Paris, 2018

Archives have made a compelling entry into contemporary art over the past fifteen years. Choosing to adopt Michel Foucault’s concept in The Archaeology of Knowledge rather than the stricter definition used by international cultural heritage committees, artists throughout the world, individually or collectively, have developed practices and entire series of works that either transform documents into archives, or consist of collecting traces, objects or testimonies. Alternatively, they use archives as an artistic practice or construct their oeuvre as a unique archive. From conceptual art to performance, very few fields in contempo- rary art have resisted the “allure” of the archive¹.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, this omnipresence has been interconnected with a very strong social demand and what appears to be a desire to keep records of the past, which have been claimed by groups (mostly political, professional, sexual, or ethical) with more or less constituted identities or visibility. Archival holdings have therefore been formed as part or independently from traditional archival institutions: associations have been founded to conserve, bring to light, and reproduce these new archives. This appropriation of memory has taken unprecedented forms—videos, digital data, libraries, objects—differentiating itself from the distinctions of documents, objects, works. Social demand has fueled an interest in artworks raising the issue of the archive and its truths.

Major cultural institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, have also started to build artwork archives, in parallel with the regulatory archive collections from public institutions which are destined, in France, for the National Archives. The Kandinsky Library is exemplary from this point of view, with a collection that includes the archives of artists, magazines, and collectives. Artists donate or sell their archives in the same way that writers and social scientists (philosophers, sociologists, historians, or anthropologists) began to do in the late 1980s. We can still remember the moment when Guy Debord or André Breton’s archives were placed on the market.

The intention of this book is to offer the hypothesis that, while major archives continue to be established, a less well-known and promoted—yet equally important—type of archive is growing, the curator’s archive. Through a series of interviews, Michela Alessandrini offers us the opportunity to read the thoughts and opinions of curators from all generations, women and men with different cultural backgrounds, living and working in various distinctive ways. This is also an opportunity to reflect on the content of these archives, and how closely connected they are to curating.

In the mid-1980s, the archive world in France was taken aback by the name given to an institution: Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC). This archival collection was created to encourage interest in traces left by the essential yet neglected world of publishing, and by the singular connection between author and publisher. The relationship is similar to that which brings artists together with two main figures in the art world, whose roles sometimes overlap, that is, the gallerist and the curator. According to art historians, curators are newcomers to the contemporary art world—the fifth element after the artist, gallerist, critic and the collector (public or private). Curators’ archives are part of this complex setup. They are even sometimes confused with those of other specialists, such as critics for example. It is interesting to read—particularly in Hou Hanru’s interview—how the exhibition’s archive fuels a meta-discourse that inspires a full range of publications, courses, and workshops on the art of exhibition-making. In Deleuzian language, this would appear to be a knowledge construct that uses a discourse which finds its inspiration in curators’ archives. Archives, in this sense, extend the curator’s gesture, and fix a moment in time, with joint consequences. On the one hand, curators create an oeuvre—Hans Ulrich Obrist has more than 300 international curatorial projects; Barbara Vanderlinden claims her archivist work as an artwork (“an authentic work”). On the other hand, exhibitions can now be replicated endlessly, as these archives produce both a discourse, which provides art theories, and the possibility of re-staging. Several years after the original exhibition, even when the curator is no longer present, thanks to these documents, and in the manner of choreographic archives, we will be able to replay exhibitions—a practice that, until recently, had only been used in archaeological reconstructions.

Through archiving, the curator becomes a reliable authority. These archives also contribute as much to the creation of resources for the historical documenting of contemporary art as to the functions of the art market, which puts the artist and the curator in competition with one another. To avoid such competition, more artists are curating their own work, for example Haris Epaminonda or Thomas Hirschhorn, with exhibitions that involve the occupation of a space, rather than the display of artworks. Furthermore, artists are curating the work of their contemporaries and others (Philippe Parreno showing works by Tino Sehgal, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, John Cage and Merce Cunningham as part of Palais de Tokyo’s project Carte Blanche, 2013).

The interviews gathered here involve personalities of different age groups from around the world. This diversity raises certain issues. The relationship that curators have with their archives is influenced by two important factors; the first, as with Jean-Hubert Martin, questions belonging— or not—to an archival culture. In this case, the act of archiving is a totally assimilated practice; it is a habitus which has become a style. Classification, which was initially an impersonal—almost mechanical—gesture, has gradually evolved to the point of becoming an activity in itself, the library being the space where it takes place. Rather than a morbid fetishization, this accumulation becomes another kind of documenting, the continuous writing of a personal living encyclopedia. Study plays a key role in the development of this practice, and the relationship to archives is also largely determined by the contemporary historical context of globalization and digitization. Since the beginning of the 1990s, we have changed our way of thinking about archives. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we entered what Édouard Glissant has defined as the “Era of Chaos.” The very notion of archives has been profoundly affected: pre-1989, archives were localized, personalized, in other words rare; they are now proliferous, multiple, plural, non-material… While they used to be small private treasures, to some extent, self-portraits like Szeemann’s archives, they have become common place. Manuel Borja-Villel, with his project The Archives of the Commons at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, says it all when talking about the Red Conceptualismos del Sur: curators’ archives are part of a much wider network that questions the notion of artworks and individual practices in favor of working collectively, allowing art and politics to mix.

When reading this panorama of perspectives and practices, it is possible to understand what could be defined as the archives of our times, namely—and this is not anecdotal—the proliferation of art archives that are no longer confined to places or people but are being shared by curators. Records of a multitude of gestures and ideas are brought together, some relating to administration, others to art. Far from being obstacles to the making of future exhibitions, they are the rocks—not the bridge—which enable the crossing of the river. They only make sense because they are a series, designing a new art, the art of archiving.

Philippe Artières is a historian and the research director of the CNRS at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology of the EHESS-Paris. He has long been the president of the Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault, is a co-founder of the association Sida-Mémoires, and curated the project Bureau des Archives Populaires du Centre Pompidou in 2017.

FOOTNOTE

1. Translator’s Note: Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); originally published as Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1989). ↩︎