Manifesta Journal 6

MJ - Manifesta Journal
journal of contemporary curatorship
N6, Autumn / Winter 2005

Archive: Memory of the Show
Archive:
Memory
of the Show
N6, Autumn / Winter 2005

Viktor Misiano
Contents
Frdric Maufras
no. 6 294 Introduction no. 6 374 Film on Art: A Potential Memory of Exhibitions,
to be Itself Preserved
Chiara Bertola
no. 6 296 Storytelling for Memory Anton Vidokle
no. 6 378 Notes on Exhibition Archives, Real Estate
Francesco Manacorda Shortage and Other Problems
no. 6 304 Archives: Monuments or Documents?
Marieke van Hal
Francesco Manacorda with Hans Ulrich Obrist no. 6 382 An Active Archive
no. 6 305 An Interview with Arlette Farge
Sandra Frimmel
Francesco Manacorda with Hans Ulrich Obrist no. 6 386 An Interview with Matthias Mller and Peter Piller
no. 6 322 Archiving Time
Roomers Sight
Francesco Manacorda with Bruce Altshuler no. 6 396 After the Game is Before the Game:
no. 6 328 The Missing History of Curating Theory and Practice of an Open Exhibition

Sandra Frimmel with Jrgen Harten Henry Meyric Hughes
no. 6 334 Archives as Clarification Plants for Contemporary no. 6 404 Drawing the Line Short: Exhibiting in a Contested Space
Culture: Unwanted Memories Versus the Urge for Archiving

Rafal B. Niemojewski APPENDIX: MANIFESTA ARCHIVE
no. 6 342 Where Do You Come From? And Where Are You Going?
On the Memory and Identity of Biennials Archive: Memory of the Show
no. 6 410 MJ discussion, 8 April 2005, Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia
Vadim Zakharov
no. 6 354 The Archive as an Alien Archive: Memory of the Show
no. 6 450 MJ discussion, 1 July 2005, National Centre
Yasmine Van Pee for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia
no. 6 360 Fight on, Superfools! Archiving Underground New York
IN MEMORIAM: IGOR ZABEL (1958-2005)
Leif Magne Tangen
no. 6 368 The Dream of Being Able to Fly Igor Zabel
no. 6 468 Dialogue
FROM THE EDITORS
Viktor Misiano
Introduction
There is an internal drama in the curatorial oeuvre. It is ephemeral. A text This curatorial obsession with the retention of the vanishing nature of the show
fiction or non-fiction - could change the material media, could lose many of its is shared by the artists. Artists are creating works about shows, documenting
initial meanings, but it remains intact. A film has had a very dynamic becoming and commenting them, and proposing themselves as exhibitions guides, creating
determinate from the technological progress. But still a movie be it mute, black- sometimes fictive, but very often absolutely authentic exhibitions archives. And
and-white, color or Dolby-Surround - is practically equal to what it was at the they are writing about it, for MJ 6 for instance.
moment of its production. While an exhibition is in live only the period it is hosted
in situ, for one month, perhaps two or three months, but maximum five. And then Obviously, not only the obsessive will to keep memory of own achievements
it despairs acquiring a spectral essence it is kept in the memory of people, in make archives so attractive for artists practice as well as for curatorial studies.
the published reviews, in press-releases and in the invitation card, in the form of The archive is a fascinating phenomenon by itself. Provocatively ambiguous is its
photo- or video-documentation and in its catalogue. In other words, it survives in relation within reality, its pretention to be a bearer of objective truth, its internal
different types of archives. structure and dynamics. Evidently, archives are inseparable from the questions:
who is controlling archives, who is filling it and according to which criteria, who
This short life being a substantial premise of the show is interiorized in the curato- are keeping it, what is accessible and what is closed? In other words, the archive
rial practice. Working on the show a curator perfectly knows that his oeuvre will is always a political problem. This justifies the archive critic, the struggle to keep
be seen only by a ridiculous minority of potential public, and that this show will archives under the public control and also the creation of alternative sources of
be of display only for a ridiculously short time. As a result, he is implementing in information and archiving.
his product its post-mortem existence. He is producing a heavy catalogue, often
including the original views of the show (and, because of that, this catalogue is But still a dramatic difference between an authentic show and its simulacra re-
often published after the vernissage and sometimes even after the finissage); he mains. Perhaps this one is even a bigger difference then there is between a Glen
is taking personal care of the shows documentation and often gazing in the photo Goold piano exercise listened to in a concert hall, or on a CD at home, or between
or video objective himself; finally, creating a show for which the curator keeps a Giorgio Streller performance seen on the stage of the Piccolo di Milano, or of
in mind that it should be not only attractive for the public, but also photo- and the TV screen. Thus, an opposite reaction might also be proper, that is, not to
videogenic. obsessively keep what is inevitably destined to non-being, but to ignore it. To be
as maximum as possible in the present moment, avoiding documentation of your
The archive is a special preoccupation and field of activity in curatorship. Periodi- activity or choosing forms that could not be kept by any documentary medium.
cal exhibitions like Documenta, the Venice Biennale and others are installing their That is a strategy that as a shadow is always behind curators or artists archive
own archives and websites. And stable institutions museums and exhibition obsession.
centers do the same. With the intention to resurrect an exhibition corpus new
publications on the shows of the past are to be published, historical investigations
are to be initiated, international conferences about the exhibitions past and future
are to be organized, and finally reconstructions of the legendary shows or just new
exhibitions about the exhibitions of the past are to be curated.
294 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 6 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 6 295

REFLECTIONS
Chiara Bertola
Storytelling for Memory

Chiara Bertola is an art A culture that does not create a memory of itself is dead even before being born, What Ilya Kabakov has to say about the concept of museums is highly interesting,
critic and chief curator
of the Contemporary
a culture that does not transmit and communicate its own memory is destined to in particular when referring to contemporary art: for Kabakov there are no demon-
Art Program at the be cancelled from history. In this sense it can be compared to the work of critics strable differences between history as exhibited in museums, and what has been
Fondazione Querini
and curators who decide on and produce exhibitions and publications with the discarded and has ended up in the dustbin of history. This does not mean that there
Stampalia in Venice. In
2000, she created the main aim of leaving some trace of their activity in time. Arent we, perhaps, always are museums comparable to dumps, but that all dumps can be museums. It is by
FURLA Prize and has weighed down by the need to produce an ever greater number of events, constantly teetering in balance along this thread that we make our judgments about contem-
been curating it since
then. She has curated rushing to finish a catalogue in time in order to document them? More than the porary art, and it is not easy to know beforehand what it is worth handing on to
several exhibitions both event in itself or the experience of the work, it seems that what counts is to leave a posterity and to remember. As always, only time will say, but it is clear that first of
in Italy and abroad
with the artists Joseph
mark in time in order to become part of historical memory as individuals. all it is necessary to undertake a knowledgeable and critical work of documenta-
Kosuth, Giulio Paolini, tion. It becomes urgent to give an answer to such questions as: what remains of
Michelangelo Pistoletto,
We are afraid of disappearing without a trace, we always have the sense of time an exhibition and what can we really hand on about it? How can we record it and
Ilya Kabakov, Boris
Mikhailov, Lothar being lost, of the transience of things and often our undertaking is aimed at the present it to the future?
Baumgarten, Kiki Smith, intense construction of facts and events so that they at least might remain and hold
amongst others.
out in time. All this is born out by the fact that today, more than in any other age, As a provocation I would mention Vincenzo Agnettis Mandare a memoria from the
1
From Interview with museums of every kind are being born, devoted to this or that specialisation, to any end of the sixties, which underlined the crisis of art languages and hypothesised
James Revel, RAI
Educational Channel,
kind of things, because anything can become the object of a classification in the their being reduced to zero, because only in this way would it be possible to be-
2004 expectation that objects ordered and conserved in this way will become what we gin a new culture internalised and memorized in a different way for the future. A
already anticipate they are, in other words the bearers of memory.1 fundamental condition for this to happen was, for Agnetti, to take the languages of
the various branches of art back to their starting points through cancellations, nega-
These phenomena spark off a change in the relationship that we have with histori- tions, contradictions, and nonsense, until they were totally eliminated.
cal time: our society has become archiving society, capable of observing and con-
serving. While we are alive we attend to the construction of our personal memory In his 1969 Libri dimenticati a memoria (forgotten from memory books) Agnetti
which will make us alive and present, even when we are gone. undertook such drastic cancellations as to reduce the work to nothing: the pages of
Some kind of problem is created when archiving and conserving are referred to the the book were actually cut out, not because their content was useless but because
various manifestations of the languages of contemporary art of which we do not only by assimilating culture and by metabolising it could it be forgotten. What
always manage to have neither sufficient documentation nor knowledge of their real counts, Agnetti said, is to absorb knowledge in order not to be a slave to it, to try
value. They leave a trace in time only in a fragmentary and heterogeneous way and to produce a culture forgotten from memory just because it is by now part of our
often we do not manage to understand their important aspects at once, because biological heredity.
they are only hinted at, intuited And here we find that concept of insecurity and
arbitrariness that surrounds contemporary art: the work of the critic, the curator, It is certainly useful to take up Agnettis idea again because it gives a central place
and the function of institutions, shows, and museums give memory an uncertain to something that we today should, perhaps, start from in order to have a memory
character. of our creative facts. Agnetti states that in order to remember the present it is im-
portant, first of all, to be aware of it. So we are dealing with an awareness that was

Giulio Paolini, Lora X late in being formed in us, but that now and a witness to this is this very magazine there are no longer any crossing points. Or rather everything is a crossing: since Kiki Smith, Homespun
(Capogiro), installation Tales, installation at
at Fondazione Querini which is devoting a whole number to the problem of the Archive/Memory of Shows that day there is globalisation as far as the eye can see, from dawn to dusk, the Fondazione Querini
Stanmpalia we have begun to place at the very heart of the debate. Today we speak, not only future is a crossing. 3 Stampalia, Venice, 2005.
Venice, 2004.
about the immediate meanings, modes, and messages of art, but also about how it 3
Cloe Piccoli, Interview,
2
James Revel, Interview, is possible to archive and give a memory to a contemporary art show. If present time is experienced and hypothesised as a crossing, how can we leave D. La Repubblica delle
2004 a trace and a memory of it to the future? The problem resides in the speed of ac- Donne, 23 March 2005
The latest generation of artists consider this a lost war lost and pay little attention to tions that follow each other incessantly, in the habit of not having a fixed abode,
it. They have undermined or definitively impeded their work from having a memory. in the speedy acquisition of information and facts that make it almost impossible
Their creativity is manifested through performed events that are often completed to localise them, follow them, and find out what has happened. In fact, often we
with the event itself, an art that as never before becomes the place for the meeting are not even sure that the event actually happened at all. What is important is that
and exchange of cultures and is ever more similar to life. Even when the artists it is recorded in the melting-pot of news that circulates inside and outside the net-
choose to express themselves through formal objects, sculptures or paintings, they work and the specialised magazines. What is important above all is to activate the
are dealing with forms almost always not destined to endure as a result of the fra- media machinery in order to make the fact seem truthful and to make it universally
gility of the materials employed: soap, paper, ice, embroidery, chocolate, recycled famous.
objects, scrap In short, artists seem to be extremely aware of the impossibility of
lasting, even of lasting until the present moment, and it becomes extremely difficult If it is true that there is underway a reorganisation of our relationship with time and
to imagine how they can be inscribed in the future time of memory. historical experience, I think it is only now that we are beginning to measure the
effects of a missed opportunity for remembering our creative work. The speed with
This crisis seems linked to the fact that we have left behind a time of certainty, which art events occur, evolve, change, and are immediately substituted by others:
orientated and progressive in which many of those of the preceding generations today all this happens too quickly. We are dealing with phenomena that cannot be
lived: today the present is no longer certain, the future even less so and suddenly captured unless within an abbreviated time, one, therefore, destined to be remem-
the link between past and present has become largely hypothetical. This temporary bered only briefly.
situation has in large part transformed the conditions of our experience of time:
there, where we were able to find reasons in history, we only find a refuge against On the other hand, as I said earlier, many artists have decided to oppose to the inde-
the dangers of the present and the uncertainties of the future; there where we structibility and eternity of classical art the fragility of ephemeral materials which are
found a sense of history, now we only find a basic discontinuity 2 easily destroyed in time. Think of that long strip of paper drawn on with a scalpel by
Elisabetta Di Maggio that covered the whole floor surface of an American museum.
It seems to be this very experience of fast, fragmented, non-distant time that deter- The fragility of that embroidery cut into tissue paper contained, however, the cour-
mines the work of many artists today. There comes to mind the relationship with age and force of such a powerful gesture as that of accepting its own destruction. It
time and space necessary to meet other people that is so basic to the work of Rirkrit was a work created to be destroyed from its very first showing (and in fact the public
Tiravanija. It is interesting in this regard to note what the artist said in an interview: walked over it, tore, and eventually destroyed it). And a work created not to resist
Everything has changed since 1989. The wall has been broken to pieces by a time, like a work in ice or the useless gesture of washing the traces of the past from
exultant crowd and there isnt any place for installing Check Point Charlie because a wall with soap, what memory might it want, or can it, leave of itself?

4
Unless, of course, the We collect, archive, and classify all the traces, including those that for a long time sibility of allowing the viewer inside the experience is missing. The risk is always Ilya & Emilia Kabakov,
photo itself becomes Where is our place?,
a work of art and is were considered inert or unimportant for history. We archive things with the idea that of transmitting something too cold. This was a risk already underlined by Pier installation at Fondazione
transformed from a that eventually they will be useful for something. But the work on memory that we Luigi Tazzi in a comment about the problem of archiving the contemporary.5 Tazzi, Querini Stampalia,
simple record into a Venice, 2003.
genuine artists work, one
undertake must never be a mere work of classifying what has been removed, lost, in the footsteps of Michel Foucault, warned against the ascetic aspect of archiving
able to present a view and destroyed. Given that a work of art can be seen and understood in its essence modern culture and of the risk of creating archives full of de-sexualised knowledge.
that has in itself both the only when we are in front of the original, it is evident that any attempt to represent Even today the risk is to hand down a cold culture, found to quote Foucault once
sense and the spatial
surroundings of the it through any kind of image is useless. again within a domain without vision: in other words, knowledge that no longer
original work. wishes to recognise bodies and senses unless within a sample of them that, in fact,
5
Pier Luigi Tazzi, But it is just as true that this attempt, even if giving little satisfaction, has still al- suppresses them. And by body I also mean the judgment and reaction of the public.
Archivio numero 0, Cid lowed a certain efficacy in archiving and having, in time, memory. This is how How can this be regained?
Arti Visive 1985, Prato,
p. 148.
printed images have gone to form a storehouse that is transmittable and necessary
for the spread of the history of human creativity. But what sense does it have to document a contemporary art event today, with its
The problem of leaving a trace of things had already been posed in the sixties and fragmentation of expressive codes, the shortening of time and the reduction of live-
seventies when art had eliminated the concreteness of material and form in order to able space, with the break with both creative linguistic and geographical confines,
affirm the action and force of an idea. This was how Conceptual and Performance an art that displays itself ever more through its relationships with others and that
Art found a way of leaving a trace of themselves: using photographs accompanied has become a metaphor for daily ephemera?
by words. The memory of those times that has been handed down to us has, If the thread of what can be represented has broken, then why should we wish to
therefore, often been unfocussed and uncertain, confused and distant it has de- represent it as though the ephemeral appearance of the outcome had the consisten-
teriorated together with the deterioration of the images on which is printed the only cy of something no longer there and that no longer wants to be? What sense would
trace of their existence. it have to collect what images and forms do not want to have, and to represent it in
order to transmit it, once again, in order to give it an image and a form?
Minimalism, too, had given a hard knock to the possibility of representing or consign-
ing a work to memory, but it had also taught that, besides vision, there are also other It is perhaps necessary to learn to give uncertainty a memory, searching out or in-
senses with which we can appreciate a work of art. Experience and needs that are venting some vehicle that could transport the sense of a work into the future, even
still alive today. There comes to mind one artist out of many, Wolfgang Laib, whose those works that, in order to be understood and seen, need to pass through the
work is difficult if not impossible to transmit by way of a simple catalogue. We lose experience and time of meeting. An efficient tool for handing something on might
the possibility of regaining the life and sensorial experience that we have when pass- be words, the story of a work. The story of an event that has happened leaves a
ing through an installation of his made from just two walls of beeswax, or undergoing truthful trace by transforming it into spoken words that recall and spark off images
the experience of one of his milk sculptures. All this surrounding sense of the work, in the mind.
linked to sight and the senses, cannot be repeated with a simple photo on paper.4
I am thinking of the most recent solo show by Tiravanija in the Palais du Tokyo. A
What was missing yesterday as well as today, is, then, the possibility of regaining show that ironically declared itself to be anthological. In it the artists work, which
the true memory of the experience of that particular work or event or show; the pos- was in a completely empty white space, was replaced by the story of the work. Ev-

erything was played on the concept of absence. There were only the titles of the
installations in empty spaces. In the Main Hall of the Cordeliers, a young lecturer,
with no clue of the previous installations of the artist but to whom he had given writ-
ten notes with detailed descriptions of his works, led the public through an amazing
virtual anthological path. An intelligent escamotage by Tiravanija who, in the form
of another language, and one equally capable of employing time, found the pos-
sibility to allow the visitor to think back and go over again the experience of actions
and events from years earlier. A story leaves space to what seems lost today: the
experience of a work, of the life and time passed and experienced in the event.
Exhibitions, on the other hand, are genuine critical writings and so it is not difficult
to consider them visual tales. In this way we give one a possibility of handing down
the event of a show or the experience of appreciating a work. Ours is the task of
codifying and divulging them as live stories able to impress on future memory a
real trace to be recorded in art history. When it comes down to it, isnt perhaps what
remains in the memory only the recollection of an experience and the tale of it?
Venice, May 2005

VIEW OF THE OVERVIEWS
Francesco Manacorda Francesco Manacorda with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Archives: Monuments An Interview

or Documents?
Francesco Manacorda The notion of the archive is becoming crucial in the curatorial field as at the pivot
with Arlette Farge
Part 1 sauver de son dsastre,
is an art critic and mais le jeu des rgles
independent curator
of the missing history of exhibition making and the consequent widely lamented Exhibition and Savoir/Documents and Artworks/ qui dtermine dans une
based in London. In curatorial amnesia. From another perspective, the ephemeral nature of contem- Exhaustivity and Choice culture lapparition et la
2004, he curated The disparition des noncs,
porary art exhibitions suggests that their nature is similar to Robert Smithsons leur rmanence et leur
Mythological Machine
at the Mead Gallery notion of the monuments of Passaic as ruins in reverse. Exhibitions are in fact Hans Ulrich Obrist: Before we start, it might be a good idea if Francesco ex- effacement, leur existence
in Warwick, England, built as temporary archives, meant to be dismantled usually after six weeks. plained to you a bit about the principle behind this project... paradoxale dvnements
a show on the impact et de choses. Analyser
of media images. He Such contradictions are at the core of the set of conversations gathered here. All les fait de discours
is currently preparing the contributors play a key role in the current definition of different aspects of Francesco Manacorda: Manifesta Journal is a magazine that analyses ways of dans llment gnral
an exhibition on film de larchive, cest les
and performance as
this problem. Arlette Farge is historian and director of research at the CNRS and conceiving and organizing contemporary art shows, and deals with the interdisci- considrer non point
re-presentation and teacher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has plinary challenges that such activities involve. This issue is devoted to the theme comme documents
collaborates on such (dune signification
written extensively on the notion of the archive as developed in her research on of archives and exhibitions. So it deals with questions around the memory of
publications as Flash cache, ou dune rgle
Art, Metropolis M, and the police and prison archive of 18th century.1 In 1982, Farge wrote a book with contemporary art shows, but also with the use of the notions of memory and of de construction), mais
Domus. Michel Foucault in which archival materials regarding requests of direct incar- archive in contemporary art. comme monuments;
cest - en dehors de toute
ceration to the King of France are grouped and reprinted.2 In the interviews, the mtaphore gologique,
1
See in particular
Arlette Farge, Le got possible similarities of archival documents and works of art are investigated from HUO: What is at stake here is to explore the link between the notions of archive sans aucune assignation
de larchive, Editions du dorigine, sans le
many perspectives to the point of evoking the paradoxical assonance between and of exhibition, theres a sort of paradox: the exhibition has a major archival moindre geste vers le
Seuil, 1989, but also
Arlette Farge, Des lieux the word document and the word monument.3 The interview with Arlette Farge problem, because the exhibition itself generates archives, but it is in its essence commencement dun
arch - faire ce quon
pour lhistoire, Editions was conducted together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, who also gives, as a subject of ephemeral... pourrait appeler, selon
du Seuil, 1997, and the
interview of Arlette Farge
a separate conversation, some views on the paradox of archiving exhibitions and les droit ludiques de
in Entretiens with Jean- curatorial practices in reference to his own growing archive of interviews. Such a Arlette Farge: ... and in other respects it needs previous archives itself... I say ltymologie, quelque
Christophe Marti, Quel chose comme une
resource certainly represents a significant attempt to construct a collection of doc- this because I myself am in the process of preparing a show for La Villette [in archologie. Michel
bruit ferons-nous ?, Les
prairies ordinaires, 2005. uments and oral testimonies around exhibition making, amongst other themes. Paris]... Foucault, Sur larchologie
des sciences. Rponse au
The final conversation explores the difficult transition from archival documents to cercle dpistmologie,
2
Arlette Farge and Michel
Foucault, Le dsordre history writing. Bruce Altshuler, director of the programme in Museum Studies at HUO: Would you like to talk to us about it? Cahier pour lanalyse,
n. 9: Gnalogie des
des familles - Lettres de the New York University, has produced one of the very few historical accounts of sciences, t 1968, pp. 9-
cachet des Archives de la
Bastille. Gallimard, 1982.
curatorial practices.4 His voice testifies to the problems that such a task has raised AF: Its a show Ive been working on for two and a half years now. The theme is 40, in: Michel Foucault,
and points to possible solutions in relation to the future. love. To be a bit more precise, you could say that this exhibition is trying to show Dits et Ecrits, NRF,
3
The notion on which Gallimard, Paris, 1994,
the way in which love cultures in Europe are changing, and have been changing vol. I, p.708.
Foucaults archeological
system is entirely base dis ever since the 1960s, that is, since womens liberation, and the emancipation of
as follows: Jappellerai
4
Bruce Altshuler, The
our bodies... Avant-Garde in Exhibition:
Archive, non pas la
totalit des textes qui ont New Art in the 20th
Century, Harry N. Abrams,
t conservs par une FM: Will the show have artworks, and films? 1994, and University of
civilisation, ni lensemble
des traces quon a pu California Press, 1998.

Hans Ulrich Obrist AF: Yes, and a lot of photos, plus performances and video, as well as TV inter- a themed structure. To give you some idea, the exhibition covers about 1,000 Arlette Farge.
(Zurich, 1968) is curator Photo by Didier Gaillard.
of contemporary art at views with individuals who have been kind enough to take part in the project. square metres, over 10,000 square feet, and weve divided the space up into
Muse dArt Moderne sequences. There are three sequences. The first is devoted to what is currently
de la Ville de Paris
HUO: And youre the overall curator? hampering and preventing desire. So this is quite a pessimistic part of the show.
and professor at IUAV/
University of Venice. He Theres a lot of observations relating to everything that is liable to prevent amorous
contributes to various AF: Precisely. Im doing the show with a sociologist called Rose-Marie Lagrave, encounters and desire: unemployment, work conditions, Aids, and so on... The
art magazines and
co-curated Manifesta who is also at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. At La Villette title of this first part will be: Its Raining Stones, referring, needless to add, to Ken
1 (Rotterdam, 1996), weve been working with professionals who have been in the position to tell us, Loachs film. The second sequence is focused on the idea of utopia in the 1970s.
the first Berlin Biennale
(1998), Cities on the when we came up with the exhibition concept: theres such and such photog- Weve tried to work slightly off-kilter, in order not to come up with the same old
Move (1999), and rapher for this, and such and such an archive available for that etc. I think I classic photos about the womens movement, etc. And weve worked on this part
Utopia Station at the
understand what youre trying to say, when you talk about the toing and froing with artists and photographers. The purpose of the third part is to raise a specific
Venice Biennale (2003).
In 2003, he published between the production of a narrative which is ephemeral but which will leave question: whats the situation with love nowadays? We try to show the whole
the book Interviews behind a catalogue and a mark, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the range and gamut of forms of desire and love, and we try to suggest that love can
(Edizioni Charta, Pitti
Imagine 2003). obligation to be fuelled by things already made and done. Furthermore, when you be a certain kind of subversion...
put on an exhibition like this one, and spend three years preparing it, on love and
Arlette Farge is director
of research in modern love cultures, you are totally exceeded by time, because everything goes very fast FM: And in this exhibition, do you show in addition to art objects also current
history, Centre National and it really is as if youre trying to board a moving train... documents and objects? Do you deal with them in different ways?
de la Recherche
Scientifique, Paris. A
historian, she has a HUO: Since I came to France, in 1990, I dont think a single week has gone by AF: There are objects tout court, that is to say, everyday objects. For the third
special interest in the without an artist or a philosopher or a writer, with whom I have a conversation, part, for example, we did the rounds of all the bric--brac shops in Paris, to buy
eighteenth century, and
wrote a number of books, mentioning Lyotards exhibition, Les Immatriaux. Arguably, this is the leading tiny little things, which weve here called love objects. These are objects that are
such as Le Got de example of the theoretician who becomes an exhibition curator, and Id like to offered - especially in working-class circles - either between friends, or between
larchive (Seuil, 1989),
Le Cours ordinaire des know if this exhibition is important for you. For example, do you see your own people who love or are fond of each other. There are lots and lots of love objects
choses (Seuil, 1994), Le show in the spirit and continuity of all this, that is to say in this tradition of the of all shapes and sizes. Some are very poetic, and there are also some that are
Bracelet de parchemin.
history of ideas, and the production of knowledge? trivial, but theyre always quite kitsch things, theyre not art objects...
Lcrit sur soi au XVIIIe
sicle (Bayard, 2003)
and LEnfant dans la AF: The challenge has actually to do with a production of knowledge. Moreover HUO: Are you making a connection with the readymade? How are these objects
ville. Petite confrence
sur la pauvret (Bayard, the sense of the exhibition, its main thread, is rather political. Were researching put on view?
2005). a real issue, which I reckon we have to deal with today: how can singularities ar-
ticulate themselves in respect to a hypothetical collective life? Actually, this is not AF: The set designer Patrick Bouchin is working on their presentation right now.
a chronological exhibition; it would obviously have been too easy to end up with A detail has just come to mind: at the flea market in Paris we bought a wedding
some kind of historical commentary, starting with 1968 and the sexual libera- dress from a young woman who was selling it because she had left her husband-
tion. Quite the opposite, we have made chronology dysfunctional, by preferring to-be just before they were due to get married! And well be exhibiting the note

Is it possible to provide a definition of the
value of what is kept, independently of
knowing who wants to keep what and for
whom?
she put on the dress: Dress bought but never worn. What a pain!... The core jects which are evidence of history. Do you see a connection with the exhibition
of the show consists in the contribution made by photographs, installations, and youre working on?
pictures: Picassos LEtreinte, a work by Hopper, there are also some erotic little
sketches by Masson... and then photographs ranging from Valrie Jouve to Gior- AF: No, probably not. First of all because there are really not very many objects,
gia Fiori, by way of Jean-Luc Moulne and Louise Oligny, etc... and, next, it seems to me that all the works which will be shown have already
been properly thought about by the people who have made them. Let me give
HUO: Theres an aspect in the question Francesco has just asked that Id like to you an example: in the show, there is a section on prostitution: this is one of
delve deeper into, because I think its something that concerns us a great deal in the sections which gave us the most food for thought, because there are huge
contemporary art. Its the question about the difference between the document amounts of photographs about prostitution and very many different ways of posi-
and the artwork. Are we meant to present them in the same way? The other day tioning oneself in relation to the issue of prostitution, especially at this particular
I was talking at great length with the English artist Tacita Dean, and she told me time in the feminist debate which, in France, is deeply split between those who
that there is always a moment in her work when something that she had first of think that prostitution represents the freedom of the womans body, and those
all used as a document turned into a work, or part of a work. Do you subscribe to who think that prostitution is the sign of maximum oppression and disfiguration.
a difference of this type, and do you not hierarchise things yourself?
FM: You talk about data found in archives as managing to prompt the illusion
AF: For the time being were not involved in any hierarchic treatment, but we still of some kind of access to the real, and you emphasize the fact that they can
havent finished the exhibition design, it is just now starting to be worked on. What mislead you through such feeling, and for this reason they need to be constantly
we have done, and what I have just finished this summer, are the texts which go with questioned, and not simply accepted. I find that there is something similar as far
the show. This matter of interpretation and catalogue texts is very delicate, because as the work of art is concerned. Have you made use of this expertise to put on
you have to know if you want to guide the public towards a certain reading of the this exhibition or when you talk about photography?
works and documents on view, or on the contrary if you prefer to leave the public
free and to their own devices, leave people with their own questions. Should one lead AF: For me, talking about photography was a stroke of luck, because, a few years
and steer the public or should one let it acquiesce to the work, that is to say, be upset back, I published La Chambre deux lits et le cordonnier de Tel Aviv, making use
or disconcerted by it? I think that a work is like a book, everyone must appropriate it of photos from the late 19th century and from the 20th century, which strangely
for themselves. Having said that, there must be a thread, and one must comply with made me mindful of the 18th century. So I had already involved myself in this
the intention(s) of the curators, which is quite legitimate, but at the same time it is kind of odd and impossible exercise, which remains for me one of the keys to
important to leave the public relatively free. Theres a balance here. As far as objects everything that I do. I know that for me, to draw from a work of art is to proceed
are concerned, which I was just talking about, I dont think theyll become artworks. towards a future as well as not to retake as I do not like this term re-take,
But I dont really know what an artwork, or a work of art, is... They possibly give rise let us rather say to capture again. What is indeed involved here is making
to the idea that looking at an object somewhere can become an artistic act. something new, with something that was, and that was exhibited or presented as
an artwork. I have the same relation with archives, when Im reading or working
FM: In one of your books you talk about [Flauberts] Bouvard et Pcuchet, and on them, I have this slightly special relationship, which is not just empathy
you say that in their museum one sees history, because they gather all these ob- because that would be too simple but lets say a certain experience of disorien-

I dontt actually work on a computer,
I copy archives by hand and I keep them
all. They are starting to to become archives
themselves
tation in familiarity. And in this disorientation, of the work and the archive, I try Now, to answer your question about the parallels it might be possible to draw up
to capture something that might let me conceive of the future. Pleasure first and with the 18th century, we are obviously obliged to shift everything, because it is
foremost, but then the future... never possible to make direct comparisons. And it would be a serious mistake to
do so. For the matter of archives, for example, the 18th century is precisely the
HUO: As were recording this interview with you in your home, Id be curious to moment when the practice of creating archives started, it was the moment when
know if you have personal archives that you keep here. How does the organiza- the supervisors, the lites, the kings advisors, started to develop a certain obses-
tion of knowledge work here? sion for archiving. The police also started to gather a few statistics. The 18th
century was the dawn of an era which would be an era of compulsing archiving.
AF: I dont actually work on a computer, I copy archives by hand and I keep But what I find most interesting, and this is a major difference, is the fact that oral-
them all. Theyre all in cupboards in the adjoining rooms. And they are starting to ity was primary and predominant. The archive and the written medium in general
become archives themselves, because they are getting older... (laughter). I keep could not involve many people, because there was a population which did not
everything and there are cupboards filled with bundles that are stored according to have total mastery of writing. So this orality is absolutely thrilling to examine, be-
theme. Everything that I have used to make a book is collected and kept together, cause it creates events, because it is a ceaseless sharing, and it represents a need
but I find my way about all my files very easily because they are indexed. for the other: people who do not know how to write need people who do know how
to write. But what excites me is the challenges of this orality in the 18th century
HUO: Behind this question there is also the issue of the relationship between in relation to the challenges of orality today, in a world in which archiving is king.
public and private. At this particular moment, in the art world and elsewhere, we This refers to institutions like the IMEC [Institut Mmoires de lEdition Contempo-
are living through a very strange period. We can observe an extraordinary fragility raine], which you probably know about at the abbey of Ardenne...
in public institutions, and a greater and greater presence of private organizations,
which are starting to call the shots. And I was wondering, since youve talked HUO: This also brings us to the matter of computer technology. I have just read
about this separation between public and private in the 18th century, whether your very interesting interview in Vacarme, and then the interview with the direc-
you think that its possible to find things there which might be useful to us today... tor of the IMEC. And in this interview you discuss Googles project to digitize the
Could the 18th century provide us with tools for answering this question? holdings of all the major Anglo-Saxon libraries. The project will only involve books
written in English, so, as Edouard Glissant says, we can read into this an additional
AF: I think youre right when you say that at this particular moment, where art symptom of this process of homogenizing knowledge and learning, versus the idea
is concerned, and archives, and with the increasing power of the private sector, of a globalization which would bring certain differences to the fore. So I would like
something very significant is going on. It is easy to see the arrival of a private you to tell me what you feel about this issue of digitizing archives.
market, that is to say something contrary to the idea that we have about archives,
and a memory that is ours. In my opinion, there is a total contradiction, on the AF: I absolutely dont believe in exhaustivity. I think there is a very considerable
one hand, between this situation of permanent injunction to collectively recall a difference between the exhaustivity proposed by digitization, and the attitude de-
memory that we would not possess sufficiently or that we might have occulted, scribed just now which consists in copying archives by hand. Because, needless
and on the other hand concurrently, the desire to distribute this memory to large to say, I was making selections. I havent copied out all the archives of the 18th
numbers of private machines, managing it in a community-oriented way. century! You have to know how to make choices and work using those choices as

a basis. For me, exhaustivity is a red herring. It is always difficult to know how HUO: Yes, and in the art world there is a kind of paradox. On the one hand, it
to stop. I always tell my students: Dont go any further, you have very effectively is true that there are more and more archives, but at the same time there is more
demonstrated what you wanted to demonstrate, and it would serve absolutely no and more amnesia...
purpose to go any further, and the content of your subject will not be strengthened
by 15,000 more archives... AF: That goes without saying! Youve put your finger right on it, theres a sen-
tence that I noted about this, it just so happens, in a recently published book, an
HUO: You talk about kilometres of shelving... (laughter) amazing book by Camille de Toledo, called Archimondain, Jolipunk. This is the
sentence: How are we going to rediscover an oral history in a period that is being
AF: Yes. Im sufficiently exercised about all this, because weve arrived at a point archived excessively? I ask myself this question. What is a period that is being
where archives are so numerous that I feel I have to say stop. I just wrote an archived excessively? Talking about a character in his novel, Camille de Toledo
article for the magazine LInactuel about the risks of archives. It is strange, after says: His duty was invariably to talk against oblivion and to try and recreate an
all. I wrote Le Got de lArchive and 15 years later Im telling myself that we have oral history in a period archived excessively. I think that is absolutely correct; we
to beware of archives! I think something very weird is going on, something which do have a period that is being archived exaggeratedly, but we dont even have the
seems to be out of control. This is why I involve myself in intellectual discussion time to archive... And this is what Ive felt as Ive been preparing this exhibition.
with the IMEC. I find it very helpful to go and see Jean-Pierre Vernant, to have
access to his archives, but I cant believe for a single minute that we are going to
advance the state of our knowledge by simply archiving everything, because we Part 2
are neither more nor less learned than in the Middle Ages. Interdisciplinarity and Foucault
HUO: And how do you see the new deal associated with digitization? I tend to FM: I think that one of the most exciting features of your work is that you propose
think that digitization is going to offer a way of looking at our time, which will be a reading of archives other than the one performed by those for whom they have
completely different from the way we might look at the 18th century, the 19th been put together. This aims to locate in them individual events, here for example
century, and even the 20th century, if only in relation to the instability of the orality, and more generally to reinstate the life which lurks behind them. You
various media. dont use them as statistical sources but as points of departure for scenarios,
almost in the sense of film scenarios. What I mean is that you have a slightly
AF: I think that instability is in any event a permanent condition. This also goes oblique approach to archives and their use. And in this respect I should like to
for 18th century archives, which are unstable, and suffer a great deal of damage. know if you think that for you it is important not to have had any initial training in
But what is even more unstable today is the issue of knowing what we are going the field of history. Furthermore, as this absence of initial historical specialization
to do with all this, and who are we in the face of all these data? What time will makes you naturally more disposed to an interdisciplinary approach, I wanted to
they deliver to us? What does digitization make it possible to do? Is it possible to ask you the extent to which you bring interdisciplinarity into your work?
provide a definition of the value of what is kept, independently of knowing who
wants to keep what and for whom? Briefly, all this seems to me to stem from a AF: If there is any interdisciplinarity, it does not really involve what I managed to
terrible disarray. learn from my law studies. Actually, the most immediate share of interdisciplinarity

I found that idea of providing raw archives
very beautiful in spite of everything.
is certainly due to my encounter with disciplines such as anthropology and sociol- with him. First of all I felt like saying no, because there was an age difference
ogy. But I think above all that the interdisciplinary orientation has been associated and above all a difference in stature, needless to say. In the end I met him and
more with encounters with people than with encounters with actual disciplines. I I dont know quite how to put it... There are just people who have grace; and
am thinking of Foucault and Bourdieu, who were both people who given me many then I was passionately interested in all that anyway. So we worked together and
essential tools in this particular respect, what I mean is that there was something in things turned out to be as simple as you could wish. It may sound pretentious
them that was non-formatted, and non-framed, it spilled over in all directions, said like that, but its true. He was very fond of Philippe Aris, and I suppose
and it was this overspill that was the truly interesting thing for me. But there is that he thought that in my work there was something different from the historians
also something that I have learnt with my work on photography, and this is that academicism that he didnt like. I think there are certain things that mattered a
the real if it exists gives rise to a multiplicity of landscapes, a multiplicity of great deal in this encounter. He needed to work with a historian with whom he
faces, and that it has a particular way of being appropriated by everyone. The could have a real dialogue, even ifas Im only too awareit was not a balanced
dream would obviously be to measure all the instances of this, but this is a task dialogue, given what he was at that particular moment... Its a slightly sad story,
that I am not capable of undertaking. The archive was straightaway provocative too, because we were going to write something together again, but we didnt have
through its abundance and this certainty that the real was something that could not time to complete that project properly, because he died.
be summed upit was not fixed because it is not fixable. Archives showed that it
was always elusive, and that what I was doing was trying to follow it in its flights, HUO: What was that project?
which I had chosen because I had liked them... and my motives were always very
personal and very subjective. I have never been a theoretician, I am not Foucault AF: A project about secrecy.
or Bourdieu. I do not know how to construct systems. It may sound a bit obsessive
to say so, but the archives have taught me that the real is not an escape, but a kind FM: Did you want to write it like the other book, Le Dsordre des Familles, by
of inexhaustible source of arrangement between men and women, negotiations and showing the documents involved directly to the public?
interstices, and this is what I am keen to explore...
AF: We had had disagreements about that... Actually not even disagreements...
HUO: Youve just mentioned Foucault, and this, of course, is one of the things Lets say that we didnt have the same opinion. He came up with a lot of archives,
we talked about with Francesco on our way here. We are very curious to know a but if I had been on my ownthis wasnt possible because if Id been on my own
bit more about your encounter with Foucault and the way the book [Le dsordre I wouldnt have written that bookI would have come up with fewer archives.
des familles] you wrote together was written... But he had made that decision, and this probably links up with your questions,
about whether the archive could be in itself a work of art. For him there was an
AF: Its very simple. I had written my thesis, and then after that, a little bit later, aesthetics of the archive, and above all in relation to those requests for confine-
Vivre dans la rue, Paris au XVIII sicle. I wasnt going to Foucaults seminar, ments which he found absolutely overwhelming...
and I didnt know him. In fact, it was he who wrote to me. I had noted a refer-
ence to me in Surveiller et Punir, a reference to Vivre dans la rue..., but that was FM: He talks about a shudder, a frisson, doesnt he?
all, I didnt know him at all on a personal basis. He phoned me, and then wrote
to me to say that he was working on some dossiers and he would like me to work AF: He talks about vibration and it was strange and unbelievable for me, because

My immersion was a lengthy process,
but I enjoyed it, I copied things out for
hours and hours, and I felt that that
particular movement gave me some kind of
inspiration...
he was someone who reclaimed emotions, and I have to say that at the time, at to its own devices, attests to everything and doesnt attest to anything. I have a
the Ecole DEtudes Suprieurs, I was experiencing a great closure towards the specific example in mind. When the archives in Russia were opened, there were
question of emotion. Emotion had pejorative connotations, and Foucault freed lots of people who went to buy them by the kilo! Lots were divided up and sold.
me a great deal in that respect. Because to see the great Michel Foucault mak- For me its crazy to use archives like that. With Foucault, we reached an agree-
ing use of what he called physical vibration in order to work, obviously helped ment, so we negotiated. For his part, he told me that he thought I was right, and
to get rid of my inhibitions. Needless to say, he was talented enough to do it, but for my part, I found that idea of providing raw archives very beautiful in spite of
this legitimized the place of emotion in the historians work. At the same time, he everything. I found that the exercise was very beautiful but that if we were mak-
had the idea of an aesthetics of the text, because these letters start with the words ing an offering, we had to take things as far as possible. But I didnt think about
Your Majesty and some very protocol-rich formulae, and he was also intrigued them solely in aesthetic terms, whereas Foucault very definitely thought about
by that form of orality which showed through inside the letters, because they were them in terms of artworks, as, incidentally, he mentions in the introduction.
whispered to the public scribe.
HUO: In Le Dsordre des Familles, there is the idea of introducing archival data Part 3
without making too much comment about them, and this is also a challenge of Methodological Immersion
the exhibition
HUO: Another aspect I find very interesting about this question of archives is that
FM: Yes, your book reminded me a great deal of the structure of a catalogue, in you talk about an experience of total immersion. Let me quote you: This came
which there is an introductory essay, followed by the works. I think that we find about in this way without any preliminary strategy, by total immersion in the
this in Le Dsordre des Familles. There is an introduction, a conclusion, and, in documents, by being steeped in language and syntax, by the erupting entrance
the middle, there are these raw archival data... into a world which had never been taken seriously. Could you tell us a little bit
more about this idea of immersion in archives?
AF: Actually it was an intentional gesture. To start with, I dont think Foucault
wanted even a written introduction. He wanted to give it completely, and he AF: Immersion was crucial for my profession because, at the outset, it made up
thought of it in an odd, almost sacred way, because he said that he was present- for my lack of knowledge about that century. It goes without saying that I had
ing it like an offering. It was an offering to the public. It was the idea: you are read things, and I didnt come to this terrain absolutely virgin, but I possibly didnt
still that, you have been that, and I am offering it to you. have the familiarity with the subject that I would have acquired if I had studied
history in a traditional way. But I think that this also goes much further. At a
FM: Theres also an almost religious sacrificial dimension... certain moment, I realized that if I really wanted to work on the 18th century,
I couldnt just take notes and sum things up. I said to myself that if I made a
AF: Absolutely. But this is the first time that anyone has pointed out to me that it series of index cards the way historians do, I would never succeed. The material
bears a certain resemblance to the format of the exhibition catalogue. And I think that I was not acquainted with, and which I was trying to decode, seemed to me
thats quite accurate. But I am always bothered that a piece of evidence can be to be so rich that I forced myselfbut I didnt mind thatto copy things, to ven-
left as such. Even if it may have the value of an artwork, a piece of evidence, left ture into syntax and vocabulary, and I was quite convincedwhich you will find

The original is the thing that can constantly
shift in meaning and in the interpretation of
meaning.
thoroughly navethat even the movement of my body as I was in the process FM: But we also make use of it, dont we?
of writing could only give me ideas! My immersion was a lengthy process, but I
enjoyed it, I copied things out for hours and hours, and I felt that that particular AF: So this is where it becomes complicated. I think that we necessarily make
movement gave me some kind of inspirationrather than summing up sentences, use of it and that the fact that we have it is a stroke of luck. But it is nevertheless
and following arguments, punctuations and hesitations step by step. I imagined necessary to invent forms and step back from them. Moreover, I would all the
the voices and I heard sounds. My immersion was not anything imaginary; rather same admit that I sometimes believe that there is some real. You will probably
it was being with. tell me that this is precisely because I am a victim of illusion, but all the same...
When I worked for Le Bracelet de Parchemin, about the contents of peoples
HUO: Theres yet another aspect of archives which we havent talked about. This pockets, about the objects which they carried on them when they were dying of
is the notion of sensitive archives, which have to do with feelings. cold, there was the real nonetheless. Then I probably lent a very specific sense
to this real. But there was indeed that in their pockets.
AF: In conditions where documents are digitally copied, immersion is impossible.
Its physically impossible. And as far as sensitive archives are concerned, which As for my passion for films, I like movies and I like going to the cinema, its as
may offer information about emotions, I think there are heaps of sources for which simple as that. It has only been later on that Ive understood films impressive
these methods are very suitable. But I also think that there are documents for ability to manufacture stories which we believed to be true. I started thinking
which this makes no sense. Furthermore, why do we look so hard for originals? If about that and connecting it with the historians work. And then what has al-
it were solely information which had any value, why would we attach the slightest ways struck me, even if I was just now talking about sounds, is the visual side
importance to the preservation of originals? Because, as its name suggests, the of archives. For me, the archive is above all else visual, and films have really
original is the origin, and because we are keen to get back to the source. Origi- prompted me to see scenes that I was reading about. There were in fact bonds
nal is also being a bit crazy... The original is the thing that can constantly shift of kinship with the cinema, and then in the cinema there was that amazing way
in meaning and in the interpretation of that meaning. And if we no longer have of being forever obligedbecause of the dcor, the objectsto make history: we
originals, Im not saying things will be better or worse, but it will be another life. have a given time in which this particular history unfolds.
It really will be something else.
FM: To pursue this film metaphor, the cinema as a machine is an architectural
FM: And does your notion of immersion have something to do with the illusion space in which we immerse ourselves, and where we perceive what Christian
that induces us to think we are touching the real? This is something very similar Metz called the impression of reality. Because immersion in it is total, there is
to the work of art and to the aura of the work of art. You go to see the work of no other sound in the auditorium than that of the film, no other light than the
art, but you do not want to see a reproduction of it, no matter how perfect it may light of the screen, the whole sensory reality is absorbed by the film, and this is
be. Lastly, does this notion of immersion have any connection with your passion something similar to what you are doing...
for films?
AF: Yes, and then this also calls to mind a certain form of cinema which Im
AF: You are absolutely right when you stress that an illusion is involved here. We very fond of, and which is the transcription of the commonplace. It was Chris
have this illusion, and we must be aware of it, but it is undeniable that we feel it. Marker who said: I may have crisscrossed all the countries of the world, but the

only thing that interests me is banality. This is a very arresting statement, all the
more so because in many of his films he dealt extensively with reminiscence and
memory. And what we find at certain moments in the cinema, whether it is well
produced or badly produced my observation has nothing to do with value judg-
ments, is this presentation of the commonplace which becomes extraordinary
and ceases to be banal, precisely because it is presented [mise en scne]. This
kind of endless doubling [mise en abme] greatly interests me, because it ques-
tions me, because it is forever prompting me to ask myself if I am not over-inter-
preting things, when I myself do the presenting. In reality, isnt what I regard as
noteworthy and meaningful, in presenting archives, the least significant and most
banal thing there is? Films always help me to think about such things. On the
one hand, I can see the risk of spectacularising banality, but at the same time I
like it when films eradicate the commonplace and show it. Needless to say, this
is a contradiction, but it helps me in writing history.
HUO: In Quel Bruit Ferons-Nous? you say that every intellectual bases his or
her thinking on two or three powerful ideas, and with regard to one of them, you
mention the idea of utopia constantly activated to talk about the present while
writing history. Could you tell me something about this utopia?
AF: Its a sort of madness, its wanting to recount the present, which is not yet
over, because it is still unstable and therefore does not exist. It is a question of
talking about a present that never exists by recounting what has passed. For me
this has the scale of major madness, of major utopia, and it is the only one that
interests me...
Interview recorded in Paris on 27 August 2005

Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

Francesco Manacorda with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Archiving Time FM: Contemporary art exhibitions seem to be akin to archives in reverse (as through, within zones for projections, light zones and dark zones. The space is
in Smithsons Passaic ruin in reverse) because, instead of being collections furthermore programmed in a different way every day.
of data from the past, curatorial projects are akin to science-fictional archival
narrative. Harald Szeemann hints to this concept in his definitions of shows as FM: You clearly have an interest in developing and questioning an archival impulse
archives in transformation. Do you think that archives in reverse is an produc- in your curatorial approach. Interarchive (Kunstraum der Universitt Lneburg,
tive way of describing curatorial practice? Do you feel like your professional 2002), a show you conceived with Hans Peter Feldman, for example showed
activity is similar to the building of provisional archives, which are not turned artworks alongside your personal research archive [a meta-archive]; Utopia Sta-
into statements by historians after their assemblage, but arise as statements tion seemed closer to the attempt to gather materials on the artists fascination
as they are built? I am adapting here Smithsons sentence from Passaic: The for utopia than to a merely thematic exhibition of artworks. What attracts you in
zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is all the new con- the notion of the archive? Is it completionism and the temptation to include ev-
struction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of romantic ruin, erything that drives you, or is it rather the attempt to construct an unconventional
because the buildings do not fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise discourse out of what are normally conceived closed categories?
into ruin before they are built.
HUO: For Interarchive, it started with bringing within the exhibition my archive,
HUO: When Hou Hanru and I curated Cities on the Move in 1997-98 we thought which did not have a location. It was an archive on the move to Lueneburgs
that it could be interesting to develop a traveling show that would constantly University; such a situation prompted us to ask ourselves how to deal with the
change, in order to research for the exhibition throughout the traveling of the ex- archive in an active way. It is not an archive-collection but rather a working
hibition itself. The result was a permanently changing show, starting off in Vienna archive, with documents often related to the preparation and research of and
with Yung Ho Changs display feature consisting of a scaffolding structure. There for exhibitions. The idea was to make the material accessible. With Beatrice von
has been an ongoing dialogue lasting many years as the side-effect of the travel- Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig we decided to invite artist Hans-
ing show. On the one hand it was very fast, on the other hand there was a very Peter Feldmann to undermine all certainties that go alongside the static idea of
slow process of emerging dialogues, of emerging collaborations, of feedback loops the archive. The project is structured so that, after almost 10 years in Lueneburg,
and notions of circularity (I had long conversations with Heinz von Foerster at the the archive will continue its journey and that a new project can happen with it in
time), also of simultaneous mise en abme and recycling of previous exhibition another city. The archive is not conceived as a continent (rock solid and impos-
design. As Liam Gillick said: We can see in the past traces of the future. ing), but as an archipelago (welcoming and sheltering). In douard Glissants
words, the idea of a non-linear time implicit in this idea, or in this concept, the
In a different way, this continued with Utopia Station with Molly Nesbit and coexistence of several time zones will of course allow for a great variety of different
Rirkrit Tiravanija; the project has evolved into a kind of a learning system. After contact zones as well. The title Interarchive has a double meaning: it is
having been very horizontal in Venice, it evolved into occupying a receptive an archive between cities, on the move, not belonging to a geography, and at the
zone which can at any moment be animated. In this perspective, we decided for same time it alludes to the inbetween-ness of archives, the zone between other
the restaging of Utopia Station at Haus der Kunst in Munich to develop a more archives, a network of archives, to connect Lueneburgs archive to many others
organic programme. One of the centre pieces is actually a vertical tower, recycling all over the world: an archive always hides another archive... which leads us to
material from Venice. In fact it is not a building, but a passage that one can walk Utopia Station, the project triggering many different archives, all the conversa-

The archive is not conceived as a continent
(rock solid and imposing), but as an
archipelago (welcoming and sheltering).
tions, the posters, which are on the e-flux website and can be downloaded, the exhibition catalogue and of the notion of exhibition as a discourse of potential
sonic and film archives and remixes, the display feature archive... The project was statements delivered to the visitor. In Le dsordre the unconventional reading
and is not thematic. Utopia is a trigger, a catalyst. of the data is the key for the production of interesting statement. Do you see a
similarity with curatorial practice as one that, through constant reinvention, has
FM: The archival impulse also seems to be behind the interview project that you to serve as a tool generating discourse? Would you think of exhibitions as tools
have been carrying out for some time now. Do you conceive it as a necessity to enabling a dynamic memory?
gather relevant materials for future generations, or are interviews generated as
the starting point of your curatorial research interests? Would you ever conceive HUO: Yes, definitely exhibitions are about dynamic memory, like the brain. As
converting it into an exhibition and show several interviews? Israel Rosenfield told me, memory is dynamic. It depends on context and it is
in motion. When we are watching a film, we are watching a series of still im-
HUO: The interview project had no master plan. It almost started by accident ages. We dont see these still images, we see motion. The brain is integrating
originating from the fact that I did not follow the usual kind of academic trajec- two events - two stills - and it is creating from these two events something else,
tory but came from economy and sociology and crossed disciplines; something which is motion. Memory is an integration of temporary events and in this sense
mobile or light could be installed in myself, a bit like Arlette Farge described it it works over time. It is relating events taking place in one moment to the next, or
for her practice. The beginnings of the interview project are around 1993. I did to two previous moments, etc. Indeed, this is what the brain is constantly doing.
some interviews with Vito Acconci and Felix Gonzalez -Torres the for Museum I would say that memory is based on relationships. It consists, on the one hand,
in Progress, and these were recorded in a film studio. Soon afterwards I started in temporary relationships, and on the other hand in spatial relationships. We are
traveling with small video cameras and the interviews could happen anywhere. I relating fragments from different spaces, from different temporal frames. Memory
started to record weekly interviews with artists, architects, scientists, which were is these relationships. It is not a particular space, a particular time, but rather a
very often related to my exhibition projects and research. In terms of its archive, particular set of temporary and spatial relationships that are dynamic.
there was no plan, it just happened; there are now 1400 hours, towards an infi-
nite conversation. Since 2002, the dialogues have often become trialogues, I go FM: You often mention the missing history of exhibition design and curatorial
to see someone with someone else and the second volume of the interview series practice and the subsequent amnesia of key historical precedents. Why do you
will be conceived as a polyphonic novel. All the cassettes are digital so it is more think there is a reluctance to write that history? Do you think the archival material
about time than about space. The whole archive fits into a suitcase. Concerning is insufficient due to the ephemeral nature of art exhibition, or do you feel that it
your question about the video documents, all the interviews are transcribed and would be a very controversial meta-discourse? Would you ever write that book?
so far only the text versions were used, to use the video documents will be the
next step. Joseph Grigely is working on an exhibition of the archive, of all the HUO: Many books are missing. There is a whole missing exhibition literature
books, texts and interviews. first of all. The key texts by curatorial pioneers such as Alexander Dorner or W.
Sandberg (his famous radio broadcasts) or Pontus Hulten are mostly out of print
FM: One of the interesting features of the book Le dsordre des Familles by and often not accessible in English. Then there is amnesia about very important
Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault consists of presenting archival data with very other curatorial pioneers. This is also true for radical experiments in exhibition
little commentary in order to make them speak. This model reminded me of an design, projects that are often not included in architectural monographs and are

Definitely exhibitions are about dynamic
memory, like the brain.
somehow marginal as temporary constellations, but where very often the main accessible, or a big part is hidden in storage: The division inevitably corresponds
inventions are made. to editing: in or out? The essential museum experience is based on selection
(by unseen hands, for unarticulated criteria, from unknowable quantities). The
FM: We once discussed about the possibility for exhibitions to be collected by museum is the only institution that systematically freezes its assets away. Within
museums, thereby entering tout court the archives as autonomous objects rather the extension, the notion of storage, visible storage and robotic retrieval eliminate
than special (archival) gathering of distinct artistic practices. Would you not think arguments of difficult access, unwieldy logistics and impossibility. Combined with
that such a gesture would freeze the artworks included in a single possible dis- the appeal for a more customized, individual museum experience, the rethinking
cursive category? Would this be disrespectful of the artworks as discrete cultural of storage initiates a new way of conceptualizing the collection. Will the viewer,
unities? liberated from curatorial editing have opportunities to make his/her own choices,
to reshuffle works now chained together in prescribed narrative sequences and
HUO: Exhibitions usually are temporary constellations, but there are excep- significant interpretations?
tions where whole exhibitions enter the collection of a museum. The idea of the
collecting of exhibitions was mentioned in a discussion with Daniel Buren who
told me that he convinced the Belgian collector Herman Daled to buy only his
works for one entire year. When the collector was finally freed from this one year
contract beginning January of the subsequent year he took the first plane to Berlin
and bought a whole exhibition of Lawrence Weiner... There are also precedents of
whole group shows having been sold to a museum. A recent example is the Ann
Lee project by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, where the whole exhibition,
the whole project is both in the Museum in Eindhoven, as well in the De la Cruz
collection in Miami.
FM: If you were the director of the imaginary museum of curating, which exhibi-
tions would you collect and why?
HUO: Ever since I moved to Paris generations of artists and architects have told
me about Les Immateriaux, which happened some years before I moved to Paris,
and it is a show I regret for me not having seen it, but, as many group shows,
it would probably have been impossible to collect this complex impermanent
constellation. As Rem Koolhaas showed in his extraordinary though unfortunately
unrealised project for MoMA in New York, the memory of previous exhibitions
could be digitally present in the museum at any time. Koolhaas also shows that a
museum is an ambiguous treasure of collections, as some works are on view and

Francesco Manacorda with Bruce Altshuler
The Missing History

of Curating
Bruce Altshuler is FM: How difficult was it for you to trace the history of exhibition installations? and the subsequent amnesia regarding curatorial practice. Why do you think
director of the Museum
Studies program at New What kind of documents (pictures, notes of the participants, reviews, films or there is such a resistance to write the history of exhibition making? Your book is
York University. Formerly, personal accounts gathered in interviews with artists, curators and visitors) would the only one inaugurating this field, everyone complains about the amnesia but
he was director of studies
make it easier for you to understand the curatorial dispositif at work in the shows no one writes the history do you think it is an impossible task or a delayed
at Christies Education
Departement. He is the you were investigating? What kind of elements peculiarly defining the nature of complex necessity?
author of The Avant- exhibition display one can find in archives?
Garde in Exhibition:
New Art in the 20th BA: I think it is less a case of resistance than of non-interest among art historians,
Century (1994), and BA: Available research resources for exhibition history obviously vary greatly, with but this has greatly disappeared as art history has moved from a monographic
Isamu Noguchi (1994),
editor of Collecting little material existing for some quite important exhibitions for instance, the leg- focus on individual artists to include a broader consideration of social and institu-
the New: Museums endary 1906 Die Brucke exhibition held in the Dresden suburb of Lobtau and a tional histories. You can see this now in growing scholarly research on the history
and Contemporary Art
great deal for other shows, especially those after the Second World War. As in all of the art market, a natural complement to the expanding interest in exhibition
(2005), and co-editor of
Isamu Noguchi: Essays historical work, with exhibitions one must attempt to retrieve primary documents history. And with libraries and research centers actively collecting material to
and Conversations rather than rely solely on the standard histories, which often reify past errors or mis- support research in these areas, the scholarly infrastructure has vastly improved.
(1994). He has
published numerous statements. Among the most important documents are, not surprisingly, installa- In addition to this reorientation of art historical work, the development of aca-
essays on modern tion photographs, which can be found in contemporary press, institutional archives, demic programs in curatorial studies itself a function of the growing market
and contemporary
art, including catalog gallery archives (both for commercial gallery exhibitions and for documentation for (and related general interest in) contemporary art, including the expansion of
essays for exhibitions of shows in which gallery artists participated), and a rich source often ignored museum collecting and display of contemporary art has generated a need for
organized by the Whitney
the personal records of artists included in exhibitions being researched. After historical knowledge and a theoretical understanding of exhibition practice. Aca-
Museum of American
Art, New York; the photographs I have found correspondence in the archives of institutions, galler- demic programs demand historical and theoretical resources, so the educational
Carnegie Museum of ies, artists, and curators and personal interviews to yield the most unexpected market in curatorial studies as well as a more broad and interdisciplinary art
Art, Pittsburgh; Japan
Society, New York; information. Of course, what is said in interviews though almost always useful history also has and will continue to encourage research and writing in exhibi-
and the Vitra Design one way or another must be taken with a grain of salt, informants often spinning tion history.
Museum, Weil am Rhein,
Germany. their stories to highlight themselves, and repeating things that they have stated so
many times that they are more myths than living memories. In correspondence FM: Contemporary art exhibitions seem to be akin to archives as they are
especially, and in interviews, I have come upon the little details that shed new, organised as groups of elements that eventually might coagulate in a coherent
revisionary light on things I thought I knew, or that opened up entirely new direc- discourse. Their tentative nature, though, almost makes them archive in re-
tions of inquiry. And in terms of understanding the system within which exhibitions verse (as in Smithsons ruin in reverse) because instead of being collections
function, records of and interviews with dealers and collectors are critical. As more of data from the past curatorial projects speculate on what will possibly be
institutions, such as the Getty Research Center, collect and make available such interesting in the future. They gather elements of todays culture, all of which
material, work in exhibition history will become less difficult. are, according to the curator, relevant cultural manifestation and therefore
worth being collected and remembered in the future (i.e. kept in an archive).
FM: Many people (and among them Hans Ulrich Obrist as well as Anne Stanisze- Do you think that archives in reverse is an interesting way of describing cu-
wski for instance) often complain about the missing history of exhibition making ratorial practice?

People disagree about whether anything
can be avant-garde in our time, but I think
that art and curatorial practice fall on
the same side of the fence whatever one
decides.
BA: I am not sure that I would characterize curatorial practice as archives in re- FM: Your exhibition history stops with When Attitudes Become Form, the key
verse, but it is interesting to compare exhibitions to Smithsons Passaic, New Jer- exhibition for the development of curating as cultural practice. Would you ever
sey buildings that rise into ruin. For me your point seems closer to viewing exhi- continue your historical narrative from that point? Do you think it will be an im-
bitions in terms of what Philip Fisher calls the futures past, as entities created possible task? Do you think that curatorial practice has expanded to an excessive
with an eye to how they will fit into a future narrative of their cultural moment. degree in respect to the avant-garde drive that you trace in your book?
But is this anything more than saying that curators in their exhibitions attempt to
assemble a revealing or accurate picture of something a new artistic direction BA: I ended The Avant-Garde in Exhibition in 1969 with When Attitude Be-
or concern, a cultural phenomenon, etc.? Given this intention a curator naturally comes Form, because it seemed a significant point of closure both the end
would believe that his or her exhibition will be seen in the future as depicting of the Sixties, and, as an exhibition of anti-institutional art that was funded
or indicating what the past was like, and if it was not that would be due to the by a large international corporation, a symbolic event pointing to what the art
poor judgment or lack of information of those looking back on the exhibition and world would become, especially during the late Eighties when I began work-
its historical setting. (Here I am reminded of the American philosopher Charles ing on the book. As you mention, it also marked in the activity of Harald
Peirces notion of truth as the ideal end of inquiry, with beliefs always fallible, but Szeemann the developing discipline, or career, of curatorial practice, thus
tending toward a single conclusion.) So I agree that curatorial practice aims indicating another (a perhaps related) cultural break. The book was not a
at least in part, since it might have other purposes, such as providing pleasure to single narrative containing anything like a tight argument, though there was
viewers to generate material worthy of an archive, but this seems to me the aim the subtext of avant-garde artists increasingly losing control of the presenta-
of most intellectual activity that issues in a substantial object. tion of their work. Other exhibitions could have been chosen, and the material
could have been configured differently (and more theoretically), but the point
FM: Archives often imply collection whose sense has still to be made through the was to look at the way in which exhibitions, and the presentation of art to the
questions we ask to it, although in the case of exhibitions, they had been previ- public, are critical to art (and cultural) history. One could readily write about
ously very similar attempt to make a discourse from a series of discrete elements. later exhibitions in fact I am currently working on a book that assembles
Does this imply a double work, a sort of meta-discourse for the exhibition histo- exhibition documentation through the millennium and develop additional
rian? Did you have to first construct a lost discourse from the archival materials themes, such as the increasing institutionalization of advanced art practice.
you used, and then extract your personal narrative of it on top of that? And such practice of course has come to include curatorial practice, which I
think can be designated avant-garde to the same degree that contemporary
BA: I tend to think of the research process as a dynamic one, in which you si- art can. People disagree about whether anything can be avant-garde in our
multaneously generate a narrative (or multiple narratives) in terms of which you time, but I think that art and curatorial practice fall on the same side of the
search for (and interpret) documentation, and the documentation leads in new fence whatever one decides.
directions that can reconstruct the explanatory framework that led to it. As percep-
tion is not possible without conceptualization, so nothing is evidence without a FM: Some artist-curated shows, in particular some of the historical avant-garde
theory that recognizes it as such. But the initial narrative/interpretation is contin- such as the surrealist ones, have influenced generations of artists and still today
uously restructured (revised, redirected, expanded, etc.) in light of the documents are crucial to curatorial practice and installation. Do you think that exhibitions
to which it has directed us. of that kind should be collected by museums? Would this mean granting group

I see no reason that entire exhibitions
curated by artists or by non-artists should
not be viewed as single objects to be brought
into museum collections, with all their
attendant documentation.
show the value of discrete art objects? In case it would, do you think of it as
problematic?
BA: The question of collecting exhibitions is an interesting one, and I see no

reason that entire exhibitions curated by artists or by non-artists should not
be viewed as single objects to be brought into museum collections, with all their
attendant documentation. Such collecting would not negate the value of the indi-
vidual artworks in these shows, which certainly can be displayed and studied in
other contexts. In terms of the practicalities of collecting whole exhibitions, apart
from the cost, or the difficulty of assembling groups of important art works of the
past, the museum registration methods being devised for installation art, such
as the Guggenheims Variable Media Initiative, suit exhibitions perfectly. These
include interviews with the artist/curator, documenting general and specific intent
and specifying those aspects of the installation that must remain the same and
those that can be altered.

INTERVIEWS
Sandra Frimmel with Jrgen Harten
Archives as Clarification
Plants for Contemporary
Culture: Unwanted
Memories Versus the Urge
for Archiving
Sandra Frimmel (1977) SF: I would like to talk to you about memories of exhibitions and the possibility JH: This is a very new possibility that we seldom use, because of shortages in 1977 to 1998, he served
is an art historian and art as the director of the
critic based in Berlin. She of ensuring that they are archived properly. How do exhibitions continue to work funding. In the best case, all that remains are a few photos or even a CD with Kunsthalle Dsseldorf.
is also a Ph.D candidate after their relatively short duration? How do they inscribe themselves into collec- images. For Berlin-Moscow, for example, we published a press review prefaced He has curated
at the Department of Art numerous exhibitions,
History at the Humboldt-
tive memory? How do curators handle the fact that their work into which they by an extensive sequence of images that present each of the exhibitions rooms, such as the legendary
Universitt in Berlin. In have invested several months or even years of preparation disappears again providing a good impression of the situation in the exhibition venue. Of course, Marcel Broodthaers,
2003 she received the after only a few weeks? What does the afterlife of an exhibition look like, after their the reconstruction of the atmosphere is also a question of interpretation, which Muse dArt Moderne,
prize of the Corporation Dpartement des Aigles,
General Satellite for time on display is finally over? can, for example, be supported by the reports on the exhibition in the press. What Section des Figures
contemporary art in the did these reports cite? What were the reactions like? How polemic were these (1972), Museum of
category Scholarship Money (1978), Georg
for the preparation of a JH: When we talk about the afterlife of exhibitions, we need to make a differ- reactions? This can help to reconstruct the atmosphere to a degree, though, of Baselitz Gerhard
scientific study in the ence between those who remember exhibitions out of professional interest and course, this reconstruction will still be incomplete. Richter (1981), The
area of contemporary Axe has Blossomed,
art for her study titled
the memory of the public, which is actually what constitutes collective memory. Soviet Art Around 1990
The Russian Pavilion The latter can be fixed through the exhibitions resonance in the media. Collective I started in Dsseldorf in 1969, when the institutions, the entire art industry and (1991), Siqueiros/Pollock
at the Venice Biennale memory only contains that which is present in the media. Very little is actually the very nature of its mediation were being called into doubt. This doubt also Pollock/Siqueiros
from 1990 to 2003 (1995), The Fifth
Between Self- perceived in a collective sense beyond this sphere. Of course, this doesnt mean concerned the function of the curator. At the time, there werent actually any cura- Element Money or Art
representation and that individuals dont have intensive memories that they can draw upon at any tors in todays sense of the word, curators who produce certain thematic designs (2000), Berlin/Moscow
Self-definition. Recent Moscow/Berlin 1950-
exhibition projects given moment. Not so long ago, an official from the Cultural Ministry in Rome or concepts. It was at this time that we brought the famous series Between to 2000 (2003).
include Reflection at came up to me and said, Oh, so youre the person who made the exhibition The life. Most obviously, the name Between meant between the institutions and the
the National Center
for Contemporary Arts,
Axe has Blossomed on the 1930s! The catalogue is fantastic! The exhibition took public, but it also meant that we were striking a kind of provisional pose: we only
Moscow (2005) and place in 1987 and people still remember it now, 18 years later. But this isnt col- sent out little notes as invitations; there were no completed installations, no open-
FUTURE7 Eurovision lective memory, but professional memory. ing ceremonies, and no speeches. This ritual which is part of the art industry
at the Center for
Contemporary Culture, was suspended. We made this decision quite consciously, because we felt that
Ekaterinburg, Russia SF: Exhibitions are usually reconstructed according to documents that have en- one can only experience what happens here if one is actually present. It can only
(2004). She contributes
regularly to Moscow Art tered the archive, such as catalogues as in your example but also invitation be experienced in the moment it happens, and then, its over. This was a con-
Magazine, Artchronika, cards, press-releases, photos, etc. But in the end, these documents only recon- sequence of what was forming under the terms of performance and action at the
taz die tageszeitung
and Plato Review.
struct reactions to the exhibition and not the exhibition itself. Documents can be time. The notion of the artwork in the conventional sense had become obsolete.
archived, but not the atmosphere of an event or the interrelation of different piec- There were no documentations, no catalogues, nothing. By now, many of these
Jrgen Harten es. This is something no catalogue can ever achieve, no matter how good it is. actions are being reconstructed, by interviewing eye-witnesses, for example. But
(Hamburg, 1933) is
a freelance curator, if one subscribes to a more radical view, artistic experience only takes place in the
based in Berlin. He JH: Sad but true. Still, one could use up-to-date technologies to document at least encounters with the artists on location, and no-where else.
studied anthropology,
psychology and art the spatial situation, even if the exhibitions atmosphere is beyond reconstruction.
history in Hamburg and SF: Such eye-witness interviews document things that were supposed to be re-
Munich. In 1968, he
was secretary-general of
SF: But this new possibility has not been around for very long membered by individuals many years later. In doing so, they lead the original
Documenta 4, and from intentions behind events ad absurdum.

What does one actually hope to gain
by archiving exhibitions? Which degree
of necessity does this have for charting
ones own position in the present?
1
Aby Warburgs famous JH: Quite so. In this case, memory is something unwanted, because it fixes JH: In this specific case, this really is a flaw. One methodological approach cre-
Mnenosyne Atlas is
eventually reconstructed something that can be neither repeated nor reconstructed in its immediacy. But ated two exhibitions, neither of which can be reconstructed. However, there is a
and published as Der this immediacy is actually based on a deeper form of refusal, on a rejection of the press review and a CD for the Berlin exhibition, and the Moscow exhibition was
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne,
ed. Martin Warnke and
archive in principle. One wants to rely upon the events immediacy in conveying also documented through a CD, so that these materials can indeed be used to
Claudia Brink, Akademie a message in the sense of an emotional movement. Everything else is second- remember or to reconstruct both exhibitions, at least to a certain degree.
Verlag, Berlin, 2000. It hand.
consisted of 79 sturdy
wooden panels - lost by No matter which exhibition I was making, it has always been my goal to connect
now - to which images SF: Where are the origins this refusal of the archive? There are two types of archi- the classical exhibition catalogue (i.e. the book) to the exhibition as closely as
from Warburgs collection
of photographs and val construction. One of them is based upon the assumption that everything that possible. In some cases, my catalogues even contain floor-plans of the exhibi-
reproductions were to enters the archive will be stored there in temporary deactivation. The other, which tions spatial organization, so that one could use the catalogue as a navigation
be pinned, creating an
image of art history in
is based on a notion of Aby Warburgs, is a dynamized type, an active archive.1 aid through the exhibition, and then later, to reconstruct it. However, this is not
motion. In the dynamic archive, things only take shape because they are viewed again always possible. In other cases, we have published two volumes: the first was
and again. Is the refusal of the archive actually based on the idea of not allowing printed on occasion of the exhibitions opening, while the second documented the
2
The exhibition Berlin
Moscow / Moscow artworks to lay dormant? Or is it based on the desire to avoid reinterpretation or exhibitions presentation. But today, one can hardly do this for financial reasons.
Berlin 1950-2000 was transformation through the active archive? This was only possible for as long as one could work within the framework of a
held as a part of the
German-Russian Cultural flexible administration in order to mediate between the desired success of the
Encounters 2003/2004. JH: The first question that comes to mind is: what does one actually hope to gain exhibition and the boundaries that public interest has in reality.
Its German version was
presented in Berlins
by archiving exhibitions? Which degree of necessity does this have for charting
Martin-Gropius-Bau ones own position in the present? In many cases, archives save things from being SF: In other words, you already attempted to plan for a documentation that would
from September 2003 forgotten, and this is also true of exhibitions. Another fundamental question would be as adequate as possible during the exhibitions conceptional phase in order to
to January 2004, while
its Russian version was be how important the reception and documentation of exhibitions is in compari- make sure that the reconstruction and the memory of the exhibition would be as
shown in Moscows State son to the actual creative process of the curators work. Which concrete gains close as possible to the original exhibition. Is there perhaps an impulse today to
Historical Museum from
April to June 2004. Both does one hope to make in saving the remainders of exhibitions, those fragments shift the exhibition into its supplementary publication, away from its momentary
exhibitions presented that the media convey, in order to be able to activate them again? effect to its documentation, so that archiving of the exhibition might mean that
extensive comparative
overviews of Western
more of it remains than during its actual duration, that it might even grow in terms
and Russian art from SF: So what does one hope to gain by archiving as a curator? If one looks at of content and value?
the second half of the Berlin-Moscow,2 for example, the relationship between the exhibition and the
20th century. Jrgen
Harten was one of the six vehicles for its memory is rather difficult. There were two variants of the exhibi- JH: If you think of the RAF-exhibition in Berlins Kunstwerke, you can see this
curators of this bilateral tions, each of which had its own catalogue. However, the overarching themes in effort quite clearly. The question is in how far something like this is intentional,
project.
the catalogues did not exactly correspond to the thematic organization of either why it could be intended, and whether it is actually possible. As far as I am con-
exhibition, which means that it is hardly possible to draw any conclusions as to cerned, my colleagues and I have always wanted to be up-to-date, to find points
the goals of the exhibition by using the catalogue alone. of connection with what was already in the air. This wish had to do with wanting
to attract attention, helping the artists, and furthering their reputations. Accom-

I understand the work of the curator
as a way of helping people to discover
things that are not perceived when one uses
conventional categories of classifying art.
panying the catalogue with an exhibition was a part of this process. Often, the JH: There is actually very little you can do about this. After a guided tour through
argument was something like: the exhibition will go, but the catalogue will stay. the Moscow-Berlin exhibition, the curator of the last biennale in Istanbul came
But one could also ask in how far the exhibition represents an effort deserving of up to me and told what an impressive and stimulating experience this kind of
appreciation? In how far is the exhibitions curator interesting as an interpreter? exhibition-dramaturgy was for her, that she had never seen anything quite like
For me, a substantial question was always: which impulse should be delivered it. For me, it is incredibly attractive to set exhibits in relation to one another. In
to posterity? After all, it isnt about the curators self-representation, but about Berlin-Moscow, this was an interesting aspect, but it was impossible to carry
the matter at hand, because an exhibition is a kind of celebration or feast. In the through consistently. For me, artworks on display are marked through their pres-
time of the mass-media, an exhibition-opening is a big event that people want ence. They are present, they have an effect, and they want to be seen. On the
to participate in. This is something that isnt so easy to pour into the archive. A whole, an exhibition has more of a chance of being successful when it irritates
good exhibition is a larger whole that slowly takes form in the course of many its visitors, making them feel curious or affected by the presence of what can be
months, and when it is done, one celebrates. After this celebration, the curator seen there. This is very important to me. I understand the work of the curator as
of the exhibition is usually exhausted and doesnt want to know anything more of a way of helping people to discover things that are not perceived when one uses
his exhibition as an event. conventional categories of classifying art. In short, a good curator is usually able
to reveal something new.
SF: In this moment, his job is over; he is no longer responsible for the exhibitions
life during the duration of its showing. Do you see this fleeting, ephemeral aspect SF: Something like this only works in the moment in which the spectator is stand-
of exhibitions as something positive because the experiences of its visitors con- ing directly in front of the artwork, but eludes archiving. In fact, the archive fails in
centrate on the moment, a moment that is actually very intense? this moment. In the end, one has nothing to fall back upon other than memory.
Do you, as a curator, see the transitory nature of your work and its short-term
JH: Certainly. This is just like at a celebration or a party. After all, a party is also existence as a positive quality? Perhaps the archive does nothing but damage to
the high point of the everyday since it concentrates the intensity of life. As a cura- this positive quality? Could it be that personal memories of the exhibition allow
tor, one actually works toward this goal and this is a fascinating experience. Then it to be relived far longer and remain in memory far more intensively that all me-
again, there are exhibitions that are only put together to sell a book, for example. dia-reports, newspaper articles or catalogues, because one recalls the exhibition
But these can hardly be considered as real exhibitions. In this case, the exhibi- again and again, keeping it alive by combining it with new experiences?
tion becomes no more than a means to fulfill an end, and this has little to do with
curatorial activity. JH: Yes, I think this is true. The eye-witness testimony of people that have seen
a certain exhibition cannot be replaced by anything else, providing that they have
SF: One of my initial questions was how curatorial praxis overcomes or arranges really grappled with what was on display. On the other hand, I think one can con-
itself with the moment of transitoriness. It seems to me that this question does vey at least a small part of an exhibitions atmosphere if one offers possibilities for
not exist on the level of a problem for you personally, that it does not give you comparison despite all of the catalogues limitations as a medium, if one reflects
any reason for concern, but is actually inscribed into the exhibition sui generis, upon the exhibitions basic idea in this publication. Of course, this already points
as a character trait. beyond the exhibition itself, but then again, the exhibitions occasion for celebra-
tion can become the point of departure for further reflection. These possibilities

In the final analysis, any exhibition is more
persuasive than any documentation one
might make, no matter how good it is.
for comparison can also become relevant in terms of methodology. For example, their concepts are purified when they are processed by the archive after they are
in 1981, I curated an exhibition of the two painters that I thought were the best over? Or, to put in even more pathetic terms, does the archive distill that which
German painters, namely Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter. This exhibition was has value for eternity?
an attempt to create a constellation of two completely different worlds that would
not destroy one another. It was not so much about drawing comparisons in terms JH: I understand this formulation somewhat differently. The notion of the purifi-
of form but in terms of emotion. I repeated this method in an encounter between cation plant is a perfect fit to exhibitions like The Fifth Element, which I curated
Pollock and Siqueiros. The catalogues of these exhibitions may not convey the in Dsseldorf in 2000. Exhibitions like these come from an extremely large ar-
atmosphere, but they do reflect the basic idea very nicely, in my opinion. chive of cultural history, so that the exhibition itself becomes a purification plant,
which purifies everything it contains. In this specific case, the goal was to clarify
SF: Do you think that the idea of emotional comparison that lies at the base of the relationship between the financial and spiritual valorization of art. But I am
these exhibitions flowed in their catalogues in an adequate form? not so sure whether it is the specific goal of an archive to purify such concepts
post facto. First and foremost, the archive is a collection point. Making use of the
JH: Of course, it would have been nice if we would have the possibility of docu- archive through research and reconstruction can help to clarify or purify murky re-
menting the exhibitions space with modern media at the time, in order to walk lationships in the exhibition. Lets return to the example of Berlin-Moscow. In this
through them again in a virtual form. Sadly, we simply did not have this pos- case, I imagine that if we used the archive in order to scan what remains of the
sibility. However, there are a few nice pictures of the exhibition space. When I controversies we experienced in making the exhibition, we might be able to find a
imagine how young curators work in their future profession, I sometimes wish I far more critical approach to the issues at hand, even clarifying them completely.
had the opportunity to document their process of working. This is hardest of all in Of course, this was not possible while we were putting the exhibition together.
thematic exhibitions. Take Harald Szeemanns exhibitions Der Hang zum Gesa-
mtkunstwerk (Tendencies toward the Total Work of Art), The Bachelor Machine, SF: Do some exhibitions depending on their conception become archives
or my exhibition Museum des Geldes (The Museum of Money) in the 1980s, of themselves?
which there are some very impressive pictures. In this case, it was very impor-
tant to me that one would be able to gain a spatial impression of the show in JH: I would say that they become pseudo-archives. An exhibition is a transitory
retrospect. In working on such a comprehensive theme, one can only proceed event. It cannot be an archive, simply because it does not remain. An exhibition
punctually and associatively; this is the only way that the concept will gain the like Berlin-Moscow could function as an archive under certain circumstances, but
necessary density. In this case, the curator also fulfills an artistic achievement, only if I were to lock its exhibits into the building, making sure that everything
which he would like see documented in the catalogue, at least by presenting the were to remain as it was. But this is impossible.
sequence of images with their commentaries in the way they were realized in the
exhibition. In the final analysis, however, any exhibition is more persuasive than Berlin, 14 April 2005
any documentation one might make, no matter how good it is.
SF: At a recent talk in Berlins Kulturforum, Paolo Bianchi spoke of archives as the
purification plants of contemporary culture. Could one say that the exhibitions or

STUDIES
Rafal B. Niemojewski
Where Do You Come From?

And Where Are You Going?
On the Memory and
Identity of Biennials
Rafal B. Niemojewski is In the first week of May 2005, several enthusiasts of biennials,1 including myself, in botany to describe a plant that requires two seasons to complete its life cycle);
an art historian, writer,
and freelance curator
came to the capital of Lombardy to assist in a conference organized as a parallel their participation would be equally relevant, or perhaps even more so, given the
based in London and event to a somewhat undesirable MiArt art fair. The title of the conference, Da est potentially interdisciplinary nature of the conference.
Paris. He is currently
a ovest da nord a sud Sguardo sulle Biennali del futuro Creativita giovane
conducting doctoral
research at the Royal a confronto [From East to West, from North to South A Look at the Biennials The Milan conference was quite symptomatic of todays general perception of
College of Art in London of the Future An Overview of Young Creativity] was particularly attractive, but biennials a perception marked by widespread excitement, confusion and mis-
on the proliferation
of international large- it soon became evident that the event, which had been advertised as a meet- conceptions. Deplorably, at this important moment in the history of biennials, as
scale exhibitions of ing for curators of emerging biennials, was quite different from what had been they are expanding in bewildering they are also being ridiculed (sometimes this is
contemporary art.
expected. due to the biennial organizers themselves, but at another times, biennials are the
1
For the sake of target of cruel but not entirely unjustified mockery from artists, as was the case
clarity I am using
Instead of ardent discussions on the future of large-scale exhibitions, there was a with Maurizio Cattelans 6th Caribbean Biennial charade) or even demonized as
the word biennial
here as a generic peculiarly incoherent suite of exposs. Along with three young curators who had exclusive playgrounds for an international jet set of curators and artists. Biennials
term for all recurring been involved in some of the most emblematic international large-scale shows, have even been linked to a conspiracy theory whether the product of perverse
international exhibitions
of contemporary art, namely, Nicolas Bourriaud (comparing the 1st Moscow Biennial to the 8th Lyon provocation or born of genuine paranoia which was circulating during the
regardless of the rhythm Biennial), Massimiliano Gioni (evoking Manifesta 5 and the upcoming 4th Berlin opening of Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian; it claimed that biennials were all part of
of their recurrence or
whether they prefer
Biennial) and Tirdad Zolghadr (presenting an overview of the 7th Sharjah Bien- a secret cultural program developed by the CIA and were carefully designed to lay
to use Italian words nial), the list of invited speakers included the organizers of the Bali Biennial, a the groundwork for economic colonization. Very intriguing, indeed.
(biennale, triennale, etc)
national Indonesian exhibition that openly promotes traditional and local art forms
in their titles.
and displays video art and other radically revolting experiments (sic) in an exhi- This grotesque situation hardly comes as a surprise, since there exists no single
bition entitled Outsider Art. publication today that could be used as a reference on the subject no thorough
examination of the phenomenon of large-scale international contemporary art ex-
Even more surprising was the participation of Jota Castro and Evelyne Jouanno, hibitions as a whole. Before we speculate about the future of biennials, then, it
creators of the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya, a slightly nave but otherwise seems reasonable first to try to understand their present condition and reflect on
good-hearted militant art project, which consisted of sending several suitcases of their past, especially in light of this crucial moment in their history, namely, their
small-size artworks to be clandestinely displayed in a private apartment in Gro- astonishing proliferation.
zny. To make matters even more perplexing, Castro, a Paris-based Peruvian artist,
admitted during his talk that the only purpose of having the biennial label was A Propaedeutics for Biennials
to incite press attention.
With major shifts occurring in geopolitics, the ever-accelerating pace of the Inter-
Indeed, the only thing all the presented exhibitions had in common appeared to net revolution, the boom in low-cost air carriers, and all the other transformations
be the use of the world biennial in their titles. Considering that the organizers that made the world appear to shrink considerably in the 1990s, the spread of
were so ostentatiously inclusive, it is surprising that no botanists were invited (the large-scale exhibitions went almost unnoticed. It wasnt until the end of the de-
term biennial, apart from its application in contemporary art, is commonly used cade that the art world slowly began to become aware of the phenomenon.

The art of mocking The first signs of this awareness came from the art press, with a series of articles identity, as well as providing a shared discourse associated with international Biennials at the table:
biennials: Navin Ken Lum, Geeta Kapur,
Rawanchaikuls about biennials announcing what was, from the start, a proliferation for some large-scale exhibitions. By analyzing their programs and transcripts, we discover Charles Esche, and
SUPER(M)ART How and an outbreak for others. Lescalade des biennales, by Catherine Francblin, an astonishing variety of points of view and presented exhibition projects. In ad- Charles Merewether
to be a Successful at the Biennalicity
Curator, presented at
published in Beaux Arts magazine in 1999, was certainly one of the most ambi- dition, they offer a unique chance to identify the common features of the corpus symposium in Sharjah.
the Liverpool Biennial in tious early attempts to describe the phenomenon. Another significant example of exhibitions, which are otherwise very diversified and difficult to encompass in
2004. is Global Tendencies: Globalism and Large-Scale Exhibition, a long discussion a single clear category.
about biennials conducted online with several curators (Francesco Bonami, Cath-
erine David, Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist) and artists (Martha Rosier and The construction of a typology would, it seems, be quite perilous at this point,
Yinka Shonibare) and later compiled for the printed page in ArtForum in Novem- but before going any further lets try to summarize and systematize the biennials
ber 2003. Perhaps the most comprehensive publication on biennials to date is collective knowledge about themselves. The fundamental criteria for biennials are
the second issue of Manifesta Journal (2004), which includes a dozen essays as follows: they are international (although they can be limited to a certain region,
analyzing the phenomenon from several perspectives. as is the case, for example, with the Asia Pacific Triennial), large-scale (this crite-
rion is very relative and would have to take into account the number of presented
Shortly after the first appearance of the articles in the press, biennials and their works, participating artists, exhibition space, as well as the degree of institution-
proliferation became a favorite topic of panel discussions, conferences, and sym- alization in the organizing structure), and recurring (at any given frequency, but
posia. To name the important ones: Bienalia, held in Santa Cruz de Tenerife with an allowance for possible and, in fact, quite common irregularities).
in March 1999; Biennials in Dialogue, a three-day conference in August 2000
organized by Ren Block in conjunction with his exhibition Songs of the Earth at A further selection would result from weeding out media-specific exhibitions (for
Museum Fridericianum in Kassel; Venise, Valence, Lyon ... quoi jouent les example, biennials of graphic art, photography, video art, or ceramics), as well as
biennales? a panel talk at space Paul Ricard in Paris on 24 September 2003; those limited to a certain age group (young artist biennials, art school biennials).
and a discussion organized jointly by Art Forum Berlin and the 3rd Berlin Biennial Having done this, we are still left with exhibitions as diverse as DakArt and the
for Contemporary Art in October 2003 entitled Biennial-Country or Real Place? Munster Sculpture Show. Lets try, then, to highlight some of the features such
shows have in common.
Eventually such conferences would multiply exponentially, just as biennials had
themselves. In 2005, there had already been three major symposia on the subject First, the emergence of a new biennial is never fortuitous; rather, it is always a
by the time the Venice Biennial opened in June: The Making of International Ex- part of a larger and often very elaborate agenda. For Venice, setting up a bien-
hibitions: Siting Biennales, held in New Delhi in January; Biennalicity, organized nial was a way of updating the city; for Kassel and Tirana it was a step toward
in April as a part of the 7th Sharjah International Biennial in the United Arab reconstructing the city; for Guangzhou, a think-tank for constructing the city. In
Emirates; and finally, the unfortunate Milan conference I mentioned at the start the cases of Johannesburg and Moscow, it was about projecting internationally a
of this essay. new image for a country undergoing radical transformations the post-apartheid
society in South Africa, the post-communist society in Russia. Strategies vary
While some were more significant than others, these articles and conferences as does the degree to which organizers are transparent about them from an
were important milestones in forming or, more precisely, describing the biennial independent initiative developed by a small circle of artist-curators, to a carefully

Discussing cultural constructed cultural policy, to an arbitrary governmental decision, as in the case of self-consciousness and a certain amour propre is particularly visible among 2
Riccardo Selvatico,
diversity: Hassan Sherif, Syndic of Venice and
Okwui Enwezor, and Ken of a top-down configuration. newer, emerging biennials, which seem proud of belonging to the prestigious a member of the
Lum at the Biennalicity international club of large-scale exhibitions. original Venice Biennial
symposium in Sharjah. Commission, quoted
A second essential feature in the identity of biennials is their common discourse, in Lawrence Alloway,
or at least (for those of us who are more skeptical) a common vocabulary gener- Finally, its useful to look at how biennials approach the past their attitude The Venice Biennale
ated by curators and, of course, artists. Many curators and artists, having par- toward art history and their own record. Unlike museums and in accord with their 1895-1968: From
Salon to Goldfish Bowl
ticipated in a number of large-scale exhibitions and having visited others, often own punctually recurrent nature, biennials tend to perceive time as a succession (London, Faber and
make reference to other shows while explaining the conceptual framework of their of instances rather than as a narrative, and thus synchronize perfectly with the Faber, 1968).
own work. In this rich network of cross-referenced themes and issues, several are postmodern vision of history. Biennials like to think of themselves as metronomes
particularly popular, such as modernism, the transgression of art, the notion punctuating art-world developments, as observatories of contemporary avant-
of the Third World, post-colonial theory, the center vs. periphery opposition, garde work. And since they are the offspring of modernism, being in synch with
institutional critique, urban culture, architecture, and utopias. the Zeitgeist is one of their ultimate goals.
From the point of view of display strategies, the white cube is still a dominant It was never an objective of biennials to look into the past. Already with the birth
model, while the dirty, post-industrial cube has become a new favorite of biennial of the first such large-scale exhibition, the Venice Biennial, the aim was to show
curators. Recently, with increasing pressure to make large-scale exhibitions more the most noble activities of the modern spirit2 and to survey the art of our time.
site-specific, curators look for more adventurous venues, with subway stations Similar aspirations were evoked when, more than half a century later, the So Paulo
currently in the lead (Moscow, Istanbul, Berlin). Over the course of a history Biennial was established, based on the Venetian model of an exhibition compris-
marked by several groundbreaking shows, biennials began to be perceived as ing national representations. In this respect, the early biennials can be seen as the
playgrounds or, if you prefer, laboratories for new models and trends in curating direct descendants of the nineteenth-century salon now institutionalized, with
and especially given the usually enormous scale of such shows in different its own venue (the Palazzo del Arte in Venice, Niemayer Hall in So Paulo), ex-
forms of co-curating or team-curating. panded many times over in size, and updated with a new spirit of internationalism.
In 1955, the first Documenta introduced a different model of a single international
When opening the international symposium in Sharjah in April, Tirdad Zolghadr, exhibition. This initially encompassed a broader spectrum of the Kunst des XX.
its host, mentioned meta-narratives as a common feature of biennials. Indeed, Jahrhunderts, but after its second edition Documenta evolved toward a survey of
it does seem that biennials are beginning to enjoy talking about themselves. It current art production. In 1980, the soggy foundations of the Venice Biennial shook
should be noted that a growing number of conferences on biennials are organized when Harald Szeemann and Achille Bonito Oliva introduced Aperto, a new section
by biennials themselves and often take place as part of their opening. Further that questioned the anachronism of a structure based on national pavilions. But the
evidence of this phenomenon is the increasing number of public-relations events most defining event for the biennial tradition as we know it today came four years
on behalf of one biennial organized during other biennials. The presentation of later, with the birth of the first large-scale exhibition in the Third World.
the Moscow Biennial was initially due to take place during Manifesta 5, for in-
stance, or, more recently, the launch event for the new Singapore Biennial was La Bienal de Habana was groundbreaking in all sorts of ways. For one thing,
scheduled during the opening of the Venice Biennial. Such a surprising level for the first time, the focus was clearly directed toward art coming from Latin

Strategies of display: America, that is, from outside the traditional core of the contemporary art Synaptic Plasticity 3
I am referring here
Mega-white cube in the to Alloway, The
Sharjah Expo Centre. world. But the innovation of Havana didnt stop with this. Looking at the Venice Biennale
Karlin Hall: the post- themes treated in the Havana exhibitions and parallel conferences, we are Very few people had a chance to see the Beijing show. Similarly, only a few lucky 1895-1968; Manfred
industrial setting of Schneckenburger,
Prague Biennial.
struck by the contemporary aspect of these topics and questions, which con- people were able to attend the Sharjah Biennial. Therefore, one would think Documenta: Idee
White cube, Moscow tinue to play a central role in the common discourse of todays biennials. After the idea of recording the most staggering failures and most brilliant accomplish- und Institution:
style: an outdoor focusing on Caribbean cultures in 1986, the next edition of the Havana Bien- ments of biennials would be something natural. From the perspective of an art Tendenzen, Konzepte,
exhibition set on a frozen Materialien (Munich:
lake during the opening nial was accompanied by a conference on Tradition and Contemporaneity in historian, the need for structuring such a memory in the form of an archive or Bruckmann, 1983);
of the 1st Moscow the Arts of the Third World. These questions were further elaborated in fourth a publication encompassing all earlier editions is indisputable. Even putting and Harald Kimpel,
Biennial. Documenta: Mythos und
edition of the biennial in 1991 with a discussion on Cultural Domination and aside questions regarding the identity of biennials, in an art world post-Duchamp, Wirklichkeit (Cologne:
Alternatives to Colonization. Finally, the 1994 exhibition addressed a whole Broodthaers and Beuys, documenting exhibitions is certainly no less important Dumont, 1997); as
well as Kunstforum
range of current issues such as art, power and marginalization; migrations; than preserving artworks. Given the number of ephemeral artworks presented at International, no. 119
hybridizations and cultural mixtures; ecology; the periphery of postmodernity biennials in which performance and happening have played particularly impor- (1992): Die Documenta
all of which are now part and parcel of the vocabulary of the new genera- tant parts, it is surprising just how few of these events were actually documented als Kunstwerk.
tion of biennials. only the most established were, it would seem.
The first edition of the Havana Biennial, and the emergence of the Istanbul Bien- Right after the second edition of Documenta in 1959, its initiator, Arnold Bode,
nial in 1987, mark a turn in biennial history: the birth of a new breed of globalized established the Center for Research on International Modern Art in Kassel; this
biennials and the start of their spectacular proliferation. The climax of this trend eventually became not only one of the leading libraries specializing in twentieth-
came in the mid-1990s, when every year at least one new biennial exhibition was century art, but also a unique collection of material concerning the eleven Docu-
introduced. Today, we count over fifty exhibitions of this type worldwide, mostly menta shows so far. It wasnt until very recently, however, that serious research
located in territories that until recently were considered peripheral Central and on this material was launched, starting with the titanic project of reconstructing
Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America. the fifth Documenta, curated by Harald Szeemann in 1972, which, from an art-
historical point of view, was certainly the most groundbreaking.
With this new generation of biennials, the scope of their historical perspective
grew even shorter and, in addition to considering the present, biennials increas- The Venetian counterpart of the Documenta Archiv is the Historic Archives of Con-
ingly started to reflect on the future. The historically oriented exhibition became temporary Art (ASAC). While preserving the Venice Biennials documented history
a rarity and, if included at all in a program, were presented more as a subsidiary and, in earlier times, actively participating in its events, this archive is currently
event (examples include From Rauschenberg to Murakami 1964-2003 in Venice entirely unusable due to the on-going restoration of its headquarters in Venice.
and Accomplices in Moscow). Several efforts to include traditional art forms in
a biennial exhibition yielded truly disastrous outcomes, the most prominent ex- Both exhibitions are the subjects of a small but solid literature: Lawrence Allo-
ample being the Beijing Biennials attempt to display international contemporary ways history of the Venice Biennial, and two separate books, as well as a special
art with an eye on traditional Chinese easel painting. issue of Kunstforum, devoted to the history of Documenta.3 The same has been
true also of some of the more established biennials of the younger generation: the

Jeremy Dellers parade history of the Lyon Biennial has been written by Alain Vollerin4, and Manifesta friendly tone. There would be nothing particularly intriguing about this work had it The archives of Manifesta
during the opening of 4 opened to the public
has the recently published Manifesta Decade. Among the younger biennials with not been commissioned by one of the curators of the 7th Sharjah Biennial, which in one of the biennials
Manifesta 5 in San
Sebastian. archives, Manifesta (with its archives at the International Foundation Manifesta opened three months later. This very self-conscious Emirati biennial also com- venues. Display designed
by Mathieu Mercier.
headquarters in Amsterdam) and Istanbul are the two best examples. missioned and produced another video, this one about itself Wedding Cake by
4
Alain Vollerin, Histoire
des Biennales dart Solmaz Shahbazi and invited Luchezar Boyadjiev to carefully study the partici-
contemporain de Lyon History shows that a recurring exhibition which fails to develop any form of mem- pants and their works so as to prepare lectures and organize a guided tour of the
(Lyon: Mmoire des Arts
ditions, 2003); and ory will most likely slip into oblivion. Such was the case with Rosc (the name, show, thus leaving behind documentation and recordings that will eventually be
Barbara Vanderlinden from Gaelic, means poetry of vision), a large-scale international show held in part of the biennials memory.
and Elena Filipovic,
Dublin between 1967 and 1988. Not only did this event attract some 50,000
eds., The Manifesta
Decade: Debates visitors and more than a hundred participating artists, but the names of the jurors Digital Divides
on Contemporary appointed to select the works for the first edition testify to its scale, scope, and
Art Exhibitions and
Biennials in Post-Wall importance: James Johnson Sweeney, senior curator of the Museum of Modern Todays biennials have a very powerful tool available to them in digital information
Europe (Cambridge, Art in New York and the first director of Guggenheim; Willem Sandberg, director and communication technologies. Very few of them, however, make sufficient use
Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2005).
of the Israel Museum of Jerusalem and former director of the Stedelijk Museum of it. The Internet, in particular, shares a strong synergy with the biennials it,
in Amsterdam; and Jean Leymarie, a Paris-based art historian and critic who too, is a global network and its development in the 1990s overlapped their period
was later the director of the cole du Louvre. Similar, too, are the stories of two of proliferation.
other biennials from the soixante-huitard generation: the short-lived Bienal Arte
Coltejer, held in Medellin, Colombia (19681972), and the Nuremberg Biennial The advantages and benefits of digitalization are numerous, much more than
(19691971); memories of these events continue to live in the minds of their merely the tremendous reduction of effective physical storage space. The process
participants but, sadly, nowhere else. of digitalization offers the possibility of preserving original artifacts in optimal con-
ditions and, at the same time, of rendering a digital equivalent that can be easily
Still, participants minds should not be underestimated, especially when it comes made available to the public. In addition, it enables the collection of all sorts of
to the minds of artists. With a little encouragement, art can play a substantial data (images, sound, text), which can later be stored in a uniform manner, re-
role in the process of representing and constructing both individual and collec- gardless of their origin.
tive memories of large-scale exhibitions. Quite unexpectedly, the first example of
such a contribution has come from a figurative painter, Franois Boisrond, whose For biennials, a particular point of interest is the opportunity of documenting an
works can hardly be associated with the biennial context. His series of exhibition exhibition in all its components, including its production something that seems
views from Harald Szeemanns Plateau of Humankind are the personal and high- particularly well suited to recent popular curatorial strategies, which see an exhi-
ly subjective record of an exhibition-goer struck by the artworks as much as by the bition as a process that transcends the unities of time and space.
gloomy atmosphere of the Arsenale. Another, more critical example is Palmeni or
Bliny, a video by the young Berlin-based artist Dirk Herzog that documents the Digital documentation can also provide a new level of quality for visitors, not only
opening of the 1st Moscow Biennial. The event is pictured through a series of sustaining the life-span of a show but also providing them with additional layers
laconic interviews with its participants filmed in a slightly sarcastic but generally of reading, offering insight into things one cannot experience during a short visit.

I supply! You Demand? Last but not least, the interactivity of the Internet has proved to be a very effective The most popular
(Pearl Guided Tours), memory of the 50th
performance by Luchezar framework for reflecting and exchanging ideas between artists, curators, and the edition of the Venice
Boyadjiev during the public. Biennial is ... the heat
opening of the 7th wave.
Sharjah Biennial.
One of most elaborated and successful endeavors of this type was, certainly, E-
Manifesta, which was created as a parallel project to Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt. It
included a detailed description of the exhibitions conceptual framework, several
discussion forums, a database of relevant links, and even pictures of all partici-
pants. Equally ambitious was Blogwork, an interactive Internet project organized
by the Venice Biennial in 2003. Unfortunately, in both cases, the networking op-
portunities were very short-lived, as neither of these websites is still online. While
preserving such projects, and the websites of previous editions, would certainly
be the easiest and least expensive form of maintaining a biennials memory, the
number of exhibitions taking advantage of these formats is curiously small.
This relative resistance and lack of commitment to constructing a memory lead

us to wonder if perhaps the amnesia of biennials is intentional and, in extreme
cases, statutory. Keeping the baggage of history as light as possible, combined
with a low degree of institutionalization, allows biennials the chance to reinvent
themselves with each edition, to start almost from scratch over and over again.
Disappearing and reappearing, each time with a new image, new personnel, and
changing venues and ideas, biennials are today more than ever questioning the
notion of progress inscribed in their origin, and the capacity and pertinence of
transgression. In the meantime, however, as long as Antarctica remains a bien-
nial-free continent, the possibilities are endless.

ARTISTS VIEW
Vadim Zakharov
The Archive as an Alien

Vadim Zakharov The theme of archives and the documentation of exhibitions is as important as sion, which now targets its own material. The archive becomes an Other, an
(Dushanbe, 1959) is an
artist, editor, archivist of
never before. I think that this is connected to the fact that we understand the Alien with regard to itself. It is as if curator and artist had accidentally set the
the Moscow Conceptual exhibition as something quite different than throughout the last century, so that mechanism of a monstrous flywheel into motion, separating it from themselves,
art scene and collector,
any consideration of the specificity of archiving will take place in a rather dif- naively assuming that they could force it to do something or another. But the
who graduated from the
Moscow State Teachers ferent field than the collection and conservation of information. The fact of the Archive is still a sovereign master and is very reluctant to tolerate any kind of
Training Institute. He matter is probably that the exhibition is no longer the final point of destination ambition. It responds in kind, drawing upon various methods of destroying its
participated in exhibitions
of unofficial art, and that both curator and artist are striving to reach. Prestigious exhibitions such as material through correction or loss, flooding it with second-rate information as
worked in collaboration Documenta or the Venice Biennale are no longer the final instance of a career well as with fires, wars, maniacal action and many other things. All that re-
with Igor Luts, Victor
Skersis (SZ group),
as they were fifteen some-odd years ago. Many people have begun to under- mains of many significant exhibitions of the past is a dozen or so photographs
Sergey Anufriev and stand that art is not only made through participation in prestigious exhibitions in the best case. But today, we have a surplus of information, which often has
others. Since 1992, he
or collaboration with go-getting galleries, but in a complex, dynamic process. a rather distant relation to culture. The paradox of the cultural archive lies in
publishes the Pastor
magazine. He is the One could add another important aspect: powerful forms of documenting and the fact that two mechanisms - archiving and self-liquidation have been
founder of Pastor Zond presenting art in journals, catalogues, or on television are often more important fired up at once. Today, the accent is on active deletion and cancellation, but
Edition, and exhibits
internationally. He lives as cultural events than the exhibitions themselves. not only in connection with the growing mass of garbage, but due to the fact
and works in Cologne that the Archives responsibility with regard to its material has changed in part.
and Moscow.
The sweeping growth of the number of exhibitions transforms the dynamic of The Archive becomes a labyrinth. In its guts, the notion of the mainstream is
the art system into a seething flow, in which there is no stopping, no rest. The lost. As the process of archiving reaches global proportions, the labyrinths grid
system of contemporary art adjusts itself to this state of affairs and takes shape expands in geometrical progression, giving rise to desolate directions, places
in dependence on whether this or that curator or artist will be able to come in of indifference, dead-ends. This, in fact, is the trap of the Archive as an Alien;
time, or whether this exhibition wont coincide with yet another Art Basel and so this is where we voluntarily enter information about ourselves.
forth and so on. Correspondingly, the accent is not placed on the exhibition, but
on the event and all possible means directed at archiving and documenting it as For more than fifteen years, I as an artist have been actively collecting ma-
an event among other events. This fast and furious rhythm turns the event into terials such as photos, videos, catalogues, booklets and invitation cards on the
a goal in and of itself, also quickly introducing the category of oblivion: there activities of contemporary artists from Moscow. From 1989 until today, I have
will never be any return to yesterday. Not only the curators but also the artists collected information on over 120 exhibitions of Russian art in the West. This
immediately flee the scene of the crime, erasing it from memory. material is unique, especially if one considers the fact that it documents an im-
portant period, namely the appearance of contemporary Russian culture in the
The cultural archive also adjusts to this rhythm. The artist no longer measures West after the Perestroika. This gives rise to the question that is most important
his creative life through exhibitions, but through events, through hundreds of to me: how should I conserve all of this material? The first, most natural path is
significant and insignificant episodes. The exhibition is no longer an account to continue collecting material in the hope that with time, Russian culture will
of work done in a given space of time, but an advertising spot. Having gained become interested in itself, that people will bring the necessary money and time
this status, it completes a transformation (a Perestroika of sorts) in the system to take on the function of processing it. But as an artist, I understand full well
of the archive: the process of archiving activates its own mechanism of aggres- that the archive has a tendency to delete itself, and that my method (the second

Fountain. Aqua sacra, path) is based upon the active use of this material and its insertion into another thinking that that at least half of this material will probably have disappeared History of Russian Art:
mixed media, 1992. from Avant-Garde to
context, into the body of Today. What I mean is the situation in which the col- within the next ten years if I dont start to play with the Archive, prolonging Moscow Conceptualism,
lection of an archive and the process of its presentation flow together. In this events, facts, and documents in time. In this process, there is no rigid position installation, 2003.
unified whole, it is often hard to tell where the archives basic material ends and that might preserve materials through any means. Quite on the contrary, storage
where its commentaries begin. Without any interruption whatsoever, the col- in memory takes places through cultures state of Laughter. Yet even here, there
lected documents are included in other exhibitions, publications, installations, is no final escape from what we call the law of natural selection. What comes
once again crossing over into the category of an artwork. This creates a more to mind is that this irrational mechanism of culture, this law, can be overcome
complex figure for conservation in culture, which could be called a personal by taking the path of rationalism and positivism. Unlike in previous periods,
dynamic archive. The Archive-Alien has more trouble digesting this nontradi- todays strategy of inserting something into culture begins by taking over the
tional figure in its womb, hiding it in the clandestine organs of its swollen body. Archive of culture before anything else. The artwork first needs to lie down on
In this case, the artist-archivist plays the role of Odysseus, running away of all a preparatory shelf and only then prove its superiority and necessity, and not
of those who try to trap him in this or that dead end, in this or that descriptive vice versa. This is what contemporary policies of curating and dealership aim at
system. In doing so, he creates the mythological fabric of a narrative that brings doing. But against the background of the ever-quickening process of self-liqui-
real archival material into the world of poetics. After all, the cultural archive has dation, this policy becomes a self-parodizing system, a Mad Hatters tea-party,
always tended to move in this poetic-mythological direction anyway. As para- where places are traded at breath-taking speed. It is this situation that forces
doxical as it may seem, omissions, discrepancies, mistakes, gerrymandering, or the artist to reassess his own role.
the feelings and emotions of those who describe these or those events increase
the archives chance of conserving its materials. It is a mistake to think that the problems in contemporary art today lie in the
inflation of the role of curatorship. Artists are happy to give their fates into the
I look through dozens of photographs that I have made in attempting to recon- hands of art dealers, making use of their services, but also articulating their
struct a complete image of an event. Here, for an instance, behind this opening, extreme dissatisfaction if the dealer fails to justify their hopes. It is only natural
there is supposed to be one of the artists most important works, but for some that this passivity of the artists turns against the artists themselves. A curato-
reason, it hasnt been photographed, while here, the space of the exhibition rial crisis also arises at the same time, as many things begin to fall from the
seems huge even though it was tiny. And this picture, for an instance, is just shelves of the Archive, even if they were brilliantly prepared to ensure their sur-
plain wrong: these pieces werent even supposed to be at the exhibition. One vival unto eternity. This is why the Archive itself becomes actively impossible to
gets the feeling that the Archive has already made its choice, that it had already control, a monster, an Alien, indiscriminately gobbling up everything.
decided what to present to the eyes of posterity in the moment these photo-
graphs were made. And still, we continue to talk about real events in culture. The problem is actually that the panhandling grimace of the artists and the busi-
ness-like orgasm of the curators brings on the dissipation of both poetry and
When I look at my bookshelves, where I keep hundreds of documented events, I responsibility in culture, which leads to dry indifference to what was done yes-
am both proud and happy, because I believe that I am preserving this material, terday. This is why it no longer makes sense today to collect material on exhibi-
and while it may not be professional, it was been collected purposively and will tions and event thoughtlessly or mechanically. One needs to take responsibility
survive, at least in the history of Russian culture. But suddenly, I find myself for the quality of information collection. In any case, I as an artist-archivist

Romantic Archive, can and should answer for the photo- and video-archives that I create, stepping
installation at Altzelle,
Germany, 2005. in a new active dialogue with the Archive of culture as soon as the time requires
it, providing for conditions of co-authorship with curators and art-dealers. If the
artists take on this personal responsibility and the curators reject the positivistic
idea of using the cultural Archive as a lever to attain their goals, we could reach
a turning point in giving meaning to how and what we strive for in art and what
remains after we are gone.

VIEW INTO THE PAST
Yasmine Van Pee
Fight on, Superfools!

1
Archiving Underground
New York
Yasmine Van Pee is an Boredom is always counterrevolutionary. art history: history tends to favor institutional affiliations over scattered ephemera. 3
Sometimes also referred
emerging curator and to as New Wave, and
critic from Belgium, who
Situationist slogan, Paris, May 1968 The Pictures group, especially, tapped into or, more precisely, was created out of in a later incarnation
is based in New York the concerns of critical postmodernism. Leaving aside for now its obvious merits, No Wave the
and Montreal. She holds history of the terms is
Of Reaganites and Bad Painting: Picturing 1980s New York we can note that the particularities of critical postmodernism effectively led to the too complex to dive
an M.A. in curatorial
studies from the Center exclusion of a wide range of practices deemed unfit, including such practices as into here. Discussions
for Curatorial Studies at The eighties in the United States are often characterized as an apolitical era of high are now being documented by the CCS archives. of the history of punk,/
Bard College, where she New Wave, No Wave
is currently employed as consumerism, superficiality, and right-wing politics. A decade of glut and garishly and their relationship
an assistant archivist and bad taste. As far as art goes, well, most of it has been relegated to historys back- Archiving the Underground to the New York art
research scholar. She is a scene may be found
founding member of the
yard, a hangover-inducing memory in Day-Glo featuring barrel-chested neo-expres- in Bernard Gendron,
Fortune Cookie Art Group sionists and the slick glitz of neoconceptualism. Lost between the cracks is an It is probably a good idea to remind ourselves of the original messy multitude of Between Montmartre
in Ghent and 1099 and the Mudd Club:
entire substrate of underground art practice, a strain of art production that was si- practices in the period. The project underway at the Center for Curatorial Studies Popular Music and the
Productions in Montreal.
multaneously radically anti-institutional, populist, and utopian in a hand-me-down, to research and document alternative exhibition practice in late 1970s to mid Avant-Garde (Chicago
mottled kind of way. The forms it took varied widely, from art events in makeshift 1980s New York aims to create a centralized archive of the period, which and London: University
1
This slogan appeared of Chicago Press, 2002);
on a poster for The venues and punk nightclubs like Mudd Club and Club 57, to artist-produced cable will be available to interested researchers. Very concretely, we pursue four main Steven Hager, Art After
Batman Show, one of the TV shows, indie zine-styled art magazines, poster art in various incarnations, and activities: first, collecting visual documentation, printed material, and ephemera, Midnight: The East
earliest thematic loft- Village Scene (New
shows by the New York
the founding of such guerrilla artist-run spaces as Fashion Moda and ABC No Rio. such as posters and flyers, from artists and curators; second, interviewing key York: St. Martins Press,
artist collective Colab. It About a year ago, the archives of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in figures; third, surveying existing archives, both public and private, so as to com- 1986); and Yasmine Van
was organized by Diego Pee, Boredom Is Always
upstate New York, a cluster of archives focused on post-1960s curatorial practice, pile a record of available sources; and fourth, surveying mainstream art journals
Cortez in January 1979. Counterrevolutionary: Art
embarked on a project to document this underground.2 and newspapers, as well as underground zines and publications with limited in Downtown New York
2
The project is funded distribution, in order to create a library of articles from the period that will provide Nightclubs, 1978-1985
by a grant from the Keith (masters thesis, Center
Haring Foundation. To judge from recent exhibitions, the eighties art scene of downtown New York is a context for the purely documentary materials. Geographically, the scope of the for Curatorial Studies at
fast becoming canonized. As overview-shows like the recent East Village USA at archive is confined to downtown New York, in particular the East Village (also Bard College, 2004).
the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the upcoming The Downtown Show: called the Lower East Side). When you walk through that part of New York today,
The New York Scene, 19741984, organized by New York Universitys Grey it is hard to imagine the kind of place it was twenty-five years ago. Today tourists
Art Gallery, usher the decade into mainstream art history, it becomes further stroll through streets lined with pretty little boutiques and bistros, but back then,
removed from experience as it is reduced to words and a selective list of names the Lower East Side was a wasteland of decrepit tenements, drug addicts shoot-
and images. The energy and exuberance of the period somehow seems to have ing galleries, boarded-up buildings, and burnt-out lots. Its low rents and its loca-
gotten lost. Parallel to this is the growing canonization of the period within aca- tion on the periphery of the SoHo district were the main attractions for a younger
demia. The study of 1980s art seems to have crystallized around discussions of generation of artists who were gradually being pushed out of SoHo by rising rents
institutional critique and appropriation (in the latter case often referencing artists and spreading gentrification. But there was also, of course, the music.
associated with the Pictures group), with most of the rest of the decades artistic
production dismissed as retrograde and, frankly, too ugly to discuss. It is, indeed, It is hard to overestimate the impact of punk on artistic practice in New York.3
not wholly surprising that these two strains of art practice have usurped 1980s In the mid-1970s, the punk scene crystallized around the infamous CBGBs, a

Poster for The Times dimly lit bar and concert venue on the Bowery, Manhattans skid row. New York covered in both the regular press and most major American art publications. The Poster for the Batman
Square Show, 1980, Show, 1979, New York.
New York. punk spawned an entirely new rock aesthetic, a well-defined subculture with its Times Square Show is today mythologized as a spectacular 24/7 party that her- Courtesy of Robin
Courtesy of John Ahearn. own territory (roughly the East Village), its own dress codes, its own aesthetic, alded the days of 1980s madness that was to come a process not insignificantly Winters.
and a particular attitude that permeated all activities. Punk was more than music. helped along by the fact that the show included very early pieces by a handful of
4
Curiously, the art 6
Richard Goldstein, The
worlds adoption of the It formed the core of an aggressively seductive lifestyle that spread like a virus artists whose work would come to define the decade: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith First Radical Art Show of
terms punk and New through New Yorks young bohemians and hooked up with parallel developments Haring, Kiki Smith, Dara Birnbaum, Nan Goldin, and David Hammons, to name the 80s: Three Chord Art
Wave markedly lagged Anyone Can Play, The
behind the rest of the and sensibilities in film, literature, performance, fashion, and the visual arts. but a few. Praised at the time as the first radical art show of the 1980s, the exhi- Village Voice (June 16,
cultural landscape. By the late 1970s, the punk scene in New York had bred a very specific com- bition has since become a vehicle for many different historical interpretations and 1980).
The timeline for the
art practices under munity of young artists.4 Edit deAk, one of their most prominent critics, labeled an oft-cited starting point for phenomena as different as the East Village art scene,
discussion here runs them para-SoHo luminaries: that part of the art world which never had a loft, 1980s eclectic pluralism, appropriation art, neo-expressionism, and the introduc-
roughly from 1978 to
is younger than the art world, and hangs out in clubs.5 It was a generation that tion of graffiti into the art world.6
1985, whereas the
heyday of the New kept one eye on the past, finding alternatives for what was perceived as the stag-
York punk scene is nant SoHo scene in icons of earlier radicality, such as William Burroughs, Allen The Center for Curatorial Studies archive refrains from interpreting and formally
generally considered to
be between 1974 and Ginsberg, and Andy Warhol; it was a generation driven by frustration with the positioning this moment. Rather, it aims to organize a multilayered accumula-
1976. Perhaps, then, art exclusiveness of the established art world and utter boredom with its offerings. tion of visual documents, oral testimony, and ephemera, guided by the simple
really is the dim kid in
the back. directive the more the better the archival equivalent of thick description. Its
Not surprisingly, punk also spawned a very particular mode of exhibition practice: fundamental aim, perhaps somewhat idealistically, is to document events in suf-
5
Press release for
Dubbed in Glamour:
its aesthetic was tinged by a fascination with pop culture, decay and sleaze, and by ficient detail so as to counteract any single interpretation, leaving instead cracks
Image Frolics, three the raw, bare-bones hey ho lets go attitude and rank amateurism that also char- and fissures and a collection too complex to allow any unitary or simplistic ap-
nights of music, readings acterized punk music. Significantly, these exhibitions and art events were almost proaches. This is not to say that the archive of downtown underground practice
and performance
organized by Edit deAk in entirely extra-institutional and artist-organized. The most frequently cited example is devoid of direction. It is an accumulation of materials that reflects the personal
November 1980 at The of this kind of underground curating is without doubt The Times Square Show (New interests of the researchers involved. Yes, it is a memory of the exhibitions it
Kitchen, an alternative
space in New York. York, June 1980). Because of its reception and effect, this show actually balances documents, but it is a constructed memory. Furthermore, it is a form of latent
on the cusp between the underground and the established art world; one of the memory. In a way, and in fine irony vis--vis its open-ended principles, it is only
most exuberant examples of underground curating, it at the same time signaled its in interpretation that this memory will be activated. To achieve its criticality, the
dissolution. The Times Square Show was a month-long art extravaganza organized archive has to be poured into interpretation, into experiential and shared forms of
by John Ahearn and Tom Otterness (with other members of the artist collective knowledge. In that sense, it is not unlike an archaeological site.
Colab) in an abandoned massage parlor on Times Square then still Manhattans
center of hard-core sleaze, not the ultra-sterile lightbox it has since become. The The Power of the Mess
shows location also provided it with a loose concept many of the included works
played on themes of mass entertainment, drugs, decay, and prostitution. The ex- Perhaps it would be good to step back for a moment and look more closely at the
hibition was, hands down, the most notable art event in New York that summer of format of the archive as a form of knowledge. The model of the archive allows
1980. It involved over a hundred and fifty artists, was seen by thousands, and was the introduction of older, historically tainted forms of art history, forms that rely

Poster for Celebrating the on an almost obsessive accumulation, connoisseurship, and empirical research. dcor of Montmartre, surrealist exhibition practice, the Independent Groups This Invitation to The Andy
Space Age, a one-day and Edie Show, a
exhibition of paintings The archetypes of the archaeologist, the dilettante collector, and the connois- is Tomorrow, New York happenings, the Fun Palace, Warhols Exploding Plastic performance by Ann
by Kenny Scharf and seur though outdated and mistrusted in contemporary art history hold a Inevitable, Dsseldorfs Creamcheese nightclub, andso many other examples. Its Magnuson and Joey Arias
theme party at Club 57 at Danceteria nightclub,
nightclub, 1979, New
tangle of references that have the potential to dislodge the accepted truths of the main characteristics a certain level of populism, a confusion of media, and the New York.
York. received body of academic criticism on the art of the 1980s, a body of critique relishing of spectacle stand in particular contrast to the purist tale of reduction Courtesy of Ann
Courtesy of Kenny Scharf. largely bound by a very narrow definition of the political and the subversive and that is generally taken to define exhibitionality. Perhaps because of its frivolous Magnuson.
7
The term constructed through the exclusion of inconveniently deviant practices. The re- nature, this model is seldom discussed, though the importance of analyzing the 8
In particular writers
exhibitionality is introduction of art historys discarded methodologies may form just one way to communion of art and mass spectacle hardly needs stressing. associated with the
borrowed from Martha journal October.
Ward, Impressionist move beyond this gridlock.
Installations and Private Another notion that surfaces in the archive of New York underground curating in
Exhibitions, The Art
The creation of an archive that documents exhibition practices ignored by main- the late 1970s and early 1980s is that of critical praxis. Against the grain of the
Bulletin 73 (December
1991): 599-622. stream scholarship and academic criticism has a broader implication as well, reigning sentiments in academic criticism about the 1980s, Id like to suggest
namely, in the opportunities it offers for enriching our understanding of exhibi- that when a practice situates itself as an alternative to the established system
tion history by emphasizing the temporal fluidity and fundamental diversity of of art production, display, and distribution, that gesture has inherent critical po-
exhibition modes. I believe that it is in the concept of exhibitionality which tential, regardless of whether the works that circulate within that practice exhibit
underscores the play between the art object and its site of display and exchange overtly critical or political content or present radically new formal investigations.
that exhibition history finds its raison dtre.7 The study of how the display of It is certainly true that a large portion of works exhibited through underground
art corresponds to and affects art production and the understanding of art opens curating and publishing in 1980s New York did not engage in explicitly critical
a window into both the development of contemporary art and the social and aes- discourse, nor did they have an obvious political leaning or engage particular
thetic framework that structures its reception. It is in this light that the acid-free social issues. Often, works were intended solely as an expression of the individual
boxes and binders of the archive present their most disruptive potential. They feelings of the artist, which they communicated through quite traditional formal
contain trails that run counter to entrenched narratives regarding the dynamic be- means. Not surprisingly, such works were written off as retrograde by most critics,
tween modern art and the spaces in which it was shown: the saga of modernisms both then and now. What is more important, however, is that the circuits in which
dance with the walls of the white cube a fairly linear tale of reduction, flat- these works circulated were also dismissed. Critical postmodernism, especially,
tening, and ever greater confusion between the object and its context of display. had a particular and rather peculiar blind spot for critical forms of distribution and
The archives boxes do not accentuate any uniform tale of exhibitionality, but display.8 Looking back at the polemics of the eighties, it is striking how such al-
rather encompass the diverse routes taken by the interaction between art objects ternative practices have been marginalized in favor of overtly critical art that never
and their sites of display and exchange. Our boxes, then, contain the potential had a problem functioning within the confines of the established art system.
to effectively mess up the received history and distill from it a new and richer
understanding of the social and aesthetic forces at the interface of art and soci- Yet there is a case to be made for the importance of alternative forms of practice.
ety. For instance, one important alternative model of exhibition practice especially In The Author as Producer, Walter Benjamin argues that the criterion of a works
obvious in the Center archive is the funhouse. This represents a pervasive strain political potential is its position within the system of production, not its subject
in exhibition history, as even a makeshift list will demonstrate: think of the caf matter. A political tendency, he says, has a counterrevolutionary function as

9
Walter Benjamin, The the writer feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a pro- Poster for the Real Estate
Author as Producer, Show, 1979/1980, New
in Reflections: ducer.9 For artistic activity to be effective critically and politically, he goes on to
York.
Essays, Aphorisms, argue, it needs to instigate an Umfunktionierung a term borrowed from Brecht Courtesy of Robin
Autobiographical Winters.
Writings, ed. Peter
that can roughly be translated as functional transformation, or the transforma-
Demetz (New York: tion of the forms and instruments of production. This is because, Benjamin says
Schocken Books, 1986), and his argument is of particular importance for any notion of critical practice)
226. This essay was
originally delivered as an an artists practice should never be merely work on products but always, at
address at the Institute the same time, on the means of production.10 Benjamins text is most often inter-
for the Study of Fascism
in Paris on April 27, preted in formalist terms as a plea for an innovation of form, for the radical use of
1934. novel methods of composition or style. A more traditionally Marxist reading points
10
Ibid., 228, 233.
towards arts infrastructure. In other words, to change the function of an artwork,
Emphasis added. one should change the system within which it functions. It is in this sense I feel
that underground curatorial practice in 1980s New York displays its criticality,
11
Wall text at the
entrance of East Village, not through the content or form of the works that circulated in its channels, but
USA. through the very existence of those channels, through the countermodels of pro-
12
Low-rent is of course duction, dissemination, and display that they offered.
a relative term in New
York.
I agree with Dan Cameron, curator of East Village USA, when he states: Today,
as an emerging generation of artists takes up some of the broader cultural is-
sues left unfinished by the 1980s, a corresponding need exists to explore the
East Villages vivid legacy.11 But it is important to stress that this reworking
should surpass the formal, as happened then and still happens today. When, for
instance, I look at the neighborhood I live in, a low-rent part of Brooklyn12, I see
many forms of praxis (the distinction between art practice and curatorial practice
being often unclear and, more importantly, besides the point) that reiterate the
fundamental need for an alternative that also fueled the 1980s underground.
From hybrid music venues/art spaces to galleries in someones living room, con-
temporary art is still capable of creating channels outside the established art world
and its inherent standards of good conduct. So fight on, superfools! And raise a
glass to the power of the mess.

STUDIES
Leif Magne Tangen
The Dream of Being

Able to Fly
Leif Magne Tangen is a Die Museen sind voll broadcasted nationwide covering frequencies of West Germany. During 1969 he
freelance writer based in
Leipzig, Germany and
Bernhard Hke, 1967 opened up a TV gallery with the name Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, where the
Reine, Lofoten, Norway. main idea was to make art pieces that only existed in the very same moment
This is the End, the Only End My Friend it was broadcasted or shown on the screen. The first exhibition, Land Art, was
broadcasted on nationwide covering television on 15.04.1969 and included eight
It is necessary to start with one of the real starting points: Bauhaus 1925, when works from Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson,
Lszl Moholy-Nagy forwarded the idea that the piece of art as well as the artists Marinus Boezem, Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer.
must have considerations for the age in which they live in. What is important to
recognize is that the role of the curator, such as we have learnt to love and to hate The broadcast included a recorded documentation of the opening that took
it through the last decade, has been very important throughout the development place in a TV studio in Berlin, which was for the occasion rebuilt as a white
of art exhibitions during the whole twentieth century, and that one of the most cube, where eight monitors were placed in the wall and photographs from the
important but also the least known figures is Gerry Schum, who, during productions were covering the space in-between like a mosaic. The opening was
the years 1969 to 1972, realized a number of pieces and exhibitions in a rather just like any other opening today, with a detailed introduction by Gerry Schum.
unusual format television. It should be mentioned that during these times there The first piece, made by the then only 23-year old Richard Long, started with a
were a number of exhibitions produced , which were rather critical to the white 360 camera movement and a white map of moor, England. Walking a Straight
cube, and turned to unusual spaces. One could say that a whole generation of 10 Mile Lind Forward and Back Shooting Every Half Miles starts with a black
artists had a different relation to the institution than the (especially American) board with the word Forward followed by 21 sequences, approximately seven
post-war generation, by talking about, to use the words of Harald Szeemann, seconds each, from the landscape. The camera is placed in Longs point of view
breaking the trinity of power: studio gallery museum. It was the end of the and it zooms in the landscape slowly ahead. The sequences fade to white and
sixties and the early seventies when a large amount of exhibitions in which insti- are lap-dissolved. The last one shows a river, followed by a black board with the
tutional critique was embedded turned up, among them When Attitudes Become word Black, and after this, 21 new sequences , the first starting where the last
Form (Bern, 1969) by Harald Szeemann, One Month (1969) by Seth Sieglaub, one ended: in the river. The whole piece includes the sound of Richard Longs
and the summer exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Information (New York, breathing and sounds of his steps.
1970). The gallery of Schum was in Dsseldorf and he made exhibitions for the
viewers on German television. This is a very typical piece for the exhibition Land Art, but it is the only film or
video piece that Richard Long made until today. The piece shows how Schum
Land Art worked closely together with the artist to produce pieces since most of them did
not work with film earlier. Another brilliant example from the exhibition Land Art
In 1968, Gerry Schum made a TV show about the use of multiples and editions is Jan Dibbetss 12 Hours Tide Object With Correction of Perspective. In this
in the gallery scene of Cologne, Dsseldorf, Paris, Munich and Bern, to intermedi- piece a bulldozer makes a three meter wide trapezoid in the sand close to the
ate sales of art to the layer of people with less spending power. Schum was no cameras elevated position, which becomes 30 meters wide close to the ocean.
artist himself, but he worked a lot with artists and was producing TV shows from Through the wide-angle lens of the camera, which is the only way to get an over-
biennials, art fairs and also documentaries about artists and the arts. This was view of the trapezoid, it turns to an equivalent square. With time, and the tide,

Filming for Land Art: the trapezoid vanishes. Dibbets work aiming more directly to how the cameras Divertimento Gerry Schum filming for
Jan Dibbets, Land Art, Dartmoor,
12 Hours Tide Object mechanical features affect the viewers perception of reality. England, January 1969.
with Correction Buren was part of the second and last exhibition of Fehrsehgalerie Gerry Schum, Identifi- Photo: Ursula Wevers,
of Perspective, Cologne
A last example from the exhibition is Barry Flanagans A Hole In The Sea, which starts cations, which was produced by Kunstverein Hannover and broadcasted with nationwide
the Netherlands,
February 1969. off with a view of a beach and the ocean. In the foreground you can see a plastic coverage. Before this, the gallery had produced two new works that were shown in the
Photo: Ursula Wevers, cylinder sticking up from the sand. Next sequence is filmed from above and is show- middle of the ordinary programme without any form of information to the TV audience.
Cologne
ing the cylinder like a circle in the midst of the image. The ocean is rising, and the One of the pieces was Keith Arnatts work TV Project Self Burial, shown one time a day (a
Filming for Land Art: different cuts are illustrated by a black board with time information from 13.15 PM few seconds ) for one week, where Arnatt himself sinks down in a hole of mud gradually
Barry Flanagan, A Hole in
the Sea, Scheveningen, until 16.38 PM. Seen from above the image looks just like a hole in the ocean, but in until the eight and last episode where he was totally covered in mud. The other produc-
the Netherlands, 1969. the end the illusion is broken by that the waves turns the cylinder out of balance, and tion was Jan Dibbetss TV as a Fireplace, where a close up of a burning iron stove was
Photo: Ursula Wevers,
the last image is shot from ground and shows how Flanagan wades out and gets the shown for 2:45 minutes every night for eight nights in a row. Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum
Cologne
cylinder. Land Art combines room with space in a noteworthy manner. also had some breakthrough in the art world, for the first exhibition was shown within
the When Attitudes Become Form at ICA, London, and the MoMA summer exhibition
Financial Times? Information as well as at different exhibitions and smaller biennials.
The exhibition was sent at 22.40 PM, relatively late in the evening, but received Identification
good press coverage. It was however not well received by the TV channel that
paid for the production costs, which were actually larger than some museums Very late in relation to Schums own utopian plan of continuation, the second exhibi-
would have invested in such an exhibition at the time. Gerry Schum had some- tion was sent at 22.40 PM on 30.11.1970 with contributions from Joseph Beuys,
what of a political agenda about giving the artists the same rights as other allo- Reiner Ruthenbeck, Klaus Rinke, Ulrich Rckriem, Daniel Buren, Hamish Fulton,
graphic creators like writers, composers and musicians. The ideological thought Gilbert & George, Stanley Brown, Ger van Eik, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti,
behind a TV gallery was to make art more accessible for a larger mass of onlook- Pierpaolo Calzolari, Gino de Domeninicis, Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio, Gary Kuehn,
ers. The time was almost mature enough for such a revolution and television and Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Franz Erhard Walther and Lawrence Weiner. The large
video were considered the correct mediums for this kind of expansion, and for amount of artist and the more opened up title makes the exhibition more varying
the democratisation of art. But as Daniel Buren points out in an interview in the than in Land Art. The body is in focus, often its rashes or limitations. The two grand
extensive exhibition catalogue Ready to Shoot, the exhibition of Schums galleries exclusions are Gilbert & Georges Ohne Titel, where the artists sit quite relaxed in a
in Kunsthalle Dsseldorf in 2004: Unfortunately the idea of confronting quite British garden landscape for 1:25 minutes, and not the least Daniel Buren, who dis-
normal consumers with art through the medium of television, was a dream. It was played the TV stations board of warning of technical problems for almost a minute.
a very successful dream, but it never became reality. What Buren means is that The artists with the probable largest impact because of its sense of humour were Ger
television already by then was reserved for one type of information that art was van Eik, who showed the piece in which you can see a close up of a cactus that gets
unable to overtake, and that you could not democratise art through television a shave by a razor, and Gino de Dominicis, who showed the work where he tries to
or more precise, that you could not democratise art at all. fly with help of his own powers. Maybe because I cannot swim, I decided to try to
learn how to fly, says De Dominicis in the voiceover of the piece.

Gino de Dominicis, Videogalerie Schum for the production of a catalogue or a book as an exhibition, because it is a much Gilbert & George,
Tentativo di Volo, 1970. The Nature of Our
The film was included in
larger apparatus. Any hindrance is many-doubled with each step on the way to Looking, 1970. The
the second tv-exhibition For the TV gallery this was the end. No stations were inclined to make more the realisation. This was in the end overwhelming and stopped Schums ambi- film was included in
Identifications, and in the the second tv-exhibition
exhibitions after Joseph Beuys had treated a TV with a blutwurst and Reiner Ru- tious expedition in what was really the starting phase. Identifications, and in the
same year together with
Quadrati-Cerchi made thenbeck crumbled up a pile of paper and threw them into a corner. This meant a same year made into a
into a video edition. new phase that consisted of a real gallery that worked with video exhibitions and Today, most curators work closely with the realisation of the work, and they work video edition.
Photo: Ursula Wevers, Photo: Ursula Wevers,
Cologne editions. From the start, Schum had been working with editions, limited or un- closely with the artist as a commissionaire. They make things possible, and are Cologne
limited, of both exhibitions and single art pieces. His original idea did not include preoccupied with the physical and intellectual aspect of the exhibition as well as
a regular gallery, but the distribution of the pieces were a part of how Schum the off-site project. It is quite clear that the manner in which Gerry Schum worked,
wanted to develop an economy around the production of artists who worked with considering both how, where and the ideological and intellectual thoughts behind
video and film. The editions that the video gallery made were mostly limited and it, is to take as a model for the future.
Schum, together with his collaborator Ursula Wevers, made them accessible by
a certificate of objects. Mostly this were new productions with several of the art- This article first appeared in Site Magazine, issue 9/10, 2004. Translated from
ists from the two television exhibitions, but there was also an exhibition by Bruce Norwegian by Power Ekroth.
Neumann in collaboration with Konrad Fischer Galerie, and an exhibition with the
then already deceased Peter Ruher. Editions were made also by Richard Serra,
John Baldessari and Wolf Knoebel. The gallery opened late 1971 and had its last
exhibition planned but never realised in December 1972 with Hanne Dar-
boven. Gerhard Alexander Schum ended his own life in March 1973.
Schum is described by Christiane Fricke in the book Dies alles Herzchen wird
einmal Dir Gehren as both a product and a brilliant catalyst of the art of his age,
but he was in the same degree a prototype of how the curator helps the artists to
realize pieces of art that would never be possible otherwise. This means that the
word catalyst could be transmitted to how Schum acted with the exhibitions that
he produced. It is rarely more correct to say that these pieces of art would never
have been produced without a certain person. Besides the more regular responsi-
bilities, Schum combined technical knowledge about film and video as a medium
with a propelling force for the democratisation of contemporary art and the goal
to make it more easy for artists to make a living out of their creations. For most
of the artists it was the first time to work with the medium of television, or, in the
worst case, a monitor. Contemporary art also became a very demanding medium,
because for broadcasting requires much more organizing work is required than

STUDIES
Frdric Maufras
Film on Art:
A Potential Memory
of Exhibitions, to be
Itself Preserved
Frdric Maufras is One of the major points of interest in the recent travelling exhibition of Gerry Pierre Coulibeuf,
a freelance critic and Klossowski, Peintre-
curator, who contributes
Schums work is that it helps to offer a new visibility for an approach that is Exorciste (1987-88,
to many magazines encountered less and less in art institutions and TV channels: the approach of 25 min, 35 mm, color)
around the world, Regards Productions
the auteur-cum-director of films on art. The visual arts do indeed crop up in the
such as the Canadian
magazine Parachute, and worlds film pantheon, to wit, the numerous museum scenes in Alfred Hitchcocks
teaches communications Vertigo and the great classics structured around pictorial representation, such as
and visual semiology
in Paris. After running Michelangelo Antonionis Blow Up and Andrei Tarkovskys Andrei Roublev, but
a radio programme few dedicated film auteurs have made films, whose central object is artworks
devoted to contemporary
art, he also studied
themselves - two who have being Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.
film making, which in
turn prompted him to
The so-called film on art category undeniably stems from the catch-all, describ-
write and direct several
documentary films on art ing works (be they undertaken on film or using video), whose way of looking at
and literature. things overlaps with the way artworks, artists and even exhibitions look at things.
And yet there is not much in common between a documentary approach like that
of Henri Storck, one of the pioneers in the genre with his film about Paul Delvaux,
made in 1944, and the more recent approach adopted by Pierre Coulibeuf, who
himself produces an artwork by incorporating Michelangelo Pistoletto in a fiction
film titled LHomme noir (The Black Man).
The fact is that we have above all made this type of film distinct from the tradition-
al cinema, to the point of institutionalizing it somewhere between the 1970s and
1980s. This period saw the creation, among other things, of a specialized col- of the Earth) made by Gianfranco Barberi and Marco di Castri in 1989, dealing
lection at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the International Festival with Jean-Hubert Martins curatorial project - are focused on an exhibition, thus
of Film on Art and Pedagogics [FIFAP] in 1976, and the Montreal International proposing a consequent visual memory. And fifteen years later there is little risk
Festival of Films on Art in 1981. Over and above their own cinematographic chal- of encountering this type of work, when museums have considerably reduced
lenges, audiovisual works were actually seen in those days through the memory- their production budgets and general television channels, and often even cultural
based challenge, which they could bring to the public as well as to specialists in channels, too, grumble and make a fuss about investing in such films, if they do
the visual arts. not also entail social and historical challenges. To such a degree that it is nowa-
days quite hard to come across a global project, such as Gerry Schums study,
Some people, on the fringe of written art criticism, have specialized in this adven- which has been broadcast on one such channel.
ture, two such being Gerry Schum and Heinz Peter Schwerfel, but this is because
this type of work was also designed to be transmitted by television stations. For Television worldwide has actually changed considerably since the heyday of film
all this, few films one being the outstanding Magiciens de la terre (Magicians on art, between the 1960s and the 1980s, and the ambitious films then made by

Pierre Coulibeuf, virtue of associations with museums. Cultural television channels, financed either Heinz Peter Schwerfel,
LHomme noir (1993-98, Bruce Nauman - Make
76 min, 35 mm, color) wholly or partly by public funds, started to make their appearance in Europe in the Me Think (1997, 70
Regards Productions late 1980s, but they appear to have become more and more reliant on plans un- min, 35mm)
Artcore Film
derwritten by the free-market economy, which is keener on audience ratings once
the backing of advertisers has been acquired, and leave less and less room for
budget artistic experiments. But it is possible that museums and teams organizing
monumental exhibitions have not had time to grasp the fact that, at this particular
moment in time, because the small screen is backing out of its commitment, this
requires them to find new production margins. A documentary film, needless to
add, cannot replace the real visit to an exhibition, whose complete reproducibility
is in any event futile, but film is probably the medium most capable of making
it possible to constitute an archive and memory of the arrangement of works
which are invariably multi-dimensional. What will be left, in a centurys time, of
present-day biennials and Documentas, if not a few fragmented images and, as
was already the case in the period of painting salons in the 18th century, critical
reports published in the general or specialized press?
Solutions still exist. If institutions were to earmark part of their budgets for the es-
tablishment of favorable conditions for creating a film archive of their exhibitions,
the backing of international organizations like UNESCO (which has incidentally
accommodated the FIFAP in its premises since 1985) could also be applied for
with regard to conserving an area of human memory.
Translated from French by Simon Pleasance

EXPERIENCES
Anton Vidokle
Notes on Exhibition
Archives, Real Estate
Shortage and Other
Problems
Anton Vidokle is a A few years ago I was invited to contribute to a publication called Interarchive forced to move. Of course moving the enormous paper cocoon he had been oc- Firstenberg and based
Moscow-born, New York- on the photo archive of
based artist. His work
- a rather large book that dealt with all sort of archival practices from artists cupying and finding a new place for it would be extremely difficult. No doubt, David Alfaro Siqueiros.
has been exhibited in works to personal collections. For my contribution I photographed the archive with real estate prices increasing astronomically in New York City over the years, Along with Florian
such international shows Waldvogel and Mai
of Jean Noel Herlin, who lived in the same New York housing complex as me, any new place he could afford would be even smaller than this current apart- Abu Eldahab, Vidokle
as the Venice Biennial,
the Dakar Biennial, on the 14th floor. Jean Noel has been collecting various exhibition ephemera: ment. He was very alarmed and I felt sad for him. I was relieved when I ran is one of the curators of
and the d Biennial, invitation cards, posters, press releases and small catalogues from New York into Jean Noel again a few weeks later: he found a studio apartment uptown Manifesta 6, scheduled
as well as at Tate to take place in Nicosia,
Modern, the Moderna galleries since the early 1970s, and has amassed close to a million documents and was moving in the next few days - while the archive would finally be go- Cyprus, in 2006.
Galerija Ljubljana, the of this nature in his small one bedroom apartment. The apartment was so filled ing to a separate storage space! Perhaps Jean Noel will now find a girlfriend...
Muse dArt Moderne
de la Ville de Paris,
with cardboard boxes, files and folders, that all that remained for a living space
the Museo Carrillo Gil was a narrow path leading from the bedroom to the kitchen, a tiny area with I am really happy that e-flux is an electronic and not a physical flux. If not, I
(Mexico City), the UCLA
two small chairs and a coffee table and one half of the bed. He slept sideways would probably be stuck with an incredible amount of clutter. It is very much a
Hammer Museum (Los
Angeles), the Institute because the rest of the bed housed yet more files and boxes. This small space growing archive of exhibitions where, should you want, you can easily access
of Contemporary Art occupied by an enormous archive was truly a spectacle - both appealing in its thousands of press texts, artists statements and images from, what is in our
(Boston), Haus der
Kunst (Munich), and aesthetic of yellowing papers accumulating dust, and absolutely repulsive be- opinion, some of the most interesting or important international public art institu-
PS1 (New York), among cause of the kind of lifestyle it imposed on its inhabitant: it was not a place tions and initiatives in the past four or five years. Rather than being all-inclusive,
others. Together with
Julieta Aranda, Vidokle
suited for having a partner or a lover, but more of something like a hermits cell. it is instead an extremely selective bank of information. The archive at e-flux is
put together e-flux video growing rapidly at a pace of about 60 or 70 new items each month and is ac-
rental, which started
Jean Noel and I spoke at length about his collection. His archive is non-hier- cessible from anywhere on the planet with Internet access 24 hours 7 days a
in New York and is
traveling to Kunst-Werke archical and includes material from some important exhibitions at well-known week. So in this sense it can be a useful tool and is completely free for anyone
(Berlin), International institutions and galleries, as well as numerous articles from completely marginal interested in such research. In fact it seems that many people are interested, as
Foundation Manifesta
(Amsterdam), the Moore places that probably do not have historical value. This lack of selectivity was an we keep basic statistics of visitors to our site and find that every month more
Space (Miami), and important point that, for Jean Noel, implied a political value. He told me that he than ten thousand readers appear to search for information. The only disconcert-
other venues. As the
founding director of
sees the archive as an artwork related to certain theoretical concepts that had ing aspect of all this is its instability. The Internet is still very young and not
e-flux, Anton Vidokle been popular during his studies in France in the late 1960s. He also said that very permanent; you pull a plug and the whole thing can vanish without a trace.
produced and published
he had tried to end this work many times -only to find himself compelled to con-
online projects and print
publications such as tinue. Jean Noel then asked me if I would like him to look up information he has I think this instability is one of the reasons why recently we decided to also
The Next Documenta on my work and exhibitions. I promptly declined. For some reason I found the engage in more object-based enterprises such as book publishing or physical
Should Be Curated by
an Artist, Do it, Utopia idea of seeing a direct connection to myself within this situation rather disturbing. projects. Our first project not based online is e-flux video rental (EVR), a free
Station Poster Project, video rental shop, a screening room and a video archive. Launched at our store-
and others, including the
upcoming project and
Recently I ran into Jean Noel in the neighborhood caf. He was very upset. Ap- front on the Lower East Side of New York in September 2004, EVR comprises
exhibition entitled An parently for the past 25 or so years he has been living in this apartment covertly, more than 500 individual works by something like 260 artists and operates
Image Bank for Everyday
sub-letting it from a friend (which is not allowed in our housing complex). Now three international branches in Berlin, Amsterdam and Miami. To put together
Revolutionary Life,
co-curated with Lauri that the building was purchased by a new owner he was found out and is now this project, Julieta Aranda and I contacted nearly 50 curators/selectors, who

e-flux video rental, in turn, invited a number of artists to contribute one or more single channel a shared experience and to make it possible for it to become part of all as-
Portikus, Franfkurt am
Main, September 2005. video works or films. Most of the material in our inventory is recent, covering pects of social life, rather than to have it remain static - as a collectable com-
production of the past few years. There are also some more historic works for modity in a private collection, in a museum, or as an item in a static archive.
example a pornographic film Lawrence Weiner made at the PS1 in 1976, entitled
A Bit Of Matter And A Little Bit More, or a fantastic 1979 video by Judith Barry So in its own small way (for it is based on a likeness of a small-scale shop), EVR
titled Casual Shopper, as well as much of the work by such amazing artists does create one possible model for an active archive that can be seen as an exhi-
as Michel Auder and Jozef Robakowski most of it produced in the 1970s. bition by some, or as an artwork in the expanded field by others, or even as just a
strange video rental store, but one that I would hope never manages to imprison
Although some may see this differently, EVR is not really an exhibition, rather us within its walls (as with the apartment of Jean Noel).
it is an artwork in the form of an unusual archive: one meant to explore vari-
ous circuits of distribution and circulation. EVR functions on several different
levels: in a form of a free video rental shop that allows members to check out up
to two titles for two days to watch at home, and as a resource center contain-
ing an archive where people can come during regular business hours and view
material they are interested in on our in-house monitor. It also functions as a
social space with a program of large format screenings and a schedule of talks
by the artists and curators participating in the project. Furthermore EVR travels
from one location to another, never spending more than six months at any given
place. In the next two years we hope to have EVR visit at least a dozen cities.
In the current issue of Frieze (90), Jrg Heiser writes: Over recent decades
artists seem to have become increasingly aware of the issue of circulation not
only as a practical, social and economic one, external to their actual work, but
an aesthetic one, at the core of it. And it is precisely in such a way that EVR
is best approached. Why do issues of circulation seem so important? To answer
this question it is interesting to think back to the beginning of modern art and to
recall many Bauhaus artists and artists of the Russian avant-garde who were all
interested in working with books, posters, industrially mass produced objects,
films, etc., and then again, after the Second World War why so much of the
artists we now consider as originators of the phenomenon of contemporary art
like the conceptual artists, the Situationists, etc., similarly embraced ephem-
eral modes of production. Among other reasons, for me this always pointed to
a certain desire implicit for significant artists of the past 100 years to make art

EXPERIENCES
Marieke van Hal
An Active Archive
Marieke van Hal is Archives usually have the appearance of something closed, dead, and dusty. But Roy Cerpac, The
general coordinator of the Diamond of Manifesta,
International Foundation
what are the task and the meaning of an archive? What possible function might it drawings at Manifesta
Manifesta in Amsterdam serve? What is its use? Can archives be something active and alive? at Home, Amsterdam,
and managing editor of 2003.
MJ Manifesta Journal.
An art historian, she The meaning of an archive (literally: a place or collection containing records, docu- Manifesta 4 decided
previously worked as ments, or other materials of historical interest) is referring to the past and is basi- to show as part of the
curator at Montevideo/ Biennial program the
TBA, the Netherlands cally determining to look back. Generally we regard an archive to stand still; it complete curatorial
Media Art Institute. is a depository for stored memories or information. With regard to professional research, presenting all
the artists documentation
I would like to refer to
archives, we envision the archive being used regularly by study or research for a the curators researched
the book Interarchive specific purpose or need. An archive comes alive when one uses it as a tool to cre- in a public installation
edited by Beatrice von conceived by the French
ate new insights or generate new knowledge; an archive = information = the past artist Mathieu Mercier.
Bismarck, Hans-Peter
Feldmann and Hans = knowledge = knowledge for the future. In the field of contemporary art we are
Ulrich Obrist, published mostly acquainted with archives in relation to artists, artists archives, and the con-
by the Kunstraum der
Universitt Lneburg servation of art works (museum depots). Museums continuously show the most
(2002) in which the important part of their archive, the permanent collection, or regularly use their
meaning of archives in
contemporary art are
depots for putting up new exhibitions based on a specific selection of art works of
being researched. The the collection, added with works from other museums or private collections. This is
Interarchive project was
always based on research and studies for a new angle of incidence or theme.
based on the donation
of the personal archive
of curator Hans Ulrich How do we keep memory of exhibitions, taking place outside the museum circuit,
Obrist to the University of the public, contains documents relating to the production of the exhibitions and
Lneburg. when we regard an exhibition as a collective giving a specific reflection of an theoretical discourses, as well as books, press clippings, video documents, floor
artistic time? What happens with the documentation of independent art projects plans and digital images from all the Manifesta Biennials. It also includes flyers,
by significant curators? Are biennial and curatorial archives worth keeping for posters, invitation cards, buttons, catalogues, art books and magazines, biogra-
memory? From the beginning, Manifesta, as a nomadic biennial of contemporary phies, bibliographies, and portfolios for the 214 artists and the 17 curators who
art, envisioned a flexible structure for the organisation, one that would enable it have participated in Manifesta so far, as well as the complete curatorial artists
to change and experiment and thus avoid the pitfalls of institutionalism. Although archive of Manifesta 4 and Manifesta 5 presenting the complete artists docu-
there were, after the early editions of Manifesta, piles of artist portfolios, cata- mentation the curators researched, containing more than a thousand portfolios of
logues, and other publications holed away in storage rooms, garages, and private those who were not presented in Manifesta.
homes, it was not until 2002, at the time of the fourth edition in Frankfurt, that
Manifesta started establishing a framework for preserving its memory. All cities What has always intrigued me is that in between all the materials, one can find
were visited and all documents from the first Manifesta exhibitions were collected documents, i.e. letters, reports, notes, email correspondences, photos, film re-
at Manifesta at Home, the base of the Foundation in Amsterdam. This archive, cordings of numerous historic meetings, interviews, talks and events that took
which is now covering five Manifesta editions and which is made accessible for place behind the screens. Maybe more than any artist portfolio or catalogue text

Unpacking the archives, or official newsletter these internal documents give real insight in the changes in The archive of Manifesta now serves as an active generator of, and stimulus for, Manifesta at Home,
Manifesta at Home, Amsterdam, 2004.
Amsterdam, 2004. the contemporary arts in the nineties, the altering structures and power struggles, new discussions on issues relating to contemporary art and curatorial practice,
the changing positions between artists and curators, the emerging flying curator helping to critically redefine basic assumptions and initiate new operational pro- See Roy Cerpac, The
Manifestas board Diamond of Manifesta,
and its growing fame, and of course the changing landscape and the rapid devel- cesses. The archive provides a core rationale for all Manifesta activities, not only
visiting, Manifesta at January 2003.
Home, Amsterdam, opment of numerous biennales of which Manifesta is one example. the biennial exhibition, which is mostly known to the general public, but also this
2003. Manifesta Journal, the first professional journal specifically dedicated to topics in
An archive is not only interesting in terms of what has been, it also gives interest- contemporary curatorship curatorial strategies, conditions, dilemmas, and con-
ing suggestions of what for example could have been. Manifesta 1 received a lot of texts. In connection with each issue of the journal, MJ Discussions are held, in cities
negative criticism (see the press clippings at the archive) and the visitors amount throughout Europe, at which a number of the journals contributors are invited to
was not sky high. What if Luxembourg had not shown interest in hosting Manifesta, elaborate on their articles. Another important platform initiated by the International
would Manifesta have existed at all today? What if Roger Buergel was selected in Foundation Manifesta is the series Coffee Breaks three-day conferences that
the final curatorial selection for Manifesta 5, who would have curated Documenta feature lectures and workshops aimed at in-depth discussion of, reflection on, and
XII? What if Manifesta would have gone to places where it was not invited? What if critical investigation into specific subjects in the contemporary social, political, and
curators would have decided to make a book instead of an exhibition program? artistic climate. And of course, the upcoming The Manifesta Decade book, edited
by Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and
As Szeemann observes in Interarchive, Ideally an archive should suggest or trig- Biennials in post-wall Europe, which is another example of a forum for intensive
ger memory. In order to define the notion of Manifestas memory (read: archive) research and discourse. Manifesta is, at present, the only biennial of its kind that
some interesting brainstorming sessions took place in 2003 in Amsterdam with is developing, as means of expression and interaction, new structural outlets for
the Israeli artistphilosopher Roy Cerpac, which I would like to give attention research and study, in addition to the existing two yearly-exhibition format.
to. Wishing to avoid the trap of developing a traditional and overly meticulous
paper archive, during these brainstorm sessions, the archives of Manifesta were Roy Cerpac came up with a metaphor to express the concept of the archive, in
regarded as a source for promoting critical reflection, inspiring reinvention, and both its internal and external functioning, namely, the diamond. A colourless
stimulating new knowledge. A number of metaphorical modes for the archive were precious stone of pure carbon, the diamond is the hardest naturally occurring
considered, for example, the notion of the arch, a curved structure or supportive substance on earth. It is transparent, has the capacity of focussing light, is multi-
device, as in a bridge or an arcade. Similarly, the word archein (Greek, to be- faceted with many angles and can keep on crystallising itself. By its very nature,
gin, to initiate) suggested potential directions for the Manifesta archive. Another a diamond invites you to visualise many realities, and by dissolving or adding
important notion examined during these discussions was that of the ephemeral, angles to its structure, you can discover new ways of seeing and reflecting. The
since, after all, the ability to change is a primary element in Manifestas identity. image of a diamond also serves to point to the fact that the nucleus of Manifesta
By responding to the constant changes in the geopolitical and social situation, as is its archive, its memory, which serves as a basis of a changing ideology. If the
well as to the unceasing developments in the arts, the archive could represent a philosophy of the dialogue is the spirit of Manifesta, the results should be pre-
point of intersection between, on the one hand, the preservation of memory and, sented through dialogue. This quote, by Viktor Misiano, suggests maybe the best
on the other, the challenge to memory that derives from new awareness gained in how to use the metaphor of the diamond and what the International Foundation
experimenting with changes in working methodologies. Manifesta regards as an active archive.

ARTISTS VIEW
Sandra Frimmel
An Interview with
Matthias Mller
and Peter Piller
Sandra Frimmel (1977) SF: How would you describe your archive? What are the criteria according times, about 20,000 prints, and the fifth or sixth time around it finally started Footage Film Festival
is an art historian and art (1996 and 99), the
critic based in Berlin. She to which you collect and archive, and how do you make use of the archive to get interesting. This kind of process has to be repeated several times. first German festival of
is also a Ph.D candidate afterwards? There is a particular focus in a glance that is concentrated on something for autobiographical films,
at the Department of Art Ich etc. (1998), and
a very long time, and this takes time. When you discover something you first various touring programs.
History at the Humboldt-
Universitt in Berlin. In PP: I began collecting about eight years ago. At that time I went for walks have to tire of what you have discovered before youre open in order to see For more than fifteen
2003 she received the around the Ruhr and took a lot of photographs. My intention was to photograph something new. years he has taken part
prize of the Corporation with his films and videos
General Satellite for in a way that did not reveal what the object being photographed actually was. in major film festivals
contemporary art in the My purpose was to capture interspaces. But this was a kind of photographic MM: Like any other artistic practice the work with the material found goes worldwide, including
category Scholarship the festivals at Cannes,
for the preparation of a question I was not able to solve myself. By chance I happened to find the an- through various phases some that are determined rather by spontaneity and Venice, Berlin and
scientific study in the swer in a local newspaper where I discovered the kind of photographs that I intuition and others that are influenced though reflection and taking distance Rotterdam. His work
area of contemporary has also been featured
wanted to take: a site intended for future construction. I had been searching for from ones own fascination for particular artefacts. The fact that I pile up a lot in several group and
art for her study titled
The Russian Pavilion this kind of photographic perspective for a long time and consequently started of material around me doesnt mean that I have to work with all of this acquired solo exhibitions, for
at the Venice Biennale collecting photos of that type. I was able to do this at the time because I was wealth. Very often its just a case of generating a creative work situation. Both example at Documenta
from 1990 to 2003 X, Manifesta 3, and in
Between Self- working in a media agency. My daily, quite mindless job consisted of leafing targeted and random collecting always involve conscious sorting otherwise the Whitney Museum
representation and through newspapers and tearing out advertisements. At the time I found myself I would end up a messie. Its the hierarchy of an ordered system that turns of American Art and the
Self-definition. Recent Muse du Louvre. Since
exhibition projects in a unique position because I had daily access to a vast array of newspapers the jumble into a collection. 2003 he is Professor
include Reflection at that I would never have been able to afford myself. I did this for several years for Experimental Film at
the National Center the Academy of Media
as a research job. Finding hundreds of photo negatives in a rubbish container was a coincidence
for Contemporary Arts, Arts (KHM), Cologne,
Moscow (2005) and that happened to me at the roadside on the way from my flat to the studio; Germany.
FUTURE7 Eurovision On the question of how I collect: Its significant that I didnt approach this with this was a case of snapping a chance because the material would have been
at the Center for Peter Piller (Fritzlar,
Contemporary Culture, the intention of identifying anything in particular. I became aware of something disposed of at any moment. Viewing and sorting the pictures then took several Germany, 1968) studied
Ekaterinburg, Russia and was usually not even sure myself what of, so first I just filed it in a tempo- weeks. Only when I am familiar with the material can I develop criteria, name German Language and
(2004). She contributes Literature and trained
regularly to Moscow Art rary folder. In the course of a few years this collection with various collection themes and devise techniques that enable further processing to follow a spe- as a visual artist. His
Magazine, Artchronika, areas grew to around 6,000 photos. I cut all of them out and filed each picture cific path. archives to date have
taz die tageszeitung been published in eight
and Plato Review.
according to subject topics. Obviously, now my collection isnt growing at the volumes by Revolver
same rate as in the beginning since there is a maximum amount of pictures In my archives I collect what counts as mass-media canon, globally circulated, Verlag (Frankfurt am
Matthias Mller per category. I dont need any more than 100 photos per category since I cant industrially produced films in the hope of finding something unseen in what Main), which also
(Bielefeld, Germany, published the series of
1961) studied Art and process more than 100 in one book or show them in an exhibition. has occurred thousands of times as well as material intended for disposal, aerial photos Von Erde
German Literature. He rejected material or that certified as substandard. One of my most important schoener. Piller was
works in film, video and awarded the Ars Viva
photography, and has Two years ago I was offered what was left from an aerial photograph company finds is the only film in the Sao Paulo film museum that was not considered Prize 2004 and received
organised numerous boxes full of prints. This situation was similar to the newspaper pictures. For worthy of being included on the archives official inventory list. We pass just as the Rubens Prize from
avant-garde film events, the City of Siegen. He
six months I sat looking at them, baffled; it was only then that the first picture clear a comment on ourselves through the material we dispose of as through
such as the Found exhibited widely at
groups started to take shape. In the end I looked through the material several what we consider to be fit for archiving. In this respect my collector activity is museums and galleries

internationally, including sometimes similar to that of an investigator drawing conclusions from investi- its the visual intelligence that he shows in the outstanding presentation of his Peter Piller, Girls
Bonner Kunstverein, Shooting, Inkjetprints,
Frehrking Wiesehfer gating a suspects domestic waste. archive that brings the collected pieces together to form an autonomous work Ed. 6, Peter Piller Archive
(Cologne), Barbara Wien of art. My archive is a quarry for projects, some of which have been growing 2000-2005.
(Berlin), and ProjectSD, Courtesy Galerie Michael
SF: How do your two archives differ from each other the photo and television for years, and also a temporary hideaway, a refuge from the strains of the real
(Barcelona). Wiesehfer, Cologne.
archives in structure, content and use? world. Much as I do take personally what I have acquired in my work, I always
come back to the point at which I wish to leave the world of conveyed ideas
MM: The photo archive is much more homogenous and comprehensible, behind me and produce my own pictures. This becomes increasingly difficult
whereas the film archive is made up of avant-garde / experimental works, the more intensively you focus on the pictures already in existence.
vast amounts of found-footage films and countless feature films. The latter
are meticulously catalogued in order to facilitate retrieving particular settings. SF: To an extent your artwork is a compiled show of extraneous works. This
But sometimes it is the unorganised and non-catalogued anthologies of frag- is very similar to the work of a curator. The artists work making him into a
mented material with the most diverse content that generate ideas for new curator of an exhibition for extraneous works, as it were. What is your stance
projects. There is never a master plan for their use; every project develops its on this thought?
own requirements and strategies.
PP: Indeed there is something curatorial in the way my attention was caught
SF: Where does your archive stand in relation to your artistic work? Do you see by photos in regional newspapers. Rather the way a curator notices an artist
collecting as an artistic activity to be pure preliminary work? that no one has yet heard of thats how I notice pictures. First it requires
attentiveness, taking seriously the fact that these photos can be of interest in
PP: Its just preliminary work, the mere collecting of material. I would not provincial daily newspapers. I develop criteria for a particular collecting field;
exhibit the archive as an archive; that should remain in the dark. Firstly, my going by these I decide which picture is superior to another. This process often
archive is whatever comes to mind when you think of an archive and then it takes several years. In my archive volumes the order the pictures are arranged
becomes what I make of it. The pictures sometimes have to lie there for three in plays a very important role. And the selection work is immense. There is
or four years before I know whether or not I will exhibit them and how. Various evidently something curatorial in this. And of course, there are also extraneous
interests play a role here: sociological, purely photographic, artistic and so on. works that were not initially intended as works. Instead they are banal everyday
I always try to handle each of these aspects appropriately. photographs that normally get put straight into the waste paper bin and arent
even looked at properly because theyre difficult to tell apart.
MM: Collecting and selecting are the fundaments of all artistic work be it the
organisation, filtering or processing of collected impressions and influences. I MM: Within an archive like in a museum I have the freedom to create
dont consider this to be an autonomous artistic activity. When making films rapports between disparate material, to make unintentional links, to determine
the research, i.e. the compiling of information, is an invisible part of the artistic my own course. By applying my attention in carefully measured doses I can
process in a fundamental but also self-evident way. Within the context of the take details and raise them to become major elements. A parallel exists here to
fine arts the mere accumulation of suitable material is often hastily acknowl- my artistic work. When studying found material I find it is a question, among
edged as a stance. But I consider Peter to be a superb collector and archivist; other things, of freeing the pictures from their original context of use and giv-

Peter Piller, Girls ing them a new context, of sometimes relating them to my life. The procedure involved. Sometimes the reactions dont occur until long after the exhibition or
Shooting, Inkjetprints,
Ed. 6, Peter Piller Archive itself points towards the multiple possibilities of association; Willem de Greef presentation has ended. Recently I received a long letter from a visitor to an
2000-2005. pointed out that every montage in found-footage film only portrays one of many exhibition who had seen a video installation of mine in the Tate Modern a year
Courtesy Galerie Michael
possibilities, thus stressing the relativity of every existing order. The growing beforehand and clearly this delay was necessary in order to be able to com-
Wiesehfer, Cologne.
availability of pictures does not mean that any material for any purpose is un- ment on the work in such a differentiated way. This testimony to an oeuvres
conditionally at my disposal. Found footage as an act of empowerment is not to afterlife is seldom.
be understood in the sense of an unlimited quantitative accumulation; on the
contrary, it is a critical procedure in which we carefully investigate what kind The immaterial aspect of working with moving pictures means that they only
of ideas are articulated within an individual picture. Fundamentally all use of exist during the moment of the presentation; dialogic rapports between indi-
suitable material opens up a moral question that I have to put to myself. vidual works of mine only occur in my own film programmes and in individual
exhibitions. Once these are over the works only survive by way of the visitors
SF: Your archive volumes remind me a little of exhibition catalogues. It is memories. This is yet another process of creative acquisition and of subjective
possible that a viewer may perceive these books as exhibition catalogues and production and shifting that is compatible with my own procedures.
subsequently try to reconstruct an exhibition between the stage of the archive
that you never get to see and the ending of the book? SF: In his book The Voices of Silence Andr Malraux assumes that the re-
production of artwork provides the means to put the shattered pieces back
PP: No, I see the archive volumes exclusively as independent artist books and together in an imaginary museum, in a museum without walls. He sees an
not as catalogues for a skipped exhibition. And in any case, the exhibitions aura that has been obliterated through reproduction, then allowed to flow back
from my archives look quite different to how you would normally expect some- together into a superordinate construct of ideas. I am particularly interested
thing like that to be. In the exhibition I want to ensure that everything comes in the obliterated aura of reproduction, even if were not talking about artwork
into contact with everything else and for it to appear anything but ordered. but about photos from daily newspapers. To what extent do you work with this
What emerges is rather a crossword puzzle-like structure of pictures of quite obliterated aura? To what extent do you generate a new aura?
diverse origin. The impression of an archive disperses very quickly since there
is nothing objective in my interest in newspaper pictures or in pictures found PP: Firstly, I doubt whether the aura really is obliterated through reproduction. I
on the internet. My personal perspective is centre-stage and focuses on the dont exhibit pictures cut out of newspapers; I reprocess them. I inflate the pictures
criss-crossing of pictures from completely different media. of course and subsequently generate an aura. There are pictures I want to inflate and
others I would like to place lower down. In one group of pictures, for example, people
SF: What about the afterlife of your works? What kind of effect do they go on having on their birthdays in front of their house with flowers, I made slides from the news-
after the end of an exhibition or presentation? To what extent do they define them- paper photos and then took Polaroids of the slides with a camera from the 1970s.
selves through the viewers attempts to recall or to reconstruct after the event? The result was a kind of DIY look. At first I try to find out what I want to say with a
particular group of pictures and what the group itself could recount. Next I think about
MM: The question presupposes the ideal case of an intensive communicative which material quality and which size would best fit. My way of putting together an
relationship between the work and the observer, in which the artist is also exhibition has a lot to do with telling a story, or rather the beginning of a story.

Peter Piller, Temporary SF: That is exactly what the extinguished aura is all about. We are talking very personal form of access. Many people feel a very personal rapport to the
Sculptures, Inkjetprints,
Ed. 6, Peter Piller Archive about everyday culture that has been torn from its context and put into a wider aerial pictures because they were taken during our childhood days. I particu-
2000-2005. narrative context that repeatedly subjects it to new ascriptions of meaning. larly like way the narration begins, starting on the wall. Its like a sound that
Wiesehfer, Cologne.
penetrates peoples memories, mobilising them. When collecting even I am
PP: The only problem is that my newspaper pictures are invisible within their suddenly made to remember things. There are some pictures that I show be-
original context. The minimal formal manipulation that I allow myself to per- cause they remind me of particular situations. What happens in the archive
form in removing the pictures caption is, in effect, a far-reaching manipulation always takes place in the file of unsolved cases. Its what I havent become
of the content. Newspaper photos arent seen as pictures but as mere optical conscious of, what isnt yet sorted, that makes up the process that is actually
confirmations of the information supplied by the captions. A bank destroyed important to me here.
through vandalism suddenly looks like a modern sculpture or the tyre marks
left behind by a bicycle on a lawn is reminiscent of Land Art. It is only when SF: Every new exhibition/festival, every new context, in which your works are
the pictures are released from their meaning that they begin to communicate shown, involves a new shifting of context. How do you respond to that?
with our memories and suddenly enter into art history. The picture that I make
visible is not the picture that was in existence before. The motifs are mostly MM: Responding to that in a sensitive and respectful way is primarily the task
quite banal but we recharge them with meaning by combining them with our of the curators. Until now my concern has not been to produce for specific
memories because we dont actually know what it all is. occasions or situations, nor to serve the popular discourses of the exhibition
hosts. On the one hand I try to compile the work in a complex manner that al-
SF: Id like to come back to the thought of the imaginary museum. Would lows for a variety of readings, but I avoid contexts that seek to reduce the work
you consider your archive to be an imaginary museum due to the fact that to one level of meaning. When a curators authoritarian assumption puts itself
the works are torn from their context and put together having been given new above the work, this sabotages the plural reading suggested by Peter Tscher-
meaning? kassky in reference to non-fictional films.
PP: Yes, certainly. The pictures have been released from their context. The shift- The transfer of the work into alternating contexts is exciting as exciting as my
ing of context in the exhibition rooms benefits me greatly since it provides me with artistic discourse with decontextualised pictures and tones and ones that have
the opportunity to present my own beliefs as generally binding. The wonderful been implanted into new contexts. At best this enables the content of an oeuvre
thing about exhibiting is that it constantly leads to misunderstandings. to appear that would have been overlooked within other contexts.
Many situations in the newspaper photos have no meaning without the pho- SF: You said that after the exhibition the works survive only in the memories
tography; they are scenes from a moment in which the photographer took the of the visitors. They are, as it were, deactivated in their materiality between
picture. Without the photographer the situation would not come about. Many presentations. Do you consider the immaterial afterlife of your works in the
people from the countryside come to the city in order to experience culture. memory of the visitor as an integral component of the works? How significant
They know all of these pictures from the past. When they see the same pic- is this form of afterlife in your works for you?
tures put into order all of their memories return causing the emergence of a

Peter Piller, Vandalism/ MM: The fleeting character of working with time-based pictures is intensi- MM: Its left to the observers discretion to what extent they open up to the art-
Tree Outrage,
Inkjetprints, Ed. 6, Peter fied through the briefness and the structure of my films and videos. There are work and allow it to have an immaterial afterlife in their memories. Its mental
Piller Archive 2000- breaks and joints in the construction; not everything is said; not everything is replay has very little reproduction accuracy; its full of omissions and blurred-
2005.
shown. Taking the Off Screen Space and making it into a theme in works such ness. My work isnt reproduced or administrated here but prolonged and trans-
Wiesehfer, Cologne. as Home Stories or Play activates the observers imagination: what is hap- formed: the process generates something different that is no longer subject to
pening outside the picture, in the area not shown? The questions dealt with my control. I find that this has something liberating because it relieves me of
by an oeuvre like Album are written out in full in the form of inserted texts. some of the burdens of authorship and creates a dialogic rapport. As a col-
They are part of the work while simultaneously standing for much more. My lector I am very interested in accumulating, but in my work there are always
films and videos do not illustrate pre-formulated content; they lend form to the moments of complete willingness to lose and forget this is the only way to
process-like, incomplete parts of my thought-work. To this end I work using make room for what is new.
intensification and surges, which overstrain the observers receptiveness and
memory capacity, and with fragments and gaps that the observer can fill. March 2005
These meandering movements between excess and omission demand an ac-
tive observer who is prepared to put in a certain effort. The observers interac-
tion is not only to be performed in direct confrontation with the work but also
in remembering it. I myself can only formulate an invitation to do so, but no
obligation.
SF: To a large extent the construction of meaning takes place within the ob-
servers memory, in the intermediary work between the observers own wealth
of experience and the works presented in your exhibitions that mobilise memo-
ries that he/she believed to have forgotten. Is this about administrating memo-
ries or about producing them?
PP: I see myself as a producer of memories. I constantly want to get access to

my own memories. When I manage that I then produce something that causes
the observers of my work to gain access to their own memories. That is the
ideal case. In all the years I never stopped feeling an unbelievable joy when
experiencing how a picture starts to speak when you take away its meaning,
when you really only look at it as a picture. There are so many surprising
aspects that are concealed within it when its not immediately attributed and
stuffed full of meaning.

EXPERIMENTS
Roomers Sight
After the Game Is Before

the Game: Theory
and Practice of an Open
Exhibition
Roomers Sight are Roomers Sight uses unidentified free spaces for curatorial experiments. We allow all participants, i.e. the artists, the hosting institutions and us, to take main interest focuses
Jessica Beebone (lives in on performance as an
Frankfurt, Germany) and fill real and medial spaces, turn institutional gaps into places of communica- a critical self-reflection. Responsibilities, wishes and (personal) premises are artistic and curatorial
Andrea Domesle (lives tion, or slip into niches of social interaction in order to extend them to make made visible with each individual project. method, the system
near Vienna, Austria), of art institutions and
two free curators who
temporary art transfer stations. At the centre is the visualisation of social relevant socio-political
joined to form a team in processes that play a major role in conjunction with art. This is why we are in- Roomers Sight Stages Huis Clos for the IG BILDENDE KUNST, Vienna themes. Her touring
2004. terested in actions, experiences, opinions and attitudes of people that work in exhibition Homeland Is
More information: Just Around the Corner
www.roomers-sight.net the art business or make a living from it. Roomers Sight creates investigation Anyone who visited the IG BILDENDE KUNST in the Gumpendorfer Strasse in is on show in Europe and
contexts within which we show art and at the same time observe or question Viennas 6th district between 18 and 26 April 2005 saw the gallerys display the future EU states in
Jessica Beebone 2004-2008. With the
(Frankfurt, 1968) studied recipients, curators, gallery owners, artists, culture politicians etc., in order window veiled in a casually applied coat of paint. A projection screen that artist Martin Krenn she
Art History, Classical to acquire information on their views. This can be done in writing or orally, echoed curious glances, reflecting light and movement, creating a relationship is curating The Tectonic
Archaeology, Ethnology of History, a reflection
directly or by post. In this way we generate a contemporary archive consist- of tension between inside and outside. Huis Clos (Private Society, based
and Contemporary on the Nazi period, for
Dance. She is ing of sound media, film and photographs, original handwritten records, notes on J.P. Sartre) was written on a sign that hung on a golden chain at the en- Forum Stadtpark Graz,
currently working as a and evaluations. This archive allows for conclusions to be drawn concerning trance. A total of 41 people from Viennas art scene accepted the invitation A, and the Centre for
freelance curator and Contemporary Central
performer, investigating the art of our time and how art is understood. Contrary to conventional exhibi- sent privately or publicly via member journals or posters to an evening meal European Art, Usti nad
the borderline zone tions we put the artwork right into the context of its contemporary interpreta- and curatorial experiment. Labem, CZ, 2005-2006.
between curatorial and
performance practice. tion. The collecting of statements on art and its presentation are linked and
Her projects include are mutually dependent. The project was designed especially for the position of IG BILDENDE KUNST,
staged reactions to
art and artists and art
which is located between the museum quarter, the gallery mile and the art
exhibitions. In 2003- Experimentation for us also means initiating games. The apparent harmless- academy, and took a stand on the content of its programme and its work. IG
2005 she accompanied ness of the stage appearances in Roomers Sight turns out to be a strategy BILDENDE KUNST is one of several representative bodies for artists in Austria.
the project ONE STEP
BEYOND by artist Lukas in which expectations and social norms are infiltrated. We provoke situations It seeks to promote greater consciousness for their structural needs and strives
Einsele: www-one-step- that not only arouse a childlike and unprejudiced joy in playing along, but also to actively influence decision processes that affect their social or economic
beyond.de
question the meaning of assigning roles on and particularly behind the stage situation. Additionally, it provides information and advice for its members.
Dr. Andrea Domesle, of the art business. Playing is not only a metaphor but also the acquirement Huis Clos challenged the institution to examine the criteria of its cultural
MAS, born in Heilbronn,
of theatrical methods and theories for curatorial work. As a temporary lodger work. IG BILDENDE KUNST is often identified with only the exhibition room;
Germany, studied Art
History, Old and New we develop an individual piece in situ for the respective location: a hybrid the other rooms are not visible and are thus not perceived as belonging to
German Literature, of theatrical staging, empirical research, environmental studies, art presenta- institution. Huis Clos came about at a time of upheaval within the institution;
Philosophy and Cultural
Management. After tion, scientific documentation, mediation and reflection. Like any game, our its new committee was striving for a greater extension of its activities into the
having worked as an performances require voluntary players who are inevitably functionalised and social and political arenas. This reorientation was what made our experiment
assistant and curator
in museums and as are theoretically interchangeable. They are involved as co-authors, making possible, which in turn revealed weak spots. Various ideas from committee
the artistic director of visible their individual multifunctions as producers, intermediaries or recipi- members, the current situation and the exterior perception of IG BILDENDE
an arts society, she is
ents. Since each of our experiments concentrates on one aspect of the well- KUNST collided on the subjects of art standards, acceptance within the scene,
now a freelance curator
and art critic. Her rehearsed set of rules, undermining them, annulling or deferring them, they member activity and political assertion.

The Roomers Sight In the place where exhibitions normally take place Roomers Sight installed The lack of commentary by an outsider was repeatedly sensed as a feeling
archive, showing Huis
Clos: Part I, opening Part an experimental laboratory. Research topic: Viennas art scene. Which motifs of insecurity, as were the microphones that were set up to record the discus-
II, 2005. substantiate the realisation of contemporary art exhibitions, the selection of sions. The idea of taking part in a playful experiment whose course was to
Roomers Sight and
artists, the themes, formats and contextual references? Normally, these factors be determined by those taking part provoked a variety of reactions. The mood
Tatia Skhirtladze
are not visible in the gallerys rooms; the experiment was to reveal to what of the evenings greatly depended on the guests professional self-conceptions
extent they can be brought to light. and individual characters since they were simultaneously participating recipi-
ents, sought-after specialists and test subjects under observation. They cor-
The joint dinner that traditionally follows the opening of an exhibition, and is responded to the expectations and clichd roles allocated from outside such
normally intended for cultivating social contacts, underwent an adaptation in as that of the predominant manager curator in charge of all, the disappointed
Huis Clos (Part I): it became the starting point of an exhibition still unknown artist abused by the art business or the culture-policy networker in just the
and yet to be carried out (Part II) that would develop from the processes of the same way that they upheld group or gender-specific behaviour patterns. Those
six evenings. The gatherings made a performance of themselves as culinary not certain about their roles showed their mistrust with a tendency to feel
and sensory events. The soirees were sponsored by a wine merchant and by exploited and robbed of creative resources. Safety was sought by returning to
local speciality restaurants. On one particular evening the chief chairperson the rehearsed level of discussion and to the behaviour of the scene.
herself did the cooking. The exquisite catering for the guests symbolically en-
hanced both the location and the very meaning of coming together. The concept of Huis Clos was therefore rated in varying manners. Roomers
Sight had few well-known and rather more prominent names from Viennas
The way each evening evolved, the nature of conversations and the whole art scene on the public invitation card for the final presentation and had not
atmosphere were all determined by the guests, their interaction and their received confirmations from all. Some saw this as a cool strategy in order to
reactions to the art around them. Roomers Sight made a deliberate point of latch into a particular society; others saw it within the context of the alterna-
limiting itself to the role of the host. On the floor works by 28 artists were on tive ambience of IG BILDENDE KUNST as a cheap trick intended to enhance
display set up on foam pads and propped against the walls in alphabetical its own status or as an inadmissible manoeuvre aimed at enhancing its con-
order. The works were taken from our private collections. Most of them were trol. The criticism expressed by artists, authors or curators on the violation of
in return for curatorial services, speeches or texts. With this special presen- the unwritten rules of the game demonstrated how strategically the scene be-
tation we incited not only the trial of real and fictive presentations but also haves, its degree of concern about the preserving its (individual) interests, its
discussions surrounding the work of exhibiting. Core themes emerged that are elitist and authoritarian behaviour and the extent to which it is influenced by
known to play a dominant role in the art business such as power, contacts, fears, be it fear of functionalisation or fear of its competitors. In the assortment
social background, conditions of production and distribution, economic rela- of guests that encountered each other completely unprepared it also became
tions, strategies of artists or curators, the role of the media and of culture pol- clear that the so-called art scene breaks up into individual heterogeneous
icy, medial tasks, a need for sponsor systems, the influence of the art market, fragments and, as a community, knows little about its members. The oppor-
obsessions, fears and a passion for collecting. Most guests were faced with the tunity to spend an evening in constellations not of personal choice opened up
problem of revealing their assessment criteria and selection methods. unsuspected avenues of exchange.

In Sartres stage play Huis Clos (No Exit) three people have to rot metaphori- added photographs taken during the evenings. The sequence of the evenings
cally in hell. Each is at the agonising mercy of the other two. They are neither could thus be reconstructed; rapports between the spoken word, exhibits,
dead nor alive; they are themselves to blame for being trapped in habits that people and artwork shown in the slideshows could be reproduced.
depend on the reflection and judgement of others, unable to determine their
own existence. Those subjected to post-modern society on the other hand Like all of our projects, Huis Clos is in large parts an ephemeral event. It also
do not shy away from constant changes to, renewal and recombination of looks at the question of its presentability and the divergence between art and
the elements of its identity concept. The opportunity to furnish oneself in a the practice of holding exhibitions. This opened up further scope for action:
variety of covers was embraced by guests confessing a persuasion towards an new artwork and projects emerged during the experiment and were integrated
open, rather pan-genre concept of art. When the role-play was consciously as a performance into the presentation of Part II at the vernissage. Thought
perceived and applied, coalitions formed; demarcation and convergence were processes were transferred to real space and exemplarily localised both in the
perceived as a positive reinforcement of personal positions. Under these cir- gallery and in external exhibition locations the men only bar The Golden
cumstances the guests used the free space available for thought or concrete Mirror and the office of one of the guests. Huis Clos showed itself to be a
experiments, using Roomers Sight rather like a service facility as a platform social process and a paradigmatic one not only for Viennas art scene. This
for its own projects. process transformed it into an open exhibition, leaving behind it the question:
Where does an exhibition begin? Where does it end? With the invitation, at the
Subsequently, the results of the soiree were on display from 29 April to 25 museums ticket stall, in the curators head, in the artists studio, on the back
May 2005 in a public exhibition intended to be seen, heard and explored. page of the exhibition catalogue, on the way to a restaurant after the vernis-
This second part of the experiment involved highlighting the social processes sage or in the visitors memories?
of soires and placing them in an adequate relationship to the exhibits.
Huis Clos was created and performed in collaboration with Marisa Lehrmann,
Rather like the very nature of the soires, the exhibition did not comply with Karlsruhe (project and exhibition design) and Tatia Skhirtladze, Vienna (sound
what is normally expected. To begin with, the opening, which was situated and picture documentation).
between Parts I and II, took place simultaneously at two locations: in the
gallery room and in the caf of the music shop next door where Roomers During six soirees works were shown by: Norbert Becwar, Eva Bertram, EVA
Sight invited people to a personal conversation parallel to the official speech. & ADELE, Gor Chahal, Simone Demandt, Peter Dressler, Katja Eckert, Lu-
Twenty-eight artists supplied works; works by four artists remained in the gal- kas Einsele, Christine de la Garenne, Sabine Gross, Peter Hauenschild, Axel
lery combined with documentation material, relics from the soirees and artistic Heil, Indra., Alexander Krause, Oleg Kulik, Sabine Laidig, Uli Langenbach,
work and curatorial ideas stimulated by the guests. The other artwork was re- Via Lewandowsky, Jutta Obenhuber, Melanie Richter, Lois Renner, Georg Rit-
moved since the thematic link to the private collections was no longer given. ter, Christof Rser, Andreas Rost, Tinka Stock, Vivan Sundaram, Loes Swart,
Nives Widauer.
The material gathered during the six soirees was processed in an exhibition:
menus on empty tables gave information on core themes. The sound record- Guests of the soirees were: Rdiger Andorfer, Barbara Aschenbrenner, Max
ings could be listened to in their full original length on earphones. A slideshow Bhme, Eva Brunner-Szabo, Dieter Buchhart, Sinje Dillenkofer, Claudia Eh-

gartner, Katrin Fessler, Andreas Fogarasi, Susanne Gamauf, Robert F. Ham-
merstiel, Bettina Henkel, Dagmar Hss, Judith Huemer, Ulrike Johannsen,
Martin Krenn, Gerda Lam palzer, Hans BIWI Lechner, Franziska Maderthaner,
Nina Maron, Gerald Matt, Vesna Muhr, Alexander Ostleitner, Catherine Pan-
dora, Lisl Ponger, Elisabeth Priedl, Reinhold Rebhandl, Natalija Ribovi, Marie
Ringler, Gabriele Rothemann, Roland Schny, Walter Seidl, Lorenz Seidler,
Tim Sharp, Alicia Ysabel Spengler, Karin Sulimma, Vitus H. Weh, Sebastian
Weissenbacher, Nives Widauer, Andrea Winklbauer.

A CASE STUDY
Henry Meyric Hughes
Drawing the Line Short:

Exhibiting in a Contested
Space
Henry Meyric Hughes is The current issue of MJ is devoted to the archiving and memory of exhibitions Nikos Charalambidiss work, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is strongly 2
Vassilika Sarilaki,
an independent curator typescript description,
and writer on art (since
that actually happened. The following personal reminiscence is a record of an autobiographical and rooted in the experiences of recent history. For him, the La Casa curva (project
1996), President of the exhibition that did, indeed, take place, but whose meaning and trajectory were personal and the political are two sides of the same coin. Describing himself as for the Venice Biennale),
International Association n.p.
imbedded in historical events. It is written in the knowledge that the context of a cultural terrorist and exploiting militaristic tactics, imagery, and metaphors to
of Art Critics (AICA)
and President of the such events and of the conditioning factors is quickly effaced and that memory go with this, he keeps up a sustained onslaught on social injustice and failures of 3
See Nikos
International Foundation and myth-making become inextricably entwined. the imagination, the collapse of utopias and the ubiquitous evils of persecution, Charalambidis, Social
Manifesta. Gym, exhibition catalogue
flight, and exile. for the Cypriot Pavilion,
1
The Turkish Republic In December 2002, I accepted an invitation from the Cypriot Ministry of Education Fondazione Querini
of Northern Cyprus Stampalia, 50th Venice
was summoned into
and Culture to curate the official Cypriot pavilion for the 50th Venice Biennial the fol- Charalambidiss project for Venice, La Casa curva, was designed to occupy four Biennial of Contemporary
existence in 1983, but, lowing June. Space had been booked on the ground floor and in the garden (the Area travertine-clad spaces on the ground floor of the old palazzo, which had been Art, 2003 (Athens:
apart from Turkey, the Futura, 2004), 77.
Scarpa) of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, which is located in a grand Venetian converted into a suite of exhibition rooms in the 1950s by the modernist Ital-
only countries ever to
give it formal diplomatic palazzo on the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Time was short, but the Ministry had al- ian architect, Carlo Scarpa. In echoing the curved forms of an abandoned army 4
See Tracey Emin,
recognition were ready issued an open call for submissions, so when I went to Cyprus for a week in the encampment on the borders between Greece and Albania, Charalambidiss Casa This Is Another Place,
Afghanistan under the exhibition catalogue
Taliban regime and Iraq second half of January 2003, I was able to examine artists dossiers, visit a number of curva followed the curved undulation of his dreams and constituted a utopian (Oxford: Modern Art
under Saddam Hussein. studios, and line up some options. I also set aside a day for visiting Northern Cyprus, residence of the future, where political collisions and conflicts of our reality are Oxford, 2002).
which was easy enough to do on an E.U. passport (provided one left after eight in the intertwined with the metaphysical, alchemic aura of dreams.2 It also echoed
morning and returned before five in the evening), but which practically none of my the physical layout of Mies van der Rohes modernist masterpiece, the 1929
hosts had been able to do since the division of the island in1974.1 Barcelona Pavilion, and physically incorporated elements such as a skylight and
an artificially rusted picture window from the artists own sixth-floor accommoda-
My initial trip to Nicosia provided me with a wealth of images and ideas. It also tion in a third-generation International Style apartment block in Athens. In short,
coincided with a period of intense political activity, when an estimated 70,000 it was to be a hybrid utopian installation, constructed from a combination of
Turkish Cypriots staged a popular demonstration in the northern part of Nicosia different architectures, histories, traditions, geographies and chronologies an
in favor of the reunification of the island and in protest against the obstructionist ill-defined territory, defined by the Greek word utopia, meaning, more or less, of
policies of their aging leader, Raouf Denktash. no place and focusing neither on the present nor on the distant future, but on
the near future, with its direct, though diffuse links to the present.3
Against this background, and within the context, of Francesco Bonamis over-
arching theme for the biennial, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the After carefully going through the proposal Charalambidis had submitted, we began
Viewer, which had already been announced, I decided to change the ticket of my discussing the political situation in Cyprus, and I told him of an exhibition I had
return flight, so I could pay a brief visit to the Cypriot-born artist Nikos Charalam- just seen of Tracey Emins work at Modern Art Oxford,4 including one of the videos
bidis, whose reworking of Cypriot themes intrigued me and who was now living she made in Northern Cyprus and a framed, handwritten account by her father
in Athens. This encounter marked the beginning of a friendship inspired by my of his teenage years there and sexual initiation in a hamam, at the hands of the
esteem for his practice and also, I dare say, by our shared experience of having owners wife. To my astonishment, Charalambidis reached into his portfolio and
once lived in a divided city (in my case, Berlin). fished out a number of images he had appropriated from Emin, in earlier works

Nikos Charalambidis, with a Cypriot setting: Tracey as Madonna astride a donkey proceeding along the away. Growing up, I realized that it was the bust of Kemal Atatrk, ubiquitous Nikos Charalambidis,
Social Gym Perfume of Social Gym Perfume of
Peace, video stills, 2003. Green Line, for example; Tracey preparing a vegetal perfume in no mans land; in every Turkish village.6 Peace, video stills, 2003.
Courtesy the artist. Tracey as a quacks assistant, squeezing the teats of an udder containing a mys- Courtesy the artist.
terious unguent.5 It soon became clear that he regarded Emin as a kind of artistic For my part, I started considering how best to supplement those works by Emin
5
This was supposed to 6
Nikos Charalambidis,
be a therapeutic cream: and political alter ego, and we quickly resolved to do everything we could to try to that had Turkish-Cypriot connections. I quickly discovered from a chance conver- Emin in a Social Gym
The cream itself is based include her presence and, if possible, her work in the installation. sation with Sir Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, that the Workout Meeting,
on an old recipe that unpublished typescript
Mrs. Erminia Triantos, College possesses one of her very few early paintings to have survived destruction (2003).
from a village near the On my return to London, I contacted the ministry to confirm my selection of Chara- at the time of her emotional suicide a conventional, but accomplished paint-
small Greek town of 7
According to Paul
Prevesa, has kindly lambidis for the show and asked whether, as a special consideration, we might be ing, entitled Friendship, in a style reminiscent, perhaps, of Jules Pascin or Egon Huxley, the professor
consented to reveal to me able to devote to Emin the smallest of the four spaces in the Area Scarpa which Schiele. Frayling thought it might be a portrait of members of her family, seated of painting at the Royal
after the intercession College at the time, the
of her son on the
must have once served as a vestibule inside the original entrance to the palazzo at a table.7 College has this painting
strict understanding and which was furnished with a white marble bust, dating from the 1860s, of the because all graduands are
that it would eventually bearded Count Giovanni Querini, last scion of the family and himself a Cypriot by To complete the selection for this small room, with its homage to an artist who is requested to donate one of
be delivered by hand their works to the College
to Turkish and Greek origin. Given the tense political climate, the request was not an easy one and I partly of Turkish-Cypriot descent, Charalambidis decided to display a new three- collection when they leave
soldiers serving on was told it would have to go to the minister himself for a decision. quarter-length nude self-portrait, Dressed in my enemys nakedness, a photo- the institution. Friendship
either side of the Wall in (oil on canvas, 183 x
Cyprus (Charalambidis, graph in which he festooned his body with pictures of body parts from well-known 173 cm, 1989) was not
Social Gym, 53). See Whilst waiting for the ministers decision, Charalambidis and I began to develop images of Emins work, including his own take on her crotch, as a variant of the painting originally
also Tracey Emin, My selected by the College
Life in a Column, The
our ideas on how we might best use this small room, measuring barely four me- Gustave Courbets La Cration du monde. And in one of those leaps of the imagi- authorities, as a defiant
Independent (1 July ters square. Charalambidiss initial idea was to erect a golden bust of Tracey Emin nation that characterize his approach, he planned, for the Bedroom of La Casa message stuck to the back
2005), where Emin beside, and slightly below, that of the donor; the idea for this bust was derived, as curva, a bed for the union with my enemy, that artist who made that bed, which of the canvas made clear
writes: I was walking (despite its wobbly spelling
down the street today, he says, from a childhood recollection: would be inspired by the cell the Americans devised for the Taliban prisoners and punctuation): Really
and some complete and constructed according to the real cells dimensions,8 while the Talibans Sorry, But I love my nan
stranger looked at me [Grandmother] to much
and said Old Witch. I Travelling for Pakhna, the village of my grandmother, we used to pass through mat for praying and sleeping was to be replaced with a hand-woven woolen rug. to part with her (I could
stood in my tracks and the Turkish village of Kantou, where a stasis [stop] was necessarily in the The pattern in this rug was to be faithfully copied from a ground plan of his former have sold this one) Its a
smiled, and she said good picture too Thank
schedule, to greet Mr. Ferhat Gorgun, the beloved friend of my grandfather. His home, one he had made at the age of seven and taken with him, as his only pos-
it again: Old Witch. I you TRACey. Emin herself
laughed and thought, too store, a small wooden grocery, seemed to my eyes like a dolls house located session, when he and his family were rendered homeless by the intercommunal is reputed to have said
damn right! in the village square, just opposite the tall minaret with the colourful lanterns fighting in 1974. later that she was better
represented in the collection
and the round marble balcony. What impressed me above all, however, was a by this label than by the
golden bust in the square, which looked brighter and even more imposing and By now, Charalambidiss imagination was working at full stretch on what was canvas itself! See Huxleys
comments in Paul Huxley
commanding under the evening lights. Only a few days after the conflict, we rapidly developing into The Tracey Emin Project, under the ironic heading, Mi- and Christopher Frayling,
passed the same way through the village, but it was now devastated and de- nor Artists Should Always Serve Majors. Here, Emin was to be invited to take part The Royal College of Art
Collection: A Selection of
spoiled. I remember the intense astonishment I felt when I first saw the busts in a bilateral debate, in which through a special programme of physical educa- Paintings and Drawings
column broken violently and realized that the golden bust had been taken tion what Charalambidis referred to as a workout in a Social Gym the (London: Artwise, 1998).

8
Nikos Charalambidis, two parts, me and my enemy, are discussing the Cyprus problem, searching for divides Nicosia; visitors of all nationalities were able to pass through freely in Tracey Emin, Friendship,
Emin is my enemy, 1989, oil on canvas,
unpublished typescript solutions, telling each other stories that we might be told by our parents regarding both directions for the first time in twenty-nine years. The relics of the physical 183 x 173 cm, Royal
(2003). the relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.9 barrier separating the two halves of Cyprus are still in place, but the political College of Art Collection.
9
Charalambidis, Emin
landscape has been transformed. Charalambidiss dictum: Good Walls Make
in a Social Gym Workout Before this could be developed any further, we heard, to our delight, that the Good Neighbors, has taken on a different meaning, and it would seem that the
Meeting. Minister of Education and Culture (an architect of distinction, who had trained in time has finally arrived for the strenuous gymnastics that might be capable of re-
London) was willing to give his formal consent to my proposals for the Cypriot pa- energizing the sclerotic zones of this contested territory. In September 2006, the
vilion as a whole, including the room dedicated to Emin; the only conditions were sixth edition of Manifesta, the European Contemporary Art Biennial, will be held
that politics should not be uppermost and that Emin should be included explicitly in Nicosia, and it is billed as a bicommunal event. We may hope that it will have
as a guest of the Cypriot government. The way was thus open for me to approach the power to mobilize the energies of participants from the widest possible social
Emin through Jay Jopling, her dealer at White Cube; Emin herself was at the time and geographical constituencies.
spending some months in Australia. Initially, both Emin and Jopling responded
to the proposal with spontaneous enthusiasm, but later, in the cold light of day,
they began to have second thoughts. Emin was recovering from a period of stress The author would like to thank Nikos Charalambidis for his assistance with the
caused by overwork and decided to stay longer in Australia; understandably, per- preparation of this memoir.
haps, she also entertained ambitions of her own for making her dbut in Venice
in propria persona, rather than in effigy, astride a donkey or preparing a magic
potion. Her final answer was a gracious, but firm refusal.
Charalambidiss union with his enemy was not to be, and this political-meta-
physical relationship was never consummated. Instead, by an ironic twist of the
artists imagination, the visitor to the exhibition was introduced to an intimate
space, which might have been Emins, through a mirror set in the bottom of an
upended sofa. This was yet another throwback to the artists childhood and to
his recollection of paying a school visit to a secret hideout used by Colonel (later,
General) Grivass National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA), in the struggle
for independence from the British during the 1950s. So a certain consistency of
approach was preserved, by virtually smuggling the visitor into the broad utopian
space of the Casa curva.
On 23 April (St. Georges Day), six weeks before the opening of the exhibition
in Venice, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus took the wholly unexpected
decision to open two of the four crossing points in the Green Line, or Wall, that

APPENDIX: MANIFESTA ARCHIVE
Part 1: Presentations
Archive:
MARIEKE VAN HAL:
Welcome everybody at the MJ discussion in the Tallinn Art Hall. My name is
Marieke van Hal, and I am coordinator of the International Foundation Manifesta
Memory of the Show

in Amsterdam, as well as managing editor of the MJ Manifesta Journal. Before I
introduce the subject and the speakers I think its good to sketch the context of
this discussion, and the subject in particular.
MJ Discussion, 8 April 2005, Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia The International Foundation Manifesta, based in Amsterdam, is the head or-
ganisation of the Manifesta Biennial, which is moving every two years to another
European city. Manifesta 5 took place in 2004 in San Sebastian, in the Basque
country of Spain, and Manifesta 6 will be held in Cyprus next year, in the capital
Nicosia.
The discussion of today is organised in connection with the MJ Manifesta Jour-

nal, the journal of contemporary curatorship. MJ is a project of the International
Foundation Manifesta in collaboration with its two editors Viktor Misiano, who
is here at the table and who will moderate the discussion, and Igor Zabel, who
is curator at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The editors have been
involved with Manifesta for long, for Viktor was one of the curators of Manifesta
1 in Rotterdam in 1996 and Igor was the general coordinator of Manifesta 3 in
Ljubljana.
This is the fourth MJ discussion in a series. Former discussions took place in

Sofia, (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithiania), and Moscow (Russia). We are working on
a fifth discussion in St. Petersburg. As the title of todays discussion - Archive:
Memory of the Show - tells, it organized in relation to the sixth issue of the
Manifesta Journal, which will deal with this subject specifically and which will
come out in the autumn of this year. This discussion will focus on various archi-
val practices and projects. We have therefore invited a diversity of people in the
contemporary art field: an artist, a professor, as well as museum representatives
and exhibition curators in order to investigate the functions of the archive in the
contemporary art field, as well as the changes in its use.

MJ Discussion, Tallinn We all know that museums archive art works in their collections, but how do we Viktor Misiano is an art critic and curator from Moscow, Russia, and editor of the
deal with an exhibition as an ephemeral event? Is it possible to archive a show? Manifesta Journal. He was also co-curator of Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam in 1996.
How do we keep memory of a biennial, for example Manifesta, which is even a
nomadic event? Is it possible to document this? What is the best way? Hedwig Anders Hrm is an art critic, lecturer and curator working here at the Tallinn Art
Fijen, who is the director of the International Foundation Manifesta, will talk Hall, who will discuss some of the collection-dilemmas at the Tallinn Art Hall.
about this later. What is the task and the meaning of an archive? What possible
functions does it serve? What is its purpose? I think there are many aspects and HEDWIG FIJEN:
questions related to the archive in contemporary art, and I hope to explore some I would like to address in my introduction how we transformed the Manifesta biennial
of them here. from its two-yearly exhibition format into a more structural theoretical programme
based upon the notion of what we call an active archive. Archives usually have the
To introduce the invited guest speakers: appearance of being closed, dead and dusty. What can be the task and significance
of an archive? What can be its function and use? Can archives somehow be active
Hans-Peter Feldmann is an artist from Dsseldorf, Germany. His picture archive, and alive? The archive as a facility and notion in the field of contemporary art has
which was based on found material, became very well known. On this occasion gained prominence in the cultural discourse since the change of the millennium.
he will give a lecture on the danger and misuse of archives.
There are some interesting examples of different archive projects which took place
Beatrice von Bismarck is professor of art history and visual studies at the Academy recently. In 2002, the book Interarchive was published by the Kunstraum of the
of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. She is also co-director of the Kunstraum of the University of Lneburg by our colleagues at the table, Beatrice von Bismarck
University of Lneburg, where she worked on the Interarchive research project and together with the artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. Another archive project took place
publication, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hans-Peter Feldmann and academy at Manifesta 4 in 2002 in Frankfurt. The complete curatorial artists archives,
students. This particular project and research focused on the meaning of archives presenting all artists documentation the curators researched, were conceived
with regard to the contemporary art field. in a public installation by the French artist Mathieu Mercier. In 2003, there
was the Documenta Archive which developed the exhibition Wiedervorlage d5,
Hedwig Fijen is the founding director of the International Foundation Manifesta in Eine Befragung des Archivs zur document, questioning the archive on Harald
Amsterdam, and she was the director of Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam, in 1996. She Szeemanns Documenta in 1972. The last example is the project Curating Degree
will talk about the meaning and the use of the archives of Manifesta, which have Zero Archives by Dorothe Richter and Barnaby Drabble in 2003. They started
been transferred to Amsterdam since 2002, the different editions of the Manifesta a touring exhibition, presenting a growing archive including materials such as
Biennial, and the ways of dealing with these two. videos, websites, CDs, articles of a group of over sixty international curators.
Sirje Helme is an art historian and curator from Tallinn. She is currently the direc- What does Manifesta mean by active archiving? What is the idea behind it?
tor of the Centre for Contemporary Arts here in Tallinn and she has recently been When Manifesta was incepted in the 1990s, we began with the idea that
appointed director of the new art museum, which is under construction. Manifesta should be different in terms of creating a changing, flexible and ex-
perimenting structure that would not suffer from too much institutionalism. Al-

though after the first Manifesta editions, piles of artists portfolios, catalogues festa in Amsterdam. This archive contains data and documents on the pro- MJ Discussion, Tallinn
and other information was left in local storages, garages and private houses, duction process of exhibitions, theoretical discourse, symposia, books, press
Manifesta did not want to decide until 2000, after Ljubljana, to set up a frame- clippings, video materials and digital images from all Manifesta biennials, as
work for keeping the memory. Not willing to be trapped in developing of a tra- well as catalogues, biographies, portfolios of over two hundred artists and sev-
ditional over-complete paper archive, I organised a series of brainstorm ses- enteen curators who have participated in Manifesta so far, as well as more
sions in Amsterdam with the Israeli artist Roy Cerpac, aiming to identify the than 1000 artists portfolios of those who were not presented in Manifesta.
notion of the memory (read: archive) in relation to the role the International
Foundation Manifesta wanted to play with the archive as a source for critical The physical archive acts as a kind of active generator and stimulus for new
reflection, a source of reinvention and stimulating acquiring new knowledge. discussions on issues in contemporary art and curatorial practice, critically try-
ing to redefine basic assumptions and initiating new operational processes.
During these talks with Roy Cerpac we tried to come up with a modus for a meta- The archive (or perhaps we should not say archive, but information resourc-
phorical way of presenting our Manifesta archive, analysing for example the notion es) and the process of its accumulation is the core rationale of all activities,
of arch, as in archive, as a curved structure or supportive tool, such as a bridge which is not only the bienniel as such, but also the Manifesta Journal, the
or arcade. In this context also the word archein (Greek =to start, to begin) came journal on curatorial practices. Also the series of Coffee Breaks, three-day con-
close to the potential meaning of a pro-active Manifesta archive. Another important ventions with lectures and workgroups, aimed at in-depth discussions, were
element examined during the discussions was the ephemeral aspect of Manifes- taking place for the last three years in Liverpool. Another illustrative example
tas programme, the lack of consistency as a main element of Manifestas identity. is the planned Manifesta Book as podium for intensive discourse. At this mo-
ment Manifesta is the only biennial in its kind developing new interfaces for
Responding to a constantly changing geopolitical and social situation in Eu- extensive research and studies besides its existing two-yearly exhibition format.
rope and the developments in the arts, the archive could stand at the inter-
section of keeping the memory on the one hand, and challenging the memo- This discussion related to the Manifesta Journal is maybe the best example of
ry with new awareness by experimenting and changing working methods. As what we regard as the active archive. I believe our active archive could function
Harald Szeemann wrote in the book Interarchive: Ideally an archive should as a bridge between Manifesta itself, its audiences, professionals, funding organi-
suggest or trigger memory. The archive of Manifesta could fill in the need for sations, artists and curators, in a way of initiating, concentrating, recording and
a body to re-check contents and reflect on activities and decision-making pro- questioning our aims and working processes.
cesses, giving feedback on all levels of organisation, stimulate discussions and
initiate new debates and develop an interdisciplinary structure, in which new In this new notion of the active archive, it is able to play a decisive intermediary
content could be developed for the future of Manifesta on all levels in the net- role, which the biennial is not equipped to, as it focuses more on presentation and
work. So what did we practically do, and what was the precise idea behind it? installation processes. In this sense, both the foundational archive and the bien-
nial programme are able to create a synergy in tasks and consistency: the tem-
In 2003, all documents and materials from Manifesta 1 to 4 were collected porality of the presentation opposite to the permanency of the ongoing research,
and made publicly accessible for the local, national and international art pub- debates and discussions.
lic at the Manifesta at Home offices of the International Foundation Mani-

While the main task and notion of the archive was identified after a few discus- producers actually using archival practices within their work and using it in a way MJ Discussion, Tallinn
sion sessions with Roy Cerpac, he came up with a more metaphorical level of that is not only rather unconventional but also very much related to the present
communicating the new notion of the archive in its internal and external function: time and not at all full of dust and boredom. That was an observation we made
he chose the diamond. The diamond is a precious stone of pure carbon and is the earlier on, but we tried to frame that theoretically. The archive as a facility and as
hardest naturally occurring substance on earth. It is transparent, contains ability a metaphorical measure gained, as you probably have realised in everyday life,
to focus, has polygon views and sharpness and is able to continue to crystallize significant importance in the cultural discourse of the late 20th century and central
itself. A diamond in its nature invites one to visualise many realities, as to dissolve aspects of an overall social development and questions related to that develop-
and add new angles to its structure and maybe discover even new sites. With the ment came together when you dealt with archives.
diamond it is meant that the nucleus of Manifesta is its archive, its reminiscence,
serving as a custodian of the changing ideology, not in explicit form, but as an The orientation towards the past, searching for a view of the future, as really to
active involvement of Manifestas recollection in all aspects of its editions. make a connection between the backward look and the look forward, became at
the turn of the century of particular importance. I think it was related to hopes
If the philosophy of the dialogue is the spirit of Manifesta, the results should be and speculations linked on one hand to memory, which you have mentioned
presented through a dialogue, Viktor Misiano once said at a Coffee Break meet- (memory in terms that you can actually record everything that has been there in
ing in Liverpool. Misianos words give a great example of how we within Mani- the world), and that also related with the technology of digitalizing, so that for the
festa use the metaphor of the diamond. first time, mankind seemed to be able to have an archive of virtually everything
that has ever happened.
BEATRICE VON BISMARCK :
As it has been mentioned twice already, I am going to give you a brief introduction I think that was one part. But it went together with another very important devel-
on the project that has the rather vague title Interarchive, which it was intended opment in science, meaning the research done in brain equivalent technology,
to indicate that the archive as such is not in itself complete, but is also intercon- and the question of what is our brain in relation to other recording media. By that
nected with a lot of other archives. That was the basic idea for the title. What I I mean that memory is one thing, but what does forgetting mean? How can you
will do is give you a brief introduction to the concept of that project and then run actually be able to forget and how can you erase information out of your brain
quickly through some of the examples that we have in its book, in which it is clear again to make space for something else? How does memory as space work in
that it is really an archive of archives. It was the solution that we found to gather an active, productive and erosive way? In that context a lot of cultural activities
the information that had been gathered in that research about archival practices have happened, for example something that I call museumisation of everyday
in contemporary art. life. Museumisation is probably not an English word, but I mean by that how
a real life turns into a museum like a surrounding. Be it that you have quarters
As Hedwig has already mentioned, archive is a word with a rather bad reputa- of cities that really look like museums, be it that you have normal ordinary life
tion, because it sounds extremely boring, it sounds as if it has only to do with circumstances that have frozen into something that already is a memory of itself
cellars and dust, something that has been forgotten and quite rightly so, is not of while its still alive. The idea of globalisation linked to cultural archives and I think
use anymore and so on. Funny enough, if you look at the artistic activities of the there have been a million initiatives in recent years, particularly at the turn of the
1990s, particularly in the early 21st century, you find a lot of artists and cultural century, to build up something like national heritage, like every country had for

its identity a project of having its own archive and summarizing everything that sentences. Thus, all types of museums, libraries and collections are addressed
has happened culturally in that region. Then the idea of what is a monument with the term archive, but in the same way, all the facilities in which information
and what do you do with a monument, what is it for which again is related to items are gathered.
the idea of memory. And the question of image-processing how does image
processing actually relate to this idea of having ideally a comprehensive archive If one assumes archives to be places pervaded by power relationships, two types
of things happening at the very moment. of demands form the prerequisite for the archives manifested within them. By
power relationships I mean that theres always somebody responsible for the way
Interarchive has really set itself in relation to these questions, three main ideas the archive looks, for the selection that has been made for the archives and for
of what an archive that is not only related to the past should be. It should be a the access and the possibility to actually deal with the material. It sounds obvi-
process-oriented archive; it should be flexible; and it should be open-ended. So, ous, but sometimes it has to be said again. Firstly, hope for perpetuation is one of
right from the beginning, the idea was that an archive is not something that is the ideas to actually put up an archive, perpetuation of the present by means of
supposed to have an end in itself, its not something that has the idea of com- recording. And secondly, striving for the greatest possible completeness, so what I
pleteness, and its not something in which only one particular person is respon- was just saying and I think this was one of the ideas that has become extremely
sible for what is said, but that al lot of people are involved in the creation and in important in the late 20th century. Universal models are reflected in both of those
the activities within the archive. two approaches. The resulting link to the past, to that, which has been, and the
stasis, the firmness inherent in such concept of archives explain the yearning for
In having said that, the Interarchive publication intended mainly to bring to the its destruction. This is a yearning that you find all through the 20th century when
fore all those criteria dealing with archives that lead to the conscious and co-ac- you look at avant-garde art dealing with museums. One of the major criticisms of
tive involvement in the social present and future. Therefore it focuses on those avant-garde against museums was that this art lives a life after its death in muse-
practices of constituting and handling archives through which collections of infor- ums. I think in this respect for museums its also a good idea to kind of reflect on
mation in the broadest possible sense are subjected to various forms of processes how you actually can turn a museum into an archive in motion.
and narratives, which produce meaning. I think this is a very abstract formula-
tion, but I mean by that, that if information come together, they can continuously So what the Interarchive project tried to do, is on one hand to look at what were
form just by recombining and by new connecting of these materials, they can the constitutive power aliments that normally are responsible for building up an
continuously form new meaning, and I think that was in part what Hedwig was archive; and on the other hand to look for archives, who are dealing with it and
addressing when she said that you can put an archive into motion by reusing in were using archives with the kind of multiplicity of voices that can become visible
a constitutive process. in them, and do this in a certain kind of dynamic way. We started with a real ar-
chive, that of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who at a point in his career decided
In contrast to the everyday meaning of the word archive that I was already ad- that the archive he had at the moment was becoming too big and not really useful
dressing, the term is taken in the broadest possible sense as a place, where as for what he wanted to do with it anymore. He gave it to the University of Lne-
in Derridas, the French philosophers terms, symbols are gathered. Derrida uses burg as an experiment, quite consciously as an experiment. As much as it was
this as a starting phrase to say that this is where you can only start talking to one not intended and it would have been impossible to make this archive accessible
another, because you have the symbols from where you can start formulating in the normal library way that you enter and you know where all the materials are

and you can open the books. Knowing that right from the start, the idea was to exhibition, in which all the material that was unpacked was presented in pho- MJ Discussion, Tallinn
deal with the archive in a way that opens the archive up with unusual perspec- tographic imagery. The idea to do an exhibition immediately came together with
tives. The cooperation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hans-Peter Feldmann and the the idea of extending the archive, of building up a network of archival practices.
students of the University of Lneburg led to the questioning of what you usually This is what happened in the exhibition you can see in the different vitrina
want to do with the material, how you usually want to look at books, how you use archives by a lot of cultural producers in the field, who sent some of their items to
all the little stuff thats in archives, like letters, like little items, like writing notes, Lneburg in order to represent their own archives. It was books, but it was also
like exhibition plans. All that stuff is in these boxes, but the only thing you cannot little items, address books, but it was also for example by Koo Jeong-a a whole
get when you look through the Interarchive Book, is the contents of the books. tower of books. There was a website collection, websites which also referred to
You can learn something about the smell of the books, you can learn something archives. There were interviews with artists about being archived, what it actually
about the weight of the books, you can learn something about the colour, the sur- means to be part of an archive and how people actively deal with that. There was
face and what it is like to actually open up a box, what it sounds like when you do a whole film collection of films that deal with the problem of archives and what it
it, but you do not know what is inside the book. It is like trying to avoid the normal means to lose an archive, to open it up to find disorder in the archive. And, again,
approach towards the contents of the archive. Instead in a kind of playful, almost there was this slightly absurd level in the whole presentation, which had to do
absurd way doing everything else with books that is normally not done. with statistics, meaning for example: do files by female artists weigh more than
files by male artists; what do they have to do with the regions they come from; is
That was the very first step and what Ill do is Ill introduce you to the first part there any relation between the colour of the box and the contents, etc. So you had
of the book, which is called Approaches and deals with coming to Lneburg in these rather beautiful but silly graphics, purposefully silly graphics with presenta-
a photo sequence by Hans-Peter Feldmann. You can see the beautiful medieval tions looking colourful and nice.
town of Lneburg. This is the University campus and this is the preliminary
place where the boxes, the banana boxes quite pragmatically, are stacked with This exhibition then led to the publications third part. The second part was a
all the archival material in them. Then all these boxes had to go from St. Gallen theoretical reflection from different theoreticians of different disciplines, mean-
to Lneburg in a quite elaborate transport process and were then unpacked by ing philosophy, sociology, architecture theory, film theory, art history of
the students. This is the process of the unpacking and you can see the different course, cultural studies relating in particular to this very specific perspec-
episodes of what has happened to the boxes. They were photographed, they were tive of how can you put an archive into motion, how can you organise it in a
looked at, they were recorded, and they were weighed. Then some of the data flexible way, for all the other memorial functions it can have. I think this has
were catalogued and the photographs of the contents of the boxes were prepared been discussed a lot and I think it is a matter of opening that discussion up.
for exhibition. But how much information can you get from a photograph? You
can get very beautiful visual imagery, but you cant get closer to the books. You So the third part was particularly trying to open that up and exemplify this mode
can see that they exist but you cant really get into them - and really quite pur- of flexibility in the book, being like a snowball system all the people that were
posefully so. asked to be part of the book were asked also to ask other people with their prac-
tices related to archives, to become part of the book, too. The circle of people,
I am sorry the pictures are so incredibly bad, but maybe it will give you just an who participated, became bigger and bigger the longer we continued, and it was
impression of what the next stage after the recording process was. It was an only a haphazardous decision to make, to say ok suddenly, ok, now we stop.

We could have gone on forever and I think we still could be doing this. And I think fice, in which he gave a chart of the interconnectedness of his own work in his
everybody knows activities that are not in the book, but some of them are. own archive. This is an archive of Anne Oppermann an autobiographical installa-
tion, which continuously changes when it is reinstalled, and includes the previous
Maybe Id quickly rush through some of these positions, as some of them are installations within itself.
extremely heterogeneous. Ill start for example with the institutional context of the
Documenta 3; it is not what you expect an archive to be. It has boxes and it has Ill stop here, because all I wanted to tell you is that the range of the archival
numbers and you go through the numbers and you find what you are looking for practice and the way, in which archival practices have become part of artistic
this is the archive in a traditional sense, although it is of course living, because production at the moment, is extremely wide. I think the positions we have in the
it is used constantly and like the Wiedervorlage book turned into something really book share that they deal with these practices in a self-reflexive way. They actu-
interesting. ally ask themselves, why they are doing it and how they can open up a practice
in an innovative and productive way, so that the archive plays a role within the
This is an example of the Arnold Dreyblatts archive, a digital archive, about cultural production of the 21st century.
memory and archive in process, an archive that he is dealing with constantly and
presenting constantly in different shapes and talking constantly about memorial HANS-PETER FELDMANN:
processes. Ans this is an archive by Annika Eriksson, an archive, again, about When we talk about archives, we normally talk about the positive sides, of which
archives, collectors of strange things. In one case there is a Batman, who is col- there are quite a few, and which make archives very valuable to our culture and
lecting Batman items but there are millions of other interesting archives. This for our daily life. But I would like to talk today about one side, which might be
is an archive by Jonathan Faiers and Volker Eichelmann, two filmmakers, who a little bit negative. I am trying to explain this through the history of the word
collected film scenes in art archives. Its a kind of doubling of what happens with archive.
archives in archives. This is Rene Greens installation in the Viennese Secession
exhibition, in which she turned her own work into a living archive, in as much as Normally, when I study a certain topic, I look into my archive, my encyclopaedias
she showed it so that you could go thorough her work like in a retrospective. But to find the background of the word, because the words themselves already tell
all the rooms were interconnected; you could use different exits and entrances a lot about where they come from and what they really mean. To this contribu-
and intertwine this base, so that while you were actually in the exhibition, or if tion I found about the word archive the following. It comes from the Greek word
you went twice, the better, you would never see the same connection, you would archaion, and archaion means city hall, government building. The background
always open up new connections. In exhibitions this can usually happen, but in of the word archaion is again another Greek word archein archaion-archein
this case it was explicitly intended to happen. This is Josef Grigelys archive of the and it means to govern, to rule a country. In these city halls, in these government
people, who talk on the in this case - road to him. He collected the conversa- buildings there already in Greek times were many-many papers, too many to keep
tions he was having in written word. This in an archive that was found, one of them all there at the same time. So they decided to take out the papers, which
the found image archives, in which the guy who found it, brought it back and were no longer used in daily business and put them to a certain place, a place
presented it, is really the one, who made sense of the archive, because otherwise called archaion. Thats almost the whole story about the word archive, but the
there was no preliminary sense. This is a sound archive by Carsten Nikolai, the sense that it comes from the government as a place or from the people who rule
German artist dealing with sound. This is an archive of OMA, Rem Koolhaas of- a country, is also telling a lot about the idea of archives.

First, you must know that in Greek times maybe less than 4% of the population As a clue to the archive coming from a negative background, there might be the
was able to read and write and was using paper to write down something. If even other words derived from the word archive words like hierarchy, oligarchy,
in those times the government buildings and city halls were full of paper, it means monarchy and patriarchs. They all have the same basic background word, ar-
that to rule a country has to do with paper and writing and keeping the things that chaion, and they all mean in the same way to rule people. But today we are
were written. The idea was also that when they put papers in archives, to maybe lucky, we dont use these words much more, because we came to another way of
go back to it one day and find out things which happened some time ago. They living together, which is called democracy. This is also a Greek word, but it has a
could have thrown the papers away, but they did not do this, they wanted to keep completely different background. The main part of this word comes from demos
it forever, to go back to old days and to find out, what happened then. the people.
Beside this simple story of an archive I want to go back to the background of that Of course the paper archives have changed a lot in the past 2,000 years, even
the archive was invented by rulers and governers of countries and societies. The if the main changing only happened in the last forty years. At the moment weve
4% of people who were able to read and write of course never connected with the got bigger and better computers to digitalize all the writings on paper, which have
culture and the education compared to all the illiterate people. People who were been stored on paper before. It is again a big new tool for us, this digitalization of
educated and introduced to all kind of knowledge usually came from the circle of words and pictures. But it raises again the question of what will be the bad side.
leaders of religion and of course leaders of people, of communities. I did not under- Because like I said before, all big things have two sides.
stand in the beginning what it means that it was a government who invented the
paper archive and what the connection was, but if you think of Russia, maybe the Photography was already kind of an extension of the old archives, pictures on
KGB without their archive, then you understand what it means to have an archive. paper. But today you find that even photography is being digitalized, so the little
Or the German Gestapo, or the German Stasi this would have been completely step of a hundred years, when photos were only on paper, is already past.
impossible without an archive. These police organisations were only one tool of the
government, so government is using the archive as a tool to install governments. No The negative side of the archive and digitalization could maybe be Bill Gates, the
archive means no government. At least in the negative case the governments can- owner of Microsoft. He is really one of the richest persons in the world; he can use
not survive without big archives. The totalitarian systems would not survive with- his money to start a big new business. In the last few years he has been buying all
out their archives, because normal opposition would have thrown them over very kinds of photographic archives around the world. At the moment, he has got the big-
quickly. The archive is a tool for governments, an instrument to rule a country. gest archive of photography around. The archive is called Corbis and anybody can
buy pictures from it. Gates buys the rights from other archives and sells them again.
The archives in general are a kind of a benediction for our culture. We can go He is still buying an archive once a month from somewhere around the world, so one
back to our past times to find out what people did then and where they reached day he will have a monopoly of pictures. This might be if it is misused the bad
in their struggle to survive and to build up culture. We can learn from archives. side. At the moment it is only used to make money, but maybe one day it will also
But it seems to be a natural law that all the good things in the world always have be used for other things, you never know. And he stores the paper pictures he buys
a bad side. For example, look at the nuclear power it can be very good if used in a mountain somewhere in the States; to be sure they do not get destroyed. The
as an energy source, but it can be the very opposite, if used as weapon. You can data that is digitalized in his computers is changed all the time and stored in different
find two sides to every important thing in our life. places, so he can be sure it will not get destroyed.

Before this lecture I was asked to talk about my work in relation to archives. My first framework of an exhibition, which aims to create a readable narrative, always
reply to this was: I dont have an archive, except for some encyclopaedias, but not a succeeds only partly - and in many cases fails at all. It comes from the nature of
real archive. But still, I have many things: books, photos, magazines, newspapers, art works which always coincide more than single illustration of the concept. We
too much to place it all in my house. So I have different storage places, such as ga- could even say that the art works are more like holes in the body of an exhibition,
rages, store rooms and cellars to spread my things, because I cannot keep them all rather than symptoms of the concept. Lars Nittves catchy concept of a show as
in one house. Still, if I have so many things, thousands and thousands of pictures, I a storytelling (he talks more about the museum shows, but the difference is really
cannot call it an archive, because the main quality of an archive is that if you go there not that big) is of course adequate up to some extent. But the stories told have
and look for something you will find it. That does not happen in my archive if I go many unexpected turns that are actually not controllable at all. It creates some-
there and look for something, I never find it. It is a problem, but I still keep all the thing that, despite of the intensions of the curator, is very close to the concept of
things, maybe waiting for something that could happen to this kind of archive that I post-modern allegory, as described by Craig Owens. He speaks of art works, but
have. My archive is more like a sunken ship, where I sometimes dive into looking for it seems now be more accurate in the case of an exhibition.
something, not finding it, but always finding things I have never seen before, which I
like very much and pick some out and use them in my work. Many people who have Owen understands post-modern allegories as not coded games to hide the
something similar, if you come to their apartments or offices, they are full of paper and meaning. They rather try to point to something that can be shown only as
books, it is hard to imagine that these people will find their way through all the mess something postponed, or as holding back meaning. Its not a story, because
they have around themselves. But still, it is also a kind of an archive. it does not create order, but rather a heterogenic field with many symbolic
breaks and failures of significations. So, in a way, this post-modern allegory
Of all the experience of archives, on the positive side is that you can go some- is destroyed allegory, because of its hysterical nature - it puts out puzzles, it
where and find all this information you want to find out. This use of archive is a wants to be read, it desperately seeks for interpretations, and at the same time
big progress in our lives. On the other side, you might experience that you have it pushes away any final reading, the totalizing signification that could govern
a kind of an archive, but you cannot find anything there. You get lost and come it. Every exhibition, that pretends to be fully readable and it succeeds in a way,
out with no result again, this is in a way kind of positive, because another is born dead. That is the paradox of an exhibition because it does in a way aim
word, which comes from the Greek word archaion, is anarchy. It has the same to end variations and interpretations, but at the same time also to create them,
background. Anarchy can sometimes be really positive. to open up them up; to fix the flow in order to push it further. This is the secret
of the vitality of an exhibition. The exhibition also tries to be two things at the
ANDERS HRM: same time - to be a text and to be a metatext of that text. It tells the story and at
I was just explaining that unfortunately we cant turn off the noise, because the the same time it comments this story. And we might agree that this is a rather
noise is part of the data recorder, which is recording all that is being said. So I schizophrenic position.
apologise for that. My talk is titled I just titled it actually : Exhibition, cura-
tor, archive an exercise of power. How to archive such a monster is a really difficult task. And first of all is it
The exhibition is by its nature a temporary constellation of art works with the possible at all? Total archiving seems to be an utopian project with Borgesean al-
aim to point at something. However this something is not easily graspable, be- lusions and I refer to my friend Marco Laimre, who once said (I use his metaphor
cause exhibition as an act of signifying is not very straightforward. The conceptual in another context ) that making a total archive is like making a one-to-one map

of the world. According to Borges and Laimre, maybe Germans with their exact- I still possess it; it has never been made public though. It consists only from the
ness would be able to do that. artworks that are filmed in proper translatable format. In 2001 together with the
Centre of Contemporary Art we made it into a product - we made a double CD-
The limits of archiving become especially visible in the context of relational Rom based on the material I had gathered, and made a history, creating a basis
projects, or in the projects that we could call the new genre public art (a term for all further researches on the field. Despite of the fact that it coincides with a
that came up in the conversation with Maria Lind). Projects based on the process large part of the whole material, it is still an ideological constellation. Even based
and participation that are will not be viewed at all, are the most difficult to repro- on this material there would be seven other ways to put it together and now I
duce, because the process is the only place where the content is created. We can would definitely do it totally in another way. But I possessed this knowledge and
name the situation, we can describe it, but we can not reproduce the experience. exercised my power by creating the history. By now this archive is totally out-
The experience is lost forever and this is the case also with more conventional dated, its in VHS format which dismantle, colours are shading etc. Basically, this
exhibitions. archive is in the process of disappearing, in a few years there will be nothing left
of it. I kept the knowledge to myself, never really distributed it or made it available
The second problem that is related to the first one is what Hito Steyerl points to nobody. I think that this is also the case with curating we distribute only bits
out when he speaks of documentarism in the art field. He claims that any act of the knowledge and I really think the real exercise of power lies not in the power-
of documentation is an act of power. Documentary forms in the art field at first ful positions of the curators but on their knowledge, i.e. their archives.
represent the claim of artistic works to contact with an auratized field of the social
and political. The formal devices employed are often social-realistic and attempt SIRJE HELME:
to remain as transparent as possible. Examples are art documentaries, in which Firstly, I would like to take the chance to thank our guests. On behalf of our art
performances and interventions are depicted and which illustrate certain effects scene I really thank you for coming to Tallinn. Secondly, I do not have such a the-
in the social field. Here the documentary moment is used as proof of social rel- oretical research and I did not prepare in the way that my good colleagues have
evance and evidence of an organic relationship to the field. done. But there were two problems that arose that were extremely interesting to
me. Anders already pointed partly to one of those problems. As our Centre for
I think we can extend that also to the acts of archiving and documenting a show. Contemporary Art in Estonia is an information centre, our priority is information; it
With these not fully developed thoughts and examples becomes visible the ideol- means that the most valuable part of our activity is archives. This means that we
ogy of archiving and documenting. And they actually lead us back to the conver- have thought about documenting and archiving processes quite a lot. That is why
sations held in the 1970s about the making of histories. I would like to raise two questions.
We often tend to see archives as somewhat neutral constellations or positive The first is maybe just a paradox, but in my practice I have seen that the more
constellations, as was mentioned here. The archives represent power, the power technology and the more information we have around us, the purer our archives
of knowledge, curating is an exercise of that knowledge. are, the less we have of real information. What does that mean? It means we
have reached information society, computer-centred society. We are in a virtual
I would like to withdraw an example from my own practices. In the years 1998- world where the information is flowing around. We dont have letters as from the
2000 I put together the archive of Estonian video and performance art up to then. 19th and 20th century, we dont have lovely greeting cards anymore, which point

to facts or thoughts. We dont have anything like this, we are e-mailing each from what we have kept in our memories. So the archives are telling totally dif-
other and all that e-mail correspondence is information which is lost for the ferent stories to everybody it depends on the time, on personal memory, on
archives. It might not mean anything to us just now, but after a hundred years it personal experience even if we are trying to do the absolute best, archive every
will matter a lot. I have much thought about this while reading old art histories, single detail, keep everything, and write it down.
reading biographies, which mostly are based on all kinds of notes, letters, cor-
respondence, etc. Why am I telling you this? Because at least in the case of Estonia, but probably
also in the case of other post-socialist countries... I will give you one example of
This is also an issue in our practice, as we are trying to gather to our 50 or 60 archives and the importance of documenting all the meanings around us. This is
artists folders for example exhibition invitations, press releases, etc. But already from my personal experience and I think representing all of my generation. It hap-
today we receive much of this information digitally. We maybe lose some of this pened when we started to get or read the art magazine Artforum, which was very
info, not printing it out, forgetting so in this sense the archives become more valuable at the time. It was the one of the main information sources for abroad
and more poor. that we had, thanks to some good and strange coincidences. I can tell you that
most of our generation were educated reading the Artforum magazine from the
This was just to point to one of the paradoxes of our information society. But my end of the 1960s to the mid-1970s. We were very sure that we knew a lot about
the second problem with archiving is one of personal memory. This concerns the the exhibitions, what goes on in the open world. Now, after several years, I re-
way that archives are communicating. Anders told us about the power of knowl- alised what we were doing. We were reading the information, but we did not un-
edge, the power of archives. An archive is a selection; we are not unfortunately derstand a lot of it, because we had never had the personal experience, we were
or fortunately able to copy the maps, as Anders pointed out. But we are trying not able to experience the surrounding mentality, all the desires, anything around
to do our best. Lets imagine that we are being very objective. We are trying not do that you never can put to archives. My conclusion based on this is that this is why
be individualistic, trying not to think about the power of creating an archive and our avant-garde was very theoretical, very much based on documentary evidence
collecting information. But lets say after fifty years, how are these archives com- and reproductions and not moving in real space, in mental real space. And this is
municating? Just one example. I was looking one day through our documents for how documenting and archives have influenced our life.
a lecture I was supposed to give about our first annual exhibition. And I realised
that fifty percent of the information at least is in my mind, and not in these photos, It is the same question in front of me now. We really have tried to our best to keep
tape recordings, letters, descriptions. All the atmosphere, all the meaning it our archives and I am really proud of our archives, but I am very much interested
was in my mind. And I am absolutely sure that all the people who saw the exhibi- in what they will be telling to the young people after fifty years, how the young
tion in real life are keeping fifty percent of the event in their minds. The event is people will see our scene after fifty years if they have only our archives to lean
their personal memory, in their memories, which indeed are different. on. I would really want to see that maybe I can see it; maybe some technol-
ogy will give me the opportunity to see and find out... But this is actually a very
So now, if somebody will be looking after thirty years at this I think perfect docu- important question, especially because of the technology and the way of archiving
mentation, perfect archive of this exhibition, how is this archive communicating to and documenting exhibitions and all the events have changed so much that it
the researcher? We do not know this. I am sure that the answer, the understand- is almost impossible to record them in a proper way. We just closed the exhibi-
ing, the information he or she is getting from this archive will be totally different tions of Gints Gabrans. We almost do not have any images, real images from this

Part 2: Discussion
exhibition. He will send some photos and some images, but they are not real in Viktor Misiano: Many thanks to everybody who presented their contribution to-
the sense that we were not able to make photos of this exhibition. Smoke, some day. I think we have made very different and interesting points. And now let us
images of smoke is what we can take, some jumping kids that is all. But the discuss all together about the issue of archives that I think is very crucial
exhibition was very good. Our documentation of it is very poor. for contemporary art.
Well, this was just me as a very pragmatic person, trying to create some archive of Sirje, as far as I know, for contemporary art centres as Soros, it was presumed
our contemporary art life. I think that all institutions that deal with contemporary everywhere, in every centre, to collect information. It was one of the programmes
art exhibitions have the same problems. We are all wondering, how people can of the centres.
understand our art and life after fifty years, maybe after a hundred years, because
they will have only our archives. I really wanted to stress once more the issue of Sirje Helme:Yes, you are right. Of the three programmes that we had, it was the
personal memory in archives. But it is already a longer topic and maybe one for main one. We started to collect also information from previous years. From this
the panel. idea it was also picked up our priority to be an information centre after the Soros
period.
Viktor Misiano: I have to say that when these things were happening, when the
Moscow Soros Centre was opened, and when it was in fact announced that one
of the programmes of the centre will be to film with a camera most of the open-
ings, most of the events, I did not appreciate the idea, not at the time. Can you
imagine: early 1990s, Moscow. Everything was so dynamic, every day, every
second so dense. So just to imagine that at such a moment you should have to
have an entire programme focused on just simple documentation... It seemed
totally out of the radical atmosphere of the time, it seemed to be really boring
institutional routine.
Then we started to understand that it makes sense. Because international, West-

ern colleagues started to come to Moscow I think the same happened also here
and in all other centres of that network and for them, the VHS cassettes on the
shelves of the Soros Centre were the main source of information. In fact they got
a lot of very fruitful information about what was happening on the scene thanks
to this documentation. I was recently, a few days ago, in Almaty in Kazakhstan.
And I got so fascinated with the video archive which Valeria Ibrayeva, Sirjes col-
league, has collected, that I understood that this archive should be shown. I am
preparing an exhibition I would want to, with no editing, no changing, just to

put the cassettes into the player and show them, because it is simply extremely The whole project was documented; I have an entire video archive of all sessions.
beautiful, extremely interesting, it is simply dense of information. I have also audio tapes: a tape-record archive. And then I have produced this
book, which is in fact transcripted text of the whole discussions. The material was
If to join partly what you have said about power of the archive, how the archive edited by the artists - we concluded the project in 1994, the book was published
is imposing certain narratives, and also about the very subjective and personal in 1999, because for a few years we worked on the archive. We printed all tape-
dimension of an archive, I have to say that many times when accompanying my recorded text, I edited the texts, then the artists and the philosopher edited it a
colleagues in Moscow to see the videos collected by the Moscow Soros Centre for lot, sometimes even transforming text. It was losing the authenticity of the verbal
Contemporary Art, as I saw some performances by Russian artists, some exhibi- speech. We decided that everything in the text that was edited a lot was to be
tion openings, where sometimes I myself was on the tape. The problem is that marked with blue colour. The artists and the philosopher then started to add new
now when I am recalling these events, I recall not my personal memory about text, comments related to what was discussed a few years ago. We put that also
witnessing the events, but the videotape. I cant distinguish it; I absolutely cant into the book, which is a sort of archive of lost experience, partly forgotten experi-
distinguish it even in the sense that I can recall more than is documented on ence. So the book is a physical result, an example of how relational experiences
the video. So this is a little bit different aspect of the power of documentation can be documented only in the form of presentation of an archive. There is no
it is destroying your personal feelings that you cant recollect. other form of presenting this kind of projects.
There is another interesting aspect. You mentioned relational projects, how the But, what is very interesting is how an archive and personal memory are related.
archive is crucial for relational projects, curatorial or artistic. I have here a book I can tell you of one extremely strange phenomenon. Being in that laboratory
which I produced in Moscow and which documents my own curatorial experi- space, we used to meet sometimes from four oclock until the last subway train,
ence and work, it is named Masterskaja Vizualnii Antropologij Workshop for until the deep night. I remember perfectly one very dramatic moment, when the
Visual Anthropology. It was a one-year project with a group of Moscow artists in philosopher was putting emphasis on work, creativity, and he said in a very dra-
the middle of the 1990s, from 1993 to 1994. In fact the most important artists matic voice: We should work to the last force, until complete exhaustion. Other-
of that time were involved in this project Alexander Brener, Osmolovsky, Kupri- wise there is no sense to pretend that what we are doing is creativity. Creativity
yanov, Gutov, Leiderman and the whole idea was that we used to meet often is suffering. It was said in such a pathetic, sincere strong way that I remember it
and to have discussions with the major Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga. So word for word. But it was not on the tape. I reviewed everything, but it was not on
it was an intellectual laboratory, the philosopher was establishing his own ideas the tape. Then I took the cassettes and I spent two days re-listening to it. It was
and in dialogue with the artists he would then suggest to the artist some topics, not there, it was not documented. But I perfectly remember it.
problems. The artists would then reply to his discursive provocation by art works.
Sometimes it would be sketches, sometimes real works, photos. Sometimes they 1993-1994: that was the most dramatic and hard moment of our social and
would bring something from their own studio, sometimes there were performanc- economical life. It was really very dramatic moment of our existential experience. I
es. Sometimes it would be simple stories, for example once Yuri Leiderman con- was directing the Centre for Contemporary Art, which was poor, I mean, you cant
tributed his dream, he just told us about his dream. Which he got by the way in imagine how poor it was. Nobody can imagine how hard it was to continue. So
Sonsbeek 93, in Arnhem, the Netherlands. When he used to work in Sonsbeek, in that precise moment that sentence of Valery Podoroga gave me... I remember
one night he got a dream and he presented it as a work. it so perfectly, because it gave me the justification of why am I doing this? But

it was not taped. Since that I came to the idea that we should rewrite and add to judgements. So in a way bringing those things together is forming the fundamental
the documents, because documentation is not sufficient. There was something in problem. How do we establish an ethical judgement about what is important to re-
the air at that moment, even if Podoroga never pronounced these words, which he member - I think thats what I wanted to ask, it is a very difficult question.
probably did not, otherwise it would be on the tape. So the authentic truth is what
is in my personal memory and it was not said in reality at that moment. Victor Misiano: I could simply add one note. Sometimes because of ethical rea-
sons, people are refusing to see archives. For example, it happened with my
This is my contribution today, although I didnt expect to speak today. But now let mother. When KGB opened their archives, I suggested to her to go and see her
us go to discussion audience, you probably want to provoke us? case. She decided no to open it, because, as she explained to me: I dont want
to see the reports of my friends about me. I dont want to know, who wrote about
David Bate: David Bate, Im an English artist visiting. On the day that the Pope me. Yes, but this has nothing to do with art.
is being buried, memory seems a really appropriate topic. Although his memory
means nothing to me, in a way, because Im not a Catholic, Im a passive athe- Beatrice von Bismarck: Maybe that is a good example of something that I
ist. Yet for millions of people... even in Coca-Cola Plaza cinema I noticed people would prefer perhaps as a notion, which we could filter into our discussion. It
were standing watching the burial of the pope, instead of going into the cinema. would connect all the contributions that we had, including yours. And that is
So here is a narrative, an example of a memorial, of memorializing - which also the notion of re-writing. Of course you can talk about what the relation is be-
is a way of documentation. tween what happened and what is documented. But when you start looking at
documentary right from the start as a process of rewriting no documentary
I guess my lack of interest in that reminds me, how complex the questions can ever be adequate to what has happened. So the first documentation you
you are talking about really are. Because memory has always to do with kind do is the process of rewriting. And then the whole archival problem becomes
of narratives and the stories that we tell ourselves, either in our personal lives one of a constant rewriting process, leading to the argument, in which curating
or in our cultural lives, which constitute who we are. And one of the things and putting up a show is a constant rewriting. You are connecting things anew.
that postmodernism has reminded us, is the way that there is no single grand Physically, while moving through the exhibition, you fulfil the rewriting process,
narrative, there are many many complex overlapping narratives. This in a way but also physically by actually putting the works on the wall and by putting up a
brings me back to the question of what is important to remember, rather than new narrative. Once you accept that there is no one-to-one relationship between
the problem of remembering. I dont know how you feel about that in relation documentation and what has happened, then I think that this rewriting process
to art objects - because I think there are a lot of exhibitions Ive seen Im really is very adequate in dealing with archives, because it puts to the foreground a
happy to forget, but there are other ones that I think are really important. And kind of procedural aspect. And - it does not make it sound so much like a loss,
I wonder about judgement here, because in terms of personal memory, we because things have happened and you re-experience them. I think that the
make automatic judgements about what is important as in your example examples we heard are wonderful, because you were constantly rewriting your
of this phrase. history, but I am referring to things that have happened, but have not been
documented. But other things have been documented, and so maybe your his-
And cultural institutions made up of individuals, who have personal memories, sort of tory had to be refocused slightly. Rewriting process is something I would like to
inevitably using those memories to inform very often cultural or political, ideological put into the discussion.

Sirje Helme: You are very right, because historians have always been told in the Viktor Misiano: More questions? Remarks?
first lesson dont ever trust archives. You have to be very critical about the
archives. Mare Pedanik: I am Mare Pedanik and I work in the Centre for Contemporary
Arts in Estonia. Adding to Sirjes idea about what is missing from archives, my
My question was how much is missing in these archives, not that you have to question to Manifesta and to Hedwig is how do you succeed to update your
trust the archives, but just that we can never put the personal - or any - atmo- archives?
sphere into the archives. But still its such a pity that so much is missing in ar-
chives, especially in the case of contemporary art. Hedwig Fijen: How do we succeed? In a way, in a practical sense I think, that all
the Soros Centre did, is the same. We try to collect in a very academic sense
Anders Hrm: I also wanted to add something - that probably in the case of exhibi- all kind of material in physical forms, but also for example for some time, for
tions we could trace... we put together exhibitions and we could trace all the artworks four or five years we asked all the curators this was referring to the loss of
back to somewhere. After a show the works go to a different constellation from that communication, because we do not write anymore, we send e-mails - to donate
particular fixation. They also come from very different constellations. Once I would personal memories or writings or even printouts of e-mail documentation, of com-
like to make that kind of a map of a show. Would be of course wonderful to do it with munication that you have with the artist. We tried to be really perfect in that for
the documenta, for example or maybe Manifesta, to have all the appearances of years, we worked for four years on updating an archive.
the art works together in the show as well. That definitely would add something, to
have the context, the history of what has happened to the art work, how this work has Of course in a way it is also kind of useless, because you know that you cant
been seen, etc. So Id like to once do that, sort of an utopian project. be totally archiving everything. You cannot archive certain experiences, feelings,
memories, ideas. So during the last year we have been focusing on also using part
Hedwig Fijen: I totally agree with that, and especially with what Beatrice said, be- of this archive that we now have, transforming it into educational material. So we
cause we have spoken about Manifesta and I used the metaphor of the diamond. dont try to be overall perfect in trying to have everything, but we are documenting
For example, Manifesta is now also publishing a book, which is called Manifesta the material that we have and transforming it into new projects, like the Manifesta
- a Decade, and we have been trying to write our history. And of course I therefore Journal, like the Coffee Breaks, like the discussions and symposia. So we are on
totally agree with you, it is an ongoing process, and immediately we realised, dur- one side trying to collect the memory, the material, the documents in a really ac-
ing the rewriting of this part for the Manifesta - a Decade, we immediately started cessible physical form, on the other side trying to use the memories, the talks,
to think of another book, another publication and ongoing series of publications. the discussions, transform it or mediate it in a form of a new tool, new medium
Because it is like the diamond every time there is information missing, but at the book for example.
the same time you want to focus on it from a very special point of view, like with
a diamond you look at it from any one specific point of view, which is at that time Or for example, out of this archive of 250 artists who once participated in Mani-
valuable. I think there is a lot of information missing and maybe the total polygon festa, an idea started to invite the e-flux video archive, which is not exactly the
view is almost impossible. Therefore (re-)writing what has been missing or what Manifesta archive, but involves many of the Manifesta curators, who worked in
needs to be there in the future, is an ongoing process, a working process, which our network and now proposed a new archive. So in one project we try to involve
will never stop in the end. other projects and it becomes a kind of a chain of new information. Also I have

to confess we are a little bit stuck by this idea and I have asked many of our col- still need the same old photos. Also we do not know how long it is possible to
leagues how far do you go with collecting material and how much money do keep all this visual material on the CDs. Maybe after twenty years it is lost. We
you have to spend and how publicly accessible can you make it. This is also a dont have any experience. So we decided to go back to photos, Im sorry to say,
problem you need so many financial resources, staff and people to update the but its true.
information. Of course from the historical value point of view it is important, but
is it valuable from the financial input point of view, when compared to the whole Hedwig Fijen: This is maybe the same for everyone, its plus plus. You need to
range of your activities. Is it feasible? These are the kind of questions that we are keep everything on the old layers and you need to integrate all the new technical
asking us the last few years. modes into your organisation. That makes it also difficult, because you do not
dare to step over just one tool, which you can put everything onto. So it is indeed
Anders Hrm: I have one very nice paradox on archiving. I think it was in a plus and plus. We were facing the same discussion, when Anton Vidokle of e-flux
lecture in Tartu University, where Mikhail Lotman, son of Yuri Lotman, was pre- came with his 500 videos of the e-flux video rental shop. A lot of people said,
senting a paradox: if there is an archive of all the archives in the world, where is what are you doing, how can you go from DVD again to video, we dont have a
that archive? Then its not complete, because this particular archive is not in that video recorder anymore, now we need to buy a video recorder again.
archive of all the archives. You cannot have it, you cant have it all.
It is a very interesting process. And maybe at this stage in institutions we end up
Heie Treier: Heie Treier form Tallinn. I remember Orlan had a speech where she using indeed all layers and all technical possibilities from the original photo to
was complaining all the time about how her artworks are films of operations and the old-fashioned slide, which still works great, to the DVD and the VHS and so
since the technology keeps developing; her main concern is to transfer her older on. Maybe Beatrice could answer from your archive experience how did you
videos into newer and newer media. This is also one of the problems with the deal in terms of conservation with this enormous amount of papers and books and
archiving of contemporary art - that actually you dont produce new archives, but little pieces. Do you have like a conservation programme for this or did you just
you have to restore and transfer the older archives into new technology format, if keep it as it is, in this enormous archive?
its not about paper. I guess it is also a kind of a problem.
Beatrice von Bismarck: We keep it as it is...
Sirje Helme: I would just like to add to Heies comment that this problem has
been the main problem of our Centre which kind of technology we should Hedwig Fijen: ...so it is an organic process of transformation...
use. The technology is changing after every two months. We have our old slide
archive: how do we have to keep the slides? The question is how to restore or how Beatrice von Bismarck: So far not, I hope. But I think that was actually part of
to archive our archive? We started to work together with Tartu Art Museum, but the game, the whole idea of dealing with this archive was really not to turn it into
actually we do not have any reasonable solution for this. We just had a discussion an official archive, but to do something with it. I remember that in the beginning,
about real old-fashioned slides over at lunch break: we forgot about slides, we Hans Ulrich Obrist said, the idea was to send it around the world to exhibit as it
started to document digitally and only some time ago realised that our old nice is, like an object, like pile of objects, which would not have been dealt with in the
dear slide is still necessary to make the real physical photo to put in the hands ways of how to conserve it, how to keep it up. It would not have meant to cata-
of visiting curators. Digital archive is a real archive, but not of so much use. We logue it, to make it accessible and so on. This is where we started from right

from the beginning this was not meant to be the archive that you ideally have in way in one or the other direction, but we never come to a certain point of absolute
front of you, but it would be an archive about archives. I think this is why it has clearness and truth.
this playful attitude still to it. I think this is how Obrist wanted it to be he has
been playing with it a long time and now it sits and waits for its future purpose. Hanno Soans: Hello, Im Hanno Soans from the Estonian Art Museum. One of
the things that I just wanted to direct our thoughts to is that maybe if we com-
Viktor Misiano: More questions? pare the archives in culture with some of the more applicable everyday archives,
which Im sure we all know about - but maybe are not so aware of every day.
Alisa Kovin: Hello, my name Alisa Kovin, I am from Tallinn. I wanted to talk about Like lets say the CCTV cameras everywhere on the streets here. There probably
the new technologies. A lot of people have become too free-minded, so that some are some regulations somewhere that this information of you all passing this
people cannot even differ between the virtual life and the real life. Something is street this very day can be recorded and that it has to be kept there somewhere
happening on the internet, for example on big forums, where a lot of people are in the police archives for practical reasons. Probably they would like to keep it
discussing some problems. It is good, the new technology, so that a lot of people there longer, but lets assume it is there for a month. Lets assume it is there
can talk to one-another. At the same time people have become schizophrenic for a year.
they cannot understand if something really happened or not. Like Viktor Misiano
said, that you taped an exhibition and you didnt exactly remember if this person If we come from that experience back to culture, maybe we should try to at least
said something or not. It is the same problem so I am thinking should we jump with some archives try to set ourselves a limit. There is intention of establishing
back to something that we did before? It is really weird that with the new tech- and collecting an archive. It was also articulated that this changes with people
nologies people start to forget was and what was not. who come in, it changes also the reasons people archive during the period of the
very people who initiated an archive.
(in Russian) I said it a bit unclear, Ill just say it in Russian, its a bit easier for me.
People are getting some sort of schizophrenia, concerning what was and what So maybe, at least as an experiment, we should also try to establish in culture
was not, from these new technologies. They cannot tell the difference if they did temporary archives. Lets say this is to be done for ten years, then kept for three
something or not. That came out a bit strongly... and then erased. And on another level, in this pastime of this process there could
be a secondary reproduction of that archive. I think Victors example of the book
Hans Peter Feldmann: What you mentioned now and what I think what was was a good example.
also said earlier in the speeches, is that the person who is going into the archive
is changing the archive. It depends on the person who looks at something, what So the next step we will have the book, but maybe the book could also be in
that something is like. We are trying to organise this world by various rules and a bit like digital media. Maybe the book lasts for fifty years, I mean you cannot
points, and we believe we can organise the world like this. But this, I think, is a destroy a book, but before it is gone, it is taking up this archive and reworking it.
wrong idea; because it was mentioned before that our personal view on things Thats actually the moment where the archive is created. So maybe we should
is always changing everything. It can be this way or that way and always with a also be more open to that moment of forgetfulness it comes anyway, maybe we
different result. So event archives are not what we believe it could be, a certain should just sort of pre-program it. At least in some cases.
point to measure the world, to measure ourselves. Its only one possibility to find a

Anders Hrm: I think that Hanno made a very good point. There is an artwork Thats why it was such a splendid idea about the temporary archives. But - who is
which you might of course all know, an artwork by Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who the person who is deciding, yes, we do not need this information anymore. Be-
Never Threw Anything Away. Kept everything and kept on collecting and never cause archives through history have been open and historians might be digging in
really erased anything. So I think that the point that we should clarify our archives 500-year old archives and might find very necessary information for today. Also,
or not keep them is quite relevant for example in the context of the museums as you know, the post-modern world was digging back some ten years, finding
the museums never sell any works. They collect them, they keep them, they keep values from the decade which modernists wanted to forget forever. So thank god
them forever. they were not able to destroy all archives.
Basically they could change that system, they could sell half of it. Who needs the At the same time, some things maybe we will sell - in some ways I agree with you,
artworks that step forward as sort of vampires, whom we cant keep alive, who are Anders, about the museum issue, but maybe after sixty years the same pictures
dead. We could sell them. Maybe somebody has better use for them, to hang them will be very valuable for the next generation. Because if we are looking back at
at their homes? And I think that to view to the archives from the present point of the 1950s this is more for the local audience Greenbergs paintings were
view is quite relevant here, because the museums as sort of total archives should burned in this very same Art Hall and just a few paintings were saved by some
looked at, as there will be some knowledge which hasnt been used for a 100 years, artists. These are very valuable now. So, unfortunately, memory is very much tied
but it still is there, it could somehow be pushed to some other trajectory. to political issues, dictatorships, subjective decision, etc. Its like euthanasia
who will be the person to unplug the wires from human body? This is a very cru-
Hanno Soans: I cant subscribe to that idea as a long time museum worker, but cial question. I am definitely not the person to decide that some kinds of archives
my idea was more to try to work with archives, which from the point of view of are to be lost automatically. I think the question Marko asked will stay forever, as
their establishing would take on temporality, as one of the grounding principle. long as there is human kind.
I think that would change the notion of archive quite a lot, because now we are
archiving in a very vague sense, thinking very vaguely that - whatever that means Hedwig Fijen: Maybe a small note towards you question nobody knows the an-
- that its for eternity, it is either then family archive, its for the next generation, swer, but in the Netherlands this question is extremely actual. The temporality of
or the generation after. So its always very vague - and there are lots of interest- the collection is under discussion, because two museums already proposed to the
ing insecurities because of that of course - but there would be the possibility to, state to sell part of their collection. And of course this is the most difficult ques-
especially with digital archiving, for automatic erasure after fifty years... tion, what is the decision-making process? Who is deciding, in which time-frame,
what is valuable in a collection, what is not valuable? They tried to solve the
Marko Laimre: My name is Marko Laimre. I have a question whats the main discussion in a very pragmatic way, by indexing all the objects in the museum in
difference between collections and archives? A-, B- and C-series and they tried to force the state, who is the owner of some of
the museum collection, to allow the museum directors in certain areas to at least,
Sirje Helme: This is actually a question about memory, keeping your memory, according to their judgement, sell pieces from the C-collection. So you see its
some common memory. Im sure nobody of us can say that they are the right not about an ethical discussion at large, it is more trying to move away from this
person to decide what we are keeping and what we dont keep, because we are discussion and finalize it by a very economical and practical solution. When Chris
all just human. Dercon proposed a couple of years ago to sell one painting from the Boijmans Van

Beuningen collection in Rotterdam, he got enormous criticism, so the discussion memory that is perhaps latent and inactive, but as soon as it becomes active it
was immediately left aside. Chris Dercon moved to Munich, and the next director becomes visible and useful again.
is starting the discussion again and again. The temporality of the collection is a
very actual subject in the museum world itself. At least in the Netherlands there Relating that to public collection one can play with that too, because a public
is no final solution reached. collection in general is a specific place, where cultural memory is stored. But
what happens if you sell a painting? It does not evaporate, it does not disappear,
Marko Laimre: It seems that we are talking of collections, as if collections were its not destroyed, it is just sold. It goes into another archive. And that can be
more subjective and archives more objective. But I think that isnt so. Lets take public and that can be private and it can be somewhere else ha, somewhere
video art or digital art. It seems that contemporary digital art in itself is an archive else... but you are not talking about memory anymore, in that case you are talking
and in itself is a collection. We cant decide. about possession. That shifts the discussion slightly so you are not taking it out
of our memorial storage, you are taking it out of a particular possession and then
Hedwig Fijen: Actually I think on a very general level you can put the two - the we come back to these question of powers, who has access to what. But I think
collection and the archive, as cultural archives - in one category. Because your that turns the discussion to another direction than usual, the usual being oh god,
assumption that a collection is more subjective and an archive is more objective, its lost, once you sell it, its lost. To mankind or something.
I think, is an illusion.
Viktor Misiano: More questions? Last remark?
I think an archive is as subjective, only that you maybe cannot pin down the
person responsible for this collection in the same way, as you do when you have Anders Hrm: It somehow seems, that archiving as a process is a compulsive
a private collection. thing to do you just collect and collect, and it is sort of a pathological disorder
If we agree on a very general basis that you can talk about cultural archives, and a habit to collect. You want to get rid of it somehow or you want to at least
meaning then all the museums, private collections and other archival insti- pass on the knowledge that is in your archive, but you are not able to do that. So
tutions as well as private collection. Theres a German theorist writing about you are stuck with your compulsive disorder to collect and to bring in information
memory. In the German language you have two notions for memory, which are and you are not really able to share it, to give it away, to distribute it in the way
Gedchtnis and Erinnerung. One of them means that you have an enormous that you collected it with passion and with love.
amount of memories stored in your memory, they are not active, but they are
there. And the other notion is an active one, with which we re-member and the Sirje Helme: I just wanted to say that all of the archives have never-ever been
process of remembering kind of actualises your memory. If you take this differ- looked through, because I was recently in Dublin Library, where they showed me
entiation, I think that makes a lot of sense with regards to the cultural archives. archives which nobody had touched in last how many hundreds of years. So ar-
And I do not agree to erase archives after fifteen years, a fifty years or one chives, I think, are an endless topic, and we could sit here for some more months
thousand years; because I think there will be an urge to keep something of that. and talk about archives and wed find more and more aspects to talk about. As
Maybe you erase archive X but Im sure there will be somebody coming from you said it is an illusion that we have real archives. So maybe we should finish
the side saying I want to keep this and this and that and make a new archive of with the thought that archives are illusions, it makes it easier to live for us maybe.
it. This again has to do with the rewriting process. There is always this body of We also have to leave this space...

I would really like to thank the contributors and also our young audience, because
most of them are art historians and will work with archives and memories, per-
sonal and common memories, so this was really useful. Lets hope that the next
discussion well have will also be from this quite wide position and will give use
many thoughts. Thank you.
Transcript by Pille Triin Mnnik

APPENDIX: MANIFESTA ARCHIVE
Archive:
Petr Bystrov Petr Bystrov (Moscow,
1980) is an artist,
The Dangerous
athlete, and musician,
who graduated from the
Memory of the Show

Faculty of Philosophy
of the Russian
Archive
State University for
Humanities. Currently he
is the editor-in-chief of
MJ discussion, 1 July 2005, National Centre for the newspaper Proshu

slova, and the director
of the creative laboratory
Theses for a talk at The Active Archive workshop, taking place on 1 July 2005
Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia in St. Petersburg
Knyaz Vladimir.
1. The archive is an ideological phenomenon
The archive if we subject this notion to an ideological critique is not a neutral

phenomenon. We usually associate the notion itself the notion of the archive
with something objective. This actually entails a problem: after all, the archive
has nothing in common with collective memory, with the objective perception of
the past. The past is objectified artificially. The archive is always formed by the
power of a competent jury, but its expert opinions interpret things like objectivity
and memory in rather specific terms. The archive always builds on reductions that
stem from the customary conception of rationality. It is built on customary con-
ventions: what is worth saving, and what do we need to forget. There is always
an ideology behind the archive.
2. The archive is connected to the redistribution of the past, and any retrospective
is always biased
The archive assumes a view of the past, a view of history. However, any historiog-
raphy (and an archive is a certain local historiography) represents a product of the
dominance of certain interests. Memory is always someones it always belongs
to someone concrete which means that any retrospective is always biased. The
reconstruction of the past (on any scale, ranging from the creation of a catalogue
of exhibition-participants all the way to the writing of a schoolbook on a nations

In the process of creating an archive, it (either
consciously or spontaneously) implements a
redistribution, a re-premeditation of the past.
history) assumes the possibility for manipulating the elements of the past. Thus, Depending on the degree to which political regimes change, the access to the
every time it is compiled, the archive forms a new conception of the past (no mat- past, the access to history as to a living process become more and more trouble-
ter how distant, even through the centuries). Isnt this surprising? some over years: every schoolbook, brochure, or reference to history contains a
new conception of the past that is only profitable at the given moment.
The thing is that the dominant point of view requires its own historiography. In
the process of creating an archive, it (either consciously or spontaneously) imple- This is why it is not definitive whether an archive is active or interactive, whether
ments a redistribution, a re-premeditation of the past. All too often, the relation- it is closed or open to the public, whether it is dusty or whether it has been
ship to the past is rather liberal and operative. cleaned. All of these games with the jargon of technological progress only lead us
way from the conversations more dangerous aspects, so that all of this is inessen-
3. The archive is a product of conventions tial. What is important is who this or that archive belongs to. What is important
is who promotes and produces it. Which goals does this archive have? What are
Conventions have nothing in common with the opinions of anyone and everyone. its possible consequences?
The vox populi, the opinion of the majority, the memory of a generation,
systems of voting, election, or opinion polls are all mechanisms summoned to Personal appendix
legitimate and objectify the status of the archive, As an artist, my own experience tells me that any media-representation or inclu-
a) by equating it to the rhetorical positive notion of memory, and sion in an archive always entails a strong transformation of the phenomenon as
b) by providing it with a rational foundation (i.e. presenting arguments that prove such. The mass-media never afford an authentic or adequate representation of
that it is the given version of the archive that is optimal). what takes place in experimental spaces, all the more if they belong to the op-
In this way, we can reveal a manipulatory chain that leads from the appeal to positional milieu (dissent, political activism etc.). The right to undertake medial
rationality to collective memory to the reinforce of the order of things that is prof- fixations belongs to the dominant ideology (in a broader sense). Any marker that
itable to the powers that be (state apparatus; scholarly community; curatorial is laid over events is always a ready-made which exclusively retransmits the sys-
collective etc.). tem of conventional meanings and which is not objective in any case.
4. Information is like a product that one can salt, warm up, stir-fry, and serve July 2005
In speaking of the archive, we need to address the issue of the media, that is,
of the business of information, a business connected to the trade and spread of
information. No information is ever transmitted freely or objectively. The right
to interpret facts and to discuss events on a public level (accessible to the mass-
es) belongs to political regimes / groups of scholars / curatorial or art historical
collectives / etc. The same (artificial) organization of memory falls under their
jurisdiction. The power at hand immediately retransmits itself (its presence) in
informational space.

Marco Scotini
Collecting Disobedience
An archive of art
and political action
Marco Scotini is an art The stakes in terms of current artistic practices are being wagered on the streets Viven Genocidas map, and the escraches by Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) in
critic and independent
curator. He is director of
at all latitudes and on a global scale. Public space (including that of the World Buenos Aires on March 24, 2001, or with the irruption by the Yes Men as phoney
the Visual Arts School Wide Web) is being utilized today as a political tool. Post-Seattle political mobili- representatives of the WTO at the Conference on International Services held in
and director of MA in
zation, migrants social movements and recent examples of art intervention have Salzburg from 26 to 29 of October, 2000. Similarly, the parallel urban planning
Visual Arts and Curatorial
Studies at Nuova all found that public space offers a common platform for action and the diffusion process inaugurated in 1994 by Park Fiction to oppose a large, corporate housing
Accademia di Belle Arti of projects, symbols, narratives and ideas. It is not a question of choosing to use project to be built at Hamburg port has many points in common with Ultra-Reds
(NABA) in Milan. He
regurarly collaborates non-gallery spaces as locations for art shows or of creating exhibitions in a real forms of resistance against the project by Los Angeles Housing Authority to de-
with Flash Art and other life context; rather, by their very nature, these projects are forced to locate them- molish the Pico Aliso settlement.
journals in the field and
he is also the editor of
selves outside an institutional, technical and organizational framework, adopting
No Order Magazine an attitude that in part, but only in part, recalls the history of the alternative arts Bruno Latour recently declared: At one time the laboratory was a restricted area
Art in a post fordist
movement. Todays strategies of occupying public space and forming collectives, where only those wearing a white coat could enter. Nowadays the laboratory has
society. His writings and
interviews have appeared tactics used to produce mechanisms for participatory systems, linguistic sabotage expanded to such an extent that it would not be absurd to claim we all live inside
in Springerin, Domus, and media activism, are as far from the classical models of politicisation as they it. The same could be said in relation to exhibition space, which is inconceivable
Moscow Art Magazine,
Espacio and many are from those of the 1970s institutional criticism of museums. It is as if these today in terms of the temporal, spatial and narrative unit that the museum or art
exhibition catalogues. artistic practices preferred to abandon specific roles and constraints rather than show formerly guaranteed. Recognition of these signs of a new artistic culture
clash openly with them or simply confront them. demand ever more types of presentation strategies that differ from those offered
by the art show format, no matter how up-to-date.
The impossibility of occupying any kind of lasting framework is therefore creat-
ing an exponential increase in the adhesion to a here and now that is subject to In this context, the archive - also drawing on information networks - seems the
chance and without an aura, whereby the arbitrary, the reversible and the unex- model most able to accommodate an interwoven and widespread multiplicity
pected are put to work as possibilities for action by the multitude. A rhizome-like, that has open links of variable, time-based duration. The archive model as such
non-centralized open space, and at the same time a series of performance-based is always an a posteriori construction determined by pre-existing formations and
events, hence unpredictable (which Paolo Virno calls virtuosity) characterize groupings that become connected by means of a configuration, a style or a selec-
the terrain for the contemporary artistic and activist scene: a terrain that appears tion and establish themselves in the memory. As we have seen from the above
less and less tied to the notion of local and more and more to the situational. information, each of these artistic interventions is like a document, the proof or a
In other words, it is not a socio-economic moment mechanically determined by certificate of an event.
various contextual factors, but a link-up of temporal elements in which an out-
burst of social subjectivity opens a new area of experience and creates the actual For some years now the debate on art repeatedly intersects this configuration.
conditions for direct intervention. After Hans-Ulrich Obrists comments on the amnesia of the art world, generic
website or data-based archives in the field of curating, chronologies of exhibitions
The first action organized by the Non-Governmental Control Commission on Bol- as curatorial incidents etc. began to appear, although without too much distinc-
shaya Nikitskaya Street in Moscow on May 23, 1998, or the one that took place tion being made between inventory, catalogue, atlas or collection, which are tools
on Lenins Mausoleum in 1999, share the same common ground as the Aqui with very different organizational criteria and aims.

Grupo de Arte Callejero In view of the types of situations that have been outlined, I believe the archive archive exists in its stratification. It does not interpret the document, nor does it Disobedience, Control of
G.A.C., Aqu viven Society and Bioresistance
genocidas, urban has the most to offer. It is said that what becomes history is determined by what ask it to show signs of anything, instead it elaborates, distributes and organizes section, installation view
intervention, 2001. is archived, and as we are dealing here with ephemeral events that are difficult to it, establishing series, or series of series. at Play
Courtesy the artist. Gallery, Berlin.
conserve and which in any case lie outside mainstream art, it is easy for dominant
Dodo brothers, Camera methods to construct history, leave them submerged and conceal the past. In our case such a model becomes important precisely because it does not pres- Radek Community
Car, VHS, black and ent itself so much as a collection of signs to be conserved and interpreted but Archive, Disobedience/
white, 1977. Courtesy East section, installation
the With regard to this, certain archival projects come to mind that are the retrieval of as a collection of practices that form the actual goals they speak about or rep- view at Kunstraum
artist. an order that is not officially recognized, such as Counterculture: Alternative In- resent. How can the irreducible immediacy and unique nature of an event be Bethanien, Berlin.
formation from the Underground Press to Internet curated by Brian Wallis for the recorded? How are such events manifested, linked-up, confronted and defined?
alternative space, Exit Art in New York in 1996, and in the same year, Cultural What knowledge do they contain? How can an archive be displayed? How can it
Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement at the Drawing Center, be made accessible to the public? How can it be used by the public?
curated by Julie Ault. I could also cite more recent examples.
These reflections have given rise to my project of an ongoing archive dealing
But it is, in fact, the meaning of archive as developed by Michel Foucault with forms of civil disobedience structured around a video library that acts as an
in his Archaeology of Knowledge, and expounded a number of times by Gilles area of visibility and a field of legibility, and at the same time as an audio-visual
Deleuze, that seems to me the most pertinent. Here the archive presents itself archive. That which normally would be conserved in a judicial archive is here the
as an area interposed between tradition (style, library, langue) and the single fundamental material for an archive of ideas.
work (parole, and author); it is located at the level of a discursive system
external to our language, in a place where the production of discourse is simul- The goal of the Disobedience archive is to create a common space for artistic
taneously controlled and selected and, in the end, dominated. The archive, says output and political action. It means understanding that society itself is changing,
Foucault, is above all the law of what can be said, the system that governs the and with it the language it produces as a political subject and as a media object.
apparition of the enunciation. But what are the enunciations? The enunciation We take part say some - in the movements and we want the movements to
is the language in the moment of its apparition. It is a function not an ele- have their own media. Being involved is more important for us than the illusion
ment. The enunciation is a sort of atom of discourse. In the archive nothing is of being objective.
requested of the things said or from the people who have said those things but
from the discursive space, that is the possibility or impossibility of enunciation. The construction of images defines the strata of social relationships in our societ-
The question is how do discourses function? (In our case civil or social disobedi- ies and, as Debord postulated, perceptibly unites what already exists in separate
ence becomes a condition of the political action in the post-political era. How form. The direct intervention of a grassroots political activism - the call for change
does it function?) as well as the possibility to achieve consent - is always measured by its ability to
shatter existing political structures, to point out new methods of practice in the
The Foucaultian archive is made up of heterogeneous elements in which one public realm, to create non-traditional forms of political intervention and to design
seeks discontinuity and superimposition. It clarifies, however, the specific con- new forms of antagonism and dissent.
stants that permit the regime of language to be grasped, the knowledge that the

Radek Community, The decision to focus attention on civil disobedience is based, however, on a further 1977: The Italian Exit is a central, historic platform and contains a selection Oliver Ressler, this is
Manifestation, 2001, at what democracy looks
the occasion of Manifesta motive. Civil disobedience has been defined by some as: the basic form of political of archival material from the 1977 uprising in Italy. An information area con- like, 2002. Courtesy the
4, Frankfurt, 2002. action of the multitude. Beyond the liberal tradition within which civil disobedience tains books, radical underground press, photocopying from and about 1970s artist.
Courtesy Prometeo
Lucca.
was founded from Henry D. Thoreau onwards, but also far removed from the desire Italian operaismo (workerism) and autonomy. A chronological time-line orders Harun Farocki and Andrei
for its legalization as Hannah Arendt wanted, civil disobedience cannot negotiate the main events from 1976 to 1978, including filming by Alberto Grifi of the Par- Ujica, Videogramm of
Paola Salerno, Lettera with the state and doubts its own ability to govern. If civil disobedience is not lim- co Lambro demonstration in Milan, the expulsion of trade union leader Luciano a Revolution, 1992.
di Oreste Scalzone a, Courtesy the artist.
2004. Courtesy the artist. ited to breaking the law, then defection actually demands assertive action, involving Lama from the University of Rome, the violent riots in Bologna documented by
our various capacities to produce images and to communicate etc., generalizing Italian Videoteppisti (video hooligans) and sound tracks from Radio Alice. The
what was once the traditional outcome of artistic activities. section on the 1977 movement homes in on the uniqueness and isolation of the
Italian situation as a direct precursor to Post-Fordism. For example, Oliver Ressler
As Paolo Virno claims: The breeding ground for disobedience is made up of so- has presented Protesting Capitalist Globalization, a selection of videos from eight
cial conflicts that manifest themselves not only and not so much as protest, but video-stations dealing with movements against neo-liberalism. The section Ar-
most particularly as defection or to put it in Albert O. Hirschmans terms, not as gentina Fabrica Social has gathered videos on the December 2001 movements,
voice but as exit.[] The exit modifies the conditions within which the conflict while Radek Community has visually reconstructed the various strata of a precise
takes place, rather than presupposes it as an irremovable horizon; it changes the moment in the recent Russian cultural scene, called Radek, which is character-
context within which a problem arises, rather than deals with the problem by ized by performance-oriented politics through art, and conceived as a strange
choosing one or another of the alternative solutions already on offer. configuration of different organs, pieces and ideas.
Conceived as a diverse and constantly changing archive, the project represents Disobedience was designed as a long-term work-in-progress and as such can
a guide to the different strata of civil disobedience, from the social struggles in only be presented as a non-comprehensive and provisional archive, intended to
Italy in 1977 to the recent anti-globalization protests before and after Seattle. grow and expand gradually over time and space, along a route that leads from
The project is also a collection of the plurality of resistance tactics, such as direct Berlin to Prague, from Mexico City to Barcelona, from Bucharest to Milan, involv-
action, counter-information and biological disobedience whose order and whose ing new, local situations and from time to time requiring new, heterogeneous
organization is flexible. forms of display. Finally Disobedience is an active tool to be used, to be criti-
cized, perfectioned and that can be used anywhere and by anyone who believes
Disobedience wants to be an operative archive, a tool box (not just a simple that not only this world is possible.
open source or a mind store), a video station that doesnt want to be simply looked
at, but wants to be used. It is a collection made by many, collectively and ongoing
and without any pretence of being complete. By setting in motion different signals
and situations, Disobedience is presented as a network of open topics, brought
together by artists, activists, filmmakers, philosophers and political groups, each
of whom were invited to create a separate section by involving other artists, docu-
ments, political magazines, cheap offset printing, ephemera, etc.

Viktor Mazin
Keeping the Other

Forgotten
Viktor Mazin is a Report on the workshop, based on the unique display of Sigmund Freuds Mu- Worskhop, Sigmund
theoretician, art critic Freud Dream Museum,
and curator, who lives seum of Dreams St-Petersburg.
in St-Petersburg. He
is a specialist in the
field of theoretical
The artists workshop took place in a structured theater of memory, in Freuds Museum
psychoanalyses, and of Dreams. It goes without saying that the discussion with the workshops assembled
founding director of participants, largely young artists and critics, began with the reconstruction of the ex-
the Sigmund Freud
Dream Museum in St. tremely complex and absolutely fundamental notion of memory in psychoanalysis. Nat-
Petersburg. urally, the line of reasoning was not directly connected to questions of abstract theory
but to the concrete installation of the museum in which the meeting took place.
After the clarification of categories such as memory distortion, cover memories, or

mnemonic traces, the workshops participants turned to the notion of the archive.
After all, psychoanalysis as Derrida writes in his book Mal dArchive (1995)
is a typical archeological discipline, presenting memory as an artifactual product,
as a process of reorganizing or reproducing the archive. Situated in the museum-
archive of Freuds dreams, we can see that the archive has two meanings: one of
them is nomological (in the sense of law, order, and organization), while the other
is genetic (in the sense of inheritance, bequeathal, and conservation). In this sense,
the archive does not face the past inasmuch as it faces the future.
This is actually what gives rise to a series of questions, questions which the participants
that had gathered for the workshop discussed with a great deal of enthusiasm: should the
artist even think about which archive his work will enter while he is making it? Should
he even think about this kind of entrance in general teleologically at all? If todays
mass-medial culture establishes its control over cultural values in the process of its quasi-
hierarchization of cultural values, then which position can the artist occupy in relation to
the process of mass-medialization itself? How can the artists personal collection of an
archive hope to resist the mass-medial deletion of memory? How does the artistic archive
differ from the private, political, or institutional archive? Should the artist play the role of a
symbolic agent (in the Lacanian sense of the word) in the current situation of mass-medial
narcissism? Which archive does the photograph this is me with a famous monument
in the background so typical for a narcissistic community - belong to? Can a work of
visual art realize any historization against this narcissist background at all?

Dmitry Vilensky, David Riff
Workgroup
What is to be done?
The Notion of the
Mobilizational Archive
Dmitry Vilensky (1964) Theses for a talk at The Active Archive workshop, taking place on 1 July 2005 this notion of political subjectivity, political action begins with the reconstitution of Chto delat? / What is
is an artist and cultural to be done?, Angry
activist, based in St. in St. Petersburg public spaces. The active archive is one of these spaces. Sandwich-People, or The
Petersburg. In 2003, he Praise of Dialectics,
initiated the workgroup text by Bertold Brecht.
Chto delat? / What is to
Archives are spaces for the common, spaces in which knowledge, information, We can only save this space for the common from being privatized if we recon- Digital photos transferred
be done?. He is editor and experience are gathered for common use. In this sense, the archive is quite sider its mobilizational potential. The active archive needs to become a mobiliza- onto DVD with sound,
of the newspaper What different from the collection: while collections are largely based on the economic tional archive. 8:40 min., 2005.
is to be done?, the
platform for engaged logic of the accumulation and accretion of value, the archive can, instead, be
creativity (see also: www. counted among the institutions of knowledge-production. What exactly does this mean in the sphere of contemporary art?
chtodelat.org). Vilensky
works mostly with
video, photography and However, since the archive was traditionally understood as a disciplinary space The Archive in Contemporary Art
installation, and focuses
on interdisciplinary
constructed according to the objective methodologies of its archivists, its knowl-
examination of urban edge has always confirmed the established modes of political dominance over the It goes without saying that the notion of the cultural archive at large is far broader
space. common. This regulation of common knowledge has also always highlighted its than the concept of the artistic archive. However, in the field of the arts, these
David Riff (1975) is an political potential as something that can mobilize subjectivity against power. As notions have become blurred, simply because much of the 20th centurys art
art-critic, translator, and strange as it may sound, this is what happened in the Soviet Union, where a huge employed archival strategies. However, such strategies activate the archive as
member of the workgroup
Chto delat / What is to amount of documents that may have seemed innocent at first glance were re- a space for artistic projection, focusing on how the personalized common
be done?. He lives in moved from open storage in libraries and transferred to Special Storage sections, translated from public to private produces and then deconstructs subjectivity
Moscow and Berlin.
hidden from the public eye. This did not only concern anti-Soviet literature, but itself. For an example, the majority of Kabakovs projects are constructed around
1
Cf. Alain Badiou, was also extended to a multitude of authentic leftist-revolutionary texts, ranging this kind of game with the activated archive. His inventories of late Soviet realia
Tainaya katastrofa. from Trotsky to the Situationists. In this paradoxical way, the state recognized the are a classical examples of how the contemplation of a common past can be
Konets gosudarstvenoi
istinny (The Secret production and storage of knowledge as a means of political mobilization. privatized and then converted to cultural capital. One could also remember the
Catastrophe. The End projects of the Lebanese Atlas group.
of the States Truth),
published in Russian on Yet today, it seems obvious that the political meaning of the archive is chang-
the site http://sociologos. ing. This transformation is connected to the new role of knowledge production in Such ways of activating the dormant archive stand in stark contrast to the archive
narod.ru/.
post-industrial capitalism, in which intellectual labor is gradually achieving he- as a common space for mobilization.
gemony. Under these conditions, the archive opens up, becoming active, serving
as a toolkit for contemporary production, which also means that it is in danger of The Archive, Tactical Media, and Open Source
becoming privatized, in danger of losing its political potential. In this situation, it
becomes all the more important to realize that knowledge like labor is not One of the first groups to understand the archive from the activistic perspective of
politically neutral, but that it can mobilize political subjectivity in the philosophi- mobilization was Next 5 Minutes from Amsterdam, who developed the concep-
cal sense. This runs contrary to the wide-spread image of politics as the ideologi- tion of tactical media. Their project was extremely symptomatic for the mid-to-late
cal justification of administrative power. For an example, Alain Badiou speaks of 1990s, because it is from this point onward that we can speak of the accumula-
the essence of politics as the question of collective emancipation1. If one follows tion of generally accessible multimedia archives, initiated by artists and activists

in order to mobilize a general public in the creation of open-source knowledge. 03. By addressing an ideal user, the mobilizational archive invites the public to
Needless to say, this conception is extremely powerful because it disregards clas- re-imagine itself, becoming an ideal co-creator and continuing to accumulate
sical conceptions of intellectual property and authorship, allowing archived mate- the archive as a toolkit, not for exploited (privatized) intellectual labor, but as a
rial to become part of a cultural common for general use, regulated by little more dynamic repertoire for modes of political subjectivity.
than copyleft licenses such as the GNU or the Creative Commons. However, as
the open source phenomenon in the computer industry shows, the earliest at- 04. The mobilizational archive is based upon and reproduces the results of col-
tempts to redefine (to mobilize) the active archive were limited by their purely lective practices. The mobilizational archives is created in the process of interdis-
tactical nature, failing to recognize the broader strategies that always lie behind ciplinary interaction. The process of its creation is always self-critical with regard
the creative accumulation of an archive. All too often, this lack of strategic aims to its possibilities and its legitimacy. It is not based upon the dogmata of common
makes tactical media and open source communities susceptible to exploitation knowledge (savoir), brings about a process of knowing (connaissance) the com-
by corporate structures. mon, a creative cognitive process based in the micro-politics of interdisciplinary
dialogue. It is in this sense that we can speak of the production of counter-knowl-
For this reason, it becomes important to look beyond the tactics of mobilizing edge and emancipatory experience, which is the main result of collecting and
the archive as a space for the common and to search for strategic perspectives. reading the mobilizational archive.
The experiences accumulated in many of the archive-projects over the last years
already allow us to attempt a generalizing analysis of what the mobilizational 05. The mobilizational archive demonstrates an activist approach to informa-
archive actually is and what it could be. In the following, we would like to sketch tion. In this sense, it continues the philosophical tradition expressed in Marxs
out these potentials in the form of points to initiate further discussion. 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point is to change it. In this sense, the mobilizational archive
01. The mobilizational archive understands itself as a public-common space that cannot be a simple mirror-image of existent reality. It needs to avoid passive con-
is open for social dialogue and resists any and all attempts at this spaces priva- servation and subsequent (contemplative) aesthetization at all costs. Instead, it
tization. needs to demonstrate the possibilities for aesthetic and social change, revealing
the difference between what the world is today and what it could become.
02. The mobilizational archive does not address a specialist public of scholars,
academics, or artists, but considers the general public as cultural producers. If 06. The mobilizational archive searches for alternate spaces to undertake its rep-
this public does not yet exist, the mobilizational archive is forced to address a resentations. In other words, it sees one of its most important goals as the re-
public that does not exist as of yet, thus initiating the many acts that will lead claiming of pubic space and the space of informational media. Today, it seems
to its creation. In this sense, the mobilizational archive is forced to exist in two as though the tactic with the most potential is NOT the infiltration of existing
imaginative modes: it constantly needs to re-imagine both itself and the space structures but the invention of new public spaces, not entrism but exodus. The
of the common that it wants to create. What this means is that its social projec- tactical effectivity of the mobilization archives actual strategy is defined by local
tions cannot find their foothold in ready-made social models, but require dynamic situations, but the true meaning of both approaches lies in the desire to construct/
articulation. invent/imagine new places for the common.

07. The mobilizational archive is not subjective, marginal, or subcultural knowl-
edge. Instead, it needs to aim at achieving cultural hegemony for the counter-
knowledge that it represent. However, this striving toward hegemony has nothing
to do with the old models of party dictatorship in cultural policy, or the dominance
of one political discourse. Instead, it entails the strategic construction of the hege-
mony of subjectivity, critical and irreconcilable to any and all forms of sovereign
power, capable of critically compiling everything that is best in the history of
thought and political praxis and bringing these material to new shores, allowing
them to answer the challenge of our own time.
08. The formal-aesthetic practices of the mobilization archive create a new tem-
poral mode of existence through the dialogue with the spectator-participant. As an
immediate embodiment of public space, it uses the creation of social architecture
to erode the boundary between knowledge and life. It employs the aesthetics of
cinema but is based upon participation (as opposed to interactivity), and exists
on foreign territory as a sit-in.
09. The mobilizational archive is temporary: it can only be considered as a form

of mobilization in the process of its becoming.
It goes without saying that these points for discussion have a certain ideal quality,
but their postulates are little more than an extrapolation of the possibilities that
existing practices already provide. It is our hope that the ideas formulated here
will help to initiate further discussion on how knowledge-production could be
mobilized in order to fulfill the many pressing goals at hand.
July 2005

In Memoriam: Igor Zabel
Igor Zabel Dialogue

In September 1994, the Russian artist, Ilya Kabakov, spoke at the AICA Con-
1
Ilya Kabakov, A Story
(1958-2005) gress in Stockholm. He was describing his experience of a culturally relocated

about a Culturally Relo-
cated Person, Speech at
person. One of the aspects of Western culture he was interested in, was the the XXVIII AICA Congress,
Stockholm, 22 September
permanent tendency to criticize, provoke and even destroy within this culture. He 1944, now reprinted in
compared his experience of this tendency to the experience of an orphan living in Mars (Ljubljana), 1996,
a childrens home who is visiting the family of his friend. This friend is sick of his no. 3-4.
Senior Curator home and his behaviour is aggressive and insulting, while the visitor himself sees
at the Moderna Galerija a totally different picture: a nice home and kind and intelligent parents. But there
is another thing that is essential, the friends family is strong enough that it is not
(Museum of Modern Art), in danger because of the boys outbursts. The same is true of the Western culture,
says Kabakov, and continues:
Ljubljana, Slovenia,
and editor of MJ Western culture is so vital, so stable, its roots are so deep and so alive, it is
so productive that it, speaking in the language of the parable above, absorbs,
Manifesta Journal. recasts and dissolves in itself all destructive actions by its own children, and
as many believe, it sees in these actions its very own development what is
elegantly referred to here as permanent criticism. But I would like to add a
footnote here: this criticism, like the destruction itself, is permitted, if it can
be so expressed, only from its own children. That same mom described above
would have behaved quite differently if I had started to act up at the table the
same way as her son. Most likely she would have called the police.1
It did not take too long, less than a year and a half, that the event Kabakov was
somehow predicting really happened. It took place during the opening of an exhi-
bition called Interpol in the Frgfabriken Contemporary Art Center in Stockholm;
an exhibition trying to establish a global network between Stockholm and Mos-
cow. One of the participants, the Russian performance artist Alexander Brener,
destroyed a work of another participant, the ChineseAmerican artist Wenda Gu;
and another Russian artist, Oleg Kulik, who appeared on the show as a dangerous
dog on a chain and actually bite some people, was attacked by the audience and
was later taken away by the police.

2
The letter was signed by There has been a lot of discussions (and even more rumours and gossip) about the position and the values this criticism implies) is just a set of phrases. I believe, 4
Recently, Brener has
Olivier Zahm, Elein Fleiss, caused another big scan-
Jan Aman, Catharina Ahl- Interpol scandal. I believe that the affair is so attractive because it is not just another however, that we have to understand this letter as a kind of slip, i.e. that we dal by attacking a painting
berg, Catti Lindahl, Thom- scandal in the art world. It implies an extremely serious question: the relationship have to recognize its symptomatic value; and it is this value that makes it so very by Malevich in the Ste-
as Lundh, Magnus af Pe- delijk Museum in Amster-
tersens, Matthias Wagner
between East and West, and it indicates that this relationship is far from being interesting. One has to ask themselves: what made a group of artists and critics dam. This action again,
K, Birgitta Muhr, Wenda idyllic. I believe that it was not the intervention of the police which had made this who (at least some of them) ascribe to a line of critical and subversive art to write and even more radically,
Gu, Ioanna Theocaropou- tension explicit (after all, one should expect such intervention) but An Open Letter a letter (and distribute it all over the world) in such a style which could easily be opens up the question
lou, Ulrika Karlsson, Dan of artists attacking and
Wolgers, Erns Billgren, to the Art World2, signed by a group of artists and other participants of the show (all used by a representative of any conservative or totalitarian system,? What made destroying works of other
Bigert & Bergstrm, Jo- from the West) and broadly distributed. What is surprising is the fact that the letter them blind to the style and form of their own writing? What made them directly artists. Personally, I think
hannes Albers and Fredrik that such actions are
Wretman. was written and signed by artists and critics whose position is essentially based on and roughly denunciate the artists (as well as the curator who was trying to under- highly problematic and
the tradition of permanent criticism, referred to by Kabakov. Of course, they were stand the destructive actions as artistic statements) as being politically incorrect not something one could
3
Dieter Schwarz, Chronol- easily agree with. Also, I
not necessarily expected to agree with Kuliks and Breners actions, but one would and against art, democracy, freedom of expression and women only because
ogy, in: Wiener Aktionis- believe that an artist who
mus / Viennese Actionism, at least think they would be more careful in the way they criticize them, since the they did something which is well established in the tradition of 20th century art as has destroyed such a
Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt, tradition of 20th century art offers a number of examples of aggressive, destructive a legitimate means of artistic expression, however radical and problematic?4 work has to take full re-
1988, Vol. 1, p. 168. sponsibility for his action.
and subversive actions which have, by now, attained a status of historical or even Attacking a work of art
canonical fact. Some examples of destroying other artists works are now considered I do not believe that those who have signed the letter consider Rauschenberg and does not necessarily imply
a relevant artistic position
to be major points in the development of modern art. (Immediately I can think of at Rainer to be hooligans, skinheads and enemies of art, democracy and freedom and statement, but some-
least two examples; the best known is, perhaps, Rauschenbergs Erased de Koon- of expression. We must, therefore, conclude that Breners action must be seen in times it does. In such
cases, the destructive and
ing. Another is the so-called Wolfsburg Affair from October 1961: at the opening of an important aspect different from, say, Rainers. And since they have done exactly unlawful behaviour has
the exhibition Junge Stadt sieht junge Kunst Arnulf Rainer paints over the etching the same thing: destroying the work of a fellow artist at the opening of a group a function and meaning,
Mond und Figuren II by Helga Pape, which had won second prize, with black paint show, the difference has to lie elsewhere. I believe that Kabakov is, with his foot- and we have to regard it
as a relevant statement
and attaches a label with the inscription: Painted over by Arnulf Rainer. Rainer is note, indicating the correct answer to this question: the Russians do not belong to like, I believe, in Breners
arrested and sentenced to a fine for willfully damaging a work of art.).3 The Open the family. Rainers action is included in a certain code where it has a precisely case. Personally, I do
not agree with Breners
Letter, however, is not simply a protest against the two Russian artists and their determined meaning and value; on the other hand, the position of Breners action attacks on Wenda Gus
actions; it attacks them, as well as the Russian curator Viktor Misiano, with direct seems to be at the point where two codes clash. Thus, his action could not be le- and Malevichs works (no
more that I agree with the
but, at the same time, very general and imprecise political accusations: a new gitimized by the code which it was actually questioning and attacking.
destruction of the works
form of totalitarian ideology, hooliganism and skinhead ideology, a direct attack by de Kooning or Helga
against art, democracy and the freedom of expression, speculative and populistic There are two sentences in the Open Letter which I find essential: This attitude Pape), but, of course,
these attacks were not
attitude, classical model of imperialistic behaviour, attitude that excludes female denies every possibility of a dialogue between the (former) East and the West. It meant to be agreed with.
artists. In short, the Open Letter treats the destructive actions of both Russian art- is a speculative and populist attitude that cannot be accepted as the basis of a They are deliberate hooli-
ganism which, however,
ists as being eminently political rather than artistic statements. dialogue. Something has been made very clear here. Brener and Kulik are not has a deep meaning in
two individual artists, they are not even Russians, they represent the East the context of Breners
artistic position. If those
One could easily dismiss the Open Letter as ridiculous and reactionary since it politically correctly called the (former) East. The Open Letter makes clear that
who have written the
lacks any precise analysis and reflection and because its criticism (as well as the the problematic point of the Interpol scandal is not the behaviour of individual Open Letter would actu-

ally read Breners text in artists. Brener, Kulik and Misiano only represent an attitude, which actually is (former) East and the West, since their own attitude cannot be accepted as the 6
Lewis Carroll, Alices Ad-
the Interpol catalogue in- ventures in Wonderland
stead of just searching for the attitude of the East. This coincides with the fact reported by Misiano, that basis of a dialogue. I believe that one of the best descriptions of these problems & Through the Looking-
politically incorrect and only Western artists were invited to sign the letter: was given by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass: Glass, Bantam Books, To-
compromising quotations ronto, New York, London,
in it, they could perhaps Sydney, Auckland, 1981,
understand it. Nobody asked other Russian artists to sign this letter, though most of them do When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it p. 169.
not identify with the destructive gestures of Kulik and Brener. Whats more, the means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.
5
Viktor Misiano, The 7
Samuel P. Huntington,
Response, Flash Art In- Slovenian artists IRWIN were also excluded. Ridiculous. Ljubljana is the West The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many The Clash of Civiliza-
ternational, MayJune for Russians, but the logic of confrontation has stated the Western sanction: different things. tions?, Foreign Affairs,
1996, p. 46. (The quota- no. 3, Summer 1993, p.
tion discloses one of the Ljubljana is the East.5 The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master thats 2249. Prof. Huntington
reasons why I am so in- all.6 has expanded and elabo-
terested in this affair. As rated the questions dealt
I am based in Ljubljana,
Interpol was obviously more than just a group show. Its main problem was not a with in the article, in his
my position is in advance network between different artists and different artistic attitudes and practices. The Thus, one could perhaps say that the struggle for a dialogue, or better, the struggle recent book, The Clash of
determined by the dis- show was about the WestEast dialogue. And actually, the result of the scandal for the terms of a dialogue, represents the struggle for the position of the master. Civilizations and the Re-
course of the WestEast making of World Order,
dialogue.) at the opening was a sharp division and confrontation between the Eastern and Simon & Schuster, New
the Western artists. The show, says Misiano in the same text, was to be a meta- The Interpol scandal demonstrated that the WestEast division persists and that York, 1996.
phor of the new Europe and post-ideological order (where there is no more East it was not surpassed with the fall of the communist regimes. Furthermore, this
and West). Nevertheless, the confrontation remains. The East is still the East, division is clearly not confined to the area of art. As the ideological oppositions be-
although it is now called the (former) East. (Does anybody speak about the tween the Capitalist and the Socialist systems are no longer functional, it has been
former West?) The idea of a global network in the post-ideological new Europe, a replaced, for example, with the idea of the clash of civilizations. Again, I believe
model (presumably) replacing the topography of the EastWest division, proved that at the basis of this clash lies the struggle over the most basic, human
to be a veil covering the actual conflicts and confrontations. Even more, such a and natural issues which themselves correspond to a certain power structure.
rhetoric can actually serve as a means in such a conflict. A conflict, that is, which For example, Samuel P. Huntington7, who has introduced the idea of the clash
is essentially based on the will to establish a dominant position in the discourse of civilizations, also describes how the West ensures its domination by present-
and thus in the practice itself. ing its interests as the interests of the world community and how it presents
its own fundamental values as universal, while in fact they are not valid within
A dialogue is only possible on a certain common basis which both parties in the most other civilizations. Of course, one may assume that the concept of a world
dialogue accept. For example, if I want to discuss with somebody, the meanings consisting of basically different (and often hostile) civilizations also corresponds
of the words we use have to be established and clear to both of us. The quoted to a certain strategy of power and control. The idea of the clash of civilizations
sentences from the Open Letter make clear that it was exactly on this level, the is actually much more than just an attempt of a neutral scientific description of
level of accepting a common basis, that the WestEast dialogue had failed. The the contemporary world. It introduces a certain system of interpretation and rep-
Easterners did not accept the terms of the dialogue which were supposed to be resentation which is directly applicable in the international policy. One could, for
natural for the Westerners. By not accepting these terms, Brener, Kulik and example, notice how important American specialists in foreign affairs started to
Misiano (representing the East) deny every possibility of a dialogue between the use Huntingtons terms in describing conflict areas such as Bosnia.

The EastWest conflict, as far as art is concerned, develops in an essential During the post-Stalin era in 1956, when the Polish government under Go- 8
Eva Cockcroft, Abstract
Expressionism, Weapon
aspect on the level of the fight for codification of the field and thus for its domi- mulka became more liberal, Tadeusz Kantor, an artist from Cracow, impressed of the Cold War, in: Fran-
nation. It is this codification which determines the terms of the dialogue or, as by the work of Pollock and other abstractionists which he had seen during an cis Frascina, Ed., Pollock
and After: The Critical
Humpty Dumpty has said, which chooses their meaning. earlier trip to Paris, began to lead the movement away from socialist realism in Debate, Harper and Row,
Poland. Irrespective of the role of this art movement within the internal artistic London, 1985, p. 132.
The sharp political division between the East and the West during the Cold War evolution of Polish art, this kind of development was seen as a triumph for our
period also implied a confrontation of two artistic models: the Modernist art in the side. In 1961, Kantor and 14 other nonobjective Polish painters were given
West and the Socialist Realism in the East. Western art has presented itself as the an exhibition at the MOMA. Examples like this one reflect the success of the
natural development of genuine art as opposed to the politically suppressed art political aims of the international programs of MOMA.8
of Socialist Realism and its derived forms, which was not supposed to be genuine
art, but simply political propaganda. In light of this understanding, Eastern art- Such a constellation permits a very limited acceptance of Eastern artists into the
ists have been understood as a kind of underdeveloped and suppressed Western central area of art. An average Eastern artist has, in his effort to produce modern
artists, and it was thought that they would immediately join the general develop- art, remained a kind of incompletely-realized-Western-artist, and thus a second
ments in the West if they would be free to do so. class artist. (It was, of course, only natural that the Second World produces
secondrate art.) Most often, the Eastern artists who have succeeded in the West
The identification of Western art of this century with modern art as such (this are those who have actually moved there and became its integral part. Still, some
identification was actually a part of the Western universalism, as it is described Eastern artists have reached a certain international response, partly due to their
by Huntington) introduced a subtle dialectic of domination. The essential success quality and the genuine interest of some Western critics and curators, but also
of this dialectic lies in the fact that it was, to a great extent, accepted by Eastern because they could serve as an evidence of the universal value of modern art
artists themselves. Modern art was thus located in the West. But, as Western art and, as mentioned above, as an affirmation of the Western artists and artistic de-
is universal, Eastern artists also belong to the same idiom; however, they form velopments. Nevertheless, the codification of the field and the construction of its
only its periphery. All the constitutive structures, institutional, conceptual and history and tradition, resulted in a marginalization or total ignorance of important
commercial, are located in the West, thus they are controlled by it. The East more Eastern phenomena. For example, Eastern avant-guard artists of the sixties and
or less accepts (with some delay) and repeats the main currents of Western art. early seventies simply do not exists in historical surveys of art of this time, except
(I remember a participant at the CIMAM Congress in Dubrovnik in 1987, who those who have moved to the West.
directly said that all the important modern art was produced in the West and none
in the East.) The function of Eastern Modernism, inside this constellation, thus Establishing itself as the center, West has also established itself as a general
was often not to represent an autonomous statement and position, but to serve as reference point. EastEast communication, inasmuch as it has existed at all,
a confirmation of the original Western artist or particular movement. In her article has been running via the West. This was even present in the recent project,
Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War, Eva Cockcroft describes an the EuropaEuropa exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. I found this
example of using innovative Eastern art for strengthening the position of the West, show very important for presenting a number of lesser known or unknown artists
regardless of the actual role and meaning of this art inside its original context: and works. (Among others, it made us aware of the fact that certain important
achievements of, say, Carl Andre, Barnett Newman and others were preceded

9
Ilya Kabakov, op. cit. for more than half a century by the works of artists like Alexander Rodchenko, to travel freely. As soon as these limitations disappeared, the right of free travel 10
Wenda Gu, The Cul-
tural War, Flash Art
Olga Rozanova and others.) Still, the criteria for selecting contemporary section, had to be reduced. International, Summer
seemed to depend, to a great extent, on the artists international reputation (which 1996, p. 102103.
actually means, their reputation in the West). As opposed to the proclamation of the universal value of Western modern art dur- 11
In recent Western dis-
ing the Cold War period, post-Cold-War ideology stresses the differences. (On a cussions about contem-
I believe, that we are witnessing a somehow different situation now, i.e. a change more global level, a similar development can be observed in the discourse of so- porary Russian art, es-
pecially about artists like
from the Eastern artist as an incompletely-developed-Westerner to the Eastern called multiculturalism.) As the ideological and political differences disappeared, Brener and Kulik, such
artist as a representative of a different and exotic culture. In the above mentioned the East is now established through cultural and civilizational differences, an attitude was often
present. One can easily
speech about the relocated person, Ilya Kabakov also mentions how an artist which are by themselves a starting point of conflicts, of the clash of civilizations. notice how these two art-
who is coming from the East or from the Third World is, in advance, committed (In his description of the Interpol incident, Wenda Gu, the artists whose work was ists came to represent the
wild, aggressive, irratio-
to represent his origins: destroyed by Brener, spoke very openly about the cultural war.)10 nal, non-understandable,
dangerous, animal-like
Belonging to some school now be it Russian or Mexican, French or Czech The idea of modern art originally did not need the idea of a dialogue; the sub- essence of Russia (or,
perhaps, the East in
is perceived as a negative ethnographic factor hindering the artist to a cer- stance, so to speak, was common, the only question was to what extent and general), and how their
tain degree from entering into the Western artistic community on an equal how it was realized. Through the idea of civilizational differences, however, the actions are received with
a mixture of fascination,
footing. However, the artist who has arrived from these places often himself Easterner is established as the other, thus an inter-cultural and inter-civilization admiration, fear, hatred
doesnt know about this circumstance, this hump on his back appears only dialogue is necessary. An Eastern artist now becomes attractive for the West not and, of course, pleasure.
in the new place upon crossing the border, and as Boris Groys wrote, like a as somebody producing universal art, but exactly as somebody who reflects his
growth on his back, it is visible to everyone except the owner of that back. This particular condition. He is not only an artist, but particularly a Russian, Polish
is precisely the same thing as when a critic in an offhanded manner writes the or Slovene artist, or simply an Eastern artist.11 This was clearly present in the
young artist from India, or the famous Mexican painter everyone silently Interpol incident. Renata Salecl, in her analysis of Kuliks actions, wrote about
understands what this epithet means.9 this question:
I believe that this change demonstrates an important modification in the field The paradox [...] is that Kulik was invited as a particularity as a Russian
of EastWest relationship, a shift which is connected to the dtente process dog. I am certain that if an American artist were to play a dog, he would be of
and the eventual collapse of the socialist regimes. During the time of the Cold much less interest for the international art scene than the Russian artist is. We
War, in a situation where the political and ideological confrontations ensured all know that the majority of people in todays Russia live a dog-like life. And
a firm, bi-polar structure and therefore balance and control, Western modern the first association a Westerner makes in regard to Kuliks performance is that
art easily claimed to be universal. The post-Cold-War era does not supply such he is representing this reality of contemporary Russia. Kulik-dog is therefore
controlling mechanisms any more. The necessary result is that the situation of of interest for the Western art world because of the fact that he is the Russian
art (as well as other related fields) has to be redefined. The freedom of traveling, dog. [...] And, in regard to Kuliks performance it can be said that the West
for example, could be a universal value and a proclaimed right only as long as finds an aesthetic pleasure in observing the Russian dog, but only on condi-
the bi-polar system made it impossible for a large majority of (Eastern) people tion that he does not behave in a truly dog-like manner. When Kulik ceased

12
Renata Salecl, Love to be the decorative art-object the Eastern neighbour who represents the
Me, Love My Dog, Index.
Contemporary Scandi- misery of the Russian dog-like life and started to act in a way that surprised
navian Art and Culture, his admirers, he quickly became designated as the enemy.12
1996, no. 3-4, p. 117.
13
It would be, perhaps, In short, the idea of the WestEast dialogue could be understood as a way of
more accurate to say that reorganizing these relationships after the end of the Cold War era, i.e., as a
this new strategy is still
often combined with the way how to deal with the other. If earlier, the dominant position was achieved
idea of universalism. through the universal value of Western modern art, it is now achieved through
14
Wenda Gu, The Cul- the definition of the other and, at the same time, through the definition of the
tural War, p. 103. basis of communication.13 As Wenda Gu reports, Misiano said that this incident
creates an essential stage for a dialogue between Eastern and Western Europe.14
But, it seems clear that this stage includes a reorganization of the very field of
dialogue and thus opens the question who is to be master. Unavoidably, the
Western pole of the global network could only see mere aggression, imperialism
and destruction in this attempt.
This article first appeared in Art Press, Paris, No. 226, Dec. 1997, pp. 37-42,
under the title East is East?
478 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 6

No. 6, Autumn / Winter 2005

Published by:
Moderna galerija (Musem of Modern Art) Ljubljana
Ljubljana, Slovenia
and
International Foundation Manifesta The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM), with
Amsterdam, The Netherlands offices in Amsterdam, the Netherlands organizes
and co-ordinates the New Network Program, which
Editors: is a multi-faceted resource and research program,
Viktor Misiano encompassing the Manifesta Biennial, the
Igor Zabel Manifesta Archives and a program of publications,
discussions and related activities, focusing on
Associate editor: contemporary art and its role in society.
Natasa Petresin
MJ Manifesta Journal is part of the Manifesta
Managing editor: Network Program and is co-funded by the Culture
Marieke van Hal 2000 Framework of the European Commission.
MJ - Manifesta Journal Special thanks to Hedwig Fijen, Zdenka Badovinac,

journal of contemporary curatorship Mateja Kos, Nataa Vuga, Viktor Misiano and all
authors
REPRINT
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MJ - Manifesta Journal

journal of contemporary curatorship

N6, Autumn / Winter 2005

N6, Autumn / Winter 2005

294 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 6 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 6 295

Storytelling for Memory

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Venice, May 2005

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Francesco Manacorda Francesco Manacorda with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Archives: Monuments An Interview

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Interview recorded in Paris on 27 August 2005

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Francesco Manacorda with Hans Ulrich Obrist

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Francesco Manacorda with Bruce Altshuler

The Missing History

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BA: The question of collecting exhibitions is an interesting one, and I see no

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Sandra Frimmel with Jrgen Harten

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Where Do You Come From?

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tion of biennials. only the most established were, it would seem.

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This relative resistance and lack of commitment to constructing a memory lead

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The Archive as an Alien

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Yasmine Van Pee

Fight on, Superfools!

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Leif Magne Tangen

The Dream of Being

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Translated from French by Simon Pleasance