexive. For a moment it short-circuits the fictionality of the film by establishing direct contact with the viewer. The film shows its constructedness. In home movies the frequent looking into the camera is of a completely different order. Here, there is no clear distinction between the camera and the person behind the camera. Maelstrom has many examples of that interaction: Simon, Max’s youngest brother, especially makes fun of Max the cameraman again and again by pulling funny faces before the camera. He does this not to spoil the film, but to make the cameraman laugh or to make him 243

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80 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, still, Simon facing the camera.

angry. His funny faces function within an affective relationship between two human beings. There is another extreme example of this in Maelstrom, this time of a different order. At one of the many weddings the two- or three-yearold daughter of Max and Annie is being filmed. When she turns her face to the camera, she expects to see the face of Max, her father, or one of her relatives. Instead she sees a monstrous object, namely the camera. She is clearly utterly terrified (illus. 81). This example shows in its negativity that people in home movies are not posing for the camera but for the person who holds the camera. They let themselves be filmed, not to get objectified into a beautiful or interesting image, but out of love for the person who films. According to Silverman, people in home footage do not just convey Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘this has been’ (‘ça a été’) but also ‘I love you’.12 As Forgács explains in an interview, there is a fundamental difference between looking at a photograph and watching moving images. 244

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He intensifies this difference by his manipulation of film time, by slow motion or even stopping the moving image, reducing it to a film still:

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The slow-motion technique and manipulation of the film time, the movement and the rhythm, give an opposite dynamic or an opposite possibility than in the example of the photo explained in Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. The frozen photographic second of the Barthes thesis is a good example why the photo is a tombstone, whereas a moving image is not . . . If we made right now a black-and-white photograph of ourselves, we could observe the event as already-past time: history . . . But while we have moving images of the past, we always have the fluxes of life, the contrapuntal notion between Barthes’s photo thesis and the movement (= life) on film, which proves forever that we’re alive. So my viewers – and you – know that they (the amateur film actors, my heroes) are physically dead, but they are still moving. They are reanimated again and again by the film.13

81 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, still, daughter of Max facing the camera.

245

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Hence the effect of repersonalization brought about by Forgács’s films is not only the result of the specific genre of home movies, but also of his intensification of qualities of the broader genre of the moving image as such. His manipulation of moving images – the slowdowns, the movement back and forth, stopping the movement for a few seconds – creates a rhythm that makes the aliveness of the movements a deeply sensorial experience. It creates a distance between real time and the time of the moving images. This denaturalizes our reception of time and movement, as a result of which we become overwhelmed by the life embodied in these moving images. One could wonder, now, if this is always the case in home movies. Or does it also depend on the film-maker and the kind of family that is being filmed? In this respect, the difference between the Peereboom and the Seyss-Inquart home movies is revealing. The distinction I have used so far between personal time and historical time does not automatically apply in the same way or to the same degree to the SeyssInquart footage. Seyss-Inquart’s position in history is radically different from that of the Peereboom family. I am not referring to the fact that the former family occupies the perpetrator position in history and the latter that of the victim. Arthur Seyss-Inquart was appointed by Hitler; he represents him in the Netherlands. He is the representative of Hitler, of History; one could say, he is History or, rather, the embodiment of it. This makes one wonder, can the embodiment of History make home movies of his family and friends? Or is the genre of the home movie disabled when History enters the realm of the personal? Whereas the Peereboom footage is so striking because of its vitality, the behaviour of the Seyss-Inquart family is much more restrained. It seems that the latter are constantly aware of the fact that not only the cameraman is looking at them, but also anonymous, abstract or later viewers. They embody history, and later history will be judged; their role in History will be judged. When I watch the home movies of this family, I cannot avoid mobilizing the distinction of 246

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useful versus useless. It is from the Seyss-Inquart footage that I get information. I become interested from a historical point of view when I notice that Reichsführer ss Himmler visited the Seyss-Inquarts at their Clingendael estate. They were not only fellow Nazi leaders but they and their wives also socialized with each other and played tennis. Interesting information. The fact that Seyss-Inquart’s home movies evoke a mode of looking that is usually discouraged by this genre only foregrounds, differentially, the more usual mode of looking at home movies. Forgács’s combination and alternation of the Peereboom footage with the Seyss-Inquart footage, of personal time and of a personal time that is infected by historical time, sharpens our eye for the special qualities of the Peereboom home movies. Forgács’s archival films do not objectify or categorize. Preposterously intervening in an archival object, they actually transform it: they reanimate and repersonalize. He is able to do this first of all thanks to the specific qualities of the objects collected in his archive: the nature of home movies. But, in addition, he adds a rhythm to the movement of the moving image that infuses the home movies with reflexivity. This rhythm magnifies the nature of personal time as living, as affect, as movement and as moving.

Understanding the Memory Crisis As I have argued so far, in Maelstrom personal time is shown to be in radical tension with historical time. In terms of my initial question, this tension suggests that the spread of memory practices since the 1990s is the symptom of a memory crisis rather than of a celebration of memory. It seems to be the expression of a situation in which memory is under siege. This conclusion concords with that of other cultural critics. Scholars such as Benjamin Buchloh and Andreas Huyssen have argued that this memory crisis is first of all historical and specific. According to Buchloh, mnemonic desire is activated especially 247

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in those moments of extreme duress in which the traditional bonds between subjects, between subjects and objects, and between objects and their representation appear to be on the verge of displacement, if not outright disappearance.14 In the 1990s, especially, massive migration due to economic reasons or political wars that resulted in genocides have caused moments of extreme duress. But the memory crisis is not only historically specific in the socio-political sense. I contend that it is also caused by media culture, by its overwhelming presence since the 1990s and by the specific forms that this culture develops. The enormous impact of photographic and filmic media culture has not worked in the service of memory, but on the contrary threatens to destroy historical memory and the mnemonic image. Already in the 1920s German sociologist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer explained how media culture can have this devastating effect. In his essay simply titled ‘Photography’, he makes a diagnosis of his own times that seems to be at the same time a prophetic diagnosis of ours: Never before has any age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense . . . In reality, however, the weekly photographic ration does not all mean to refer to these objects or ‘ur-mages’. If it were offering itself as an aid to memory, then memory would have to make the selection. But the Hood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. The assault of this mass of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potential existing awareness of crucial traits. Artworks suffer this fate through their reproductions . . . In the illustrated magazines people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving . . . Never before has a period known so little about itself.15 248

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In a way relevant to our discussion, Kracauer sees historicism, the scholarly practice that emerged more or less at the same moment as modern photographic technology, as the temporal equivalent of the spatial mediations that take place in photography:

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On the whole, advocates of such historicist thinking believe they can explain any phenomenon purely in terms of its genesis. That is, they believe in any case that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the course of events in their temporal succession without any gaps. Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum. According to historicism, the complete mirroring of an intertemporal sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that occurred within that time . . . Historicism is concerned with the photography of time.16 How can we consider a medium and a scientific discourse as parallel? Photography and historicism regulate spatial and temporal elements according to laws that belong to the economic laws of nature rather than to mnemonic principles. In contrast, Kracauer argues, memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Nor does memory pay much attention to dates; it skips years or stretches temporal distance. Kracauer writes in this respect: An individual retains memories because they are personally significant. Thus they are organized according to a principle which is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography: memory images retain what is given only in so far as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representations.17 249

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Memory images are also at odds with the principles of historicism, as Kracauer concludes later in his essay. Historicism’s temporal inventory corresponds to the spatial inventory of photography. Instead of preserving the ‘history’ that consciousness reads from the temporal succession of events, historicism records the temporal succession of events whose linkage does not contain the transparency of history.18 It is in the daily newspapers that photography and historicism join forces and intensify each other in their destruction of memory. In the 1920s daily papers were illustrating their texts more and more and the numbers of illustrated newspapers increased. For Kracauer, those illustrated journals embody in a nutshell the devastating effects of the representation of spatial and temporal continuities, mistaken for the meaning of history. Clearly Kracauer’s diagnosis of a memory crisis as caused by the phenomena of photography and historicism, relatively new in his day, seems also highly relevant for an understanding of the position of memory in the 1990s and after. His bleak prophecy seems to have come true.19 For Huyssen, the spread of memory practices, especially in the visual arts, is symptomatic of a crisis, not of a flourishing, of memory. The memory crisis that started at the beginning of the twentieth century seems to have accelerated and intensified at the end of that century. The reasons for this are again twofold. First of all, there is a historical and specific reason; second, this acceleration is a result of the impact of developments in media culture. I will focus, here, on the second reason. The principles of mediating historical reality introduced by photography and historicism are intensified through film, advanced electronic technologies such as computers and the Internet, mass media, the explosion of historical scholarship and an ever more voracious museum culture. It is the abundance of information that explains the memory crisis of the 1990s, according to Huyssen: 250

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For the more we are asked to remember in the wake of the information explosion and the marketing of memory, the more we seem to be in danger of forgetting and the stronger the need to forget. At issue is the distinction between usable pasts and disposable data.20 Yet it is not only this very specific mediation of (historical) reality that has its devastating effects on memory; it is also the nature of the historical and political reality of the 1990s itself. Historical memory used to give coherence and legitimacy to families, communities, nations and states. But in the 1990s these links that were more or less stable weakened drastically. In the processes of globalization and massive migration, national traditions and historical pasts have been increasingly deprived of their geographic and political groundings. Whereas older sociological approaches to collective memory, most famously represented in the work of Maurice Halbwachs, presuppose relatively stable communities and formations of their memories, these approaches are no longer adequate to grasp the current dynamic of the fragmented memory politics of different social and ethnic groups. It is against this background of a century-old, but now accelerated, memory crisis that the memory practices in the visual arts, archival or not, should be understood. It is in these practices that memory becomes an issue of transforming aesthetics. To assess the social value of such transformations in the aesthetics of memory, the question that remains is how effective these practices are in countering the threat of oblivion. I would like to address this question by taking a closer look at, first, Dariusz Jabło´nski’s film Fotoamator (Photographer, 2008), and second, Péter Forgács’s film El perro negro (The Black Dog, 2005).

Reanimating Still Images Jabło´nski made his film on the basis of a collection of several hundred colour slides of the Jewish ghetto of Łód´z in Poland. These slides 251

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made during the Second World War belong to the first generation of colour photographs, meaning that they are exceptional in a double respect: their subject-matter and because they are in colour. They were made by the Austrian chief accountant of the ghetto, Walter Genewein. Jabło´nski ’s film consists for the most part of close-ups, zooms and pans of Genewein’s slides, accompanied by a voice-over that reads from letters written by Genewein and from his administrative records. He was not only recording life in the ghetto by means of his camera, but also, as an accountant, by making endless lists. It is on the basis of these lists that we learn that the inhabitants of the ghetto produced in the factories in which they were employed 59,000 toothbrushes, 321,262 bras and 426,744 braces. But we also learn about the number of people who died in the ghetto, subdivided into victims of tuberculosis, heart diseases, malnutrition. The different deportations are mentioned and the number of vans that were needed to transport the belongings of the new inhabitants of the ghetto. These numbers alternate with information about Genewein’s career, the promotions he gained and the increases in his salary. We get an image of him as a perfectionist administrator and archivist. His records are utterly impersonal, distant and detailed in the most surprising ways. In his correspondence he also tells his addressee that he has decided not to use carbon paper any more and to change to a semi-automatic administration device. The voice-over of the impersonal administrator is in sharp contrast to the vividness of the colour slides we see at the same time. This vividness is even enhanced by the addition of realistic background noise, such as traffic and the buzz of voices. The scenes showing the colour slides accompanied by the voice-over of the administrator/ archivist alternate, however, with moving images showing the surviving doctor of the ghetto, Arnold Mostowics. He is being interviewed about his memories of the ghetto. In fact, the film opens with footage that shows the doctor in an old archive, probably the archive that houses the former administration of the ghetto (illus. 82). These 252

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82 Dariusz Jabl⁄onski, ´ Fotoamator (Photographer, 1998), still, doctor in old archive.

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images are in colour, like the slides, which are only introduced later in the film. Before we get to see the slides, the doctor gives his reaction to these slides and what they convey: It was a shock, it was a shock, it was a shock that they existed. Please understand, this was some 45 years after the war had ended. Suddenly I find out about the existence of several hundreds of photographs taken by Germans. And these were not ordinary photographs. Immediately these photos provoked a feeling of unease in me. Unease at the fact that although they showed the ghetto, it was not the ghetto. Although they were real, they did not show the truth. The nature of the doctor’s unease is not further explained at this moment. A self-evident explanation is that his memories of his past ghetto experiences are not reconfirmed by the slides. The slides show something different, less horrific than what we later hear him 253

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talk about. But the unease also seems to be caused by the colour and vividness of the slides. The way the slides are framed in the film suggests that the doctor responds to the fact that these images are too vivid to belong to the past, whereas his own memories of the ghetto do. Immediately after this introduction of the doctor, the moving images transform from colour into black and white. From then on, each time the doctor is interviewed, we see him in black and white. Further footage that shows present-day Łód´z is also in black and white (illus. 83). This results in a rather confusing, but also penetrating, situation: black and white connotes the present, whereas colour footage connotes the past. This is so confusing, because out of convention we associate colour, or the lack thereof, with the opposite. Black and white has an aura of the past, whereas colour refers to the present. Watching Fotoamator we constantly have to readjust our expectations of the significance of colour. But there is more to it: the colour slides showing the ghetto are accompanied by the voice-over of chief accountant Genewein. His sentences are in the present tense. He is not talking about the past but from the past. The doctor, however, describing or recalling the

83 Dariusz Jabl⁄onski, ´ Fotoamator, still, Lódz,´ present.

254

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situation in the ghetto, talks in the past tense. He is clearly talking from another temporal dimension than the time he is talking about. One would think that the vividness of the colour slides and the presentness of the accountant’s voice-over would be countered by the fact that the slides are stills and that time in them is frozen. But this effect is not achieved because of the zooming and panning movement of the animation. Although the slides show frozen moments of time, what we get to see as viewers is always moving. In this film, the movement of time is in all respects the reverse of what the ontology of time prescribes. This is, of course, first of all because the images contemporaneous to the ghetto are in colour. Jabło´nski, the film’s director, is not responsible for this, but a variety of devices he employed intensify the effect of the colour slides, bringing past time more definitely into the present and distancing the present from the past. When, in the literal sense of the word, memory is a form of re-calling, the film Fotoamator succeeds most effectively in bringing this past back into our present. It does it so effectively that this past looks even more present than do moments that are contemporaneous to the viewer’s time. It may be clear by now that Jabło´nski ’s film is highly self-reflexive about colour, the lack thereof and its effects. There is a recurring motif in the film that foregrounds this issue of colour in unexpected ways. There are three quotations from letters that chief accountant Genewein wrote to the photography company agfa. He complains about a reddish-brownish shade that covers all his slides. He asks for an explanation for this shade and for a solution to prevent it from happening again. The moments when his complaints about the quality of the colour are quoted are far from neutral. These appear when the most horrifying slides are being shown: slides of famished inmates of the ghetto or of the deportations. There is an enormous contrast between what the images show and what the chief accountant comments on. He is literally blind to the horror that he documents and archives. Although the colour now has the effect on us of making the images vivid in 255

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unusual ways, for Genewein the colour was not vivid enough. He could not see what he had registered. In this film colour separates times.

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Forgács’s Alternative Historiography Forgács’s work is entirely devoted to differentiating temporalities. His film El perro negro differs from his older work in that historical time rather than personal time is the main issue (illus. 84–87). At first sight this film can be mistaken for a conventional historical film, dealing with a specific national and political history, namely the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It is consistently chronological: it begins with the Civil War’s prehistory in 1930, when Alfonso xiii is still king of Spain. Then the first free elections in 30 years occur in 1931, when the majority of the people vote Republican. The king left the country and the Republic was proclaimed. Because of a series of laws announced by the new Republic, including one that allowed divorce and another decreeing the separation of Church and State, the clergy, army and the right-wing bourgeois became increasingly opposed to the new Republic. Ultimately this led to civil war on 18 July 1936. Most of this red thread of official historiographic storytelling, however, is told, not shown, in El perro negro. More than in most of his other films there is a voice-over that imposes on the images the coherence of public, historical time. The film images we get to see belong, again, to the genre of home movies, or they are made by amateur film-makers. At the beginning of the film the voice-over (Forgács himself) declares: ‘We travel through Spain’s violent decade with the images and stories of amateur film-makers such as Joan Salvans from Terassa, Catalonia, and Ernesto Noviega from Madrid.’ The films made by the amateur film-makers are not exclusively home movies. Ernesto Noviega, for example, who was more or less neutral in the Civil War, began to document that war in 1936. It was only in 1938 that he became a soldier fighting in the Falangist (fascist) army, not out of ideological conviction but in order to survive. The angle from 256

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which he films, however, remains personal. His adventures during the Civil War, the events in which he participates, are the events that are filmed and shown. I wish to discuss The Black Dog for its surprising contrast with the artist’s preceding work. Compared to Forgács’s earlier work, in The Black Dog the balance between personal time and historical time is reversed, so to speak. Whereas in his earlier work the viewer was completely immersed in the personal realm of weddings, anniversaries and the home, so that the continuity of historical time had to be imposed on it, in The Black Dog it is the other way around. The voice-over’s storytelling leads the viewer through the filmic events. The filmic image substantiates this narrative, or refuses or fails to do that. And such a refusal or failure often occurs. The filmic image usually does not illustrate what the voice-over says, or the other way around: the voice-over does not explain or elaborate what the filmic image shows. Most of the time, the spoken word and the image are not continuous. This incongruity appears crucial. In The Black Dog Forgács is ‘doing’ or performing historiography. In his earlier work Forgács was rather deconstructing historiography, exploring the limits or perhaps even the failure of historiography by showing the radical difference between personal time and historical time. In The Black Dog he seems to explore a possible remedy against that failure of historicism, in order to develop an alternative historiographic mode. In order to understand the principles of this alternative historiography, I call again on Kracauer. After his devastating critique of photography as a medium and of historicism as a scholarly practice, Kracauer ends his essay ‘Photography’ with a rather unexpectedly optimistic remark about the possibilities of film: The capacity to stir up the elements of nature is one of the possibilities of film. This possibility is realized whenever film combines parts and segments to create strange constructs. If 257

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the disarray of the illustrated newspapers is simply confusion, the game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of dreams in which the fragment of daily life becomes jumbled.21 Obviously, the kind of filmic aesthetics Kracauer is referring to differs radically from the kind of film that is dominant now. In the 1920s he would see the experimental films of the German and Russian tradition as defining the genre. But in spite of this historical specificity of Kracauer’s view of film, it is precisely this historical background of the filmic medium that helps us to understand Forgács’s attempts to forge a new historiography. The ‘pieces of disjointed nature’ that film plays with, according to Kracauer, are in Forgács’s work and time ‘pieces’ that belong to personal time and ‘pieces’ that belong to historical time. He presents these as radically incongruent. Although in The Black Dog there are certainly moments when personal history functions as synecdoche of History, usually the relation between the two realms is one of disjunction. These moments of clash between personal time and historical time are the ones that result in a different reading of the genre of home movies. Conversely, this clash makes the genre of home movies a key element in our understanding of time and of history. So far, I have characterized home movies and historicism as opposites. The home-movie genre embodies the realm of personal time, whereas historicism is the ultimate consequence of historical time. But when we approach them from the perspective of the viewer or reader, in other words, as an issue of aesthetics, they have more in common than appears at first sight. Watching somebody else’s home movies is usually a rather boring experience. This boredom stems not from the fact that the filmic quality of home movies tends to be rather bad and sentimental, but because what we see does not concern ‘us’, but ‘them’. Watching conventional home movies does not establish a relationship of similarity but of difference; the genre makes us 258

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aware of the privacy of personal time and of the sentimentality of conventional ways of portraying the family. Historicist historiography also establishes a relationship of difference, this time not a difference between personal and public, but between past and present. Memory, in contrast, is fundamentally connected to the present: it is again and again actualized in the present, and only those memories that are significant in the present can be activated. As Kracauer argues, the historicism of conventional historiography is fundamentally different from what characterizes memory. As we have seen, in his view historicism attempts to regulate temporal elements according to laws that belong to economic principles of nature rather than to mnemonic principles. For the viewer or reader of historiographic texts or images, this results in an awareness of difference between past and present, between that past political situation and ours, between ‘their’ culture and ‘our’ culture. But when home movies are combined with the historiographic mode, as in the work of Péter Forgács, another kind of relationship with the viewer or reader is stimulated. The clash between – not harmonious blending of – the personal time of home movies and the historical time of historicism brings the situations in the home movies closer to us. Instead of sensing an uncomfortable alienation, as usually occurs when we watch other people’s home movies, we begin to identify with the people in the home movies. The personal time of the home movies becomes an anchor within the historicist framework with which it clashes. In The Black Dog this strategy of establishing similarity between the viewer and the represented subjects is intensified by yet other means. The title points this out. Throughout the film shots of animals play a crucial role. The title of the film refers to one of these shots, a clip of a black dog that recurs several times in the film (illus. 84). But there are many more clips of other animals: pigs being maltreated, donkeys, horses, rabbits being shot. All these animal shots have a heavily allegorical significance that sets them apart from the traditional use of 259

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84 Péter Forgács, El perro negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War (The Black Dog, 2005), still, black dog.

animals in visual representation. The animals are never filmed as contextual details to produce a reality effect. In contrast, the animal shots, especially of the black dog, are isolated within the film. This demarcation facilitates their allegorical functioning. The black dog becomes an allegory of destruction, of the evil of war. At one moment the allegorical meaning of the animal clips becomes more or less explicit. We see pigs maltreated by men (illus. 85). Then there is a voice-over, although this voice’s identity is clearly not the same as the one who provides us with the historiographic narrative. When personal testimonies are quoted, another voice-over is introduced, clearly with another voice, in order to set the historiographic story apart from the personal stories. This personalized voice-over says: ‘The peasants hated the bourgeoisie, because they treated them like animals. One of them said: “Once we looked at the landowner, we thought we were looking at the devil himself.”’ At this moment it becomes impossible to see the clip of the pigs maltreated by the 260

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men as unrelated to what the voice-over says. The image proposes an allegorical interpretation of how landowners or the bourgeoisie treat the peasants and the lower classes. These allegorical devices function on the basis of similarity. The similarity between the maltreatment of the pigs and that of the peasants makes the one into an allegory of the other. This deployment of similarity is key to the polemic Forgács is conducting in this film. Similarity obstructs the principles of historicism, since historicism is based on the principle of radical continuity, on the temporal sequentiality within which each moment is unique and cannot be compared to other moments. The possibility of similarity within that logic would confuse the project of re-establishing temporal sequences. If similarity occurs, it has to be disentangled and repositioned into unique sequential moments. Similarity, hence allegory, is the enemy of historicism. In addition to the effect of the allegorical animal clips, however, Forgács uses another device to reorientate historiography towards the present. Again and again he uses footage in which we see people

85 Péter Forgács, The Black Dog, still, pigs maltreated by men.

261

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play-acting, or where they are involved in events of a ritualistic nature. In both cases the represented moments or histories relate in a very ambiguous or complex way to the historicist attempt to establish a continuity of unique historical moments. The opening scene of The Black Dog provides the audience immediately with a powerful example of ‘play-acting history’. We see two groups of young men, facing each other and performing a ritualized dance (illus. 86). Later, and retrospectively, we can read this dance as an allegorical representation of the two parties fighting each other in the Spanish Civil War. The dance, then, formalizes the war as a conflict between groups of men. Because men they are: the event appears to be exclusively and deeply homosocial. After the dance the same young men play something resembling a law suit that ends in the execution of one of the men. With his arms tied up and blinded, he is pushed off a mountain into nothingness, seemingly into an abyss (illus. 87). This event is amazing in many respects. First, it is amazing as an event in which a group of young men executes another young man by

86 Péter Forgács, The Black Dog, still, young men performing a ritualized dance.

262

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87 Péter Forgács, The Black Dog, still, man being pushed off a mountain.

pushing him from the top of a mountain into a gorge. This happens after a dance that turns out, retrospectively, to have been a ritualized duel. Second, the event is amazing because the film opens with this footage, even before we get to see the title sequence, giving the whole scene additional significance. Third, this gruesome event surprises because it is not real – that is to say, it is not a historical event. It is playacted: the context in which it happens is not history, but theatre. If this opening scene provides a prelude to the Spanish Civil War, it does so, again, only allegorically. This opening scene is, however, also a forerunner in a nonallegorical way: again and again in The Black Dog we get to see footage of scenes that are play-acted or concern moments or events that are repeated – that is, are events of a ritualistic nature, such as weddings, banquets or dances. It is not the unique historical moment at which the event takes place that strikes the eye, but the fact that the unique history of the Spanish Civil War is so insistently represented through 263

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images that show events of a repeatable nature: plays, performances and rituals. At first sight, Forgács’s use of the genre of home footage explains this: the home footage of which Maelstrom consists also shows mainly events that are ‘unique’ only on a personal level, not on a historical or historicist level. Weddings, births and the like occur one after another. The Holocaust or other violent events do not intrude into the representational realm of this genre. The home footage of these two Spanish sources (Salvans and Noviega) is, however, strikingly different. And this difference sheds a retrospective light on the relationship between personal and historical time in Maelstrom. Many of the performed, ritualistic events filmed by the two amateur film-makers provide us with images of the violence of the Spanish Civil War, albeit in an allegorical way. First of all there is footage of bullfights, the quintessential Spanish performance of ritualized cruelty, but there is further amazing footage comparable to that of the opening scene. The voice-over tells us about a conflict between employers and militant anarchists in 1930. It specifies that Joan Salvans, one of the film-makers, apparently did not feel threatened by this conflict as he was the son of an important employer; instead he went camping in the Pyrenees with a mountaineering club of which he was the chair. The footage shows first images of a bullfight, then of Joan dancing with his fiancée Merce, then of Joan and his friends and fellow mountaineers in the Pyrenees. As in the opening scene, the young men are play-acting: they perform another homosocial conflict resulting in yet another play-acted execution – one of the men is rolled down the mountain. In contrast to Maelstrom, a film that enacted the radical split between personal time and historical time, in The Black Dog the personal time at stake in these play-acted performances provides access to the Spanish Civil War by means of the device of allegory. But if we are to assess the nature and effect of Forgács’s attempt to transform the principles of historiography, we must account for the key fact that in his historiographic project Forgács does not obey the 264

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principles of historicism. He obstructs those principles by introducing devices based on similarity, on the repeatable and identification, and deploying these on different levels. First of all, he obstructs these principles within the film by his use of the allegorical motifs of animals standing for human subjects and of play-acted performances that ritualize violence and cruelty. Second, he conducts his obstruction through establishing a different relationship between the represented human subjects and the viewers. This is how he performs historiography without the overwhelmingly distancing effect of difference. As a result, a film about the Spanish Civil War can suddenly affect us emotionally and politically in our present moment. When similarity becomes a leading device within historiography, the Spanish Civil War suddenly becomes an experience close to us, although it happened more than 60 years ago, far away in the southwest corner of Europe. When it happened, we were not there. Now, we are.

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Epilogue: Reanimating the Archive The works of Mofokeng, Zaatari, Raad, Forgács and Jabło´nski provide strong examples of what at the beginning of this reflection I called the spread of archival memory practices that have become so prevalent since the early 1990s. Of course, it is impossible and undesirable to generalize about this art, the other art discussed in this book and the cultural practices that are performed in it. It is more important to distinguish productive from unproductive memory practices and try to understand in what respect memory practices are productive or unproductive. Because some, and perhaps even most, of these practices show a kind of naive, nostalgic and sentimental celebration of the past, usually limited to a personal past, without actively engaging this past in our political present, it is imperative to stop at attempts such as those by Forgács or Jabło´nski to overcome these distancing practices. My reading of Forgács’s Maelstrom and, in relation to it, The Black Dog, and of Jabło´nski’s Photographer, suggests, however, that the 265

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media and genres used for these memory practices are themselves deeply implicated in the crisis of memory they appear to counter. If used conventionally and uncritically, the archive, media such as photography and film and genres like documentary, family albums or home movies lead to a memory crisis. They embody the principles of traditional historicism that Kracauer criticized, for they are based on the kind of temporal or spatial continuities that are easily mistaken for the meaning of political situations or of personal lives. It is only when the use of these media and genres is performed critically and self-reflexively that they are transformed from embodiments and implements of that crisis to alternative practices that counter the very same crisis. It is only then, in the words of Jill Bennett, ‘that art does not represent what already occurred, but that art sets up conditions for relating to the event’.22 This is a call for an aesthetics that subverts traditional temporality. Jabło´nski’s reversal of the ontology of past and present succeeds in turning memory into an almost literal re-calling that makes the past more present than those moments that are contemporaneous to the viewer’s time. Forgács’s systematic clash between personal time and historical time is an example of such a productive practice. His staged clashes do not end in deadlock, but result in an aesthetics that inserts personal time into historical time, or the other way around, without either false harmony or insurmountable incompatibility. Instead, his aesthetics of temporality gives personal time a broader historical significance. The genres and media that both film-makers work with and in – genres and media that seem preconditioned for historiographic projects – no longer comply to the principles of historicism. This is how historiography can become relevant again for our political and personal present. This is how, in other words, historiography can return to its mission to serve and preserve, not dictate and erase what we are and do today, with that past in our present world. 266

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References

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Introduction 1 See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 2000). 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984). 3 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, ma, 2001). 4 Ibid., p. 225. 5 Ibid., p. 214. 6 Ibid., p. 215. 7 Ibid., p. 230. 8 Ibid., p. 231. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 For Foucault’s notion of the archive, see The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [1969] (London, 2002). Part iii, ‘The Statement and the Archive’, pp. 89–149, is particularly relevant. 12 Terry Cook, ‘Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts’, Archival Science, i (2001), p. 3. 13 See Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance’, Archival Science, ii/3–4 (2002), pp. 1–19. 14 Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vii/2 (June 2009), p. 267. 15 Ibid. 16 Alison Lewis, ‘Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto)biography’, German Life and 267

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17

18 19

20 21 22

Letters, lvi/4 (2003), p. 387, quoted in Wallen, ‘Narrative Tensions’, p. 267. Cook, ‘Archival Science and Postmodernism’, p. 4. For the term ‘social memory’ and ‘collective memory’, see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992). Cook and Schwartz, ‘Archives, Records, and Power’, p. 172. Georges Perec, ‘Think/Classify’ [1985], in Species of Space and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London, 1999), p. 196. Georges Perec, ‘Notes Concerning the Objects That Are on My Work-table’ [1985], ibid., p. 146. About the list in literature and art, see Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen (London, 2009). For a history of different media used for recollection, see Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the Age of Technology (London, 2011).

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1 Emergence 1 The expression ‘archival impulse’ was proposed by Hal Foster to describe the increasing use of archival principles in contemporary art practices. See his ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 3–22. 2 Philip Monk, Disassembling the Archive: Fiona Tan ( Toronto, 2006). 3 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, ma, 1992), p. 353. 4 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Discourse’, in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Bolton, pp. 286–97. 5 Ibid., p. 295. 6 This argument was put forward by Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘Eugène Atget, 1857–1927: The Structure of the Work’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1980. Referred to in Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Discourse’, n. 24, p. 301. 7 An English translation of this essay is included in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, ma, 1995), pp. 47–64. 8 Ibid., p. 51. 268

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

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26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 54. Monk, Disassembling the Archive, n.p. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 62. Monk, Disassembling the Archive, n.p. Ibid. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London, 1984), p. 64. Ibid. Ibid., p. 65. Tim Schlak, ‘Framing Photographs, Denying Archives: The Difficulty of Focusing on Archival Photographs’, Archival Science, viii (2008), p. 85. Joan Schwartz, ‘Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic “Othering”, and the Margins of Archivy’, Archivaria, liv (2002), pp. 142–71. Monk, Disassembling the Archive, n.p. Doris von Drathen, ‘Areal Roots’, Fiona Tan: Disorient (Amsterdam, 2009), p. 7. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Fiona Tan: Place after Place’, ibid., pp. 20–33. Ibid., p. 23. Fiona Tan, ‘Interview with Ana Finel Honigman’, Kultureflash, 6 April 2005, www.kulturflash.net (accessed 16 February 2009). Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London, 1993), p. 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 203. Richards, The Imperial Archive, p. 7. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 203. Richards, The Imperial Archive, p. 6. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983). Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, ny, 1983), p. 344. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Cambridge, ma, 2001), p. 15. Elsaesser, ‘Fiona Tan: Place after Place’, p. 25. For a more elaborate reading of Fiona Tan’s Facing Forward and of some of her other works, see Ernst van Alphen, ‘Shooting Images, 269

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35 36 37 38 39

Throwing Shadows’, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago, 2005), pp. 48–70. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford, 1983). Elsaesser, ‘Fiona Tan: Place after Place’, p. 26. Ibid. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1974). All quotations in this text are taken from Tan’s video. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, p. 344.

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2 Storage 1 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996), p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 2. 3 For a discussion of how and why archival records are socially constructed and maintained entities, see Ciaran Trace, ‘What is Recorded is Never Simply “What Happened”: Record Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture’, Archival Science, ii (2002), pp. 137–59. 4 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 3. 5 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London, 2005), p. 111. 6 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York, 1950), vol. ii, p. 424. 7 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, md, 1984), p. 154. 8 Ibid., p. 151. 9 Ibid., p. 152. 10 Birgit Stöckmann, ‘Marcel Duchamp’, in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (Munich, 1998), p. 121. 11 Stewart, On Longing, p. 161. 12 Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition (London, 1999), p. 12. 13 See ibid., pp. 15–20. 14 Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, in, 1976), p. 10. 15 For a seminal discussion of the important role of the index in contemporary art, see Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: 270

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16

17

18 19

Part 1’ and ‘Notes on the Index: Part 2’, in The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, ma, 1985), pp. 196–209 and 210–20. Delphine Renard, ‘Entretien avec Christian Boltanski’, in Boltanski (Paris, 1984), p. 71. Eng. trans. by Cynthia Campoy, quoted in Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1994), p. 32. For the term ‘Holocaust effect’, see Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, ca, 1997). Mathias Winzer, ‘Collecting, So Normal, So Paradoxical’, in Deep Storage, ed. Schaffner and Winzen, p. 28. The term ‘archivalization’ was coined by Eric Ketelaar. See his essay ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives’, Archival Science, i (2001), pp. 131–41.

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3 Listing 1 Georges Perec, ‘Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die’ (1990), in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (London, 1999), p. 124. 2 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 45. 3 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (London, 2009), p. 15. 4 Ibid., p. 18. 5 Ibid., p. 218. 6 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Aleph’, in The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933–1969, ed. and trans. Norman Thomas de Giovanni (New York, 1970), p. 26. 7 Robert Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven, ct, 2004), pp. 30–31. 8 Christian Boltanski, Les Habitants de Malmö (Malmö, 1993), n.p. 9 Christian Boltanski, Diese Kinder suchen ihre Eltern (Munich, 1994), p. 7. 10 Christian Boltanski, Les Suisses morts (Frankfurt, 1991), p. 86. 11 Christian Boltanski, Inventaire du Cabinet d’art graphique, 1977–1998 (Paris, 2000), n.p. 12 Perec, Species of Spaces, p. 84. 13 Ibid., pp. 21–2. 14 Ibid., p. 91. 271

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15 Ibid., p. 92. 16 Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal (New York, 2010), p. 12. 17 Ibid., p. 33. 18 Georges Perec, Life, a User’s Manual [1978], trans. David Bellos (London, 2008), p. 227. 19 Ibid., p. 226. 20 Leanne Shapton, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry. Saturday, 14 February 2009 (New York, 2008), p. 95. 21 Ibid., p. 53. 22 Sharon Steel, ‘Interview: Leanne Shapton’, Boston Phoenix, 24 March 2009. 23 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London, 1977), pp. 6, 7, 8. 24 Ibid., p. 8. 25 Bice Curiger, ‘Sophie Calle in Conversation’, in Sophie Calle: The Reader (London, 2009), p. 50. 26 Sophie Calle, The Address Book (Paris, 2012), n.p. 27 Ibid., p. 53. 28 John Rajchman, ‘Another View of Abstraction’, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, v (1995), p. 19. 29 Ibid., pp. 17–18.

4 Classification 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. John Ihde (New York, 1994), p. xix. 2 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, xvi/1 (Spring 1986), p. 27. 3 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xvi. 4 Ibid., p. xix. 5 Ibid., p. xx. 6 Ibid., p. xxii. 7 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), pp. 191–2. 8 For clear descriptions of the history of archival science, see Fernanda Ribeiro, ‘Archival Science and Changes in the Paradigm’, Archival Science, i (2001), pp. 295–310, and Hermann Rumschöttel, 272

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9

10 11

12

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13

14 15 16 17 18 19

‘The Development of Archival Science as a Scholarly Discipline’, Archival Science, i (2001), pp. 143–55. Manuel De Landa, ‘The Archive Before and After Foucault’, in Information is Alive, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam, 2003), p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. In archives, interfaces function as the critical nodes through which archivists enable and constrain the interpretation of the past. The interface is a site where power in the Foucauldian sense is negotiated and exercised. It is power exercised over documents and their representation, over the access to them and over the uses of archives. On archival interfaces, see Margaret Hedstrom, ‘Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past’, Archival Science, ii (2002), pp. 21–43. Ydessa Hendeles is one of the most important collectors of contemporary art and of the history of photography. She has her own museum, the Ydessa Hendeles Foundation in Toronto, in which she curates exhibitions from her own collection. For an analysis of her practice of collecting and curating, see Reesa Greenberg, ‘Private Collectors, Museums and Display: A PostHolocaust Perspective’, Jong Holland, i/16 (2000), pp. 29–41. The exhibition that Hendeles curated for the Haus der Kunst in Munich has the same title as her teddy bear installation: Partners. In the case of the exhibition, the title has several meanings. It refers to the collaboration between a public museum and a private collector, between a German institution and a Jewish collector, between Hitler’s former museum and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. For an analysis of this exhibition, see Ernst van Alphen, ‘Die Ausstellung als narratives Kunstwerk / Exhibition as Narrative Work of Art’, in Partners, ed. Chris Dercon and Thomas Weski (Cologne, 2003), pp. 143–85. Ydessa Hendeles, ‘Notes on the Exhibition’, in Partners, ed. Dercon and Weski, p. 212. Ibid., pp. 211–12. Ibid., p. 211. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xviii. Hendeles, ‘Notes on the Exhibition’, p. 215. For an explanation of the trope mise en abyme, see Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, 1997). 273

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20 Mathias Winzer, ‘Collecting, So Normal, So Paradoxical’, in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzer (Munich and New York, 1998), p. 22. 21 Ibid., p. 24. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

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5 Administration 1 Jonathan Watkins, ‘Where “I Don’t Know” is the Right Answer’, in On Kawara (London, 2002), p. 78. 2 Jung-Ah Woo, ‘On Kawara’s Date Paintings: Series of Horror and Boredom’, Art Journal, lxix/3 (2010), p. 65. 3 Ibid. 4 For a comparison of On Kawara with Monet, see Anne Rorimer, ‘The Date Paintings of On Kawara’, Art Institute of Chicago Studies, xvii/2 (1991), pp. 120–37. 5 See Jeff Wall, ‘Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings’, in Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karin Kelly (New York, 1996), vol. i, pp. 135–8. 6 Jung-Ah Woo, ‘On Kawara’s Date Paintings’, p. 71. 7 See Gary Indiana, ‘On the River of No Return’, Village Voice, xxxi/5 (4 February 1986), p. 81. 8 See Franz Meyer, ‘Hanne Darboven’, in Hanne Darboven: Een maand, een jaar, een eeuw: Werken van 1968 tot en met 1974 (Amsterdam, 1975), n.p. 9 Briony Fer, ‘Seriality and the Time of Solitude’, in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (New York, 2004), p. 225. 10 Ibid. 11 Darboven cited by Lucy Lippard, ‘Deep in Numbers’, Artforum, xii (October 1973), p. 35. 12 Mario Kramer, ‘Hanne Darboven’s Mathematical Literature’, in Hanne Darboven: Een maand, een jaar, een eeuw, p. 19. 13 Isabelle Graw, ‘Work Ennobles – I’m Staying Bourgeois (Hanne Darboven)’, in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, ed. C. de Zegher (Cambridge, ma, 1996), p. 252. 274

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14 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. A. Alberro and B. Stimson (Cambridge, ma, 2000), p. 521. 15 Ibid., p. 525. 16 Sol LeWitt, ‘Serial Project #1, 1966’ (1967), n.p.; quoted by Buchloh in ‘Conceptual Art, 1962–1969’, p. 531. 17 Darboven quoted in Klaus Honnef, ‘Grundsätzliches’, in Hanne Darboven: Bismarckzeit (Cologne, 1979), n.p. 18 Dan Adler, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History, 1880–1983 (London, 2009), p. 82. 19 Ibid., p. 40. 20 Briony Fer, ‘Hanne Darboven: Seriality and the Time of Solitude’, in Conceptual Art, ed. Corris, p. 230. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 233.

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6 Depletion 1 ‘Ces femmes, ces hommes, ces bureaux administratifs conservent leurs visages, déposés à l’arrivée. Les noms aussi sont déposés. Des noms de vingt-deux nations. Ils remplissent des centaines de registres, des milliers de fichiers. Un trait rouge biffe les morts.’ 2 ‘Tout est récupéré. Voici les réserves des nazis en guerre, leurs greniers. Rien que des cheveaux de femmes . . . A 15 pfennigs le kilo, on en fait du tissu. Avec les os . . . des engrais, ou tout au moins on essaie. Avec les corps . . . mais on ne peut plus rien dire . . . avec les corps, on veut fabriquer du savon.’ 3 Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (New York, 2005), p. 49. 4 See Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, ca, 1997). The chapters ‘Deadly Historians: Boltanski’s interventions in Holocaust Historiography’ and ‘The Re-vivifying Artist’ contain more extensive discussions of Boltanski’s work. 5 Georgia Mash, ‘The White and the Black’, quoted in Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1994), p. 128. 6 Interview with Christian Boltanski by Démosthènes Davvetas, New Art, i (October 1986), p. 20. 7 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, p. 143. 275

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8 Ibid. 9 Delphine Renard, ‘Interview with Christian Boltanski’, 1984. Quoted in Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, p. 176. 10 See Marianne Hirsch’s analysis of the family portrait in ‘Masking the Subject: Practising Theory’, in The Point of Theory: Practising Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge Boer (Amsterdam, 1994). She uses Lacanian concepts for that which Boltanski calls ‘a cultural set of codes’. The subjectivities of portrayed persons in family portraits are ‘masked’ because ‘Existing in the familial, the subject is subjected to the familial gaze and constructed through a series of familial looks’ (p. 114). 11 Renard, ‘Interview with Christian Boltanski’, quoted in Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, p. 177. 12 For a discussion of the role archiving played in Nazi Germany, see Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science, ii (2002), pp. 221–38. 13 In Czechoslovakia the Nazis brought Jewish religious articles from 153 provincial communities to Prague for the establishment of this ‘Central Museum of the Extinguished Jewish Race’. Included were 5,400 religious objects, 24,500 prayer books and 6,070 artefacts of historical value. After the end of the war it became the core of the Jewish Museum of Prague. See Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York, 1990), p. 118. 14 See David Hawk, ‘The Photographic Record’, in Cambodia, 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death, ed. Karl D. Jackson (Princeton, nj, 1989), p. 210. 15 See David Chandler, ‘The Pathology of Terror in Pol Pot’s Cambodia’, in The Killing Fields, ed. Chris Riley and Douglas Niven (Santa Fe, nm, 1996), pp. 102–9. 16 Ibid., p. 103. 17 Bruce P. Montgomery, ‘Fact-finding by Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations: Challenges, Strategies, and the Shaping of Archival Evidence’, Archivaria, 58 (2004), pp. 21–50 (p. 24). 18 Not only Nazi Germany can be mentioned here, but also South Africa under apartheid. Verne Harris describes this oppressive society as a ‘huge bureaucracy, which reached into almost every aspect of citizens’ lives, generated a formidable memory resource. Control over racial classification, employment, movement, association, purchase of property, recreation, and so on, all 276

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19 20 21

22 23

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24 25 26

27

were documented by thousands of government offices. This was supplemented by the security police and numerous other state intelligence bodies as well as by large quantities of records confiscated from individuals and organisations’. Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa (Pretoria, 2002), p. 8. Another example of a totalitarian regime using an archival organization for its oppressive politics is Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 until 1983. For how this regime used photography and archives, see Vikki Bell, ‘On Fernando’s Photograph: The Biopolitics of Aparición in Contemporary Argentina’, Theory, Culture & Society, xxvii/4 (2010), pp. 69–89. Chandler, ‘The Pathology of Terror in Pol Pot’s Cambodia’, p. 106. Thierry de Duve, ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, October, 125 (Summer 2008), p. 3. Jean-Claude Pomonti, ‘Nhen Ein, photographe en chef des Khmers rouges’, Le Monde, 5 July 1997; quoted in de Duve, ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, p. 4. Quoted by Thierry de Duve ibid., p. 11. Juan I-Jong, ‘An Interview with Christopher Riley and Douglas Niven’, Photographers International, 19 (April 1995), pp. 96, 98; quoted in de Duve, ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, p. 11. De Duve, ‘Art in the Face of Radical Evil’, p. 15. Ibid., p. 6. According to anthropologist Lindsey French, in ‘Exhibiting Terror’, in Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, ed. Mark Philip Bradley and Patrice Petro (New Brunswick, nj, 2002), pp. 131–55; quoted in Stéphanie Benzaquen, ‘Remediating Genocidal Images into Artworks: The Case of the Tuol Sleng Mug Shots’, re-bus, v (Summer 2010), p. 3. Benzaquen, ‘Remediating Genocidal Images into Artworks’, p. 12.

7 Reanimation 1 Santu Mofokeng, ‘The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1900s’, in Chasing Shadows, ed. Corinne Diserens (Munich, 2011), p. 230. 2 Mark Westmoreland, ‘You Cannot Partition Desire: Akram Zaatari’s Creative Motivations’, in Akram Zaatari: El molesto asunto / The Uneasy Subject (León, 2011), p. 35. 277

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3 Ibid., p. 43. 4 Akram Zaatari, ‘Interview’, in Indicated by Signs, ed. Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnár (Bonn, 2010), p. 120. 5 The complete contents of the archive are published in The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad (Cologne, 2006). 6 Gunilla Knape, ‘Afterword’, in Walid Raad: I Might Die before I Get a Rifle, ed. Knape (Göttingen, 2011), p. 99. 7 Hélène Chouteau-Matikan, ‘War, There, Over There’, in Walid Raad: I Might Die before I Get a Rifle, ed. Knape, p. 104. 8 Ibid., p. 105. 9 Ibid. 10 Sven Spieker, ‘At the Center of Mitteleuropa: A Conversation with Péter Forgács’, Artmargins (20 May 2002), available at www.artmargins.com. 11 Kaja Silverman, ‘Waiting, Hoping, among the Ruins of All the Rest’, in Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács, ed. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov (Minneapolis, mn, 2011), pp. 96–118. 12 Ibid., p. 102. 13 Spieker, ‘At the Center of Mitteleuropa’. 14 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive’, in Atlas: The Reader (London, 2003), p. 109. 15 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, ma, 1995), p. 58. 16 Ibid., p. 49. 17 Ibid., p. 50. 18 Ibid., p. 61. 19 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, ca, 2003), p. 1. 20 Ibid., p. 18. 21 Kracauer, ‘Photography’, p. 62. 22 Jill Bennett, lecture at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 July 2005.

278

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Stöckmann, Birgit, ‘Marcel Duchamp’, in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (Munich, 1998), pp. 120–23 Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. C. Hamilton et al. (Cape Town, 2002), pp. 83–102 Tan, Fiona, ‘Interview with Ana Finel Honigman’, Kultureflash, 6 April 2005, www.kultureflash.net Thomassen, Theo, ‘A First Introduction to Archival Science’, Archival Science, i (2002), pp. 373–85 Trace, Ciaran B., ‘What Is Recorded Is Never Simply “What Happened”: Record Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture’, Archival Science, ii (2002), pp. 137–59 Wall, Jeff, ‘Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings’, in Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karin Kelly (New York, 1996), vol. i, pp. 135–8 Wallen, Jeffrey, ‘Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vii/2 (June 2009), pp. 261–79 Watkins, Jonathan, ‘Where “I Don’t Know” is the Right Answer’, in On Kawara (London, 2002), pp. 40–109 Westmoreland, Mark, ‘You Cannot Partition Desire: Akram Zaatari’s Creative Motivations’, in Akram Zaatari: El molesto asunto / The Uneasy Subject, ed. Juan Vicente Aliaga (León, 2011), pp. 25–51 White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, md, 1973) ——, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, md, 1987) Winzer, Mathias, ‘Collecting, So Normal, So Paradoxical’, in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Mathias Winzen (Munich and New York, 1998), pp. 22–31 Woo, Jung-Ah, ‘On Kawara’s Date Paintings: Series of Horror and Boredom’, Art Journal, lxix/3 (2010), pp. 62–72 Yates, Frances A., The Art of Memory (London, 1966) Zaatari, Akram, Hashem El Madani: Promenades. An Ungoing Project by Akram Zaatari (Beirut, 2007) ——, ‘Interview’, in Indicated by Signs, ed. Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnár (Bonn, 2010), pp. 118–27 286

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——, The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of Transition in a Modernizing Society (Beirut, 1999) Zuylen, Marina van, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca, ny, 2005)

Filmography

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Fotoamator, dir. Dariusz Jabłon´ski (Koch Lorber, 1998) [dvd] The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, dir. Péter Forgács (Lumen Film, 1997) [vhs cassette] El perro negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War, dir. Péter Forgács (Lumen Film, 2005) [vhs cassette]

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Acknowledgements

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I started working on this book during my stay as Clark-Oakley Humanities Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Williams College in 2007. I continued working on it during my residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in 2010 and at the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in 2011. I finished the book when I was fellow at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne from 2012–13. I am deeply grateful to all these institutions for the exceptional hospitality I enjoyed there and for the stimulating environment they offered me.

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List of Illustrations

1 Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, 1867, albumen print from collodion negative, 20 × 27 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. © 2013. Image copyright National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc / Art Resource / Scala, Florence. 2 Eugène Atget, Coiffeur, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Paris, 1912, albumen silver print, 9 3/8 × 7 in (24 × 18 cm). Museum of Modern Art (moma), New York, Abbott-Levy Collection, partial gift of Shirley C. Burden. © 2013. Digital image Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. 3 August Sander, People of the Twentieth Century: National Socialist, 1938. Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. 4 August Sander, People of the Twentieth Century: Navvy, Ruhr, c. 1928/9. Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. 5 Fiona Tan, Countenance, 2002, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 6 Fiona Tan, Countenance, 2002, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 7 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward, 1999, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 8 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward, 1999, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 9 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward, 1999, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 10 Fiona Tan, Facing Forward, 1999, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 291

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11 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), 1934, box containing 94 collotype reproductions on various papers, box 13 1/16 × 11 × 1 in (33.2 × 27.9 × 2.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art (moma), New York. Publisher Edition Rrose Sélavy (the artist), Paris; printer Vigier et Brumssen, Paris; edition of 320. © 2013. Digital image Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. 12 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), 1934, box containing 94 collotype reproductions on various papers, box 13 1/16 × 11 × 1 in (33.2 × 27.9 × 2.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art (moma), New York. Publisher Edition Rrose Sélavy (the artist), Paris; printer Vigier et Brumssen, Paris; edition of 320. © 2013. Digital image Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. 13 Marcel Duchamp, Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), 1935–41, leather valise containing miniature replicas, photographs, colour reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one ‘original’ drawing (The Large Glass, collotype on celluloid, 7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in / 19 × 23.5 cm), 16 × 15 × 4 in (40.7 × 38.1 × 10.2 cm). Museum of Modern Art (moma), New York. © 2013. Digital image Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence. 14 Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 19th-century Section, 1968, installation view, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1972. Courtesy and © Pictoright, Amsterdam. 15 Marcel Broodthaers, Figural Section (The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today), 1972, installation detail. Courtesy and © Pictoright, Amsterdam. 16 Marcel Broodthaers, Figural Section (The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today), 1972, installation detail. Courtesy and © Pictoright, Amsterdam. 17 Christian Boltanski, Inventory of Objects that Belonged to a Woman of Bois-Colombes, 1974, installation view, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 18 Christian Boltanski, The Clothes of François C., 1972, black-andwhite photographs, tin frames, glass, each photograph 22.5 × 30.5 cm. Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, on loan from the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 292

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19 Christian Boltanski, Reference Vitrines, 1969–70, various objects in wooden vitrine with Plexiglas, 120 × 70 × 15 cm. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 20 Christian Boltanski, Canada, 1988, second-hand clothing, installation view, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 21 Annette Messager, Collection Album: Terms Used for Women, 1972–3, text on 49 pieces of cardboard, cardboard album with a string closure, 9 × 14 cm. Collection of the artist. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 22 Annette Messager, Collection Album no. 10: The Men I Don’t Love, 1972, ink on black-and-white photograph, 23 × 28 cm. Collection of the artist. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 23 Annette Messager, My Collection of Proverbs, 1974, 120 pieces of embroidered fabric, 35 × 28 cm each. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Musée des Beaux-Arts Dole; Frac Lorraine. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 24 Christian Boltanski, cover of Les Habitants de Malmö, 1993. Malmö Konsthall 1994. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 25 List of names on the Vietnam Memorial, Washington, dc. 26 Christian Boltanski, cover of Catalogue: Books, Printed Matter, Ephemera, 1966–1991 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 1992). Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 27 Christian Boltanski, plastic bag containing Archives 01 (Éditions 591, Paris, 2009). Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 28 Christian Boltanski, cover of Archives 01 (Éditions 591, Paris, 2009). Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 29 Christian Boltanski, Lost, cover (1994). Published by cca and Tramway, Glasgow, and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in association with Glasgow School of Art and The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 30 Christian Boltanski, Lost, contents (1994). Published by cca and Tramway, Glasgow, and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in association with Glasgow School of Art and The Henry Moore 293

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31

32

33 34

35

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38

39

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Sculpture Trust. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Christian Boltanski, Lost, contents (1994). Published by cca and Tramway, Glasgow, and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in association with Glasgow School of Art and The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Christian Boltanski, Lost, contents (1994). Published by cca and Tramway, Glasgow, and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in association with Glasgow School of Art and The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Georges Perec, map of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, from Life, a User’s Manual (Vintage Classics, London, 2008). Leanne Shapton, page from Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leone Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2009). Leanne Shapton, page from Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leone Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2009). Sophie Calle, page from The Sleepers (1979). Copyright © the artist and Galerie Perrotin, Paris. Ydessa Hendeles, Partners: The Teddy Bear Project, 2002. Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo by Robert Keziere. © Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Ydessa Hendeles, Partners: The Teddy Bear Project, 2002. Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo by Robert Keziere. © Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Ydessa Hendeles, Partners: The Teddy Bear Project, 2002. Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo by Robert Keziere. © Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Ydessa Hendeles, Partners: The Teddy Bear Project, 2002. Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo by Robert Keziere. © Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. 294

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41 Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001, polyester, resin, clothing, leather boots, human hair. Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo by Robert Keziere. © Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. 42 Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001, polyester, resin, clothing, leather boots, human hair. Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo by Robert Keziere. © Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. 43 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants, 2006, book of photographic works. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Annie Gentils. 44 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants, 2006, book of photographic works. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Annie Gentils. 45 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants, 2006, book of photographic works. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Annie Gentils. 46 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants, 2006, book of photographic works. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Annie Gentils. 47 Els Vanden Meersch, Implants, 2006, book of photographic works. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Annie Gentils. 48 Hanne Darboven, One Century – Dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1971–82, 899 sheets, typewriter, ink, ballpoint pen, postcards, wooden frames, felt pen, bust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (plaster cast after Christian Daniel Rauch), 29.5 × 21 cm. mmk Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. © A. Schneider, Frankfurt am Main. 49 Hanne Darboven, Card Index: Filing Cabinet, Part 2, 1975, 600 works on paper, ink, on 10 panels, each 188 × 221 cm. Collection Tate Modern, London. 50 Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, 1980–83, installation view, Dia: Beacon, Beacon, ny. Lannan Foundation, long-term loan. Photo Florian Holzherr. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. 51 Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, 1980–83, installation view, Dia: Beacon, Beacon, ny. Lannan Foundation, long-term loan. Photo Florian Holzherr. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. 52 Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte, 1880–1983, 1980–83, installation view, Dia: Beacon, Beacon, ny. Lannan Foundation; long-term loan. Photo Florian Holzherr. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. 53 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 295

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54 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 55 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 56 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 57 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 58 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 59 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 60 Alain Resnais, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), still. Courtesy Argos Films, Paris. 61 Arman, Massacre of the Innocents II (Accumulations series), 1961, dolls’ parts in wooden box, 119 × 48 × 11 cm. Private collection. © 2013. bi, adagp, Paris / Scala, Florence. 62 Christian Boltanski, Chases High School, 1988, installation: black-and-white photographs, photomechanical prints, metal lamps (detail). © Christian Boltanski. 63 Christian Boltanski, The Dead Swiss, 1991, black-and-white photographs, glass, metal lamps. Installation view, Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. © Christian Boltanski. 64 Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, 1985, black-and-white photograph, lights with wire. Installation detail, Le Consortium, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Dijon, France. Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 65 Christian Boltanski, page from Sans-Souci (Portkus and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Frankfurt am Main and Cologne, 1991). Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 66 Christian Boltanski, page from Sans-Souci (Portkus and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Frankfurt am Main and Cologne, 1991). Copyright © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 67 Tuol Sleng Mug Shot, black-and-white photograph. © Chris Riley and Douglas Niven. 68 Tuol Sleng Mug Shot, black-and-white photograph. © Chris Riley and Douglas Niven. 296

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69 Tuol Sleng Mug Shot, black-and-white photograph. © Chris Riley and Douglas Niven. 70 Display of Tuol Sleng Mug Shots in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 71 Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, c. 2011. © Santu Mofokeng. Images courtesy Lunetta Bartz, maker, Johannesburg. 72 Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, c. 2011. © Santu Mofokeng. Images courtesy Lunetta Bartz, maker, Johannesburg. 73 Akram Zaatari, Another Resolution, 1998, Lara Baladi, photograph. © Akram Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation. Image courtesy Sfeir-Semeler Gallery, Beirut. 74 Akram Zaatari, Another Resolution, 1998, Jean-Pierre Zahar, photograph. © Akram Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation. Image courtesy Sfeir-Semeler Gallery, Beirut. 75 Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, plate 57, 2003. 76 Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire, plate 58, 2003. 77 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, 1997, still. 78 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, 1997, still. 79 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, 1997, still. 80 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, 1997, still. 81 Péter Forgács, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, 1997, still. 82 Dariusz Jabło´nski, Fotoamator (Photographer, 1998), still. 83 Dariusz Jabło´nski, Fotoamator (Photographer, 1998), still. 84 Péter Forgács, El perro negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War (The Black Dog, 2005), still. 85 Péter Forgács, El perro negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War (The Black Dog, 2005), still. 86 Péter Forgács, El perro negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War (The Black Dog, 2005), still. 87 Péter Forgács, El perro negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War (The Black Dog, 2005), still.

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Index Figures in italic are illustration numbers

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address book 132 administration 22, 42, 163–86, 189, 190, 252 aesthetic discourse 36 anomic archives 157–62 appropriation 89 archival box 166 Arman 194–5, 61 artist’s book 19, 99, 110, 172 Atget, Eugène 24, 26, 2 Atlas Group, The 232–5, 75, 76 auction catalogue 123–9 Auschwitz 187–93, 238, 241 Bal, Mieke 148 Barthes, Roland 10, 31, 32, 49, 129, 130, 134, 244 Beckett, Samuel 135 Belknap, Robert 97 Bertillon, Alphonse 23, 26 Beuys, Joseph 194 Boltanski, Christian 69–77, 88, 93, 94, 98–111, 153, 195–207, 222, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29–32, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 Borges, Jorge Luis 96, 111, 137, 139, 148, 162

Broodthaers, Marcel 64–9, 88, 14, 15, 16 Buchloh, Benjamin 157, 247 Butor, Michel 18 Calle, Sophie 130–34, 136, 36 Calvino, Italo 150, 151 catalogue 92, 99, 103, 107, 180 category 33, 54, 66, 110, 140, 157, 183, 209, 243, 247 Cattelan, Maurizio 150–52, 153, 41, 42 classification 22, 26, 27, 33, 36, 40, 42, 54, 60, 71, 137–62, 172 collection 9, 55–89, 91, 156 colonialism 20, 21, 40–52, 232 comprehensive knowledge 41, 43 concentration camp 76, 152, 161, 189–93, 210, 241 Cook, Terry 13, 16 Darboven, Hanne 171–86, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 database 9, 10, 12, 16, 144 Deleuze, Gilles 135, 136 depletion 187–223 Derrida, Jacques 12, 13, 53, 54, 57, 68 299

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discursive 225 Duchamp, Marcel 57–64, 69, 74, 75, 88, 103, 11, 12, 13

identity 144, 148, 149, 88, 182, 243 index 69–77, 88, 182, 243 inventory 18, 22, 69, 72, 170, 175, 195

Eco, Umberto 70, 94, 95, 97 Elsaesser, Thomas 45, 46 episteme 141, 143 family album 28, 31, 45, 205–7 Fer, Brionay 173, 184, 186 filing cabinet 19, 23, 24, 42, 57, 58, 154, 162, 172, 177 Forgács, Péter 236–47, 256–65, 266, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87 Foucault, Michel 12, 140–43, 148, 153, 155 Freud, Sigmund 13

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Galton, Francis 23, 26 Genewein, Walter 252–5 genocide 211, 214–17, 222, 223, 248 Gordon, Douglas 152, 241 Halbwachs, Maurice 251 Hendeles, Ydessa 76, 143–53, 162, 241, 37, 38, 39, 40 heterotopia 139–44 historicism 249, 250, 257 historiography 256–65 Hitler, Adolf 150–52, 209, 210, 246 Holocaust 77, 149, 198, 199, 208, 242, 264 Holocaust effect 77, 99, 199, 208, 210 home movies 237–46, 258, 259 Huyssen, Andreas 247, 250, 251

Jabło´nski, Dariusz 236, 251–6, 265, 266, 82, 83 James, William 56 Joyce, James 93 Kawara, On 163–71, 186 Khmer Rouge 211–23 Kracauer, Siegfried 27–31, 248–50, 257, 258, 259, 266 Krauss, Rosalind 23, 24, 67 LaCapra, Dominique 44 Lin, Maya 102 Lippard, Lucy 177 listing 9, 18, 22, 41, 91–136, 179, 209 Lyotard, Jean-François 8, 9 Manovich, Lev 9–11 Magritte, René 65 Meersch, Els Vanden 153–62, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47 memorial 102, 196, 202, 204, 218 memory 12, 196, 202, 204, 218 memory crisis 247–51, 265 memory image 27, 29, 248 Messager, Annette 77–87, 89, 21, 22, 23 mnemonic function 111–22, 130 Mofokeng, Santu 227–8, 235, 237, 265, 71, 72 Monk, Philip 22, 28, 29 museum 64–6, 68, 72, 74, 210, 211

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narrative 7–9, 116, 117, 121, 122, 127, 129, 133, 170, 172, 216, 235 Nazism 34, 36, 75, 77, 187, 207–11, 213, 238, 247 Niven, Douglas 218–20 Noah’s Ark 60–61 oeuvre 61–4, 75, 88 O’Sullivan, Timothy 23, 1

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paradigm 10–12, 14 Perec, Georges 17, 18, 92, 93, 112–22, 128–30, 134, 135, 33 photography 19, 21–40, 45, 79, 99, 131, 145, 154, 157, 161, 192, 196–8, 202, 206, 212, 217, 218–20, 227–34, 245, 255 portrait 33, 37, 38, 40, 45, 196–200, 202, 204–7 positivism 22, 23, 26, 52 postmodernism 8, 13 preposterous history 148 prison 156 Proust, Marcel 114 Raad, Walid (The Atlas Group) 232–5, 237, 265, 75, 76 Rajchman, John 135, 136 reanimation 225–66 referentiality 30, 73, 101–3, 160, 168, 170, 174, 198 Resnais, Alain 187–93, 194, 199, 208, 209, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Richards, Thomas 41 Richter, Gerhard 153, 157 Riley, Christopher 218–20

Sander, August 33–7, 45, 3, 4 Saussure, Ferdinand de 10 Schwartz, Joan 16, 32 Sekula, Allan 22–3 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 238–9, 246, 247 Shapton, Leanne 123–9, 130, 134, 135, 35 Sicherheitsdienst 208 Silverman, Kaja 243, 244 Spanish Civil War 256, 262–5 Spivak, Gayatri 43 ss (Schutzstaffel) 190, 208, 238 Stasi (Ministry for State Security) 15 Stewart, Susan 56, 60 storage 18, 41, 53–89, 91, 121, 192 syntagm 10, 11 Szemzo´´, Tibor 237 Tan, Fiona 37–40, 45–50, 52, 5, 6, 7, 8 tattoo 193, 209, 213 taxonomy 75, 146, 172 telephone directory 91, 98–100 testimony 32, 36, 260 Tuol Sleng 211–23, 67, 68, 69, 70 typology 144–8 Vietnam War memorial, Washington, dc 102–3, 25 vitrine 41, 73 Wallen, Jeffrey 14, 15 Zaatari, Akram 228–32, 235, 265, 73, 74

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