Jun 23, 2008
Archive references
Today, I had a moment to read the introductory essay ‘Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument’, by Okwui Enwezor in the book Okwui Enwezor, ‘Archive Fever, Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’, International Center of Photography:New York, Steidl: Gottingen, 2008.
The aim is not to produce a theory of the archive but to show ways in which the archival documents, information gathering and data-driven analysis, the contradictions of master narratives, the inventions of counter archives and thus counter-narratives, the projection of the social imagination into sites of testimony, witnessing, and more inform the practices of contemporary art. p. 22
…as part of the a broad culture of sampling, sharing, and recombining of visual data in infinite calibrations of users and receivers. We are fundamentally concerned with the overlay of the iconographic, taxonomic, indexical, typological, and archaeological means by which artists generate new historical as well as analytical readings of the archive. p. 23
Some of the references I noted in this essay:
Books
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
W.J.T Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
MIT Press Journals
Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, Fall 2004, Vol. -, No. , Pages 3-22
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287042379847