Gottfried Fliedl, The Eternal Archives

Gottfried Fliedl

Similar to museums and libraries, archives are organs of collective memory. What they do is preserve the basis for the memorizing capacity of society. The importance of these institutions evolved together with bourgeois society. The more tradition was being destroyed through development and economic and social progress, and the more tradition consciousness was vanishing - the more the preserving and exploiting of the traditional seems to have made „historic sense“ (Joachim Ritter) - beyond the break of tradition. The acceleration of economic, social and cultural change places the present in the past at an ever increasing pace from which strategists of „museumisation“ draw objects that are meant to witness sensual substrates of the past.

That which, in order to compensate, pushes against this „attack by the present on the rest of time“ (Alexander Kluge), directs itself against the „death of things“, against the emptying of its meaning and the destruction of its functions, against disappearance without trace. All this, however, at the price of the defunctionalisation of things and their final standstill in a museum which turns them into an irreversible fact. This precarious „dialectics of the museum-like“ allows for the past only as the past and splits it off from living aesthetic, historical and political experience. As an antiquarian consciousness it makes a fetish of and reifies that potential experience which could once more release and make accessible for social use the „traces of life inherent“ (Gottfried Korff) in objects.

In the „Eternal Archives“, the dialectics of the museum-like, and putting a halt to the historical are reversed and cunningly applied to counteract mass-media forgetfulness of history itself. In so doing, means are used that have repeatedly proved themselves in the history of modernity as the voice of criticism and polemic. Since museums generally alienate objects from their original functional and symbolic surroundings and usage (offering „education“ instead), it is effective to alienate the museum-like context, to disturb it and cross it out, or to create a new one in order to bring frozen meanings back into flux. The photographs undergo all sorts of treatment: including montage, collage, cutting and reversing, commenting, colouring and changing format, superimposing and doubling. All these manipulations mesmerise the spectator through irony and shock and attack the indifference imposed by the mass media visá-vis a flood of pictures. It is exactly through the public, media ‚sameness‘, and the en mass extremely rapidly changing reproductions that the pictures have lost their power. Now, by „privatizing“ them, they have been reinvigorated with some of their pain. The archivist operates with wit, cunning and legitimate anger, yet never in a denunciating way. To a large extent, the pictures draw their impact from their implicit aesthetics and meaning which is released and made visible by itself. Since there is no moralising, but rather the simple-minded obsession of these picture worlds with power and violence, sexuality and consumerism is being mirrored by their own impulses, the photographs thus regain their political, communicative and, partly, cathartic strength. Thus, the distorted portraits of people, too, do not aim at harming a person´s integrity, but target their stereotyped thousandfold transfers and masks - thereby also rendering anonymous the power concealed behind character masks. The simultaneity of pictures as mass media suggests an understanding use of their meaning, together with the synchronicity of the incommensurable which, however, is given an appearance of truth for the photographed or filmed picture is equipped with the„image“ and mechanical authenticity of immediate witnessing. The „Eternal Archives“ tries to avoid, or rather demask, this process.

The ambivalence of authentic image and aesthetic alienation leaves room for flashes of shock as well as aesthetic pacification. Nowhere does the „Eternal Archives“ rely on an equation such as „I was there“ and „This is what it was like“. The spectator is given no chance to merely use the inherited mass-media gaze which shifts all contents to the sex appeal of sensual stimulation of mere „things“ that have been completely deprived of their contents and functional purposes.

Mass-media perception - and this has been sufficiently proven by empirical investigation - shapes people´s behaviour in museums and exhibitions and is characterized by dispersed perception. Here, any form of learning that is relevant in everyday life is more or less avoided, and „expressive“ behaviour in the sense of „having been there“ becomes the most important thing, while the occupation with the spectacular objects and arrangements that are visually and sensually displayed become the crucial factor.

The „Eternal Archives“ makes use of mass-media picture language, and the grammar and rules of de-valuation deriving from it, but the only way it can respond to the publicness of the mass media (which, in reality, is only present in form and exploits its own sheer accessibility) is simply through its own privacy.