The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer
needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the "living" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of
ways--from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's "anemic archive" of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan
Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive--as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science
and art--and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.
Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such
contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of
the historical process.
Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies--the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern
visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive
offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.
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Food & the Public Sphere
$1,223 -
Crags and Ravines Make a Marvellous View: A Study of Wu Bin’s Unique 17th Century Scroll Painting "Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock"
$3,375 -
Destruction Rites: Ephemerality and Demolition in Postwar Visual Culture
$4,455 -
Floating Time: Chinese Prints 1954-2002
$1,225 -
Amedeo Modigliani
$698 -
William Van Alen, Fred T. Ley and the Chrysler Building
$1,798 -
Critical Practice: Theorists and Creativity
$3,330 -
Entangled: Threads and Making
$1,223 -
100 Boots: A Book of Postcards
$453 -
Interpreting Visual Art: A Survey of Cognitive Research About Pictures
$3,598 -
Franz West: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, 95–15
$1,925 -
Albert Duvall Quigley: Artist, Musician, Framemaker, 1891-1961
$1,050 -
Culture and Commerce: Cultural Policy and Economic Value in the Creative Industries
$1,798 -
The Form of Meaning / the Meaning of Form: Studies in the History of Art from Late Antiquity to Jackson Pollock
$13,500 -
Fred Sandback: Vertical Constructions
$1,925 -
Art and Text
$1,048 -
Sukhdev Sandhu
$350 -
The Chasuble of Thomas Becket: A Biography
$5,400 -
Curatorial Roundtable
$350 -
The Paragone in Nineteenth-century Art
$6,750