The Big Archive by Sven Spieker

The Big Archive by Sven Spieker

The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art.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.

Spieker, Sven: - Sven Spieker is Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of ARTmargins. His books include The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262195706
ISBN 10	0262195704
Title	The Big Archive
Author	Sven Spieker
Series	The Big Archive
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2008-10-01
Number of pages	240
Prizes	Winner of Winner, Scholarly Illustrated Category, 2009 AAUP Book, Journal, and Jacket Show 2009
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.