Academic Sessions: London 2008
Archival Impulse: Location and No-Place
Session Convenor:
Dan Smith, (Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London) Contact at: Morningside Cottage, Hendon Lane, London, N3 1TT, Tel: 020 8349 2705 wunderkammer@btinternet.com
Speakers:
Sue Breakell (Tate, London) Perspectives: Negotiating the archive
Donald Preziosi (UCLA and Oxford University) ‘A Zoological Garden of Caged Tendencies’: Before and beyond impulsive Art History
Sas Mays (University of Westminster) Archival Indeterminacy in Foster, Deleuze, and Frampton
Jae Emerling (The University of North Carolina) The Origin and the Law, or Between an Archive and a Collection
Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) Archival Moments/ Anonymous History
Jo Melvin (Chelsea College of Art and Design) The Phenomenal Archive of Studio International 1965– 1975
Susan Pui San Lok (Middlesex University) Tempering the Archive
Barnaby Haran (University College London) Damaged Americanism: Walker Evan’s Photographs of Victorian Architecture
Session Absract:
Does the ubiquity of the terms ‘archive’ and ‘archival’ in recent discourse dilute their critical uses and interpretations? Is there a need to address archival forms with a greater degree of qualitative specificity? Can critical engagements with archives shed light on the relationships between theory, history, institution, studio and market?
One such attempt to reinvest the term with some critical definition is Hal Foster’s essay ‘The Archival Impulse’, in which he identifies a desire to retrieve and materialise historical material, often in the production of new archives. These practices may follow the model of artist as curator, and play on the category of collection, but they are not necessarily concerned with institutional or representational critique.
Yet these private archives do question public ones, as perverse orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large. Foster argues that in making connections between things that cannot be connected, these archives tend to underscore the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. For Foster, there is within certain forms of archival artwork a redemptive aspect: within the suggestion of possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations is an inherent possibility of transforming the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia.
What might this idea of archival impulse, and other recent accounts of archives and archival forms, offer for readings of the spaces of studio, display, collection and exchange? How useful are critical negotiations of archival forms as they intersect strata of social, institutional and psychic space? With Foster’s account in mind, this session will address these questions through drawing together critical responses to notions of archive in recent theory and practice.
Dan Smith, (Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London) Contact at: Morningside Cottage, Hendon Lane, London, N3 1TT, Tel: 020 8349 2705 wunderkammer@btinternet.com
Speakers:
Sue Breakell (Tate, London) Perspectives: Negotiating the archive
Donald Preziosi (UCLA and Oxford University) ‘A Zoological Garden of Caged Tendencies’: Before and beyond impulsive Art History
Sas Mays (University of Westminster) Archival Indeterminacy in Foster, Deleuze, and Frampton
Jae Emerling (The University of North Carolina) The Origin and the Law, or Between an Archive and a Collection
Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) Archival Moments/ Anonymous History
Jo Melvin (Chelsea College of Art and Design) The Phenomenal Archive of Studio International 1965– 1975
Susan Pui San Lok (Middlesex University) Tempering the Archive
Barnaby Haran (University College London) Damaged Americanism: Walker Evan’s Photographs of Victorian Architecture
Session Absract:
Does the ubiquity of the terms ‘archive’ and ‘archival’ in recent discourse dilute their critical uses and interpretations? Is there a need to address archival forms with a greater degree of qualitative specificity? Can critical engagements with archives shed light on the relationships between theory, history, institution, studio and market?
One such attempt to reinvest the term with some critical definition is Hal Foster’s essay ‘The Archival Impulse’, in which he identifies a desire to retrieve and materialise historical material, often in the production of new archives. These practices may follow the model of artist as curator, and play on the category of collection, but they are not necessarily concerned with institutional or representational critique.
Yet these private archives do question public ones, as perverse orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large. Foster argues that in making connections between things that cannot be connected, these archives tend to underscore the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. For Foster, there is within certain forms of archival artwork a redemptive aspect: within the suggestion of possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations is an inherent possibility of transforming the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia.
What might this idea of archival impulse, and other recent accounts of archives and archival forms, offer for readings of the spaces of studio, display, collection and exchange? How useful are critical negotiations of archival forms as they intersect strata of social, institutional and psychic space? With Foster’s account in mind, this session will address these questions through drawing together critical responses to notions of archive in recent theory and practice.