| Abstract: | The article outlines the place of the idea of archive on the conceptual map
of art practices. The concept of archive has gained a lot of momentum in
the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, not merely as a functional
tool for preserving cultural heritage but as a central issue regarding cultural
memory and the understanding of, as well as dealing with, the reality. The
first part of the article begins by pointing to the archaeological approach in
the humanities, in the works by Michel Foucault. Next the theory of new
media object by Lev Manovich is presented, which integrates the database
of multimedia materials and a multiplicity, i. e. an archive, of interfaces. The
technical level and the cultural level of the computer-based communication
are considered. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has introduced a distinction in the
understanding of avant-garde art practices between the aesthetics of montage/
collage and the aesthetics of archive, which does not allow for the elements
presented together to create a new unified whole. The inventors of
the photomontage already after 1925 turn towards a didactical curation of
photographic collections thereby rejecting the effects of the shock stemming
from a surprising juxtaposition. The German artists after the 2nd World War
connect the archival art to the traumatic memory. The next step is the institutional
critique (of the modern museum) of Marcel Broodthaers, which
considers the archive as the law of what can be said (Foucault), considering
the current discourses and dispositifs. Damien Hirst is also presented
from the institutional-critique point of view. The nanotechnology and the
contemporary digitized reality are both a sort of discursive realities, that can
be construed as a dispersion of regularities that have no natural hierarchical
order – the nanotechnology homogenizes the world of materials on the
atomic scale, dispensing with the traditional divisions of the material world,
such as organic, inorganic etc. The mediatisation of architecture and environment
transforms the world into a surface of statements: the increasingly
manipulated reality becomes itself a window into the cultural archive,
according to Peter Weibel. The photographic reflections and their theorization
by Allan Sekula are used to point to the duality of realism and nominalism
in philosophy: realism of general terms is needed, unless the world
disintegrates into fragmentariness of particular cases. Starting from photographs,
criminology attempts to create the criminal type, whereas criminalistics
nominalistically chases this particular criminal body. Lev Manovich’s
synthetic realism is presented as an uneven simulation of reality in new
media, which makes it archive-like, a constellation of signs that represent
(photo)realism. The second part of the article explains in detail Walter Benjamin’s
theory of the German counter-reformation Trauerspiel (mourning
play) from his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), and aligns it with
his theory of the technical media, e.g. from his famous paper The Work Art
in the Age of Technical Reproduction. The reality and the artwork are both
archive-like, but not in an empirical way, starting from experience, but and
archive of ruins, filed sign vehicles that have lost all their meanings. Everything
is corpse-like, which ominously points towards the impending holocaust.
In the conclusion of the second part of the article a moment from a
digital video by Slovene video artist Srečo Dragan, who together with Nuša
Dragan is the author of the first video in former Yugoslavia in 1969, is analysed.
Dragan’s Rotas Axis Mundi (1995/96) video deals with the war in Bosnia
in a way that does not betray the victims by exploiting their suffering by
making it representable, even spectacular, and integrating it into the cultural
industry (as criticized by the Frankfurt School). |
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