MN — The Anarchival Impulse N°1

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A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E A N A R C H I VA L I M P U L S E T H E A N A R C H I VA L IM PULSE N째1

Mnemoscape Magazine is a new quarterly online magazine dedicated to furthering research into contemporary visual culture and art practices that operates at the interstices of political and historical scrutiny, with a special focus on issues of memory, methodology and the archive.

Editor Elisa Adami, Alessandra Ferrini Contributors AZ.Namusn.Art, Alexander Apostol, Giulia Bassi, Lucy Bayley, Yvonne Bialek, Lisa Blackmore, Paolo Chiasera, Ben Cranfield, Alessandro Di Pietro, Wolfgang Ernst, Eirini Grigoriadou, Alana Kushnir, Pedro Lagoa, Lawrence Lek, Robert Luzar, Chris Mason, Anne Massey, Emilio Vavarella.

Graphic Veronica Adami Š 2014 Mnemoscape

Editorial

A quick glance at some of the latest, major international art events, such as the 55th Venice Biennale (The Encyclopedic Palace, 2013) or Documenta 13 (2012), is enough to realize that the archival turn in contemporary art is all but exhausted. As a research project rooted in such debate, Mnemoscape Magazine undoubtedly shares this very obsession. However, in pursuing its investigative and analytical aims, this publication provocatively takes off from a movement of opposition and demystifycation.

We propose to turn our object of research upside down. To destroy it, if you will. In this way, we hope to put this obsession under the scrutinizing eye of a microscope, critically dissecting it to the point of eventual neutralization. But, perhaps, we will just end up amplifying it with a magnifier, or pushing it to a point of sacrality, since, as we know, any iconoclastic gesture ultimately results in a reinforcement of the object of its violence.

As the destination is somewhat blurred, we felt the necessity to start this journey with questioning not so much the idea of what constitutes an archival impulse, but rather to ask ourselves what does not, what lies, so to say, on the other side of the coin.

Ten years ago, Hal Foster published An Archival Impulse, an essay tackling the emergence of a specific archival tendency in contemporary art, a trend “with a distinctive character of its own”. In passing, however, Foster suggested that this impulse, since more concerned with obscure traces than absolute origins, could perhaps be more accurately described as “anarchival”.

For our first issue, we decided to brush up and expand this early intuition. Perhaps, we felt, this position could help us 3

Issue N°1

speculating on the complicated and dynamic relationships between remembering and forgetting, keeping and discarding, preserving and destroying.

The word anarchival has a somehow unstable, undefined and undefinable meaning, difficult to pin down. The Greek prefix ‘ana-’ means both ‘above’ and ‘against’, but also ‘upside down’ and ‘wrong’. In this sense, the anarchival is at once a feature integral to the proper functioning of the archive (since its power lies precisely on the negative privilege of deciding what to destroy); a force that opposes to its traditional, authoritarian institution; and a playful, improper use of archives and archival practices. The term fluidly oscillates and shifts between the semantic fields of (1) destruction, when intended in its archiviolitic declination; (2) subversion, in its proximity to the word ‘anarchy’; and (3) regeneration in its state of openness and not yet explored potentiality. The articles that you will find here propose different examples and interpretations of the anarchival, while presenting a wide array of methodologies and raising a number of suggestive insights and observations. But, most likely, they will not solve the riddle: if anything, they will probably multiply the doubts and questions.

In P e d r o L a g o a ’s archive of destruction, the archival structure is paradoxically used to preserve what attempts against memory – namely destructive and iconoclastic acts. The language, protocols and methodologies proper to classical archaeology are improperly adopted as activist tactics to denounce political 4

The Anarchival Impulse

injustice and present situations of economical and ecological disaster by the art collective A Z . N a m u s n . A r t in the Anarcheology Series. In the work of A l e x a n d e r A p o s t ó l , here in conversation with L i s a B l a c k m o r e , the anarchival force of water is conjured up to wash away an illusory image of Venezuelan classical modernity and to reveal the crimes and abuses of the military government of the time, hidden behind grandiose, scenographic vistas.

Anarchival may be readings and interpretations of archives that challenge the pitfalls and dangers of methodological fetishisms, linear narratives and prescriptive chronological orders. G i u l i a B a s s i describes her historiographic methodology grounded in interdisciplinary analysis and exegetical rigour; whereas P a o l o C h i a s e r a proposes a method of art criticism, aptly renamed 2.0, which sits in-between Warburgian iconology and Spenglerian synchronic tables. In their (an)archival experiment, L u c y B a y l e y , B e n C r a n f i e l d and A n n e M a s s e y reveal the perambulations and unexpected connections of three archival fragments from the ICA’s collection, moving across time and space.

A central node in the debate is represented by the digital turn and the impact of new technologies of storage on the conceptual and empirical aspects of archival collections. Wo l f g a n g E r n s t coins the term dynarchive to denote the condition of permanent change, constant updating and migration of contents in digital collection. Nonetheless, Ernst warns us, not to be fooled by 5

The Anarchival Impulse

the anarchival appearances of new media: in their technomathematical structure the spectre of the archive recurs stronger than ever. Curator A l a n a K u s h n i r takes us through the exhibition Tabularium, recently on show at Slopes (Melbourne), where the contemporary condition of geographical dispersion of information in data centres is investigated through the historical parallelism of the Roman Tabularium, an institution virtually recreated by L a w r e n c e L e k in the architectural simulation Memory Palace (2014), here accessible.

Errors, glitches and anomalies are yet another feature of the anarchival impulse. In The Sicilian Family, E m i l i o Va v a r e l l a produces deliberate glitches by substituting a part of the ASCII code of scanned vintage family pictures with a story based on what he had come to learn about each of the ancestors’ portrayed therein. A l e s s a n d r o D i P i e t r o creates an anomalous guidebook of Documenta 13 using smuggled scans of the artworks exhibited in place of the original images.

Finally, the anarchival impulse operates through repetition, which as Freud pointed out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is nothing but one of the many faces in which the death drive is made manifest. In his show “Analogue Analogies� at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, reviewed for us by Yv o n n e B i a l e k , S i m o n S t a r l i n g reproduces analogue, documentation shots from the museum photo archive and creates a replica of its no longer in use photo laboratory, at once commenting on the obsolesce of the photographic medium and the funereal nature 6

Issue N°1

of museum collections. On the other hand, discussing the work of the artist trio J a n e z J a n š a , R o b e r t L u z a r shows us how, through its improper and uncontrolled reiteration, the name of the law may be performatively subtracted, deconstructed and eventually deprived of any efficacy and power. Repetitions, however, can also be hysterical symptoms due to traumatic experiences, as E i r i n i G r i g o r i a d o u ’s points out in her analysis of T h e A t l a s G r o u p ’s archive.

What we may find out at the end is that the anarchival is just another face of the archival and that forgetting is a function integral to memory as it is remembering. We could not have any better crowning to this discovery than C h r i s M a s o n ’s short story Retrograde Stairwell, whose content we would rather not disclose so not to spoil the pleasure of reading.

by Elisa Adami A l e s s a n d ra Fe r r i n i 7

54 “Ag a i nst Hi sto r i o g ra p hi c a l Po s i t i vi s m : S o m e S kept i c a l Ref l ec t i o ns a b o u t t he Arc hi va l Fet i s hi s m” A r t i c l e by G i u l i a B ass i

10 the arch ive of d estruct ion – Pe dro La goa Inter v iew by E lis a Ad a mi 22 “Anarche aology ” Artic le by A le ss a n d r a Fer r in i

66 “Ar t C r i t i c i s m 2 .0.

I nt ro d u c t i o n to a c o m p a rat i ve st u d y b et ween t he st y l es of Ro m a n p a i nt i ng a n d c o ntem p o ra r y vi s u a l a rt s f ro m 1 9 5 0 to 2 01 3 ” A r t i c l e by P ao l o Ch i ase r a

40 “ Watere d dow n moderni ty. Icon ocla stic fl ui ds i n A lexa n de r Ap ó sto l ’s arch iva l med iation s” .

Ar ticle by Lis a B lac k more

82 d O C UM E NTA (1 3 ) Da s B eg l ei t b u c h ∕ T h e G u i d eb o o k Kat a l o g ∕ C at a l o g 4 ∕ 3 S h ow c ase : A l e ss a n dro D i P i et ro

48 Alexande r A p ó sto l in c onver satio n w ith Lis a Blac k mo re

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92 “B et ween th e A rch ive an d the Un a rch iva ble” ar tic le by Wo lfg a n g E r n st

144 “ M u l t i p l e S i g nat u res of S u bt ra c t i o n” A r t i c l e by Ro b e r t Lu zar

10 4 “S imo n St arlin g’s s h ow A n alo g ue A n alogie s at Sta ats g alerie Stu ttga r t” Exhibition Rev iew by Yvonn e Bia le k

160 T he S i c i l i a n Fa m i l y S h ow c ase : Em i l i o Val va re l l a 166 “ Ret u r ni ng to t he Ta b u l a r i u m . An E x hi b it i on a nd Arc hi ve i n P u r s u it of C hro no l o g i c a l T i m e” Cu r at o r i a l Ess ay by A l a n a Ku s h n i r

1 14 “ ( An )Archi va l E xpe r im e nt t hro ug h th e ICA” Art icle by Lucy B ayley, B e n Cr anfie l a n d A n n e M assey

185 “ Ret ro g ra d e S t a i r we ll” S h o r t St o r y by Ch r is Mason

128 “ The p ath ologic al rhy thm of th e arch ive” Ar ticle by E ir in i Gr igo r iado u

193 A –Z B i o gr ap hy

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t h e arc hive of dest r u ct io n Pe dro L a goa

Inter vi ew

by E l i s a Adami

( I M G ) Pedro Lagoa, record breaking party, 2010. Hamilton Space, Seoul. Photo: unknown.

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E l i s a A d a m i Let’s start with a pretty straightforward question. What is the archive of destruction?

P e d r o L a g o a The archive of destruction is an evolving structure which, as the name suggests, is dedicated to the collection of documents related to the concept of destruction. By assuming certain kinds of destructive acts as its subject matter, the archive reinvests their signification in a movement that counters their own nature: It artificially preserves what attempts against memory. Regarding its structure, we can make a distinction between a main core of the archive and its departments.

The main core is dedicated to the research, collection and presentation of documents. The acts of destruction featured in the archive are of two different types: physical destruction – directed towards inanimate, material objects; and destruction understood in a more abstract sense – addressed to ideas and concepts. If the physical side is easy to understand, on the abstract level, one will find documents that focus on more immaterial and subjective practices of rupture with established ideological systems, codes, practices, values, theories, etc. This section comprehends things as avant-garde movements, political revolutions, or theoretical ruptures in fields such as art, philosophy, politics or science, to name just a few.

Outside the scope of the archive is destruction aimed at living beings.

The departments, instead, were initiated to enable the development of the archive beyond its initial – and more restricted – function of collecting and presenting documents, and to allow for the activation of its contents towards the creation of new work. The archive first ramified into sections, then departments and, more recently, it saw the addition of a small publishing label, the editions of the archive.

E A When did you start to work on this project and what was the motivation behind it?

P L The project started in 2007, and as with every idea, its inception is a bit hazy. At the time, I was already working with some ideas of destruction. Earlier that year I had organised the first record breaking party in Frankfurt, and I was interested in the concept of potlatch and mechanisms of creation of symbolic value which can include iconoclasm.

Also, I have a certain tendency to collect things, even if not in a particularly organised way. By that time the idea of the archive came up as a good way to organise and recontextualise a series of documents all sharing as a common denominator the concept of destruction. The basic paradox of an archive dedicated to

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collect actions against memory, an archive that focus on the denial of the idea of archive itself, seemed a good enough starting point to work with. The archive was envisioned as a research tool both for potential viewers and for myself, and it was structured in a way as to keep it open to diverse possibilities of development beyond the specific exhibition context for which it was originally conceived.

The lack of limited temporal and ‘thematic’ boundaries, and the ‘elasticity’ of the idea of destruction – particularly in its abstract sense – allowed me to work in a way that was not too restrained.

E A One of the distinctive traits of this archive is the fact that all the documents collected therein are copies. Can you comment on this?

P L Yes, the documents collected in the archive consist mainly of photocopies, digital prints, burnt CDs or DVDs. I have recently introduced objects into the collection, but I would not say they are unique either. Usually, they are industrially

produced, and therefore in principle indistinguishable from their serial twins. In a recent presentation of the London Branch of the archive of destruction ( 1 ) , for instance, one could find a 1939 World Atlas, a bottle of Italian wine produced in an anarchist farm, and a sample of a William Morris tapestry pattern, among others. The only unique objects are more likely to appear in the context of the departments.

The fact that these documents are copies, on one hand leads to privilege their content in detriment of formal aspects of design such as binding or packaging, and, on the other hand, effects a levelling down of hierarchies established on those same formal aspects while removing the aura of the unique object.

Regarding the use of these copies, we

( 1 ) Presented from the 23rd April to the 23rd May 2014, at Gasworks (London). http://bit.ly/Yz of destruction, a cut through the archive of destruction, 2007-14. Photo: Image and Communic Department of the archive of destruction.

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may distinguish two main strategies.

On one hand, the documents are presented in their entirety in the physical display of the archive. On the other hand, following the tradition of collage and appropriation, small excerpts of the same audio-visual and written documents have been creatively reassembled and re-contextualised in works such as the video a cut through the archive of destruction ( 2 ) or the text collage titled archive. Yet, I would say that even in the first case, given the archive’s tendency to put an emphasis on the relations established among the individual items, the documents are used in a way similar to the one in which fragments are used in a collage to produce new meanings from their always shifting combinations.

E A The archive of destruction has no fixed address. You told me that some of its contents are geographically dispersed between the different locations where it was presented: London, Seoul... In a sense, we may say that this archive lacks of a domiciliation, of that famous archeion, that is the etymological origin of the term ‘archive’. The domiciliation ensures the archive with the possibility of a growth and the physical security of a deposit. So my question is: What happens to an archive without a permanent domiciliation? What are the consequences of this delocalized, scattered form?

P L The nature of the archive makes it a bit hard to speak in terms of localization and domiciliation, as it might be said to have several at the same time as having none. But even before that, perhaps it would be important to start by specifying which of the meanings of the word delocalized we are speaking of: whether we are speaking of something that “is removed from a particular location”, or something that is “free from

zpSqv ( 2 ) http://archdestrcut.blogspot.it ( I M G ) The Educational Service of the archive cation Department of the archive of destruction. Courtesy: Image and Communication

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the limitations of locality” ( 3 ) .

To speak in terms of localization one would have to presuppose that the archive exists only – or mostly – as a materialized entity. The contents that are dispersed, as you mention, are some documents that were left behind after the archive was presented.

The first definition could make sense then. But since, as I mentioned, the documents of the archive are not originals, this actually does not affect the archive’s integrity that much, as it is always possible to reproduce them.

The archive can be virtually recreated anywhere technology allows and, in this sense, it comes closer to the second definition.

To say that the archive has no fixed address, means that it does not have an HQ, a physical location where it is permanently installed and available to be consulted and that not all its documents exist in a materialised form.

The only way to keep track of its contents is through an inventory kept in file cards that, in turn, make possible the reconstitution

of the archive. S o, i f on e assu me s th at th e arc h i ve exi st s more as e n un c i ati on , as i de a an d possi b i l i t y of mate r i al i zati on rath e r th an as a c on st ant physi c al man i fe st ati on , we may s ay th at i t exi st s f re e of th e c on strai n s of l oc al i t y.

B ut on th e oth e r h an d, i n orde r to ac tu al l y be c ome an arc h i ve th at c an be ac c e ss e d an d u s e d as su c h , on e n e e ds i t s physi c al man i fe st ati on s.

Given the documents’ reproducibility at any time and place, I would say that the ultimate effect of this scattering, as you put it, might be that the documents – its sporadic materialisations – become decontextualized evidences of the existence of the archive.

E A And yet another manifestation of the archive is online. When I

( 3 ) Merriam-Webster dictionary. ( I M G ) Image and Communication Department of the archive arquivo-de-destruicao.html. Photo: Image and Communication Department of the archive of d

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first came across this project on the web, I remember going through its different sections – Department of Stuffed Geniuses, Quagmire Fields Section, etc. - and I could not help but think of Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles.

Broodthaers’ work is famously associated with the institutional critique and its museum may be actually considered as an institution of critique in itself.

To what extent, if any, have you attempted to achieve something similar with your archive – I mean a deconstruction of the Foucauldian institution of the archive through the establishment of a counter-institution?

P L The archive’s structure was designed to be functional to and consistent with its conceptual

premises rather than intended to perform an institutional critique of the archive as such – even though its inception was surely informed, to some extent, by a critical approach to the role and functioning of archives.

Yet, the efforts made to deal with the notion of destruction as an object of archival preservation, induced me to introduce a few twists in the formal structure of the archive of destruction, twists that clearly differentiate it from institutional archives. For instance, all documents are available to be consulted and used without the mediation of an archivist; th e re are n o h i e rarc h i e s or i mposi ti ons of r i g i d c ate g or i zati on s an d c l assi f i c ati on s on th e doc u me nt s , be i n g th e s e de l i be rate l y org an i s ed th rou g h di ffe re nt syste ms at ever y pre s e nt ati on , bu t wi th n o obv i ou s c l u e s prov i de d to th e v i si tor. The archive tries to be as less imposing as possible on the users, leaving a great deal of decisions on their hands, from how to access – or not – the archive to the uses and interpretations that can be made of it and its contents.

The expansion of the archive into

e of destruction, arquivo, 2012. Revista Punkto, http://www.revistapunkto.com/2012/05/odestruction. Courtesy: Image and Communication Department of the archive of destruction.

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departments and other ramifications was something that arrived at a later stage. It stemmed from the need to accommodate into the project works that, so to speak, were generated by the archive itself, rather than simply collected therein.

The departments allowed for a greater freedom and playfulness in dealing with the collected material – opening possibilities for creating new logics and sets of rules. From simple repository of materials and accumulation of documents, the archive became a more Broodthaerian living organism, able to generate new ideas and offshoots ( 4 ) .

E A The destructive act can take on many different meanings. For instance, the same gesture of burning

books assumes a diverse significance according to the context in which it is performed. Whereas Latham’s ritual public burnings of books between 1964 and 1968 are to be interpreted as a liberating act of emancipation, when executed by political or religious powers, such as the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazi, or the fireman squads in Fahrenheit 451, they become an oppressive gesture of censorship. The other face of destruction as resistance and revolution, is destruction as repression. How did you negotiate this inner contradiction?

Is the reactionary side of destruction featured in your archive at all?

P L Actually, all the examples you listed above are part of the archive’s collection, so I would say that the ‘reactionary’ side, as you call it, is

( 4 ) In a 1972 interview Broodthaers, when asked about the relationship of his Musée d’Art Mod biological process. It starts with a precise intention and then it takes a life of its own, outside themselves like living cells’. Interview with Jürgen Harten and Katharina Schmidt, 1972 in Mar Cambridge) 1988. ( I M G ) archive of destruction: London Branch, 2014. Gasworks, London. Pho and Communication Department of the archive of destruction.

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present. Nonetheless, the process of selection is based more on criteria of relevance for the the critical purpose of the archive than on any moral judgement. To analyse things in terms of ‘progressive’ or ’reactionary‘ could actually become a quite exhausting exercise. Even if the examples you point can be somewhat undisputedly analysed on those terms, very often destructive acts contain in themselves a complexity not reducible to simple dualities.

Often, they encompass both ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ traits; or their evaluation on those terms becomes a highly subjective matter.

Therefore, while the archive strives to keep a certain diversity in its contents and to maintain the degree of complexity of its subject, there is also an effort in avoiding the production

and enforcement of moral judgements on the documents selected. It is up to the user to ultimately decide whether to produce – or not – that sort of judgements.

E A Your research spans over a long period of time, from the historical avantgardes of the early twentieth century to the neo-avantgardes of the 1960s, up to the present day.

I am curious: Do you detect any trends or patterns in the evolution and programmatic use of the idea of destruction in contemporary art?

P L That’s a difficult question, because I do not think so much in those terms... The organisation of the documents itself does not follow any chronological order. For me it is

derne with traditional museums, tells of the way an artwork evolves as being a sort of the initial idea, one that he would practically have no control of, ‘the ideas multiplying cel Broodthaers, Writings, Interviews, Photographs (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, oto: Image and Communication Department of the archive of destruction. Courtesy: Image

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more interesting to create transversal associations and see how things are appropriated or resurge in different epochs. To produce an analysis as you ask would be always partial, as it puts at work certain simplifications and narratives that inevitably give a false – and limited – picture of a specific time and that are often marked by the fallacious idea of ‘evolution’.

Yet, aware of these limitations, one can still acknowledge that certain moments in time – and coordinates in space – have seen destructive actions emerge with greater consistency or persistence. One should not forget that a conscious, deliberate destructive act always implies, at its root, a form of refusal or negation: Refusal of acceptance, of conformism, of subjection to one particular time: the Present. These actions are influenced by, and rebel against the time that generated them: the cultural, social and political moment in which they were produced.

Surely we can recognize certain historical moments characterized by powerful and radical rejections in art: 19 th century Europe, WWI and WWII,

the 1960s and 1970s.

So, to sketch a rough picture, the destructive drive can be found in paintings of ruined landscapes in 19 th century Europe which echoed both the lives of industrial workers and the ennui of the bourgeoisie; in Dada’s vehement refusal of the ‘civilized’ Europe that had just given birth to the rational-scientific model of trench-war and chemical warfare in WWI; in the artistic and political avantgardes and highly iconoclastic works and practices that emerged in the wake of the WWII; in the iconoclastic actions against the symbols of capitalist culture – TV sets, automobiles, pianos, etc. – in the Western countries of the 60s and 70s, which culminated in the rejection of the art ‘object’ itself with Conceptual art. The actions which emerged around the DIAS ( 5 ) can be

( 5 ) DIAS : Destruction in Art Symposium, organised by Gustav Metzger in London in 1966 ( 6 ) auto-destructive-art-t12156 ( 7 ) http://www.portikus.de/1469.html?&L=1#c3617 ( 8 ) http://ww ( I M G ) The Educational Service of the archive of destruction, 2014. Museu de Serralves, Porto.

Courtesy: Image and Communication Department of the archive of destruction.

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seen as a response to a world polarized by the Cold War, the memory of WWII and the spectre of an imminent nuclear disaster. And yet, this overview is still not accurate or even reasonably through, since it excludes many geopolitical contexts, each with its own specificities.

Nevertheless, continuing with this sort of exercise, and still aware of its limitations, I would risk to say that when we arrive in the 1980s the production of ‘destructive work’ slows down, which possibly reflects a closer alignment of artists with political and economical power and the increasing absorption of art into the field of ‘culture’ and the ‘cultural industries’. It is truth that recently there has been a number of exhibitions at institutional level focusing on the subject of destruction,

such as the Gustav Metzger ( 6 ) and DIAS show at Tate, the reenactments of John Latham’s Skoob Towers performances in Frankfurt ( 7 ) , the Damage Control exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum ( 8 ) , or Film at the End of Art at Nottingham Contemporary ( 9 ) , to name just a few. Still, this interest seems to be placed more in works produced in the 60s and 70s rather than works made by a younger generation of artists. This impression – as rushed as it has been sketched here – leaves nevertheless some questions hovering: A re we l i v i n g i n a ti me wh e n de str u c ti on i n ar t i s s ometh i n g of a h i stor i og raph i c al , arc h i val i nte rest on l y ? O r c oul d i t si mpl y be th at th e most powe r f u l expre ssi on s of re j e c ti on are to be fou n d ou t si d e of c onte mporar y ar t ? O r th e on es th at are produ c e d wi th i n th e ar t f i e l d do n ot make i t to th e fore of v i si bi l i t y ? I s th e pre s e nt mome nt on e of al i g n me nt s of ar ti st s wi th th e i r ti me an d th e refore wi th n o ref u s al s to be expre ss e d th roug h ar t ? Eventually, and on top of this, one can speculate that given the

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/metzger-recreation-of-first-public-demonstration-ofww.hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/resource-centre/#collection=damage-control . Photo: Image and Communication Department of the archive of destruction.

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present crisis in utopian thought – which got smothered by what Perniola terms as ‘nihilistic cynicism’ ( 1 0 ) – and with the colonization of all the free spaces of life and imagination by the economical sphere, the space of destruction – both symbolic and with an affect on the Real – has been taken over in its entirety by the economical and political powers, leaving one to question how much margin is left for artists to compete with that.

E A In Archive Fever, Derrida talks about the impulse to destroy the archive and, after Freud he calls it death drive. This death drive, he says, “is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive.” ( 1 1 ) The archive you are building moves exactly in the opposite direction; it does not destroy anything, but rather it memorializes the same acts of destruction which threatened its existence in the first place. Do you see the archive of destruction as a destructive or preservative institution?

Or, in other words, would you define the impulse at the base of your work as archival or anarchival?

P L My motivation to start the archive was not exactly one of a preservational nature, though this trait is obviously present and generates the paradox of preserving that which works against memory. In this sense, one can speak of a clear archival impulse.

But if we are to look for the destructive potential of the archive, we should focus on the abstract, rather than the physical order.

The archive does not attempt at erasing memory, but it ignites possibilities of generating thought and actions of a destructive nature – rather than performing a direct destruction itself. In this way, even if it apparently nullifies the original intentions which lie behind the destructive gestures – namely erasure and oblivion – I think it does keep up with their most authentic premises – the instigation of other

( 1 0 ) Mario Perniola, Art and its Shadow (London: Continuum Press) 2004 ( 1 1 ) Jacques Derrid www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxJUbd66Vcc ( 1 3 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0faittcwX London. Photo: Image and Communication Department of the archive of destruction. Courtes

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destructive acts. And perhaps this, alongside the way it operates by countering certain characteristics of institutional archives, allows me to speculate that the anarchival impulse is not totally absent from it...

E A Maybe the ultimate act of the archive of destruction should be its own annihilation – the extreme phase when the archive fulfils its inner auto-destructive vocation. Have you ever thought of smashing your own archive?

P L Given the amount of times the question comes up I would say that the archive’s self-immolation is definitely more a concern – on the verge of obsession – of people who come in contact with the archive rather than mine. In my view the project is still at an early stage, and at least until I feel the idea gets exhausted and starts to

fall into repetition – which is in itself a form of destruction – I do not think I will be too concerned with that.

The possibility of smashing the archive raises also a few questions on what kind of destruction we are speaking of, since as I said, the archive exists both as a physical entity and as an idea. And one thing is to destroy the physical materialization of an idea, while to destroy the idea itself is quite another.

E A Do you have any favourite examples of works on destruction or auto–destructive works you would like to leave us with?

PL: Well, I guess I have way too many favourites, in fact, which doesn’t make for an easy selection... and considering that this interview is getting already way too long, I’ll leave you with just one name, Japanese noise band Hanatarash and two of their performances – ‘Bulldozer Gig’ ( 1 2 ) and ‘Cock Aktion’ ( 1 3 ) – whose extreme radicality and intensity does away with the need of any further rhetoric.

da, Archive Fever (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press) 1998, 10 ( 1 2 ) https:// XwQ ( I M G ) the archaeological department of the archive of destruction, 2013-14. Gasworks, sy: Image and Communication Department of the archive of destruction.

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Anarchaeology Series – A Project by Az.Namusn.Art ( 1 ) A n a r c h a e o l o g y : a n + a r c h a e o l o g y.

by A l e s s a n d r a Fe r r i n i

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As Maurizio Coccia points out in his text Anarchaeology.

Sopra e Contro L’Archeologia ( 2 ) (Anarchaeology. Above and Against Archaeology, my translation), anarchaeology is a composite word made by combining the suffix an- with the word archaeology. The suffix derives from ancient Greek and it means at once ‘above’ and ‘against’. As such, the Anarchaeology Series presents itself as a project that strives to overcome and oppose the traditional notion of archaeology. At the same time, however, it is a wordplay, alluding at anarchy and thus proposing an even more extreme form of opposition, one that is rooted in a specific context: resistance and radical politics.

Under the umbrella of the Anarchaeology Series is a growing number of public interventions started in May 2011 by the art collective Az.Namusn.Art. Founded by Riccardo Fadda in 2007, Az.Namusn.Art collective has been developing radical actions in Sardinia, Italy, an island with a complex and little

(1) A different version of this article appears on the Action, Intervention, Daily Deployment (AIDD) web platform (a project by the Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London) — HTTP://aestheticsofprotest.org /anarchaeology-an-archaeology/

(2) Maurizio Coccia, Anarchaeology. Sopra e Contro L’Archeologia. Text accompanying the exhibition Lontano da dove? ⁄ Far from where?, Macro, Roma, IT, curated by di M. R. Sossai.

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known past and present. Widely considered as a peripheral land within the Italian nation-state, Sardinia sits on a blind spot that makes it vulnerable to sustained exploitation. The second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, Sardinia has been used since the Second World War by militaries and arms manufacturers to test all sorts of warfare matériel, train soldiers and pilots, launch bombing sorties as well as explode, burn and bury old weapons and dangerous chemicals. Indeed, between the 1970s and 2007 Sardinia hosted the most active NATO base in the Mediterranean basin. During this time, Italian, NATO, and U.S. bases occupied about one third of the island’s land and sea. Currently, Sardinia is scheduled to host the Israeli aviation training. On the other hand, Sardinia has also been heavily and brutally exploited with the construction of large industrial complexes – mainly oil refineries and related petrochemical operations – since the 1960s. With the

A Az.Namusn. Art, Occupy Sardinia, 2012.

Courtesy of the artists.

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recent financial crisis, however, these industries have mostly left. Both the military and the petrochemical industry have largely polluted the island and its sea, contributing to a cancer and leukaemia pandemic. Lastly, Sardinia has been affected by high rates of unemployment which have led to sustained emigration.

Az.Namusn.Art intervenes in this landscape, through physical, economical and cultural re-appropriations. The collective relies on a fluid group of people that have come together to create projects and actions designed to engage and challenge the local population. The Anarchaeology Series, building on Az.Namusn.Art collective’s dedication to collaborative and inclusive actions, involves different professionals that operate in specific areas, such as archaeologists, academics, and artists. Complying with the collective’s primary focus - that is developing actions of ‘civil disturbance’ - the Anarchaeology

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Series strives to transform the crisis of its geopolitical location (occupational, environmental and ethical in nature) in an opportunity to re-claim this site, its heritage and its potential for self-sustainability. In order to do so, Az.Namusn.

Art establishes a clear line between legality as a conformist or even compliant practice, and illegality as a survival strategy that ensures the preservation of independent expression.

The first part of the Anarchaeology Series comprises two videos – Anarchaeology and Nurra A.T.(Nurra Antagonist Tourism) – realized during the local initiative Monumenti Aperti 2011 (Open Monuments). Both videos can be considered as enactments of what I call guerrilla archaeology, that is an activist form of archaeological practice. Conducted through militant actions, this practice aims at unearthing and denouncing social problematics while following traditional archaeological methodology. The backdrop to these artworks is the coastal

B Az.Namusn. Art, Anarchaeology, 2011.

Courtesy of the artists.

C Az.Namusn. Art, Anarchaeology, 2011.

Courtesy of the artists.

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town of Porto Torres, in Sardinia. Once hosting a flourishing petrochemical industry, Porto Torres is now the victim of a deep socio-economical crisis as well as of an environmental disaster. Covering an area roughly three times as large as the residential area, the industrial district sits empty and decaying as a result of the recent industrial collapse. Skyrocketing unemployment figures, lack of prospects for young people, and an exponential growth in cancer deaths linked to toxic waste, have led to a diffuse sense of distrust and opposition towards both local and national institutions, which have been unable to control the failure of this vanished capitalist utopia.

The colossal industrial area of Porto Torres is now in a state of ruination, both a ghost town and a no-man land that awaits regeneration. As many local people know, this process can take decades and it is flooded with controversy and corruption.

For Anarchaeology, Az.Namusn.Art collective has worked

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with two local unemployed archaeologists. Managing to trespass into an abandoned ironworks, they have conducted an archaeological excavation, unearthing different tools and detritus that document the history of the factory. These discarded items were treated with the same care given to historical artefacts. Accurately cleaned and catalogued they were subsequently placed in the local archaeological museum, within the collection of grave goods belonging to Turris Libisonis, an ancient city from the II century. The resulting video work portrays the public’s reaction to such ‘intrusion’.

In the aftermath of this exhibition, on Sunday the 29 th of May 2011, the Az.Namusn.Art collective organised the first instance of Nurra A.T. (Nurra Antagonist Tourism) which was documented in the video by the same name. This project aimed at bringing to public attention the most mysterious and impenetrable heritage site in the area: Nuraghe Nieddu (the

(3) The Nuraghe Nieddu was actually returned to Porto Torres Council in May 2014.It will now be (legally) accessible once a year, during the Open Monuments event.

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Black Nuraghe, built about 3000 years ago), one of the best preserved on the territory, but inaccessible to the public ( 3 ) .

In fact, it sits within a private industrial complex that belongs to Eni S.p.A., an Italian multinational oil and gas company, now a fenced off, abandoned place. Bolt cutters in hand, the art collective trespassed into the industrial site and unlawfully introduced a group of 25 people (formed of families, students and artists) in order to re-appropriate the local, occulted archaeological site that was swallowed by the petrochemical industrial complex of Porto Torres. Here, in total disregard of the police force, a guided tour, conducted by an expert archaeologist, took place followed by a picnic. Nurra A.T. (Nurra Antagonist Tourism) thus came together as a peaceful but firm re-vindication of the local cultural heritage, enacted through an illegal, collective action.

The second part of the Anarchaeology Series, started in 2012

D Az.Namusn. Art, Nurra A.T. (Nurra Antagonist Tourism), 2011. Courtesy of the artists.

E Az.Namusn. Art, Nurra A.T. (Nurra Antagonist Tourism), 2011. Courtesy of the artists.

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and is still in progress. With this project, the Az.Namusn.Art collective aims at shedding light on the mysterious vicissitudes surrounding the much criticized decision taken by the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to move the 35 th G8 Summit of 2009 from the Sardinian island of La Maddalena, to L’Aquila (in central Italy), a city that was recently devastated by a major earthquake. The regeneration of La Maddalena was in fact necessary since the island was finally returned to local authorities in 2008, after decades of U.S. and Italian military occupation. The G8 was seen by the local population as an opportunity to repurpose the ex-arsenal and re-launch the island as a touristic destination (tourism being the main source of income in Sardinia). However, the works were never completed. A closer look at this event, suggests Berlusconi’s move to be a cover-up manoeuvre, in order to hide the fact that the money destined to the regeneration of La Maddalena

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had disappeared into the pockets of corrupted politicians and local authorities. Once again, the Sardinian population had been deprived of a much sought after investment; left to recover from yet another empty promise.

The second part of the Anarchaeology Series takes as its subject an unfinished statue from the fascist era, which was found on the island of Santo Stefano, in the Archipelago of La Maddalena. This statue, a bust portraying the fascist hierarch Costanzo Ciano, was supposed to be part of a grand monument which was commissioned by Benito Mussolini to the sculptor Arturo Dazzi after Ciano’s death in 1939. It was to be comprised of an altar (which was actually erected in the vicinity of the city of Livorno, in Tuscany) and the statue of Ciano, which was to sit on top of it. It was supposed to be the second largest in Italy - the biggest being the Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland) in Rome, which is 70 metres

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in height. Dazzi started to work on the statue in 1941 but, because of Mussolini’s fall from power shortly thereafter, he was unable to see it through, leaving it unfinished in a cave, on the island of Santo Stefano. Az.Namusn.Art’s project, which calls for the virtual removal of the monument, strives to draw a connection between two historical blind spots: fascism and the current corrupted politics surrounding the G8. This project is prompted by a destructive, anarchaeological impulse and is articulated in three phases.

Phase one is resolved in the video Ciano Pool (Ciano Piscina).

This work suggests the sinking of the statue in the same area used to dump toxic waste originating from the building works undertaken at La Maddalena for the repurposing of the exarsenal for the G8 Summit. In the past, this site was also used by the Italian Navy to discard polluting substances employed in the former arsenal. With this metaphorical action, obtained

F Az.Namusn. Art, Ciano Pool (Ciano Piscina), 2012. Courtesy of the artists.

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through the superimposition of footage portraying toxic seawaters and footage portraying the statue, Az.Namusn.

Art alludes at the discarding of a historical artefact, through a gesture that both calls for a process of remembering and forgetting: on one hand, the fascist statue - already a piece of a forgotten history - is re-instated into history while being submerged and so hidden again; on the other, the recent past is brought with force into the present, highlighting the corruption and ecological disaster at play in Sardinia still today.

This process of re-insertion of the past into the present, is also at the core of phase two of the project. Ciano Poll (Ciano Sondaggio) consists of an online survey aimed at gathering public opinion regarding the removal of Ciano’s statue from the island of Santo Stefano. In this way, Az.Namusn.Art interrogates the Sardinian population at large on how to activate this piece of heritage: what are they to do with such a

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controversial statue? As such, it invests them with the dilemma of determining its future legacy. By rescuing this piece of history from oblivion, Az.Namusn.Art and by extension the local population is now faced with the problematic of performing an action charged with meaning and future resonance. Once again moved by an amnesic, anarchival impulse, Az.Namusn.

Art proposes the destruction of the statue as one of the possible options. Amongst the other possibilities that they offer, are the completion of the mausoleum – involving the transportation of the statue to Livorno - as well as the refusal of moving, destroying or altering the statue.

What do you think? The poll is still ongoing and is now open to a wider public. It can be accessed here: https://www. quicksurveys.com/s/Da68ScQ The last phase, If Today Was Your Last Day and Tomorrow Was Today, still ongoing, began with a trip to La Maddalena,

(4) Although the Shroud of Turin, allegedly a faded imprint of Jesus’ face, is considered a sacred relic, carbon dating has proved that it was created in 1300 AD. Prof. Garlaschelli has developed a technique that, he claims, corresponds to that employed to create the Shroud.

(5) At the same time, the religious symbolism adopted by Az.Namusn. Art seems also to bring to light the involvement of the Vatican within Italian politics, which the fascist regime helped to establish.

(6) Blu Ciano is in fact the Italian equivalent of Blue Cyan, one of the three primary colours.

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during which the statue was ‘duplicated’ using the technique employed for the creation of the Shroud of Turin, which was developed by Professor Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia ( 4 ) . This action was performed as a funeral procession and could be interpreted as Az.Namusn.Art’s desire to both acknowledge and put to rest this statue – and with it, the political issues that it raises, including the high rates of deaths linked to environmental pollution in Sardinia. Thus, the whole procession could be interpreted as an act of closure and mourning ( 5 ). However, this performance does not simply sanction the symbolic death of the statue, rather it marks its afterlife. Reduced to a ghostly blue imprint - that at once refers to the name of Ciano ( 6 ) and to Yves Klein’s anthropometries – the statue, or at least its impression, is folded and packed, ready to be physically moved. This image is in fact programmed to be affixed in the city centre of L’Aquila, in order to bring

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back to light the problematic issues surrounding the G8 summit of 2009. L’Aquila has been itself victim of the same empty promises and corrupted practices of the Berlusconi’s administration. As La Maddalena, and Sardinia as a whole, this city has entered the register of forgetfulness. L’Aquila still sits destroyed, its inhabitants still awaiting for a much needed help that the government should have provided a long time ago.

As to conform with the amnesic status of these locations, the imprint of Ciano’s face is not made to last: it will gradually fade, until disappearing altogether, symbolically erasing the memory of this fascist hero. If Today Was Your Last Day and Tomorrow Was Today, Ciano Pool and Ciano Poll thus reverse the very meaning of archaeological practice: rather than unearthing and preserving, they call for burial, destruction and erasure.

Az.Namusn.Art’s actions thus seem to proffer amnesia as the

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only possible legacy for this controversial piece of heritage.

As a whole, thus the Anarchaeology Series consists of different artworks ⠄ interventions that adopt different and contrasting attitudes to (an)archaeological practice. We can identify a tension between the adoption of the language, protocols and methodologies proper to classical archaeology, albeit in a rebellious and militant way (as in Anarchaeology and Nurra A.T), and the inversion of such practices in the form of a destructive, amnesiac impulse (as in Ciano Pool, Ciano Poll and If Today Was Your Last Day and Tomorrow Was Today). What connects them, however, is the fact that, through anarchaeological gestures, they make us question how a society chooses to remember and to forget. By materially reclaiming the past – either in the form of gaining access to an archaeological site by force, illegally excavating a symbol of the present economical and ecological disaster of a specific geopolitical location, or advocating for

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the destruction of a piece of heritage – the Az.Namusn.Art collective brings to light the way in which historical amnesia is created by silencing and obliterating the present, rather than the past itself. If we dig enough, we can always recover some traces of the past. What is at stake, though, is the way we go about making choices for the future, from our present position. The way we act for the future. Ultimately and tangibly, however, what these artworks show us is simpler than this: we can reclaim the past and act for the future only if, collectively, we make the choice of re-appropriating the present.

To conclude, what overall unifies the Anarchaeological Series and Az.Namusn.Art’s work as a whole, is a commitment to bring to public attention – in the present - the links between environmental pollution and unregulated industrial and military developments, calling into question the way in which Sardinian’s land is negotiated and exploited at the

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expenses of its population. This is an issue that has great urgency, considering that Sardinia keeps being marketed as an idyllic holiday destination with crystalline seawaters and breathtaking coastlines. Sardinia’s image is impressed in the collective unconscious in the form of a beautiful postcard: an image that is able to cover up its tragic situation and, most of all, is able to distance the world from the struggles of its inhabitants. Projects such as Anarchaeology Series can help, perhaps, to make this illusory image fade away and to turn our attention towards what has actually been happening in Sardinia, in much the same way as Ciano’s imprint will be hopefully doing in L’Aquila, once installed

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Wa t e r e d d o w n m o d e r n i t y. I c o n o c l a s t i c f l u i d s i n A l ex a n d e r A p ó s t o l ’s a r c h i v a l mediations

by Lisa Blackmore

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Introduction — In Venezuela during the 1940s and 50s, a potent apparatus was set in motion to construct a new image of the nation under the banner of order and progress. Global discourses of aesthetic modernism in architecture and art were fused with State-sponsored planning to create road networks, mass housing and infrastructure in health and education. To underscore that this dream of a “New Venezuela” was actually coming true, the transformed nationscape was meticulously recorded through films, photographs and texts that filled institutional archives and fuelled a state propaganda machine that measured the nation’s progress by its public works projects. This thrust toward development followed the end of Juan Vicente Gómez’s dictatorship (1908-35) and was endorsed by military and civilian governments from Venezuela’s precariously incipient democracy, yet it gathered speed during the decade-long military dictatorship t hat began

(1) Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

(2) The Libro negro de la dictadura. Venezuela bajo el signo del terror 1948-1952 was compiled by political dissidents José Agustín Catalá, Simón Alberto Consalvi, Ramón J. Velásquez, and Leonardo Ruiz Pineda for the Comité Ejecutivo Nacional Del Partido Acción Democrática.

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in November 1948. Alongside the quest for modernization fuelled by burgeoning oil revenues managed by what Fernando Coronil aptly designated the “magical state”, the military rulers instituted the customary hallmarks of authoritarianism: press censorship, proscription of political parties, persecution, torture and the co-opting of national culture at the service of the dictatorship. ( 1 ) In short, the postcard-views of the modern Nueva Venezuela came at political costs that clandestine groups sought to make visible, not least through the covert circulation of the Libro negro de la dictadura (1952): the “black book” that detailed the abuses the dictatorship inflicted on dissidents. ( 2 ) Yet despite this turbulent political history, recent exhibitions, books and documentaries have tended to celebrate the 1940s and 50s as a golden era inscribed historiographically as “Venezuelan modernity”. To shore up architectural prodigy,

A View from El Silencio towards the Centro Simón Bolívar, Caracas. These two spaces have often been interpreted respectively as emblems of early signs of modernity in Venezuela and a later, fuller realization of architectural and urban modernity. Image courtesy Archivo Histórico de Miraflores, undated.

B Detail of façade of building. Image courtesy Archivo Histórico de Miraflores, undated.

(3) Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans.

Tom Conley (New York: Colombia University Press, 1988). An exception, however, can be found in the recent documentary written and directed by Carlos Oteyza, Tiempos de dictadura.

Tiempos de Marcos Pérez Jiménez (Cinesa, 2012).

(4) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (London: University of California Press, 1988), 34-42.

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the same institutional archives that the military state used to found its celebratory narrative of progress have been mined to unearth visual indexes of pristine vistas of modernity that have again been “set apart”, following Michel de Certeau, to write an exemplary account of tropical modernism that largely brackets out its stormy political undercurrents. ( 3 ) Thus, given that images from the archives originally created to generate political legitimacy for the dictatorship ( f i g . A & B ) often left traces of human presence hors-scène, they are convenient for productions of architectural heritage that draw on blueprint vistas of modernity to circumvent the fissures inherent in actual encounters and mis-encounters with modern spaces.

In contrast to commemorations that mute the interface of architecture and politics, much recent Venezuelan art reassesses more critically the legacy of aesthetic modernity

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and urban modernization. Sixty years on, Caracas’ urban fabric is a complex patchwork of iconographies and contingencies that are constantly torn and sutured. To draw on Michel de Certeau’s taxonomy of spatial dynamics, in contrast to the impeccable archival images that reflect the official “strategies” that promised immediate modernization through construction, legacies of the modern today attest to the provisional “tactics” that residents devise to inhabit the city. ( 4 ) This recognition of lived space impacts on physical sites and how they are thought. For instance, El Helicoide, a spiral colossus carved out of the Roca Tarpeya, was conceived as a shopping mall and exhibition centre but it now houses military intelligence police, a shift in use that inspired a project organised by Celeste Olalquiaga to review the significance of this modern icon ( f i g .

C ) . Similarly, Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s Ciudad Universitaria is a host to constantly fluctuating tensions: in February 2014 it

(5) The artist’s website presents his photographic series and fragments of his videos. See: http:// s107238961.onlinehome.us/index.php.

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was the site of violent protests then in June was the nexus for the Architecture Faculty’s Trienal de Investigación that featured artist-led projects and residencies to re-engage with Villanueva’s modernist icon, the superbloque.

Understood as sites of contention, modern spaces resist the reductive dichotomy of utopia vs. dystopia and its potential for inducing nostalgic responses to the past or limiting appraisals of the present to disillusionment. In this context, the work of Alexander Apóstol exemplifies the potential for productive confrontations with the ideological underpinnings of the will to modernise and the legacy of this project today. Among the central aspects of Apóstol’s practice is the mediation of archival documents whose truth-telling pretensions are redeployed to critical ends. In Residente pulido (2001) he digitally seals photographs of modern buildings turning them into inaccessible monoliths; in Fontainebleau (2003)

C Archive photographs of El Helicoide, June 1989.

The image forms part of a research archive being created by Proyecto Helicoide. Image courtesy Archivo Bornhorst ⁄ Proyecto Helicoide.

D Plan for Superbloque, installation and workshop led by filmmaker Mariana Rondón, organised

by BACKROOM Caracas in collaboration with adjkm architecture collective at the Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad Central de Venezuela, June 2014. Image courtesy http://adjkm.com.

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he superimposes spurting geysers onto archive images of fountains, conflating the imagery of oil extraction and modern monuments, and in Documental (2005) he re-stages a screening of 1950s newsreel in the liminal scenario of a present-day Caracas shanty. ( 5 ) Crucially, in Apóstol’s dialogue with the modern, water

appears as a leitmotif, acting anarchivally as an iconoclastic and cannibalistic force whose monumental fluidity signals a “watering down” of the scenographies of modernization promoted by the military state in mid-twentieth century Venezuela. Of course, relationships between water and city have long existed. In H 20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1986), Ivan Illich traces William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of blood’s circulation in the human organism through to the later paradigm of urban sanitization that advocated water as a force to remove the detritus of human life. Illich invests water

E Superbloque, installation view. Image courtesy Florencia Alvarado ∕ ©BACKROOMCaracas.

F Photograph of concrete-lined stream, circa 1950s. Image courtesy Archivo Histórico de Miraflores.

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management with biopolitical resonance, arguing that fluid purification set the stage for a new homo economicus in tune with Enlightenment rationalism: a productive subject who would inhabit a deodorized city cleansed of filth and odours.

Following precursory urban overhauls like Antonio Guzmán Blanco’s Hausmann-inspired renovations in the nineteenth century, this hygienic conception of space was manifested in sanitation projects in 1940s Venezuela when governments invested in urbanization as a route to crafting healthy, rational political subjects who would naturally pursue superación – that is, moral, economic, and social improvement.

In this context, the fact that sealing riverbeds to create concrete canals, sewerage, river dredging, aqueducts, and hydropower were flagship government projects hardly seems coincidental for Venezuela’s modernity was built on fluid foundations.

After the nation’s semi-liquid oil was extracted from the

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subsoil, its revenues funded subterranean infrastructure and modern constructions at ground level; then, as emblematic water features were incorporated into works, they served as monumental focal points that would obliquely reference the “magical sate” that made such progress possible. It is these connections between water, state and modernization that can be tracked through Fontainebleau and Caracas Suite, two series by Apóstol where iconographic liquids rise to the surface.

D i a l ogu e with Alexa n d e r Ap ó sto l A A

by L is a Blackmore L B N°1 Fo nt ainebleau

( 6 ) Memoria del Ministerio de Sanidad y Asistencia Social, iv-v cited in Juan José Martín Frec Crítica, 1994), 365-6. ( 7 ) Ivan Illich, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1986) in Malcolm M Alfonzo-Sierra, “Caracas se ha hecho una suite de su propia modernidad en ruinas”, El Nacion (Spring, 1986): 24. ( I M G ) Alexander Apóstol, Las Toninas I, a partir de Alfredo Boulton, from t

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L i s a B l a c k m o r e I’ve been thinking about your altered fountains in Fontainebleau that depicts, among other spaces, the El Silencio area (1945). This is the space that is usually cited to illustrate Caracas’ “early modernity” in architecture, but it is significant that it was also the site where Medina Angarita’s government re-envisaged Caracas as a hygienic space and sought to reverse El Silencio’s reputation as an insalubrious den of prostitution, “one of the most dangerous sources of infection and venereal contagion in the capital and a grave menace to public health ( 6 ) .” Villanueva’s residential buildings were therefore a remedy whose premise recalls Ivich’s description of the city “as a place that must be constantly washed” and where “dwelling by people is transformed into housing for people ( 7 ) .”

In Fontainebleau you redeploy archival photographs by Alfredo Boulton and alter their status as indexes that, as Barthes has it, authenticate a given reality. Your heightened jets suggest a mnemonic function: the fountain as a spectacle to remind the viewers of the monumental redefinition of

urban space and the state’s harnessing of natural forces. Your parodic exaltation of the fountain reminds me of something you said in an interview in 2004 when you stated that Caracas’ modernist appearance was “nothing but a mirage, that today is a broken mirror. Oil turned into water for us ( 8 ) .” In Fontainebleau, you seem to give the fountain and water a spectral function like the heterotopic mirror Foucault describes as “a placeless place. (…) an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface ( 9 ) .”Do you see a relationship between territory, oil, city and water?

A l e x a n d e r A p ó s t o l It’s interesting that there is a close relationship between territory, oil, city and water.

Alongside the different political plans that Venezuela has undergone since oil was first extracted, these phenomena have not only shaped the city of Caracas, they have moulded the national mindset.

When Pérez Jiménez came to power he heeded recommendations made by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean,

chilla, Planes, planos y projectos para Venezuela: 1908-1958 (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Acta iles & Tim Hall (eds), The City Cultures Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 358. ( 8 ) Edgar nal, 26 July 2004. ( 9 ) Michel Foucault & Jay Miskowiev, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16-1 the series Fontainebleau (2003). Image courtesy the artist.

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which claimed a country would develop once its infrastructure was in place. In other words, the habit does make the monk. That is why, thanks to oil revenues, the country was endowed with such impressive infrastructure for its time. However, key aspects related to human development were overlooked and today we are paying dearly for that.

The famous expression “sow the oil” (sembrar el petróleo) that Venezuelan intellectual and politician Arturo Uslar Pietri coined in 1936 advocated that oil income should be invested in other economic and social areas in the nation. Yet the expression itself contains an idea of territoriality, which situates it in a space and sets up a parallel with land. That territoriality has been defined purely through oil earnings, bypassing Uslar Pietri’s recommendations and any other parameters that might have been applied to it. Those are the origins of Venezuela’s direct relationship with money and not with production, manifested in the ongoing quest to constitute different territorial spaces which represent that money.

For Juan Vicente Gómez, who started oil exploitation, that space was the city of Maracay. For Pérez Jiménez, it was Caracas. Then the democratic regimes after the dictatorship made unsuccessful attempts at

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decentralization. Finally, Chávez designated the shanties located in Caracas’ geographical limits as his site of power. For all these rulers, defining a space has been vital, both in terms of their political discourses and their plans of action. However, those spaces were not necessarily defined by a mindset or by means of production.

Instead, what ultimately defines them is either the abundance or lack of money. This recalls the successful presidential campaign by Luis Herrera Campins in 1978 that singled out the hitherto unknown low-income area of Caucagüita with the obvious slogan ¿Dónde están los reales? —“Where’s the dosh?”

That is how abstract oil —which people have no way of measuring or attaining, that nobody sees or touches, and that only demonstrates to its citizens its overwhelming economic force— ends up defining not just territory, its cities or our idea of nationhood, but first and foremost the mindset of all Venezuelans, leaders and subjects alike. We all believe we are the direct heirs to a fantasy that has turned into water, that is, the idea that the State is a wellspring whose function is to dole out money.

Today we don’t have a plan nor any food, and our general plan by default is to keep on being heirs.

N °2 E l Hel ic oide

L B In El Helicoide (Caracas Suite, 2003) water is a destructive force that erases an archival remnant of a building that epitomised the quest for model modernity. The video enforces a dually unstable contingency: the squirting water erodes the contemporary image of the building while inferring that the conceptual foundations of modernity have also been washed away. Nothing remains.

What is more, the fact that you’re not working with an historic archive but a digital archivo (file) seems to negate

any representation of modern space.

This attack on memory is compelling.

In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates presents knowledge as a block of wax that stores mnemonic images (archival documents, if you will) that enable us to recall a concept. By contrast, if “the impression is rubbed out or imperfectly made, [it] is forgotten, and not known ( 1 0 ) .” If archival inscriptions are the condition for recollection, perhaps the iconoclastic “watering down” of El Helicoide infers collective lacunae, which begs the

( 1 0 ) Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), Gutenberg.org Posted 17 November 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1726/1726.txt ( I M G ) Alexander Apóstol, El Helicoide, from the series Caracas Suite, video still, (2003).

Image courtesy the artist.

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question of what has been forgotten or what this erasure suppresses. Does the fragility and mutability of the digital file (archivo) of El Helicoide undercut the city as a vehicle for grand narratives? Could we read the work as the somatization of collective amnesia and ⁄ or the incapacity to write a collective history based on the foundational remnants of modernity?

A A Memories of the city and the country are intensely bound up with archives and images of Caracas’ modernity where everything seemed to work and the Venezuelan dream was apparently here to stay. In reality, however, it never arrived. That development never happened and since then constant social, economic or political deficiencies have been successively dressed up in populist stopgaps paid for with oil, which end up creating a mindset driven by immediacy that in turn cultivates political models entrenched in clientelism and corruption.

In El Helicoide we are faced with an unfinished building for which a series of incomplete or sinister projects have been proposed and a fountain of water that drenches its digital printed image, erasing its ink, symbolically annulling its memory and confronting us with this building’s sole function: to be an enduring reminder of the inefficiency of our system and our

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immense capacity to imagine and to desire.

There are many ways of preserving memories but that doesn’t mean they are effective. The architect of Nazism, Albert Speer, went far enough to realise that an imposing ruin was the best expression of an equally imposing civilization or system. That is the premise that governs El Helicoide: the city ends up encircling it like Angkor Wat’s daring, improvised trees in Cambodia.

Today th e bui l di n g i s h ome to possi bl y th e be st exampl e of th e St ate we h ave : an unf i n i sh e d mode r n an d f utu r i sti c c on str u c t i o n su r rou n de d by sh anti e s, w h i c h h ous e s th e pol i ti c al pol i c e’s off i c e s an d c e l l s. This is evidently a compelling demonstration of a State that is just as improvised but that is also under military and police control; a State that is buttressed by a society in debt, that is bound to the deficiencies suffered by its increasing marginal sectors.

Inside that building, histories are erased and manipulated; outside it, people fantasise about what it is or should be, but those stories or desires are just as manipulated.

Those are the traps that memory lays for us. Just as the figure of [Venezuelan liberator] Simón Bolívar

dances to the tune of whoever plays the mambo, Venezuelan modernity is a complex space that —despite being remembered nostalgically— speaks to us of the nation and territory in absolutely military terms.

This is the base upon which any form of ideological framework rests or converges, from the right-wing military dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez to the left-wing civic-military autocracy of Hugo Chávez.

The immediacy of digital files (archivos) and the immediacy with which they can be manipulated or erased is a clear metaphor for our relation to memory, to the construction of our narratives and the way that some are substituted by others with the same speed and the same epic tone. U ltim ately in th e d i g i t al era , ide o logies an d politic s are a c ontinua l ret weet an d memor y and d e sires a re ever-ch an gin g dea d l ette r s (papel mojado).

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A g a i n s t H i s t o r i o g ra p h i c a l P o s i t i v i s m : S o m e S ke p t i c a l R e f l e c t i o n s a b o u t t h e A r c h i v a l Fe t i s h i s m

by Giulia Bassi

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This brief reflection is intended as an invitation to reconsider the role of the researcher, specifically the one of the historian, in relation to archival sources.

As an historian and assistant archivist (I have worked for several years at the archive of the Florentine Federation of the Italian Communist Party kept at the Istituto Gramsci Toscano of which I am a member), I could not but observe the obsessive, almost fetishistic use we make of the archival source. Such a use of the archive is related to the birth of modern historiography and the emergence of a certain scientific deontology, of the rules, the method, the footnotes: each statement must be strictly (and positivistically) documented, ‘tested’ according to the criteria of the reconstruction of a past which is ‘certain’, ‘static’, ‘given’, ‘immutable’. Hence the historian’s task is to restore the facts or, better, to make the facts spontaneously emerge from the data. This nineteenth-century inspired vision

A Proletari di tutti i paesi unitevi, membership card, 1945. Courtesy of Istituto Gramsci Toscano.

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of the sources is, on the one hand, the product of a series of political operations in the broadest sense of the term, on the other, it involves the perpetration through reproduction of a series of preconceptions underlying the ‘scientific’ research.

In the first place, this approach can only start from the researcher’s misconception of a key factor in founding and forming an archive, that is the (initial but constantly renewed) tension between discarding and preserving. The stored materials are necessarily the product of the archivist’s and the institution’s choices, that are, by definition, a form of selection; for such a reason, these materials should not be considered as the objective mirror of the supposed reality one would like to preserve. Only some documents, some ‘data’ and therefore some historical ‘events’ are deemed worthy of being kept, and therefore remembered, and ultimately taken into account within a research that claims to be scientific and

(1) Hayden White, Forme di storia (Roma: Carocci, 2006), 12.

(2) Francesco Benigno, Parole nel tempo. Un lessico per pensare la storia (Roma: Viella, 2013).

(3) The Italian Communist Party, founded in 1921 in Livorno and dissolved in 1991 as a result of an internal restructuring which inaugurated a new course, and of the international events that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, was one of the main protagonists of anti-fascism and Italian Resistance. Since the Republican era (1945), it has been one of the mass-based parties of the Italian political system. Among its most famous leaders are Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti (founders) and Enrico Berlinguer.

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objective. Secondly, it assumes the conception of the source as ‘artefact’ or ‘data’ (an index and self-evident, irrefutable bearer of truth) and not as a set of ‘facts’ + ‘meaning’. Although theoretical researches did and do not lack, it is on these basis that historiography has started to be defined more by its empirical work than by its exegetical value. Often one ends up (and many have ended up) either looking for something new that archives can tell us about the past or tracking down new details to add up to the well-known facts, so that the resulting historiographic research may be considered historic only because it deals with the past. ( 1 ) Thirdly, one tends to forget the always incomplete nature of the sources, and the consequently temporary, provisional and contingent aspect of the historical representations, thus denying the most intimate function of history as narrative and preferring instead an history as faithful chronicle of facts.

B Pace Indipendenza Unità democratica Giustizia sociale, membership card, 1948. Courtesy of Istituto Gramsci Toscano.

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It seems to me therefore that the success of a historiographic work is most often connected with the author’s ability or his ⁄ her luck in discovering unknown documents or new documental funds, than to its hermeneutic strength, that is to its ability, for instance, of identifying new possible readings in old sources. This use of the archive as a sort of museum for preserving pre-arranged and carefully displayed data (or facts), which are in turn the product of a certain prescriptive epistemological narrative, on one side makes of the archive a device that tends to perpetuate a given epistemic status, on the other side, as an effect, it turns the historiographic work into a mere product of handicraft. ( 2 ) Now, my research focuses on the textual analysis of the political lexicon, specifically within the context of the institutional left wing (Partito Comunista Italiano – Italian Communist Party ( 3 ) ) and the non-institutional leftist movements (magazines

(4) John R. Searle, Making the social world: the structure of human civilization (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

(5) Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

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and other political movements of the seventies in Italy). I am currently conducting a research on the semantic variations of the word ‘popolo’ (‘people’) within the Italian Communist discourse between 1943 and 1989, a word or concept that needs to be understood as ‘declaration of status function’, that is as a linguistic act endowed with the power of creating shared ontologies. ( 4 ) This entails a critical observation of the political, or more generally ‘narrative’ use ( 5 ) that has been made of such a category in the PCI political communication. I will try to make this clearer. With my work, I do not intend to find or elaborate a more or less ‘correct’, more or less ‘objective’ definition of the term, but rather, by taking into account the historical relativity of such ‘appropriateness’, I aim to highlight precisely the forms of this relativity, and the ways in which certain political agents have used this important appellation from time to time – descriptive, prescriptive or persuasive use,

(6) Charles L . Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

(7) Maurizio Viroli, Per amore della patria.

Patriottismo e nazionalismo nella storia (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001)

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narrative use – ( 6 ) . For this reason, my aim is to reconstruct historically the ways in which the word ‘popolo’ has been one of the cornerstones of the Communist political rhetoric, meaning a language that tends to stir passions rather than looking for the rational consensus of impersonal agents ( 7 ) , and to assess the ways in which this word has been ‘contracted’ and forced into an ambiguous semantics. Indeed, I believe that the ‘political’, ‘linguistic’, ‘cultural’ creation of specific categories of representation of identity should be regarded as coextensive with the ‘historical’ and ‘social’ formation of those same categories.

The way I approach the texts, both written and iconic, is rigorously interdisciplinary, in-between history and linguistics.

More specifically, for the analysis of speeches I use a qualitative and quantitative approach inspired by the work developed by the team-group at the Lancaster University, directed by

(8) I presented an example of this kind of ‘hybrid’ approach at the conference ‘Iconic Images in Modern Italy: Politics, Culture and Society’ organized with the support of Asmi in London (22-23 November 2013) in a paper entitled: Partito d’Immagine. Per un’analisi storico-semiotica delle forme di rappresentazione del partito comunista italiano (1945-1980). [The Party of the Image.

For a historical-semiotic analysis of the forms of representation of the Italian Communist Party (1945-1980)]. I did a comparative historicalsemiotic analysis of a sample of PCI membership cards and posters produced between the Second World War and the 1980s, by confronting their ‘literal’ or descriptive meaning (denotative or iconographic plan) with their symbolic, instrumental and political meaning (connotative or iconological plan).

(9) The use of the concept ‘discourse’ entails a certain number of epistemological problematics due to its large use in different research fields. In my work I use it both in a strictly linguistic sense: the discursive forms and structures of a specific text; and in a more philosophical-conceptual one: discourse as a ‘device’ in a Foucauldian sense, that is as a set of ‘practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak’, Michel Foucault: L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). ( 10 ) Paul Baker, Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis (London: Continuum, 2006).

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Paul Baker, Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak (Corpora in Discourse Analysis or CDA), supplemented with elements of semantics, pragmatic and the theories of social and political representation; whereas, for the analysis of images, I complement my historiographic knowledge with semiotic analysis. ( 8 ) In my opinion, an interdisciplinary methodological approach of this sort, on the one hand, is able to vouch for the existence of certain discourses at a quantitative level , ( 9 ) enabling the detection of linguistic patterns and the uncovering, by examining closely the collocations, concordances and so on, of the ‘hidden’ meanings of the lexical terms. On the other hand, by making possible the simultaneous observation of an extensive corpus, it provides linguistic evidences for the ‘prevalence ⁄ majority’ or ‘resistance ⁄ minority’ of certain discourses, while showing a wide range of ideological positions not otherwise detectable. ( 1 0 )

( 11 ) Broadly speaking, John L . Austin, How to do things with words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). ( 12 ) Mauro La Torre, Le parole che contano.

Proposte di analisi testuale automatizzata (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2005). ( 13 ) Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980); Bourdieu , Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

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My general aim is, indeed, to investigate and explain the link between representative devices, the militants’ orientation and the rearrangement of language, a link that is strategical as long as the political parties have used it ‘to make politics with words’ ( 1 1 ) , hoping in this way to mobilize, encourage, stimulate and steer precisely those same ‘followers’ that they had helped to denote and connote (and therefore to ‘come into being’) in the first place. This is because I do believe that a text, any text, is to be understood as a meaningful communication unit, that has neither consistentia sibi nor value sub specie aeternitatis, but that, according to stochastic processes of communication that take place within specific communicative situations ( 1 2 ) , it is rather the result of certain social motivations and practices. ( 1 3 ) One can already see how this research is far from an empiric historiographical approach. No document can be considered

C Untitled, Enrico Berlinguer at National ‘Festa de l’Unità’, Florence 1975. Photo: Rodrigo Pais & Cesare (Red) Giorgetti. Courtesy of Istituto Gramsci Toscano.

D L’elettronica nell’arte, Local ‘Festa de l’Unità’, promotional poster, Florence undated (probably late 1970s-early 1980s). Courtesy of Istituto Gramsci Toscano.

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statically in an objective sense: to describe and analyse a text as an actualization of the speech that one wants to investigate within a precise context, means first of all to look at the ecosystem and the logics of the field ( 1 4 ) where it did come to light. For this same reason, I argue that it is essential to refer not only to the intralinguistic content of the text, but and even more so to its extralinguistic context: by giving account for the communicative situation, by clearly defining the speakers and recipients of the message, by challenging the channels and media through which the communication took place, and the political objectives, broadly speaking, of such a communication, and by focusing only at a later stage on the analysis of the content. The joint use that I make of qualitative and quantitative analysis, in a perspective that is always both historic and historiographic, is precisely intended to illuminate the relationships, connections, and the power

( 14 ) Pierre Bourdieu, Les Régles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

( 15 ) L’Unità is the newspaper of the Communist Party, founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924. ( 16 ≥ )

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dynamics between language and social world within the framework of the linguistic community of reference (in my case, the Italian Communist Party).

My methodology, therefore, is as much interdisciplinary as multifaceted and ‘problematic’ is my interest in and use of the archival sources. Firstly, the journalistic sources: l’Unità ( 1 5 ) , the newspaper of the party, and the magazines such as Rinascita, Vie Nuove, Noi donne, Nuova generazione. ( 1 6 ) Secondly, the political speeches: those pronounced at the closure of the electoral campaigns or the interventions at the national congresses, key moments during which the parties talked to their electorate (within electoral campaigns) or to their members (congress); the minutes of the Party Direction meetings; the documents produced by the administrative office and the political office; the materials related to the ‘Festa de l’Unità’ and to the Institute of Communist Studies.

( 16 ) Rinascita was one of the most important magazines of the party. Founded in 1944 as a monthly publication and converted into a weekly magazine in 1962, it was essentially directed to the intellectuals of the party as an instrument for the development and dissemination of its cultural politics, and as an ‘ideologic guide’ to the movement, in the first place, and to the PCI in the second. Other magazines had a more nationalpopular character, such as: Vie nuove, founded by Longo in 1946 and changed for layout and titling (Giorni-Vie nuove) in 1971; and Noi donne, the magazine of UDI (Unione donne italiane – Union of Italian Women), characterized by a simple, direct and emotionally engaging language, in which large space was reserved to the serial story, fashion, cooking columns and the readers’

letters. The severe tone and layout suited to a well-educated and informed public was typical of Nuova generazione, the weekly magazine of the Italian Young Communists and, from 1968, the biweekly body of FGCI (Federazione giovanile comunista italiana – Italian Communist Youth Federation). ( 17 ) The ‘Festa de l’Unità’ were local, provincial, national or thematic festivals, organized every year by the Italian Communist Party, initially to finance the newspaper of the party. The Istituto di Studi Comunisti or Scuola delle Frattocchie (Institute for Communist Studies) was the centre for the political and ideological formation of the party leaders at different levels.

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( 1 7 ) Thirdly, the iconographic resources (electoral programs, posters, membership cards, propaganda images), in order to make concepts manifest not only in their discursive resonance, but also, through visual means, in their ‘corporeal’ dimension and ‘emotional’ charge, especially considering that since the 1960s and particularly during the 1970s the use of the image in different forms of communication has taken on more and more importance.

In view of what has just been said, therefore, my research, rather than on events and historical facts, aims at focusing on the narratives, or better, the metanarratives that have been made about those same events and facts, proceeding from a non static use of the archival sources intended as revelation of the not evident meanings conveyed. I am not a ‘black swan’; I am part of a more general research trend that, although considering the archives unavoidable, aims to dignify

E Untitled, National ‘Festa delle donne l’Unità’, promotional poster, Rome 1980. Courtesy of Istituto Gramsci Toscano

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F Guerra termonucleare. Strano gioco, l’unica mossa vincente è non giocare, political poster, 1984. Courtesy of Istituto Gramsci Toscano

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a historiography that does not sacralise them, but is able to value the researcher’s intuition and interpretation, and that, if anything, looks for new kinds of sources whose heuristic potential has not yet been much explored.

A r t C r i t i c i s m 2 .0 I n t r o d u c t i o n t o a c o m p a r a t i v e st u d y b e t w e e n t h e st y l e s of Roman painting and contemporary visual arts from 1950 to 2013

by Pa o l o C h i a s e r a

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The present article is an extract and introduction to the book Art Criticism. II Stile. (Publication forthcoming).

Art Criticism 2.0 is a working hypothesis for the languages of art. It analyses the symbolic forms of civilisation by comparing the works produced by peoples in different ages with the aim of formulating a critical judgement.

By multiplying images against an intimately anti-historical background, the digital age is well suited to a reflection on the relationship between different forms of content. Like this, by means of a topology that is capable of binding (logos), different works can be brought together in a critical discourse, in order ultimately to express conceptuality and not just dispersion.

The method of study that Aby Warburg developed in the early years of the last century involved the construction of tables containing images, which were related to each other through

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research. Warburg himself referred to this as “nameless science”. In actual fact, by defining a knowledge of totality, Warburg’s Atlas is highly philosophical and poetic, since it is speculative, and his studies go well beyond the limits of science, which separates in order to analyse.

Today, as never before in the history of man, the potential for “surfing” through images does indeed make it possible to create atlases (Atlantes), which is to say mental maps of knowledge and vision. Images tell us of life experience and, acting as phenomenological indices, they reflect the different ways in which humanity has approached numbers and geometry, and thus also space and time.

As works of man, images precede and define language, pointing to life in all its most diverse manifestations.

As a philosophy of life, phenomenology is of fundamental importance for understanding works of art. The truth that

(1) Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale II, Gallimard (1974). 64 (2) “The signature lies in the essence and it is like a lute that remains silent, mute and misunderstood, but if someone plays it, then it can be heard”.

Giorgio Agamben, Signatura Rerum – Sul metodo, Bollati Boringhieri (2008). 44 (3) Oswald Spengler, Il tramonto dell’ Occidente, Longanesi editore (2008). 261-273

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emerges through art is the truth of being. Being and thinking are as one. Works of art are the product of our thoughts, and the signs of works are our truth. This fact concerns the individual physiognomy of every work as a product of our thoughts, but this does not fully explain the totality of the essence of the work for it only defines it on the basis of a correlation between subject and object, excluding the existence of the work beyond any perceptive intention. The phenomenological perspective thus gives a necessary but only partial understanding. Émile Benveniste explained how there is a hiatus between sign and discourse, between the semiotic and the semantic dimension, and that it represents the challenge and potential for knowledge. ( 1 ) This is a gap to be filled, through signs, with something that never appears per se, but that is contained within a creed, the canon of a vision, divination, erudition and interpretation. In relation to something else, the sign becomes

A1 Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1951. Oil on canvas, 236,9 Ă— 120,7 cm.

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A2 Pompei, Casa di Sallustio, atrium. II century BC.

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a signature and language to those who are able to recognise it. ( 2 ) Through hermeneutics we set out our point of view. Art criticism has been fundamentally Kantian, for it has accepted the existence of an individual capable of formulating a judgement on precise a priori forms. Immanuel Kant puts forward plane geometry as an a priori form of intuition, which is to say that man intuitively perceives plane figures. And yet, if we think of the various geometries that have been theorised, the Kantian point of view loses its uniqueness, even while not entering into contradiction. If we replace plane geometry with non-Euclidean geometries, different points of view are possible. ( 3 ) It is important to reflect on the shift in production that can be established by a different canon of vision. Hans Belting recently drew attention to the cultural complexity of the exegesis of perspective, once again posing the question of

(4) Hans Belting, I Canoni dello Sguardo – Storia della Cultura Visiva tra Oriente ed Occidente, Bollati Boringhieri (2010)

(6) Ibid. 1

(5) Quentin Meillassoux, Time without Becoming (Middlesex University: London) (2008). 3

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complexity from the point of view of East and West, based on the optical studies developed in Arab lands and later Latinised under the term Perspectiva. ( 4 ) With the abandonment of the certainty of a sole truth, our age has opened up to the possibility of approaching works of art in their complexity. And we cannot reach this complexity critically and poetically. Just recently, speculative materialism examined the need to get out of the trap of correlationism to question the nature of what Quentin Meillassoux calls “arche-fossile”, which is to say “a material indicating traces of ‘ancestral phenomena’ anterior even to the emergence of life”. ( 5 ) Similarly, Art criticism 2.0 aims to extend our understanding of the work with respect to a more complex taxonomy, which considers the use of cognitive paradigms that are not directly perceptible by a priori forms of intuition.

It is possible, for example, to use non-Euclidean geometries

B1 Jannis Kounellis, Senza Titolo, 1967. Parrot, iron

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B2 Pompei, Casa del Naviglio, painted frieze of I Style. Half of the II century BC

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as a theoretical instrument that can consider the work of art as part of a more complex world of forms. Here the work of art is defined on the one hand as some sort of organism with a life of its own, which – to use a Spenglerian term – we can call physiognomic and, on the other, as an organism that forms part of a development independent from the subject, which we refer to as systematic.

We perceive particular physiognomics through the use of Kantian reasoning and we can indicate general systematics by suspending these categories and turning to a morphological type of reflection.

Quentin Meillassoux points out how correlationism uses the so-called “argument from the circle”, so that “every objection against correlationism is an objection produced by your thinking, and so dependent upon it”. ( 6 ) He counters this with the argument that “the correlationist must admit that we can

(7) Ibid. 8

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positively think of a possibility which is essentially independent of the correlation, since this is precisely the possibility of the non-being of the correlation”. ( 7 ) The working theory on this principle of thinkability appears below, in the possibility of assessing works of art from a different point of view. Starting out from artefacts, Art Criticism 2.0 intends to reread the history of art by means of a topology that, through critical and poetic discourse, can lead to new hypotheses about art, which might be referred to as “non-Euclidean”. Works of art are particular physiognomic elements that are typical of their age, and are thus unrepeatable, and yet they refer back to a common systematics which, in its independence from the subject, can clarify aspects linked to the “ancestral” eternity of the world of forms. This systematics is the outcome of the theoretical acceptance of non-Euclidean geometries.

If worked out consistently, this working hypothesis should

C1 Giulio Paolini, Quadri di una esposizione, 2013.

Installation view at the Italian Pavillion. 55th Biennale di Venezia “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico”

C2 Pompei, Villa dei Misteri, atrium, North wall.

Decorative scheme of II style. 80 BC

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shed light on why distant works are able to communicate with us today. Marx himself, in his Grundrisse (1.4.1), contradicts all his own theoretical constructions when, to his surprise, he admits to the eternal “truth” of some works of art.

Here, consistent reference is made to the definition of a topology – a construction capable of evolving in an orderly fashion (ratio). The topology is the connection, the compactness and the continuity that can be established between two conceptual domains, in such a way as to define an interaction between two wholes that have already been identified, and that we here refer to as X and Y. A cognitive process capable of creating an abstraction in the language of X, in such a way as to define a cognitive domain, is used to establish a conceptual domain of X. This X domain is compared with a Y domain in order to verify any possible isomorphism.

In his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas

(8) Douglas Hofstader, Godel, Escher, Bach: un’Eterna Ghirlanda Brillante, Adelphi (2007). 54 (9) Ibid. 54

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Hofstadter talks of isomorphism, “when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where ‘corresponding’ means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures.” ( 8 ) As “transformation that preserves information”, ( 9 ) isomorphism defines what two entities (works, ages, events) have in common in their respective physiognomies.

Every age defines its own particular physiognomy through a structure that develops systematically and the comparative study of which – as the content of a similarity that goes beyond the restricted sectors of science – also embraces both philosophy and art. As an understanding of the totality rather than of the part, these forms of knowledge can clarify aspects of the part itself. Art Criticism 2.0 considers works of art in the light of a possible relationship, which may not

( 10 ) George Didi Hubermann clarified the methodological premises of Aby Warburg’s nameless science in L’Immagine Insepolta – Aby Warburg, la memoria dei fantasmi e la storia dell’arte, Bollati Boringhieri (2006). See especially the third part, The Image-Symptom, 416-455

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be entirely demonstrable, but which nevertheless cannot be denied either. It offers a non-Euclidean interpretation of art, in other words a criticism that considers the theoretical possibility of other possible geometries. In non-Euclidean geometries, two parallel lines to infinity can and indeed must meet. Similarly, works meet outside of time, within the space of critical reflection. This convergence makes it possible to clarify aspects that go beyond the artist’s intentionality, as the initial instance of comprehension, and investigate the works of art within a possible “absolute” dimension.

Art Criticism 2.0 compares works, seeing them from a perspective that is different from that of Kantian-style knowledge-certainty, adopting Warburg’s methodology which includes the non-linear tragicality of the symptom that endlessly returns. ( 1 0 ) It is not a matter of departing from thought, for reality itself

D1 Tauba Auerbach, Untitled (Fold), 2012. Acrylic on canvas ∕ Wooden stretcher 152.4 × 114.3 cm

D2 Pompei, Casa del Sacello iliaco, East wall.

40-25 a.C.

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appears as something thought in Giovanni Gentile’s theoretical work. It is rather a matter of understanding to what degree the thought falsifies itself. For us, for example, the world is based on theoretical perspectives, which to immediate perception do not appear in terms of succinct judgement that can refer to the a priori forms of intuition, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Art Criticism 2.0 does not intend to separate the world from its authoritative witness, the human being, but rather to work towards the world, verifying theoretical posits produced primarily by thought. These may include nonEuclidean geometries which, due to their complexity, elude the direct experience of thought, but which can be reached through the use of theoretical analysis. The theory of relativity itself is built upon the complexity of these geometries. For example, it maintains that the past is no less real than the future or the present.

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If everything is intimately interconnected – and it is – then what is it that links Bach and Polyclitus, for example, or Bach and Gödel? Through what working hypotheses can we experience works? Oswald Spengler and Douglas Hofstadter have raised new questions and opened up new possible directions, uniting what appeared to be divided. Their research shows how it is possible to establish new parameters of critical judgement, bringing a new dimension to the issue of the “mystery” of works of art.

Brief Introduction to II Stile In his monumental work The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler outlines a history of civilisations, adopting a vision that shifts the focus from man to history, bringing about an authentic revolution in favour of the latter. Spengler’s subject is history as the systematic development of an organism, to

( 11 ) Goethe identifies two laws: the law of inner nature, on the basis of which plants are constituted, and the law of external (environmental) circumstances, by which plants are modified. J.W. Göethe, La morfologia delle piante, Ugo Guanda editore (2008), 100 ( 12 ) Ibid. 312

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which man can oppose no decision-making faculty. In their recurrent schemes, each population has its own unique and unrepeatable physiognomy, just as a plant is in some way different from the others, even though it shares their same destiny. Taking Goethe’s morphology of plants as a point of reference for his work, ( 1 1 ) Spengler formulates a series of synchronic tables of spiritual, political and artistic periods, comparing Egyptian, Indian and Chinese civilisations, as well as those of the ancient and of the modern Western world. The conceptuality of Spengler’s tables is based on an intuition first revealed by Goethe in his conversations with Winckelmann.

This concerns the morphology of “living nature”, according to which each birth, viewed as an imperceptible origin, is followed by slow development, splendid perfection, and then decadence. ( 1 2 ) As Spengler sees it, civilisations, like all organic beings, are subject to this destiny. Illustrated in The

( 13 ) Spengler, Il tramonto dell’ Occidente, 179

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Decline of the West, this working hypothesis makes it possible to refer to past civilisations in order to make a prognosis about the future of our contemporary world.

In Spengler’s tables, the premise on which the forecast for the future is based is the recognition of a predetermination, according to which “every civilisation has a duration which is always the same, and which always unfolds with the insistence of a symbol”. ( 1 3 ) The starting point for the reflection that inspired this study is the synchronism, as put forward by Spengler, between the period that should unfold between AD 2000 and 2200, and the Roman period from 100 BC to AD 100. I analysed Roman civilisation during the Late Republic period and drew a parallel with the contemporary age, from 1950 to the present day. I comparatively examined the approach of the Roman man and the contemporary man to space, as a physical and political

E1 Laure Prouvost, Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells, 2013 mixed media.

Detail of installation at fondazione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia.

E2 Pompei, Casa del Braccial d’Oro, triclinium, North wall. 35 – 45 d.C.

E1

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entity, and his relationship with desire, time, music, literature and technology, defining two or more conceptual domains in order to verify any possible isomorphism.

Spengler’s theory is daunting for an artist who believes in his ability to create works, because it induces a great fear: what would remain for the artist if his ability to create were removed?

The artist is an inventor (past part. of invenire), in the sense that he “finds”. And so, like a sleuth, work started on following the traces left by works of art, to understand where we are going. The outcome is that we have entered a period that, for contemporary society, represents a new Renaissance. In Roman society, this “Renaissance” finds a direct parallel in the Second Style of painting (about 100-20 BC).

The intention is not to establish a logic in history, but rather to assess how much more ground we have before us – in other words, the works of human beings.

( 14 ) Giambattisa Vico, La scienza nuova, Bompiani (2012)

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Giambattista Vico has pointed out how when man first stood erect, he became aware of the sky. The sky became manifest to him and this was the beginning of all astronomy, of all cosmogonic order and of man’s own perception of himself as a historical being. ( 1 4 ) Man’s desire to express himself has led to the development, over time, of the language that we call art. Art strives to be an act of freedom and a manifestation of our own creative ability. Could art exist without creation?

With the unprejudicedness of an artist, these were the premises for an outline comparison between the visual art of our age, since 1950, and Roman painting from about 120 to 80 BC. The tables here included are a selection of a group of 29 comparative charts. Each chart was created associating a Roman domus with a work of art. The illustrations for the archaeological part emerged from a meeting with Mr Domenico Esposito, who, with his long experience, helped make this study possible.

dOCUMENTA 13 – The Guidebook ⁄ Das Begleitbuch – Catalog ⁄ Katalog 4 ⁄ 3 — by Alessandro Di Pietro

S H OWC A S E

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dOCUMENTA 13 – The Guidebook ∕ Das Begleitbuch – Catalog ∕ Katalog 4 ∕ 3 is an improper publication. It emerges as a surplus from the triad of catalogues of Documenta (13) The Book of Books (1 ∕ 3), Das Logbuch ∕ The Logbook (2 ∕ 3), Das Begleitbuch ∕ The Guidebook (3 ∕ 3) issued by the German publishing house Hatie Cantz Verlag in 2012.

4 ∕ 3 is an improper fraction, that is to say the numerator is greater than the denominator. The result that ensues from this operation is a number that is greater than the integer, and, as a matter of fact, we can deduce that this is not a real fraction. The 4 ∕ 3 fraction is called improper because it is “improperly” used as if it were a fraction. In the same way, The Guidebook ∕ Das Begleitbuch 4 ∕ 3 aims to be “improperly” used as if it were one of the official Documenta catalogues.

During my stay in Kassel, between the 4 th and the 6th July 2012 on the occasion of Documenta 13, I used a ‘mobile scanner’ 01 to record and independently catalogue the artworks displayed in the museum spaces. In so doing, I activated a strategy of profanation which was both an act of personal appropriation and an illicit theft. The performative action was not approved of and, therefore, had to be carried out quickly and warily, as not to arouse the security guards’ suspicion. I moved in the exhibition halls as a thief who, brushing against the works’ surfaces, takes away digital strips of their skin.

The robberies took place in the different venues where Documenta 13 was set, following a path that was planned according to the order of the catalogue’s index: Friedericiarum and Rotunda in Fridericianum: The “Brain”; Neue Galerie; Documenta Halle;

01 In the archivization of images, I consider it necessary to give subjectivity to the means of production. In this sense, I found in the manual scanner a medium that corresponds to these characteristics, since it does not consider the frame, excluding the choices associated with photographic composition.

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Ottoneum; Orangerie; Karlsaue Park.

In its systematic approach, the action took the shape of a subjective archivization of the personal experience of an art exhibition.

Considering that Documenta 13 was structured by its curator Carolyn Kristof Bakargiev according what may be defined as an archival sensibility, my operation seemed to bring about a productive clash between objective and institutional modes of archiving and subjective processes of remapping.

Once back in Italy, I started to identify the filched fragments and refer them back to their legitimate authors by simply trying to remember, from spatial and temporal clues, the place and moment in which I had picked them up. The data memory embedded within these pieces of information – in the form of digital files – helped me in the process by providing the date and time of creation. As any collection of material, the snatched scans claimed for a new destination and impelled me to think what “new use” I could make of the result of this profanation.

Inspired by Agamben’s praise of profanation, I realized that the desecrated objects had to undergo a movement of re-sacralization. I decided, thus, for a process of radical mimesis, one that was functional to the fruition of images and at the same time able to reflect their nature of pure ‘information’. I opted for the accurate reconstruction of the exhibition’s guide with a significant difference: the original images were replaced by the unofficial scans that I had sneaked out. In The Guidebook ∕ Das Begleitbuch 4 ∕ 3 each scan is put in connection with its own reference artist, and right after it is linked to the index again.

Two years later, with the meaningful distance of a asynchronic delay, the book asks for being re-inserted within the formal flows of circulation and distribution at whose fringes it was born. The “improper” publication requires to be used as if it were a proper one.

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Alessandro Di Pietro

produced by

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N째 12

Ryan Gander geb. / b. 1976 in Chester (England ) lebt / lives in London

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Detail: example of layout

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Detail: notes ∕ index

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B et ween the archive a n d t h e un a rc hi vable

by Wol fgang Ernst

( 1 ) Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, in: October 110, Fall 2004, 3-22. ( 2 ) Quoted from the “cal The insistence of the archive, in: Quaderns Portàtils (Portable Notebooks) no. 29, e-book, ed. quaderns-portatils-wolfgang-ernst. ( 4 ) Bruno Lessard: The ANARCHIVE Project. In: Converge no. 3, 315-331. ( I M G ) The (still) tangible digital archive: Magnetic Core Memory (RAM) from th core one bit) and as address structure (the x ⁄ y grid). Ph (Ines Liszko) from the Media Archae

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N ° 1 Inter rupting t h e an archival d i s c ou rs e Fro m t he a rchive to th e an arch ival i mp u ls e a nd ba ck again

In academic, cultural and aesthetic discourses on storage and memory, a central epistemological focus has emerged: the “archival impulse”, manifested in an “idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events” ( 1 ) - even if this does not relate really to the archive but to its playful simulation, mistaking archival aura for the rigid power of the symbolic order. In more adventurous avantgardistic manifestos, this archive has recently been counter-balanced by a celebration of the “anarchive”. The anarchival here serves “as a form of counterknowledge production, as a dynamic that unlocks, liberates the archive” ( 2 ) . This artistic and theoretical gesture of liberation (including some

of my own previous writings ( 3 ) ) has developed a momentum of its own which now asks for flipping back, since it would be media-politically naive to confuse the current hypertextual World Wide Web with its underlying techno-mathematical substructures of algorithms embedded in the storageprogrammable computer and its literally dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) which are more strictly “archival” than ever in its media-archaeological realities.

Maybe digital media art tends to the anarchival memory aesthetics ( 4 ) ; the digital media archive does not. Rather than submitting to the political phantasies of anarchic memory politics, let us remember that a most rigid archival order is still the basis for digital memory and communication technologies.

I n bet we e n th e arc h i val an d th e an arc h i val , th e dy n arc h i ve h as e me rg e d. D i g i t al dat a n e e d c on st a nt up-dati n g ( i n te r ms of s oft ware ) a nd “mi g rati on” ( i n te r ms of h ardwa re to e mbody th e m) . From th at de ri ves a c h an g e f rom th e i de al of arc h i va l ete r n i t y to pe r man e nt c h an g e.

ll for papers” to the current Mnemoscape issue. ( 3 ) W. E., Aura and Temporality:

by MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) 2013 http://www.macba.cat/en/ ence. The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15 (2009) he first generation of electronic computers. The archive is present both as content (each ological Fund at Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin.

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B ot h t h e a rchive in it s media b as e an d t he a rchive as dis c our s e h ave li terally got i n m otion , as is in d ic ate d by te r m s like t he “process ual” a rc h i ve. ( 5 ) By definition, the “storage-programmable” vonNeumann-architecture of current digital computers interlaces real-time processing and intermediary storage of data. Micro-archiving the present has become the signature of digital culture in times of online communication media.

Conceptually, the dynamic archive is relational not only in a structural or spatial but as well in a temporal sense. But how can the concept of the archive be opened to heterochronic experimentation and at the same time fulfil its traditional task of keeping a well-defined order intact for transmission into future memory?

In classic taxonomy (especially in the Prussian state tradition), the primary task of the archivist is to keep the configuration of incoming record groups intact. This clashes with the data bank aesthetics of the digital age which is characterized

by the mutability not only of the archival records themselves but of its archival infrastructure (both hardware and software) as well. Thereby the traditionally enduring time base of the archive itself is replaced with restless reconfiguration. A rc h i val e n dura nce (os c i l l ati n g bet we e n h i stor i c al a nd e ntropi c al ti me ) i s u n de r mi n e d w hen a re c ord i s n ot f i xe d any more o n a pe r man e nt mate r i al storag e med i u m l i ke parc h me nt bu t t ake s pl ac e s e l e c tron i c al l y ; f l ow (th e c ur re nt ) re pl ac e s th e st ati c i n s c r i pti on .

Michel Foucault’s Archéologie du Savoir (1969) once translated the Kantean a priori of sensation (space and time) into his definition of l’archive as the laws of what can be expressed and administrated at all. “It is also possible, however, to understand technological a prioris in a technological sense.” ( 6 ) Media archaeology understands the archive and the “archival drive” (Mackenzie) in its Kantean and Foucauldian sense: as the a priori of the techno-logical event, the condition of possibility for electronic signals and data to circulate

( 5 ) Eivind Røssaak (ed.), The Archive in Motion. New Conceptions of the Archive in Contempor Gramophone – Film – Typewriter (transl. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young ⁄ Michael Wutz, Stanford, C Archive and Dead-time in Information Network, in: Convergence vol. 3, no. 2 (1997), 59-71 (61) Protocol. How Control Exits after Decentralization, Cambridge, Mass. ⁄ London (MIT) 2004. An techno-capitalism in current media culture is the microblogging platform www.tumblr.com for “Digital Culture” within the Tate ⁄ RCA Collaborative Research Project Cultural Value and the D

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and be retrieved at all, “generated by the referencing and storage structures of the networks themselves” ( 7 ) .

The Internet oscillates between the archive and the anarchive, depending on the media-archaeological or phenomenological point of view. ( 8 ) Toward s a n info r m ation al aesth etic s of a rc h iva l va lue: (Neg-)Entropy and d i s ⁄ o rde r in tim es of bin ar y i nfo r m atio n pro cess in g. ( 9 )

Radical media archaeology discovers the informational value from within the objects stored in an archive, such as the histograms in digital image processing, calculating the aesthetic entropy of an image. The economic concept of chaotic store administration corresponds with this hashing approach. Let us therefore redefine archival value in terms of information theory.

The current fascination with the “anarchival” as discursive category corresponds with a functional core criterium of techno-mathematical communication theory: the signal-

to-noise ratio. Twentieth century communication engineering has resulted in a positive connotation of what culturally had been rejected for centuries: noise. In a parallel sense, disorder (from the point of view of second order cybernetics) has become a situation not to be afraid of any more.

Mathematical statistics and stochastics has been developed in the nineteenth century to cope with death rates in life insurance policies (on the level of social administration) and with the laws of thermodynamics in energy management. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics each system tends, when mapped upon the temporal axis, to increasing disorder. Ludwig Boltzmann’s calculus of entropy (the tendency from order to disorder as a physical manifestation of the arrow of time) has been used as a model for measuring the degree of probabilities in digital information theory.

In terms of techno-mathematical communication theory, archival value

rary Thought and New Media Practices, Oslo (Novus) 2010. ( 6 ) Friedrich A. Kittler, Cal. (Stanford UP) 1999: 117 ( 7 ) Adrian Mackenzie, The Mortality of the Virtual. Real-time, ) ( 8 ) For a media-archaeological analysis of the World Wide Web see Alexander Galloway, n example of anarchival order clustering which is the spatio-temporal configuration of r photo, text and video. ( 9 ) Some of these thoughts have been presented at the session Digital. Practice, Politcs and Theory, May 20, 2014, Tate Britain, London.

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looses its apparent semantic meaning in favour of statistical probabilities.

It may be written or spoken words, pictures or music: The information source in this model “selects a desired message out of a set of possible messages” ( 1 0 ) - a virtual archive, with the notion of the archive itself turned upside down. This concept of information applies not to the individual meaningful message but rather to the situation as a whole order wrenched from disorder. ( 1 1 ) Archives are indeed not simply storage as time channel but primarily defined by their records filtering function which is a quality that automated search engines mostly lack. Archival value creation such as algorithmic data mining can thus be claimed as negative entropy.

Whereas statistics is still an “archival” (list-based) approach, stochastics (deciphered as Markov chains) shifts the past ⁄ present correlation to the present ⁄ future by predictive analytics.

( 1 0 ) Warren Weaver, Some recent contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication Urbana ⁄ Chicago (University of Illinois Press) 1963, 1-28 (7) ( 1 1 ) Heinz von Foerster ∕ Margare biological and social systems. Transactions of the Ninth Conference March 20-21, 1952, New Y ( 1 2 ) Some of the following arguments have been developed in my talk “The Sonic Time Machi the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, University of Aarhus, May 22, 2014 ( 1 3 ) Ki

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N °2 “S ound” and t h e u n-archivable (1 2) A d i ffe re nt k ind of record in g: Th e p h ono gra phic un -arc h ive

Is there something like a sono-cultural archive? Sonic memory still tends to be neglected in visual culture studies. Previo us to p h on ograp h ic rec o rd i ng, vo ice an d s oun d h ave e s c a p ed t he a rch ive, sin c e it is rathe r un- a rchival in it s tem poral e s s e nce ; it is ra d ic ally sign alb as e d , not symbolic ally ordered by al p h ab et ic writin g an d mus ic al s c ore not at i on . Sound and speech have been the most “immaterial” cultural articulation (before the electronic age) so far. Let us therefore apply a Derridean différance, a significant shift which makes sense only in alphabetic scripture rather than phonetic enunciation: the “unarchive”

instead of the “anarchive”.

The archival regime traditionally consists of alphabetic symbols both in its content (textual records) and its administration in meta-data (the inventory). But with technical audio signal registration, a different kind of recording emerged with does not belong to the symbolical regime any more - until with binary digitization the “Gutenberg Galaxy” re(oc)curred again. The phonograph with its simple metal needle permits the recording of vibrations that human ears previously could not memorize and writing hands never caught up with. The continuous undulations recorded by the gramophone and the audiotape keep the signature of the real, or physically raw audio material, replacing literature by sound engineering. ( 1 3 ) The phonographically recorded acoustic real “forms the waste or residue that neither the mirror of the imaginary nor the grid of the symbolic can catch: the physiological accidents and stochastic disorder of bodies” ( 1 4 ) .

n (*1949), in: Claude E. Shannon ⁄ same author, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, et Mead ∕ Hans Lukas Teuber (eds.), Cybernetics. Circular causal and feedback mechanisms in York, N. Y., New York (Macy) 1953, “A note by the editors”, xiii. ine. Explicit Sound and implicit Sinicity in Terms of Media-Epistemological Knowledge” at ttler 1999: 180. ( 1 4 ) Kittler 1999: 15 f.

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The BBC World Service once launched the “Save our Sounds” project, looking to “archivize” sounds that may soon be lost due to the post-industrical world. ( 1 5 ) But different from the archive as symbolic order composed of records in historiographic, that is in alphabetic notation, such subtextual, signal-based recording is an unarchival modality: the sound of times past.

So far historiography has privileged the readable archival records (in accordance with McLuhan’s diagnosis of the Gutenberg Galaxy being dominated by visual knowledge). But since Edison’s phonograph, sound, noise and voices can be technically recorded and thus memorized. The phonograph (respectively Emile Berliner’s grammophone) registers an impressive range of acoustic events.

Whereas musical notation (developed by the Greeks and Guido of Arezzo in analogy to the alphabet) is still symbolic recording, the phonograph registers the physically real signal.

While alphabetic symbolism reduces acoustic events to the “musical”

(harmonic) order, the register of the acoustic real encompasses the whole range of the sonic, including noise and arhythmical temporal phase shifting such as “swing” – non-archival sound in analog storage as opposed to the archival order of musical notation.

As a research method, an archaeology of listening to past sound differs from Hearing History ( 1 6 ) ; it does not simply aim to widen the range of source material for historians. Let us propose something like a “diagrammatic listening”, with the diagram having no indexical or iconic relation to a concrete sound, but rather represents a structural sound-image (German Hörbild).

So-called Humanities have for the longest time not been concerned with the physically real – due to the limits of hermeneutics as textoriented method, to the privileging of narrative as dominant form of representation and because of an essential lack of non-symbolic recording media of the real. Battles have been described and interpreted,

( 1 5 ) But caution, this is not an archive: As long as an algorithm is missing which rules the tran random collection. ( 1 6 ) Mark M. Smith (ed.), Hearing History. A Reader, Athens (University of G Geisteswissenschaften bei Dilthey aus mediengschichtlicher Sicht, in: Claus Pias (ed.), Medie The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. James Churchill, Bloomington, Ind of the Word, London 1982.

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but the real noise and smell of a combat could not be recorded for the archive and transmitted until the arrival of the Edison phonograph. ( 1 7 ) P h o no gra phy did n ot just p rov i d e histo ric al res earch with a new ki n d of s o urce mater ial; it rathe r ar t i c u late d new, rath er ah istor ic al for m s of te mpo r (e)alit y on th e leve l of t h e physic a lly an d math ematic al l y rea l (w h ich is, literally, tech n o-log y) .

With the phonograph, hearing became attentive of all kinds of sounds, regardless of their source, quality and meaning(lessness), just like the inner ear impassionately transduces vibrations analogue to electromechanical sound reproduction. With phonographic recording, listening became ahistorical, subject to the time-invariant reproducibility of acoustic signals. The phonograph provided sound production with a different kind of unhistorical index (in terms of Walter Benjamin), preserving its unique “auratic” experience, keeping the aural quality (in both senses) of its time quality since a tone exists only in

transience, that is: as Husserlean “time-object” ( 1 8 ) .

The Greek term mousiké encompassed not only musical articulation in the narrow sense, but dance and poetry as well. The essential operation to create a memory of such “time-based” arts, of course, is recording: either as symbolical archive (by dance notation in the tradition of writing as graphé), or by media endowed with the capacity to un-archivally register the physically real audiovisual signals.

Re me mbe r i n g past s on osph e re s by te c h n i c al me di a

The earliest effort of sound recording was a symbolic machine: language written in the phonetic alphabet.

But the presence-generating power of technically recorded voices differs fundamentally from the gramaphonic notation of speech in the vocal alphabet. With the refinement of the Phenician alphabet to the Greek phonetic alphabet (which Ong actually called a “technologizing of the word” ( 1 9 ) ), acoustic articulation

nsition of sound provenience to permanent storage, it is just an idiosyncratic Georgia Press) 2004. ( 1 7 ) Bernhard Siegert, Das Leben zählt nicht. Natur- und en. Dreizehn Vorträge zur Medienkultur, Weimar 1999, 161-182 (175). ( 1 8 ) Edmund Husserl, d. (Indiana University Press) 1964 ( 1 9 ) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing

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(speech, singing, oral poetry) became symbolically recordable for re-play.

But symbolic notation (musical scores end in paper archives) differs from signal recording (which rather result in media collections): “Musical notation [...] is about eternity: it kills music as a natural phenomenon in order to conserve it — once it is broken — as a spiritual entity: The survival of music in its persistence presupposes the killing of its here and now [...].” ( 2 0 ) Edison cylinders need archival protection, for sure. But once Caruso’s voice is articulated by re-playing its recording on Edison cylinder, human perception forgets about the archive. Historians among us will probably responded with reservations on this point, stressing that there is no unmediated access to the past. But let us not forget: Te chno lo gies of memor y, ad d re s s ing o ur p erception on th e affe c t i ve rather th an cogn itive leve l , s u c c e ssf ully d i ssim ulate th e arc h ive.

“Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film

rolls.” ( 2 1 ) But there is another, rather un-archival type of sound and noise sources - which is close to what humanities and classical studies know since long as the archaeological object. “Hearing the cracks and noises of a phonograph recording may initially enlighten their historical status as ‘mechanical’ instruments.” ( 2 2 ) In terms of the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon 1948), such cracks belong to the kind of “noise” introduced by the channel of transmission itself which is here: the channel called time.

When listening to ancient recordings from Edison wax cylinders, nowadays being restored with technomathematical software as digital re-production of sound, we might ask with Michel Foucault (in a slightly different context ( 2 3 ) ): Message or noise?

To perform a psycho-acoustic experiment of a very simple kind, let us imagine an ancient phonographic recording of a song or voice. Whatever the timbre might seem, one will

( 2 0 ) Theodor W. Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion, Frankfurt ⁄ M. (Suh ( 2 1 ) Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone - Film - Typrewriter, Stanford (UP) 1999, 5. ( 2 2 ) Karin Bijst Century, Cambridge, Mass. ⁄ London (The MIT Press) 2008, 26. ( 2 3 ) Michel Foucault, Messag (559). ( 2 4 ) http://savethesounds.info ( 2 5 ) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past. Cultural Origin

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acoustically hallucinate as well the scratching, the noise of the recording apparatus. True media archaeology starts here: The phonograph as media artefact does not only preserve the memory of cultural semantics but “archivizes” past technical knowledge as well, a kind of frozen media knowledge embodied in engineering and waiting to be un-revealed by media-archaeological consciousness.

Listening to technology really means close listening to the technological artefact itself. The Museum of Endangered Sounds takes care of the sound of “dead media” ( 2 4 ) , and the Technical Committee of IASA in its recommendations from December 2005 insists that the originally intended signal is just one part of an archival audio record; accidental artefacts like noise and distortion are part of it as well - be it because of faults in the recording process itself or as a result of later damage caused in transmission. Both kind of signals, the semantic and the Proustean mémoire involontaire, message and noise, need

to be preserved in media-archival conservation ethics.

Media-archaeological listening to the sonic past is rather about the technical signifier than the musical signified. When we listen to an ancient phonographic record, the audible past ( 2 5 ) very often refers rather to the noise of the recording device (the ancient wax cylinder) than the recorded voice or music. Here, the medium talks both on the level of enunciation and of reference. What do we hear most: the cultural content (the formerly recorded songs) or the medium massage such as limitations in vocal bandwidth, even noise (the wax cylinder scratch and groove)?

With digital sampling and processing of audio-signals, noise resulting from the frictions of analog technologies is usually significantly filtered, thus: silenced. But the former noise is being replaced by an even more endangering challenge: the “quantizing noise” on the very bitcritical (technical) level of signal sampling, and the migration problems

hrkamp) 2001, as quoted by G. Mazzola, Musical performance. Springer, Heidelberg 2010. terveld, Mechanical Sound. Technology, culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth ge ou bruit? [*1966], in: same author, Dits et Écrits, vol. I, Paris (Gallimard) 1994, 557-560 ns of Sound Reproduction, Durham ⁄ London (Duke University Press) 2003.

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of digital media data and the physical vulnerability of electronic storage media in terms of institutional (cultural) sound tradition. This is not just a technical question, it has an epistemological dimension as well.

(26) C o d a : M ate ria l entropy of th e signa l ver sus symb olic (arc h ival) en d u rance of s oun d record in g

The video artist Bill Viola once pointed out “the current shift from analogue’s sequential waves to digital’s recombinant codes” in technology. ( 2 7 ) Sampling and quantizing of acoustic signals analytically transforms the time signal into the information of frequencies which is the condition for technical re-synthesis (Fourier transformation). Digitalization means a radical transformation in the ontology of the sound record - from the physical signal to a matrix (chart, list) of its numerical values. Media culture turns from phonocentrism to mathematics. All of a sudden, the archive recurs, but in a more rigid

shape than previous scriptural record offices: the techno-mathematical archive.

When the transfer techniques of audio carriers changes from technically extended writing such as analog phonography to calculation (digitization), this is not just another version of the materialities of tradition, but a conceptual change.

From that moment on, material tradition is not just function of a linear time base any more (the speed of history), but a new, basically atemporal dimension.

Against the noise of the physical world, techno-logical, that is “digital” culture poses a negentropic insistence, a negation of decay and passing-away.

Digital copies of digital records can indeed be produced almost without loss of data (except the quantization noise). Music on Compact Disc or a digital video can be reproduced frequently with stable quality which was utopian in recent times of analogue recording on magnetic tape. The secret of this temporal

( 2 6 ) Arild Fetveit, Medium-Specific Noise, in: Liv Hausken (ed.), Thinking Media Aesthetics. M ( 2 7 ) Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning” in: Dan Lander ⁄ Micah Lexier (eds.), Sound

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invulnerability is that it is just (physical representations of) numbers which are written on the Compact Disc; even after a thousand copies thus a zero stays zero and one remains one.

But past sound should not just be “restored” by applying digital filters; it rather wants to be remembered with all the traces of decay which has been part of its tradition, its mediatemporal (entropic) characteristics must be archivized as well. Let us remain close to the physical record.

If sonic articulation from the past is to be preserved digitally, its temporal (entropic) behaviour must be archivized as well - like the scratch, the noise of an ancient Edison phonographic cylinder which is achieved by over-sampling. Let us stay tuned to this non-archival sonicity.

Media Studies, Film Studies and the Arts, Frankfurt ⁄ M. et al. (Peter Lang) 2013, 189-215.

by Artists, Toronto ∕ Banff (Art Metropole & Walter Phillips Gallery), 1990, 39-54 (47).

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E x h i b i t i o n R e v i e w : S i m o n S t a r l i n g ’s “A n a l o g u e A n a l o g i e s” a t t h e Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

by Yv o n n e B i a l e k

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The museum is a treacherous archive. The visitor to its gallery halls perceives its vibrancy, its miraculous ability to defy the flow of time by placing ancient masterpieces in the contemporary viewer’s visual reality. Once accessed by the gaze, history and presentness exist simultaneously in displayed objects. Nevertheless, in the presence of these objects, the beholder senses her own timeliness as opposed to their timelessness. By virtue of its archival nature, the museum is constantly driven by its more obscured facets, where not vividness, but preservation, and not flux, but stillness, are at work. In its typically unseen storage and documentation areas, all capacities prevent time from running. The museum’s archival drive motivated Theodor Adorno’s analogy between the museum and the mausoleum, which for him “are connected by more than phonetic association.”( 1 ) Indeed, once one crosses the border between the visible and invisible museum

(1) Adorno, Theodor W. “Valéry Proust Museum.”

In Prisms. London: Neville Spearman, 1967, p. 175.

(2) Cf. Azoulay, Ariella. “Archive.” Http://www. politicalconcepts.org/issue1/archive/.

Accessed July 17, 2014.

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space, the temperature drops significantly. Reminiscent of a cold room, these spaces attempt to slow down all processes of decay. Custodians are the sentries to those chambers. Like the archons of the archive, they act as gatekeepers for what comes in and out of storage, what pieces form a collection, what will remain, what will be preserved and become history. ( 2 ) Museum administration carefully conceals ulterior spaces and acts from the eye of the beholder, whose field of vision stops at the “staff only” door plate. An invitation to enter the sacred halls behind the public area is therefore regarded as a privileged distinction.

In 2013, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Germany) invited Turner Prize-winner Simon Starling to create a solo show within an exhibition series called “Open Stores,” allowing the artist to create new work in relation to the museum’s storage space.

The invitation permitted access to the institution’s obscured

A Simon Starling: Analogue Analogies (Under small yellow horses, Double Patti, Christ entombed [in an archival envelope], etc.), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 26 10 2013 ∕ 23 3 2014. Installation view.

Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

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and highly regulated preservation areas. Despite the rarity of such an opportunity, Starling nevertheless chose another approach. Instead of devoting himself to the stored artworks he chose to work with the museum’s photographic department, its analog darkroom and archive.

From today’s perspective, the history of photographic documentation at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart starts in 1927.

Ten glass plates form this year – installation views, showing the hanging of the collection – are preserved. The museum was equipped with its own photo studio in the 1920s and it must be assumed that more photographic images existed from this time. But this archival trace both starts and ends at this point. A huge gap in this inventory is correlated to the WWII, during which the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart was nearly entirely destroyed by bombing. The photographic documentation reconstituted in the years following the war, growing rapidly

B Simon Starling: Analogue Analogies (Under small yellow horses, Double Patti, Christ entombed [in an archival envelope], etc.), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 26 10 2013 ∕ 23 3 2014. Installation view.

Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

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and today occupying two storage rooms filled with negatives, slides, and prints, covering a wide range of analog photo material.

The photographic medium itself faced severe shifts in the past decades: digitalization transformed photography profoundly, entirely morphing its methods and materials, retaining merely a name for a process which describes how light forms an image.

This transformation was circulating in the air during Starling’s preparations for the show at the Staatsgalerie. The analog photo laboratory and all of its equipment was to be dismantled and replaced by digital reproduction technologies; the original equipment was therefore extraneous. The copy camera and the darkroom, once standard for the development of analog photographs, were about to be disassembled, vanishing from the museum’s invisible area, adding yet another end to the media history of photography.

C Simon Starling: Analogue Analogies (Under small yellow horses, Double Patti, Christ entombed [in an archival envelope], etc.), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 26 10 2013 ∕ 23 3 2014. Installation view.

Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

D Simon Starling: Analogue Analogies (Under small yellow horses, Double Patti, Christ entombed [in an archival envelope], etc.), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 26 10 2013 ∕ 23 3 2014. Installation view.

Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

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Analogue Analogies ( 3 ) begins with this end. The two-part exhibition included the hanging of 43 unframed inkjet-prints displaying reproductions of archival photographs from the museum’s analog photo archive and the replica of the photo laboratory as a spatial installation. While the first room, welllit and filled with photographic prints of the archival images of artworks and exhibitions reanimated the archive through re-mediation and exposure, the second gloomy gallery contrasted this effect by recreating the museum’s darkroom in the form of a one-to-one reproduction. The museum’s archival impulse was put on the display in this show, and Starling elaborated on this essential impulse by emphasizing the role of the archive’s favored method of documentation, the medium of photography, which plays the leading role in his argumentation.

The first part of the show presented reproduced photographs

(3) Simon Starling, Analogue Analogies (Under small yellow horses, Double Patti, Christ entombed [in an archival envelope], etc.), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 26.10.2013–23.3.2014.

(4) Copy camera by Sixt Walldorf, Type RK 65 CNC ⁄ A0 (1994), cf.: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and Alice Koegel, eds. Offenes Depot #3. Simon Starling.

Analogue Analogies (Under Small Yellow Horses, Double Patti, Christ Entombed [in an Archival Envelope], etc. Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2013, p. 58.

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of artworks and exhibitions. From the analog photographic archive, Starling chose a variety of paper prints of iconic works from the collection, such as Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Metaphysical Interior with Large Factory (1916) or Franz Gertsch’s Patti Smith V (1979). There were the reproductions of works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Franz Marc and Louise Lawler, among others. Starling also selected installation views of the presentation of the collection from different time periods, in which artworks appear in different constellations, such as Duane Hanson’s Cleaning Lady (1972) shown sitting on the floor in between Sigmar Polke’s Zirkus (1966) and Gerhard Richter’s Kuh II in one image and in between Jackson Pollock’s Abstrakte Komposition (1965) and Mark Tobey’s Entering New York (1964) in another. All paper prints from the archive were reproduced in the same manner: they were taken with the museum’s professional analog copy camera ( 4 ) against a black

E Simon Starling, Darkroom (transplant), 2013.

Reconstruction of the darkroom of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart on a scale of 1:1 with parts from the original darkroom equipment, pipelines, electronic devices, vinyl plates, wallpaper, paint, wood, 212,2 × 423,2 × 292,2 cm. Courtesy Simon Starling and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

(5) Image 1 (6) Image 2

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background framed on the top with a grayscale. The newly produced black-and-white pictures hanging in the exhibition were inkjet-prints measuring 150 × 120 cm. Their internal configuration cited the process of image making through photography and it questioned these pictures’status as copies.

Seen from the museum’s logic, which distinguishes between artworks and copies and therefore separates originals from reproductions, in this case Starling’s images were copies of copies.

Furthermore, these pictures pointed toward the archival impulse of the museum and the role of photography in cataloging its inventory and documenting the history of its exhibitions. In the analog era, the results of this archival gesture were material items, pictures with a physical presence, forming a second archive consisting of the original’s doppelgängers. Starling demonstrated how carefully these

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are preserved in the photographic archive with the example of Wilhelm Tübner’s Christus im Grabe (1874), whose reproduction was photographed inside its parchment sleeve and provided with the title Christ Entombed (in an Archival Envelope). ( 5 ) The double metaphor of preservation – of the body, object and photograph – underlying this picture clearly refers to the museum’s and the camera’s analogous abilities to stop the march of time. But, Starling also identifies this as an illusion in the second part of the exhibition, where the dying media of analog photography is carried to its grave.

Here, in a dimmed gallery, a second gloomy space materialized.

Inside a room-sized wooden box, the Staatsgalerie’s dismantled darkroom was rebuilt as an exact replica, partly with original equipment. ( 6 ) The visitors were able to look inside this replica, to see it from a certain viewpoint, but they were not allowed to enter it. Typical red light bulbs

F Simon Starling , Christ entombed [in an archival envelope], 2013. Inkjet print, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy Simon Starling and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

(7) Cf. footnote 1.

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illuminated the interior so that it took some time for the eye to adjust and perceive the details of the installation. Starling transformed the equipment of a functioning darkroom for analog photography into an artwork, displayed in an exhibition.

Again, Adorno comes to mind: “The German word ‘museal’ (‘museumlike’), has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying.” ( 7 ) The stillness and setup of the installation, foregrounding its gloomy atmosphere, obviously called for an interpretation connecting the darkroom to a tomb; in doing so, it showcased the death of analog photography inside its final resting place. But it built another bridge to Adorno’s quote, too: Starling’s analogy here signifies that the museum, in its archival drive, is capable of swallowing its own parts and converting them into artworks.

As a way out of this circle, Starling seemed to present a hint

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driven by an anarchival impulse: at the far end of the darkroom installation, a light box hung on the wall, switched on to display an image which, from its prescribed viewing distance, was hardly recognizable. However, a close look revealed it to be an installation view of the very exhibition the beholder just visited, connecting the now to then, the present and former experience as well as the two parts of the exhibition, thanks to the photographic image. This vital sign, a picture within the metaphor of decay, both concluded and continued the multiple analogies formulated in the exhibition, opening up yet another alternative for its many readings.

Institute of Contemporary Arts: (An)Archival Experiment

by L u c y B a y l e y, B e n C r a n f i e l d and Anne Massey

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Hal Foster, in An Archival Impulse, cites the Independent Group (IG) as an example of an earlier interest in modes of archival representation. However, it is not what Foster describes as the IG’s ‘pin–board aesthetic’ that makes them interesting for a re–exploration, but rather the way in which the diversity of the IG’s practices from exhibition making and design, to writing and slide shows, are rendered as absent presences within the archive of the IG’s institutional home, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Derrida’s (an) archival fever is a drive to preserve and remember, repeat and destroy. This contradictory impulse is inherent within an institute dedicated to the pursuit of the amnesiac timeframe of the ‘contemporary’, whilst being wedded to the historical trajectories of practices inherent in the designation of the ‘arts’.

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(An) archival Impulse, in Hal Foster’s terms, is about disrupting the stability of the archive in order to produce other narratives or possibilities. Recognising the destructive and generative potential of the archive, the idealistic aspects of the ICA may be recovered as a utopian trace in the archive that could never be fully realised in the heterotopia of the arts–space.

Three researchers, Anne Massey, Lucy Bayley and Ben Cranfield have created such a destabilising experiment in archival reanimation through an illustrated conversation.

Starting with a single archival fragment they have added to it another item from across the ICA’s history, extending the possibilities present across the non–indexical space and time of imagined connection.

(1) Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Vol 110 (Autumn 2004) p4.

A Growth and Form exhibition proposal, © Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Courtesy Collection Anne Massey

(2) Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Vol 110 (Autumn 2004) p21.

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Anne Massey ‘…retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge of counter–memory.’ ( 1 ) The Richard Hamilton retrospective at Tate Modern from 13 th February to 26 th May 2014 included a reconstruction of the 1951 exhibition, Growth and Form. This was an impeccable and pristine representation of this art and science exhibition.

With its blown up biological images and lone sea shells and skulls, placed carefully on recreated, modernist shelving, this was a triumph of contemporary curation. Hamilton’s guiding hand was a ghostly presence, having defined the display in consultation with the curators before his death. Here is one story of a cultural moment, preserved to preserve the memory of one British artist.

After seeing the reconstruction, I was prompted to look back on my own Growth and Form archive, given to me by the former

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Director of the ICA, Dorothy Morland, and housed haphazardly in my home. She died in 1999, but not before securing the future history of the ICA by safeguarding its early archive, and lodging most of it at the Tate. This is now the Dorothy Morland Collection, charting the history of the ICA from 1946 until 1968. Here is another story of cultural history, preserved to preserve the memory of one British arts administrator. But I hold another ICA archive. As Hal Foster has argued: ‘…these private archives do question public ones: they can be seen as perverse orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large.’( 2 ) I found one document, yellowed with age and torn where I pierced it with a hole punch. It’s crumpled and frayed at the top, as this is a foolscap size piece of paper and the folder is A4. Should I be left in charge of this stuff? Is there a duplicate in the Tate Archives?

(3) Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59, Manchester University Press, pp 42–45

B Description of the components that made up the Enviroment by Joseph Beuys called ‘Richtkrafte’, 1974 © Tate, London 2014

(4) Joseph Beuys quoted in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way, Violette Editions, 1998, p.114.

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The document signals to me that Growth and Form was organised by a committee, comprising some of the leading, radical scientists of the day. Richard Hamilton is one name amongst 13 others. Chaired by the advertising executive, J R Brumwell, the group concerned themselves with raising sponsorship and finding a venue for the exhibition which explores links between art and science at a crucial tipping point. The discovery of DNA, the use of X–rays and crystallography to explore the structure of life accorded perfectly with D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s empirical thesis.

In 1995 I argued that this exhibition reinforced the non– Aristotelean approach of the Independent Group ( 3 ) . But now I see another reading. It’s a fragment from history, a document I had forgotten for twenty years, which suggests the networks of science in Britain during the early 1950s were

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vital to the ICA, to its programming, to the Independent Group’s foundation, and to Richard Hamilton. I put the document back where I found it. I want to forget it.

Lucy Bayley “Fill it out with your own imagination” Joseph Beuys ( 4 ) In the Tate archive a document describes the details of a work

by Joseph Beuys, Richkräfte (Directive Forces), created for the ICA’s 1974 exhibition Art into Society Society into Art. It provides an index of the materials the work comprises: 77 black boards covered in Beuys chalk diagrams, 23 ready to go onto the next location, three wooden easels, a locked chest painted black and a stick painted brown (without a rubber bottom piece, owned by Beuys). It doesn’t say what the document is for, presumably it’s a packing list, it’s dated the day after the

(5) Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Vol 110 (Autumn 2004) p 21.

(6) Art into Society Society into Art, ICA exhibition catalogue (30 October – 24 November 1974) (7) Ibid, p.5

(8) Memorandum to Members of the Council of the ICA 25 Feb 1974, written by Norman Rosenthal, Tate Archive, TGA 955 ⁄ 12 ⁄ 3 ⁄ 3.

(9) Caroline Steadman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Encounters: cultural histories), Rutgers University Press, p 2.

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exhibition closed and is signed by the joint organizers and the ICA technician. After its showing at the ICA the work moved through a series of transformations, first in New York (1975), second at the International Pavilion in Venice (1976), ending up in the collection at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1977). Like Growth and Form, Richkräfte isn’t fixed in one historical moment but can and has been revisited in its complete form; it can also be open for what Hal Foster calls “anomic fragmentation.” ( 5 ) Art into Society aimed to be a ‘model’ for exhibition making. ( 6 ) It would evolve out of colloquium (a meeting, or assembly for discussion) with the selected artists, Norman Rosenthal (ICA), Christos Joachimides (Berlin art critic) and historian Caroline Tisdall. Taking as a starting point “Mitbestimmung” the German for participation: “it was concerned with developing the social and, thus by extension, the political language and

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context of art.” ( 7 ) It moved away from, in Rosenthal’s words, the “capriciousness” of the museum or gallery director, the hazards of some “ghastly” open exhibitions and the control of an individual or committee, towards a democratic system of organizing. ( 8 ) For Derrida and Foucault the archive is a way of seeing or knowing and therefore a symbol of power. ( 9 ) Read through this theory, Art into Society can be understood as an archival approach of exhibition making. The exhibition was a critical examination of a previous exhibition Art in the Political Struggle (Hanover, 1972) that had itself emerged out of a colloquium. The documentation of the Hanover exhibition formed a retrospective section in the ICA version in the form of a large–scale print–out of the ICA exhibition publication alongside a video of the 1974 colloquium.

For Beuys, it was not the documentation but his constant presence that was crucial. He held a school of free expansion

( 10 ) Barbara Lange, Joseph Beuys: Richkräfte, Berlin, Reimer, 1999. ( 11 ) Foster 2004, p. 5.

( 12 ) Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,’ Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 9–63. ( 13 ) Foster echoes Derrida’s discussion of the anarchival, Ibid pp. 51–51.

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of creative concepts where the lines and patterns of Directive Forces for a new society were drawn from a continuing conversations with the exhibition visitors; we find a recipe for fruit cake, a map of cosmic consciousness, and references to his visit to Ireland through a reoccuring dividing line and the organic symbols from Neolithic New Grange carvings. ( 1 0 ) They are politically implusive, abrupt and play on coincidence. Yet they are also anticipated preservation. As the boards were completed they were spray fixed and laid on the floor for people to walk over. Richkräfte, now part of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, is both an owned artwork, and an archival index. Though Beuys argued against a crisis in materialism there is value in considering a materialist reading of the object; it takes us away from historical narrative and towards a “battery of information” or what Beuys referred to as ‘Fonds’, materials with multiple properties.

C ICA Bulletin (June, 1965) © Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Courtesy Collection Anne Massey

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Ben Cranfield “they are recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible” ( 1 1 ) Who has the right to tell, re–tell, not–to–tell, forget, remember or re–claim? The duality of the archive that Derrida speaks of, one that is destructive and generative, the root of democracy and authoritarianism, haunts any act of archival formation and retrieval. ( 1 2 ) In his discussion of the Archival Impulse in contemporary art, Foster admits, in an aside, that this impulse might be more properly considered an–archival. ( 1 3 ) Indeed, Foster’s examples are to the archive what the work of Mark Dion, Susan Hiller, Fred Wilson or Marcel Broodthaers are to the museum – expositions of the fragile, arbitrary and tragic nature of the technologies of knowledge formation.

What, then remains after the archive, as place of origin, as

( 14 ) Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: art from bureaucracy, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, pp. 173–175. ( 15 ) ICA Bulletin, no.147, June 1965, p. 14.

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singular authority, is destroyed? It is the archival fragment – recalcitrant, but mute, monumental in its partiality. The document retrieved after twenty years, after forty years, recovered from oblivion, is not fungible, in that its status is one of specific materiality. However, its primary status is not as unique object, but as a witness of what might have been lost and what has almost certainly already been lost.

It is not its irreplaceability that must be encountered, not its uniqueness as a sign of its authenticity, but its ‘there– ness’ – its resistance to a finished story and a complete, reconstructed image. The archival fragment asks us to forget

its origins and to revel in its partiality, in a state, perhaps, as Sven Spieker notes, of play. ( 1 4 ) The fugitive fragment, so freed, runs ludically through the archive, opening up other possible archives, potential futures and possible pasts.

What is opened up? What is closed down? Rather than a

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crystallisation of a positivity that affirms the institution in the present as a space of contemporary art, we may take the ICA’s archive as a place of forgotten potential futures, other directions, cancellations and negations. In June 1965 the ICA published the following statement: ‘owing to the overwhelming success of the Event which took place at the ICA on May 11 th it has been decided to postpone the next one until larger and more suitable premises have been found.’ ( 1 5 ) The ‘success’ referred to was that of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills’ event Oh What a Lovely Whore. It was an event built on the idea of the radical valuing of all experience and the particular value of failure. In a piece published by Boyle in the ICA bulletin preceding the event he mused on the precarious nature of the theatre as ‘a complex interweaving of layers of reality,’ where ‘even the stage struck must reach something near orgasm at the dramatic impact of an actor

( 16 ) Mark Boyle, ‘Background to a series of events at the ICA’, ICA Bulletin, no.146, May 1965, p. 6. ( 17 ) Andrew Wilson, ‘Towards an Index for Everything: The Events of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills 1963–1971’, in Boyle Family, texts by Patrick Elliott, Bill Hare and Andrew Wilson (a catalogue for the exhibition Boyle Family held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 14 August to 9 November 2003), Edinburgh: The Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, 2003, pp. 45–59, p. 48

( 18 ) Indeed, although Oh What Lovely Whore is remembered for its dramatic outcome, curator Jasia Reichardt, who organised Boyle and Hills’ events and exhibitions at the ICA in the late 60s, commented of the piece Any Play No Play (1965, Theatre Royal Stratford East) that, “the event could have been described as an essay in anticlimax – no one was happy about it except Mark Boyle, who accepted the outcome unreservedly as something that had occurred as it was meant to...To him no manifestation of life, whether provoked or not, is intrinsically boring. Boredom exists in the mind of the recipient ⁄ consumer ⁄ spectator and in his frustrated expectations, heightened by paying a sum of money at the door for which he wants to be recompensed in some way.” Jasia Riechardt, ‘On Chance and Mark Boyle’, Studio International, October 1966, pp. 164–165.

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forgetting his lines.’ ( 1 6 ) In Oh What a Lovely Whore there were no lines to forget as the stage was turned over to the ‘audience’, who were informed that if they wanted an event they would have to create it themselves, and so they did, going ‘berserk’. ( 1 7 ) In fact, by removing the ‘script’ and replacing it with a situation (orchestrated though it was), Boyle and Hills removed the possibility of failure or success from the project.

It was, rather, a radical experiment in contingency, in ‘digging’ reality. ( 1 8 ) The ICA’s effective cancellation of the further two events that had been originally advertised may have inspired Boyle and Hills in the creation of their parody ICA: the Institute of Contemporary Archaeology. Indeed, perhaps this would have been a better name for a space dedicated to the discovery of the fragmented present. By forgetting dominant narratives and institutionalised histories, is it possible to reclaim a potential future from a fragment at play?

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The pathological rhythm of the archive

by Eirini Grigoriadou

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“Pathology, in a word illness, is always accompanied by a disruption of rhythms: arrhythmia that goes as far as morbid and then fatal de–synchronisation” ( 1 ) Henri Lefebvre,

Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life In keeping with Henri Lefebvre´s writings on rhythm–analysis ( 2 ) , the alteration, malfunction, rupture or functional disorder of a system entails a rhythmical failure that breaks the “harmony” between different regular rhythms, as suggested by the eurhythmia, which is the indicator of the system’s good health. In this case, the rythmanalyst’s task consists in exploring these irregular rhythms whose disruptions produce “a lacuna, a hole in time, to be filled in by an invention, a

(1) Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life (New York: Continuum, 2004), 68.

(2) Lefebvre employs ‘rhythmanalysis’ in his book’ – originally published as Éléments de rythmanalyse: introduction à la connaissance des rythmes (1992) – as an analytical tool investigating the way rhythms – social, psychological, biological– penetrate in everyday life making us aware of the temporal understanding of space, of the constant interaction between space and time.

In his analysis the linear (cultural, rational) and cyclic time (natural, irrational) are always in a permanent interrelation. Rhythmanalysis recognises both repetitions, regularities, stabilities and ruptures, gabs, holes, shadows, discordances, ‘arrhythmias’. The blurring of the contours between the cyclical and linear rhythms, according to Lefebvre, form a polyrhythmia

that can take the form of ‘eurhythmia’ (a state of harmony), but also the form of ‘arrhythmia’ (a state of entropy). Something that is equally akin to Lefebvre’s conception of time with the issues of memory and trauma, recollection and repetition. Issues that here are examined in connection with the pathological rhythm of the ‘archive’ where its linear and repetitive rhythms or its ‘official’ and rational rhythms are blurred with the ‘fictional’, irrational and psychological ones of the everyday life, establishing in a state of crisis a counter rhythm, a breakdown.

(3+4) Ibid., 44. – Ibid., 22.

(5) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11.

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creation” ( 3 ) . Will the rhytmanalayst “have to set up and direct a lab where one compares documents: graphs, frequencies and various curves? More precisely, will he agree to look after clients? patients?” ( 4 ) asks Lefebvre.

The destructive and conflictive condition of the arrhythmia that acts against its vital rhythms, always originated in crisis, war, desynchronized rhythms and changes in tempo, seems to have devastating death drives similar to the pathological state of the archive, which, in Freudian terms, Jacques Derrida calls the “archive fever”. In other words, a “destruction drive”, “death drive” or anarchivic “aggression” that quietly works against itself, in the core of the archive, against its regular rhythm and which in occasions is disguised as “lovely impressions”. (5) How can one write about the arrhythmia of crisis? Or rephrased, how is it possible to synchronize the normalized rhythms when these are incessantly showing its severe illness

(6) Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier, “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities,” [1986] in Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 99.

(7) Derrida, Archive Fever, 11.

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in development, its pathology, its inherent instability? When speaking about the contradictory and explosive polyrhythmia of history and subsequently of its arrhythmia manifested in the conflicted history of the Mediterranean towns, where “the ideologies of diversity oppose to the point of violence the structures of identity and unity”, Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier assertively ask “How can one not think of Beirut here?”.( 6 ) To think about Beirut is to think about its destructive rhythms, about the labyrinth of its ruins, about the terrible social disruption and the psychological effects of the trauma generated by the Lebanese Civil Wars (1975 – 1990 ∕ 91) and the continuous current conflicts. How can one write the violent history of Lebanon when, in theological terms, it cannot be attached to a series of events with a beginning and an ending or a succession of atrocities and murders,

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and when it trespasses national geopolitics and is linked to the processes of globalization, chained to stories mediated by mass media used to control memory, and bounded to ideologies and political and economical interests? In this scenario, the truth will always be constructed, volatile. How

can one write the history of traumatic events that were lived, but have been experienced in a way that suggests what Derrida calls a “radical effacement”? ( 7 ) Therefore, how can one get close to the traumatic experiences of a nation whose memory is vague, dissociated, and severed from its cause? Events ‘so real’ that they exceed the boundaries between truth and falsehood, historical evidence and invention, the real and the imaginary, the local and the global. And what can one do with these ‘dislocated traces’ that the conflict of war has left in the present?

Perhaps these issues can be answered by setting up a lab and

(8) Walid Ra’ad, “Documents from The Atlas Group Archive,” in CTRL SPACE: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed.

Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel.

(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 626.

( 11 ) Carrie Lambert-Beatty refers to this strategy as “parafiction” where “real and ⁄ or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived”. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer 2009):54.

(9) Santiago B. Olmo, “Walid Raad and The Atlas Group: Collisions between the Documentary Archive, Memory and Fiction,” Artcontext 22 (2009): 57.

( 12 ) Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “Atlas Group Brings War Documents Home,” The Daily Star (8 May 2004):12.

( 10 ) Alan Gilbert, “Walid Ra’ad,” Bomb Magazine 81 (Fall 2002):40.

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investigating these “traces” imprinted in the culture and in individuals, by examining the “symptoms” of irregular rhythms, or creating a foundation that could collect, analyze, generate, present and “compare documents: graphs, frequencies and various curves” of such rhythms. The foundation could even receive donations of documents and archives by individuals and institutions that hope to understand these disrupted rhythms through their obsessively compiled records, testimonies and stories. Furthermore, the foundation could occasionally establish collaboration with laboratories in order to carry out a technical analysis of the documents, necessary for its investigation and conservation.

The Lebanese media artist Walid Raad seems to have pursued this goal through his ‘imaginary foundation’ The Atlas Group Archive. “(…) the foundation’s aim is to locate, preserve, study and assist in the production of audio, visual, literary

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and other artifacts that shed light on some of the unexamined dimensions of the Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975 to 1991. In this endeavor, The Atlas Group has found ⁄ produced notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs, and other documents” (8).

These still unexamined dimensions of history which the project The Atlas Group Archive (1989–2004) intends to explore are those destructive rhythms that have generated what Raad calls a “black hole”. ( 9 ) The fictional narratives comprised in the foundation’s imaginary universe and told by invented and historical characters – presented as a collective faced with “the possibilities and limits of writing any history of the recent wars in Lebanon” ( 1 0 ) – occupy the same space as the historical accounts. ( 1 1 ) In this common mental space emerges a different

kind of knowledge based not on the “history of conscious events”, ( 1 2 ) but rather on the symptomatic history of the

( 13 ) The Atlas Group (Walid Ra’ad), “Let´s Be Honest, the Rain Helped,” in The Archive. Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether.

(London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2006),180. ( 14 ) Olmo, “Walid Raad and The Atlas Group,” 58-59.

( 16 ) Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 5 ( 17 ) T.J Demos, “Storytelling In ⁄ As Contemporary Art,” in The Storyteller, ed. Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell. (Zurich: Independent Curators International and JRP Ringier, 2010), 96.

( 15 ) Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume 5, ed. James Strachey. (London: Vintage, 2001), 491.

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‘unconscious’. In this sense, Raad urges his viewers to approach the Atlas Group Archive files, in Freudian psychoanalytic terms, as “hysterical symptoms” based not on any one person´s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories” ( 1 3 ) . Although these symptoms outline the existence of an illness or a disorder, they can find a new ‘normalized’ or even ‘liberating’ condition in Raad’s (an)archive.

The theory of trauma exposes this mutation: “(…) the patient never returns to the past. (…) what helps the subject recover is in fact the fantasy (…) a story, a tale, that penetrates right through to the unconscious, not to conscious, mind”. ( 1 4 ) The Atlas Group Archive has collected these ‘dislocated traces’ of psychic and physical violence or these desynchronized rhythms which have produced “a lacuna, a hole in time, to be filled in by an invention, a creation”. The “phantasies or daydreams” have been described by Freud as the “immediate

A Walid Raad, Secrets in the open sea, 1994 ⁄ 2004.

Plate 1; digital prints 111 × 173 cm. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

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forerunners of hysterical symptoms” ( 1 5 ) recognizing that fantasy carry the weight of ‘reality’.

An archival art characterized by an anarchival impulse and postproduction that is, as observed by Hal Foster, “concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (…), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” ( 1 6 ) The archive constructed by Raad constitutes a ‘postproduction’ of history allowing him new points of departure for reconstructing narratives. Similarly, the shift «towards storytelling» in contemporary art of the 90’s examined by T.J Demos in his essay “Storytelling In ∕ As Contemporary Art”, confronted by geopolitical events related with social trauma, “enacts a paradoxical coupling of narrative and opacity, of making connections between diverse images and questioning definite conclusions”. ( 1 7 )

( 18 ) Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004) 38. In a similar manner Mark Godfrey affirms that fiction is not employed “in order to evade historical representation but so as to represent historical experience more adequately”. Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 4.

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Although Raad’s art confronts the traumatic events of the Lebanese Civil Wars, he directs our attention not to the origin of the trauma but rather to the ‘spatial–temporal displacements’, to the specific effects and rhythms of his pathological archive.

The conflict of war is told from its blind spots, from its disruptive rhythms juxtaposed to the mechanical, repetitive rhythms and compulsive acts and routines of the characters whose memories resist a direct representation; from the loss, the absence, the perspective of a counter–history or counter– memory: inconclusive stories where the ghosts of the past inhabit in the present thus questioning the idea of a definitive history as the place where an objective knowledge of the past can dwell, as the place of an unquestionable authority, of the ‘official’ history that certifies the authenticity of a historical truth, of an event, of what actually happened.

In the framework of these ‘alternative’ histories, the boundaries

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between historical narrative and fictional storytelling, politics and poetics, authenticity and artifice, are blurred through interactions rather than by divisions or oppositions, just as the papers adopted by Raad acting as a poet or rhythmanalyst and archivist. To write the history of Lebanon seems to signify, as observed by Jacques Rancière, that the “real must be fictionalized in order to be thought”. ( 1 8 ) What is going on with this intense blue of the Mediterranean Sea? What Secrets in the Open Sea (2002) are hidden? The 6 large–format photographic prints of different shades of blue that were found under the rubble of the commercial malls bombarded in Beirut in 1992 conceal miniature latent images in black and white which represent portraits of men and women.

According to the Foundation’s web page, this discovery was made when the prints were sent to laboratories in the United States and France for technical analysis. The Atlas Group was

19 Gilbert, “Walid Ra’ad,” Bomb Magazine 81 (Fall 2002): 42 20 Lefebvre alludes to “secret rhythms” also as “psychological ones (recollection and memory, the said and the non-said)” and to “fictional rhythms” as the “imaginary””. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 18.

21 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 12.

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able to determine that the portraits corresponded to people whose bodies were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1990. The absence of the traumatic event of death – the bodies of these disappeared people – manifests the impossibility of a correspondence between fact and truth.

The images that Raad presents us reveal the non–memory of trauma, its “blurred, never–on–time, always–to–the–side” ( 1 9 ) condition. It is precisely this absence, the inaccessibility to what really happened, which activates the ‘presence’ of the spatial– temporal displacements of the trauma explored by Raad and that of the “fictional and secret rhythms” ( 2 0 ) comprised in Raad’s archive.

The documents of the Atlas Group do not reclaim a political truth, nor they pretend to represent the veracity of empirical facts. Instead, they are rooted in the diffuse zone of emotional and psychological truth where facts and the imaginary are

B Walid Raad, Miraculous Beginnings, 2000 ⁄ No, Illness is Neither Here Nor There, 1999. DVD, colour, mute, 1:43 min. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

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indiscernible. “The documents in this imaginary archive do not so much document “what happened”, but what can be imagined, what can be said, taken for granted, what can appear as rational or not, as thinkable and sayable about the civil wars”. ( 2 1 ) The possibilities and limits faced by the characters invented

by Raad call into question the experience of memory in terms of violence and trauma. The dislocated image of Operator # 17 in his video, I Only Wish I Could Have Weep (2002), constitutes a clear example. We are told that this anonymous character was a Lebanese army intelligence officer who, after the Lebanese Civil Wars, was in charge of surveilling the Corniche every afternoon (a seaside promenade in west Beirut where double agents and spies allegedly met). However, instead of fulfilling his duty, Operator # 17 redirected his camera to document sunsets and people strolling down the Corniche

( 22 ) Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 12. ( 23 ) Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 391.

C Walid Raad, Volume 57: No, Illness Is Neither Here Nor There, 2003. Set of 15 plates. Archival inkjet prints, 30 x 40 cm, each. Courtesy of SfeirSemler Gallery.

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docks as ghostly figures. The compulsive and routine action of the military officer, an action that is repeated outside of time because it is repressed, manifests the impossibility of an act of healing. As expressed by Lefebvre “Pleasure and joy demand a re–commencement. They await it; yet it escapes.

Pain returns. It repeats itself, since the repetition of pleasure gives rise to pain(s).” ( 2 2 ) Dr. Fadi Fakhouri is another one of Raad’s imaginary characters. He is supposed to be “the most eminent historian in Lebanon” and after his death in 1993, his documents were donated to the Atlas Group for their preservation, analysis and diffusion. The films Miraculous Beginnings and No, Illness Is Neither Here Nor There (1993), document Dr. Fakhouri’s habit of always carrying two film cameras and recording every time he thought the war was over. Just like Operator # 17, who was incapable of grasping the violence of war and filled with

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uncertainty before the unknown, Dr. Fakhouri would wander the streets of Beirut and obsessively film the nameplates of doctors, psychiatrists, surgeons or dentists (all disciplines that blossomed during the civil wars) as a longing for peace and the end of the war.

The impossibility of really getting to know the significance of experiencing historical events, particularly when these involve a physical and psychological injury dismantled by the repetitive habits of these characters, echoes what Walter Benjamin pointed out in his essay “On the Concept of History”: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was”.” ( 2 3 ) This impossibility is further exemplified in another of Dr. Fakhouri’s archives entitled Notebook Volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars (1989).

The fictional scenario that Raad constructs around the photographic document is based on the rumor that the major

( 24 ) Gilbert, “Walid Ra’ad,” 40. ( 25 ) Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, “Introduction: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art”, in The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1 (New York: Sternberg Press and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2008) 16.

( 26 ) André Lepecki, “After All, This Terror Was Not Without Reason”, Unfiled Notes on the Atlas Group Archive,” TDR: The Drama Review, 50 (Fall 2006): 92. ( 27 ) Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, (Forthcoming Books, 2009), 57. ( 28 ) Ibid., 20.

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historians of the Lebanese wars were avid gamblers that met every Sunday at the race track and “bet on photo–finish horse– race photographs as they were published in the Lebanese daily Annahar”. ( 2 4 ) In spite of the detailed data that Dr. Fakhouri wrote in his notebook – from descriptions about the winning historian, the record time of the winning horse, the distance and duration of the race etc, – not one single photography published in the Lebanese daily Annahar showed the ‘exact moment’, the specific ‘instant’ in which the horse crosses the finish line.

The horse was always captured just seconds before or after passing the line. This temporary time difference where truth is disintegrated, references the “documentary uncertainty” ( 2 5 ) of how history is written. Photography fails in its attempt to capture the truth, the exact ‘moment of victory’. Also, the rumor that historians “convinced (some say bribed) the

D Walid Raad, Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars, 1996-2002. Plate 132. Set of 21

plates. Archival inkjet prints on archival paper, 33 × 25 cm. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

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photographer to snap only one picture as the winning horse arrived” proves that their interests and ideologies make it impossible for the facts of history to be narrated based on an absolute truth. The historians responsible for writing the Lebanese Civil Wars acknowledge the limits of their endeavor.

As Andre Lepecki assertively noted “history seems never to be exactly where it is supposedly taking place”. ( 2 6 ) Raad’s archival art seems to operate “in a way similar to the mirror in vampire films” by revealing “past a surpassing disaster”, what the writer and artist Jalal Toufic says, “the withdrawal of what we think is still there”. ( 2 7 ) It makes visible the ‘arrhythmia’ of the archive, of its destructive rhythms, of what has been missing, hidden, lost, absent, “withdrawn”, no longer available even after “everything” have been apparently ‘synchronized’ in post–war Lebanon. ( 2 8 )

M u l t i p l e S i g n a t u re s o f S u b t r a c t i o n

by Robert Luzar

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A signature is commonly understood as the inscription of one’s name. A signature, more emphatically, inscribes who one authentically is. However, signatures do not always graphically preserve and express presence. This rupture, for instance, is what takes place under a certain multiple signature, so to speak, a multiple signature made by three artists – Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša. In 2007, Emil Hrvatin, Davide Grassi, and Žiga Kariž changed their names to Janez Janša, the exact same name of the former, controversial prime minister of the Republic of Slovenia. Proposed by the artists group as a “readymade name,” the appropriation of the prime minister’s name has become the ongoing focus of the Janša artist group’s conceptual and activist subversion of hegemonic authority, a law that substantialises presence. Signatures, a series of nine triptychs composed of black acrylic on canvas, is an important work in this regard. In part, I will look closer

(1) Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” E-flux Journal 56 (2014): 1-14, accessed June 18, 2014, http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/on-art-activism/

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at Signatures in relation to an antecedent action-based work, Signature Event Context – iterating an early essay by Jacques Derrida and playfully extending his deconstruction of the law as a presence of force and authority. My intention is not merely to explain these militant works, which try to subvert authority by over identifying the law in name; rather, I want to reconsider a radically negated presence posed by the multiple signature – Janša, Janša, Janša – and rethink the deconstruction of the law through notions of subtraction and refusal.

Politically focused art, as some argue, is purposive. ( 1 ) Artists today focus less on being anarchically antithetical to creative limits and genres. Instead, they merge art with a more militant form of life. Since the 1960’s, Slovenian artists have unabashedly focused on sovereign power and state bureaucracy affecting everyday life: for example, parading as a National Socialist music ensemble (Laibach), or distributing

(2) Miško Šuvakovič, “A Crisis of Inscription ⁄ Signature: The Power of Personal Names” in Podpis = Signature ⁄ Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, translated by I. Sentevska (a publication for the exhibition Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, SIGNATURE, Aksioma – Institute of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts), 58.

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passports for an artist run state (Irwin). These examples coincide with the artist-activist collective Neu Slowenische Kunst, which occurred during the 1980’s and prior to Slovenia becoming an independent nation state. Distinct from such groups, Janša, Janša and Janša extend the activist ethos. By changing their personal names to parallel the Prime Minister’s name, Croatian theatre director Emil Hrvatin, Italian new media artist Davide Grassi, and Slovenian painter Žiga Kariž create “a hybrid situation of multiple references with particular consequences for life itself.” ( 2 ) As “Janez” is one of the most common names for men in Slovenia, the forename references everyday language and penetrates life socially. The surname, as we shall see, multiplies the name’s ontological reference with more fundamental consequences.

To unravel some of these consequences – a subtractive dialectics of sorts – we should ask one basic question: Who

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is Janez Janša? He was born in 1953 as Ivan Janša and, later, changed his forename to Janez. He was a representative of the law; the head of the Slovenian nation state. Janez Janša was Prime Minister of Slovenia twice – from 2004 to 2008 and, again, from 2012 to 2013. A leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party since 1993, his predominantly right-wing political career has provoked controversy. Prior to his first term as Prime Minister, Janša was a journalist for Mladina, a left-wing cultural magazine; and in 1988 he and three other Mladina journalists were arrested for writing dissident articles about the Yugoslav People’s Army. Six years after his imprisonment, his position in Slovenian politics took shape. But not without being accused of, for example, nationalist xenophobia, extremism, subordinating national media and racketeering.

Most recently, in June 2013, Janša was imprisoned again, this time for taking part in an illegal commission operation with

(3) Jela Krečič, “Three New Janez Janšas,” translated by Denis Debevec, Signature Event Context, accessed August 1, 2014, http://www. aksioma.org/sec/krecic.html

(4) Rok Vevar, “The More of Us There Are, The Faster We’ll Reach Our Goal!” translated by Denis translated by Denis Debevec, Signature Event Context, accessed August 1, 2014, http://www.aksioma.org/sec/vevar.html

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the Finnish firm, Patria.

Although the unjustly actions of Prime Minister Janša may seem to prompt their name change, the Janša artists have publicly stated that their reason for doing so was personal.

Being silently aloof paradoxically expresses a certain refusal, a break from the modernist intervention into “the social political tissue.” ( 3 ) Their political proposition though holds: to multiply ‘Janez Janša’ they ask that everyone – at least in Slovenia – also change and be in common under this name.

The demand to over identify with the law in name expresses a “subversive affirmation,” as writer Rok Vevar states, “an artistic ⁄ political tactic that allows artists ⁄ activists to take part in certain social, political, or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate, or consume them while simultaneously undermining them.” ( 4 ) By making ‘Janez Janša’ a readymade name the artistic

(5) Duchamp clearly states that, for him, politics is “a stupid activity, which leads to nothing.” ‘I Live the Life of A Waiter’ in Cabanne, P. (1987) Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, translated by R. Padgett. London, England: Da Capo Press.

A Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, 2010. Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana. Reproductions: Tomo Jeseničnik. Courtesy of Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana.

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gesture aims at extending the subversive affirmation. A nod to conceptual art pioneer Marcel Duchamp, “readymade” denotes that any trivial object can be called and made – by name – into art. One of Duchamp’s most infamous works, Fountain (1917), not only uses a signature to turn a urinal into an artwork but also indicates the work as a name – R. Mutt. In contradistinction to Duchamp’s aversion for engaging politics ( 5 ) , the Janša artists transpose the object to the name itself and combat authority directly. Choosing to use the name as the art medium strikes directly at the performative gesture of this creative act, that is of calling and, without verification, authorising the work into being art.

Multiplying and ontologically emptying the name are major consequences expressed by the Signatures series. For their exhibition in 2010 at Aksioma (the Institute of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts), the Janša artists

(6) Petja Grafenauer, “The Poetics and Politics of The Signature” in Podpis = Signature ⁄ Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, translated by I. Sentevska (a publication for the exhibition Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, SIGNATURE, Aksioma – Institute of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts), 17.

(7) A sample of this reiteration, and more of the Janša art project, can be viewed online: http://vimeo.com/39754263.

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produced each of their signatures in nine triptychs. A complex intersubjective map of changed names, each artist had their new signatures as ‘Janez Janša’ inscribed in black acrylic on plain canvases – this part was actually painted by another artist, Victor Bernik. And using their original names, each Janša artist signed the lower, right portion of the canvas as well. Thus, here Janša references Grassi, Kariž, or Hrvatin; and Janša references Janša: this semiotic doubling also multiplies numerically. The twenty seven tableaus materially preserve these signatures. In other words, the actual inscriptions archive the name, preserved in medium (acrylic and ink) and contextualised within the art institution. Furthermore, the authenticity of the signature is demystified; the inscribed name is a representation, an image of itself. ( 6 ) Not to mention, the inscribed name becomes an arbitrary cipher suspended in an administrative shuffle of personal identifications. The

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emptying of the name’s presence as a multiple signature, as I am proposing here, needs to be considered through an earlier work. At the Transmediale exhibition in Berlin in 2008, Janša, Janša and Janša proposed a performative installation, entitled Signature Event Context. Although the performance was initially cancelled by guest curator Nataša Petrešen Bachelez, the artists later proceeded to video themselves and virtually broadcast this work for the web. In this virtually archived walk at night around The Holocaust Memorial, the artists continuously reiterated “Jaz sem Janez Janša” [I am Janez Janša]. ( 7 ) To extend this performative gesture, the artists signed one thousand copies of the Transmediale catalogue, by hand and in front of a live audience. For the Janša artists these physical, enunciative, virtual and momentary inscriptions of the name aim to refer, transmit and communicate “non-presence.” To understand

(8) Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 315-6.

(9) Alain Badiou, “On Subtraction,” in Theoretical Writings, Edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004), 103.

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how presence can become non-substantial I turn to a more philosophical discussion of the foregoing inscriptive actions.

“All writing,” Jacques Derrida explains, “in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence…” ( 8 ) This ‘break’ is a “radical destruction” of presence. Presence is not to be conflated with a personal ‘self’, a continuously modified yet permanent substance that is vitally authorised, inwardly preserved and morally whole.

Presence is ontologically void; it is a pre-cognitive category that, as I propose, subtracts identity of empirical content.

Subtraction, a term unique to Alain Badiou’s terminology, determines “the void of being as such.” ( 9 ) That writing engages subtraction through radical destruction means that the signature expresses a force of negation, a violent break

( 10 ) Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law, The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” in Acts of Religion, translated by Marie Quaintance and edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 264.

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destroying any hidden referent or transcendent notion of self.

The ontological negation exercised by such a force counters any archival operation; multiplying the signature – as the Janša artists do – displaces any proper context of the name that, otherwise, authorises a natural, life-preserving and founding law as a vital force.

By mentioning the law – undoubtedly an emphatic term, as is presence – I am extending the Derridean deconstruction of authority. In his later works, Derrida tries to tackle how the law, as presence, is a “mystical foundation of authority.”

On the one hand, the law is a positive authority. The Prime Minister, in conjunction with a parliamentary system, has the legal power to make laws that impact civil conduct. On the other hand, the law is natural, a force that spontaneously “insures the permanence and enforceability of law.”( 1 0 ) State authority reflexively circulates, as the great political

( 11 ) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by G. C. A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 114.

( 13 ) Derrida, “Force of Law,” 289. ( 14 ) Derrida, “Force of Law,” 270.

( 12 ) Hobbes, Leviathan, 168.

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philosopher Thomas Hobbes says, a “sovereign power” that carries “natural force.” ( 1 1 ) The law is an “artificial man,” binding every individual into a living socio-economic corpus.

This body is analogically composed of “veins receiving blood from the several parts of the body, carry[ing] it to the heart; where being made vital, the heart by the arteries sends it out again, to enliven, and enable for motion all the members of the same.” ( 1 2 ) In this way, the law is ‘natural’. It constitutes subjects in one (artificial) body, the res publica that prevails as “the name of life,” as Derrida says. “It is life beyond life, life against life, but always in life and for life.” ( 1 3 ) For Derrida, a signature is a primary example of life circulating in force, founding and preserving itself in an “inaccessible transcendence of the law.” ( 1 4 ) By appropriating the name of the law, such as Janez Janša, and multiplying its name, presence is ontologically interrupted. The law becomes

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accessible as a condition of impossibility – rather than a natural force of life that transcends and substantialises itself.

Deconstruction equivocally negates the law of its ontological force. At best, writing suspends the law as a transcendent limit; nevertheless, transcendence remains a mystical force of suspension. The law vacillates metaphysically; life magnifies in affect by subversions of its force. It is no surprise that the Janša artists take such pains – engaging, for instance, live performance and virtual technologies such as video and internet transmissions – to subvert and radically destroy the name of its law-like force. Works such as Signatures suspend the law, (Prime Minister) Janša becoming another common name. However, the rather adventurous traversal of immaterial mediums affirms the law as a virtual precondition, a metaphysical force that is always already life-beyond-life.

Subtraction is one way in which the radical destruction of the

( 15 ) Badiou, “On Subtraction,” 108.

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law can negate force of its natural and positive form of life.

Though it engages a complex epistemology, the Badiouian concept structures presence as a notion of pure knowledge.

That being as such is purely void means that presence is not only non-substantive but, moreover, unnameable. The unnameable is “the doubling of the unique;” ( 1 5 ) in other words, being as presence is logically subtracted of any empirical mode – experiential, material, or virtually immaterial force – while remaining a generic multiple. Presence is radically absent, a name that is without proper referent and, hence, generic. This generic multiplicity then is the void that doubles the site in which the name (law, authority, force) takes place.

How then do the Janša signatures exercise subtraction?

Written in ink or cursively inscribed in acrylic, the multiple signature renders its implied self-authorising force powerless.

‘Janez Janša’ iterates a multiplicity that voids authority. The

( 16 ) Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Refusal,” in The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2011), 33-48.

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law becomes unnameable. This paradoxically expresses a certain refusal of force. An anarchic action rather than positive gesture, ‘refusal’ is a more pervasive form of inscription that “excludes everything immediate.” ( 1 6 ) As Maurice Blanchot strikingly claims, writing exercises refusal by excluding “all direct relation, all mystical fusion, and all sensible contact.”

Presence “remains radically absent,” a “non-presence.” But within this exclusionary refusal, force – and this detail is key to an act of subtraction – is terminally altered. “Power as a force” is altered by engaging death – rather than a permanent self-preserving life – as a condition of “non-possibility.”

Force then is an alteration of life into death. That is, force dissipates in affect, discontinues modification and looses vital substantiation. There is no virtual and vital presence that vacillates and positively maintains the law. Refusal opens up action to a state that lets negation take place. The putative

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transcendence of law, life beyond life – to which activist gestures aim to subversively affirm yet, in effect, suspend and perpetuate – is subtracted.

What I have tried to rethink and alter throughout this article is not only the notion of law as force but a mystical presence that implicates subversive gestures. The works by the three Janša artists, especially Signatures, pose a refusal to the authority of the law. In its multiple and material form the signature of each artist radically negates presence. The name indicates non-presence in so far as the signed name appears as an empty figure. Indeed, each of these artists identifies himself under this name personally; nevertheless, ‘Janez Janša’ is depersonalised, emptied of authoritative force. The activist gesture, of affirmatively subverting the law, struggles to nullify this force. Suspending the law implicates the militant action into the perpetuation of a metaphysical

( 17 ) Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, translated by C. Mandell. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 307. ( 18 ) Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” 315.

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order of the law. ‘Force’ becomes more enigmatic through militant resistance. I am not suggesting, conversely, that artists remain completely passive to exercising any form of politics. Quite the contrary. Refusal is a radical action. It opens the subversive gesture toward affirmatively engaging “a force of creative negation.” (17) Refusal lets a creative action take place in which “negation negates nothing.” (18) The Janša signatures pose this multiple and subtractive act of refusal, this non-dialectical negation of negation, into a larger question, a question that paradoxically ends yet opens at the point where the name is inscribed.

The Sicilian Family — by Emilio Vavarella

S H OWC A S E

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The Sicilian Family is a photographic series of 44 digital elaborations of vintage analog photographs, based on my reflections on memory, glitch aesthetic and conceptual photography. I was also driven by a personal interest in the origins of my family, however, I didn’t want my research to disrupt my existing relationship with my relatives or to become the main point of the project.

I intended to gather memories and photographs: building an archive was a necessary part of organizing these materials. The archive had to both reflect the process of my inquiry as well as the nature and origin of its content, including the tensions between fact and memory, public and private, subjective and objective.

I started my research in 2012. I had a clear idea of what I needed and what I wanted to do, but there were still many variables to define. The first phase consisted of a series of visits to all my living relatives. They loved telling me stories about the family, all of which had never been written down. Those stories had

been passed down orally from one generation to the next - sometimes things had been forgotten, other times uncomfortable truths were ignored, or no interest was shown in facts that didn’t match their version of the story. Every now and then, one of my relatives was able to find a few old dusty photos stored away, and they gave them to me as a present. Many photos had been lost for lack of interest, so I promised to take good care of the remaining ones.

Sometimes my relatives didn’t know who the people in the pictures were, and I was only able to discover that later. Some of the pictures were ruined, but had notes written on the back: usually love messages sent from husbands temporarily working abroad in Germany or Argentina.

Those messages helped identify the subjects of the pictures. My family archive in its textual and visual form was almost complete.

Among the last documents that I found, was the identity card of my first paternal ancestor, a Sicilian orphan to whom someone gave

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an invented last name: Vavarella.

Thus, I realized that my last name only goes back four generations.

My mother’s lineage goes back further than my father’s, but wasn’t too difficult to track. A few of her family members had already visited the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (the Italian National Archives) in Rome and tracked their last name, Raffo, back to a family of selfmade merchants from Genova.

My maternal great granddad was the first Genovese to buy land in Sicily, and that was the beginning of the Sicilian branch of the Raffo family. After I left Sicily, I continued my research during my studies in Venice, Tel Aviv and Istanbul. I had many questions and I kept speaking with other relatives over Skype to learn more. After several months, my archive was complete.

For the second phase of the project, I decided to scan each original photograph that I had collected and to open each digital file using a basic text editor in order to visualize the photo as text.

Through this process, the pixels of the images were automatically

translated into the alphanumeric ASCII code. This code is a nonintelligible sequence of characters that contains all the information required to recreate the image through an Image Viewer. Still using the text editor, I substituted a part of the ASCII code of each photograph with a story based on what I had come to learn about each person portrayed in that specific picture.

The text was composed, in part, by the memories that were passed down to me, and, in part, by my own interpretation. Then I saved the text as a JPG file, forcing it to become an image once again. My alteration forced what were now my memories to coexist with the images, in an unforeseeable and new way. The archive disappeared but gave a new form to the photographic series.

Finally, I organized the resulting 44 images into a structure that resembled a genealogic tree. All the memories and the connections among the people portrayed are still there, but in an ambiguous and elusive way. A bit like memory itself.

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My great grandfather Giovanni, one of the original photographs I collected.

My aunt Anna, one of the original photographs I collected

View of the back of some of the collected photographs. The one on the left was sent from Offenbach (Germany) and portrayed my grandfather Giovanni and other Sicilian immigrants working on the railroad. The one on the right was sent from Verona by my great grandfather to his wife, brothers and sisters.

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Front of the identity card of my paternal ancestor Emilio Vavarella. The fields “Padre” and “Madre” (father and mother) are left blank.

Screenshot of one of the Skype meetings.

Zia Mena and her husband Giovanni Cascone, image 4 ∕ 44 from The Sicilian Family series, (2012 – 13), digital photograph

Bisnonno Giovanni, image 10 ∕ 44 from The Sicilian Family series, (2012 – 13), digital photograph

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Prozia Vita, image 26 ⁄ 44 from The Sicilian Family series, (2012-13), digital photograph

Zia Anna, image 40 ⁄ 44 from The Sicilian Family series, (2012-13), digital photograph

Bisnonno Emilio, image 36 ⁄ 44 from The Sicilian Family series, (2012-13), digital photograph

Nonno Giovanni e fratelli, image 44 ⁄ 44 from The Sicilian Family series, (2012-13), digital photograph

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R e t u r n i n g t o t h e Ta b u l a r i u m .

An Exhibition and Archive in Pursuit of Chronological Time ( 1 )

by Alana Kushnir

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In the so-called Information Age there is little evidence which attests to the existence in ancient and medieval times of an impulse to concentrate certain types of information by different creators in a single physical place. One of the few exceptions to this is indicated by the survival of the Tabularium, a building which was constructed in around 78 BCE to house official legal documents of the ancient Roman State. ( 2 ) These documents – tablets inscribed with legislation, decrees and treaties – were fundamentally legal in nature, and were crucial tools for the administration of power by the State. Unlike a library, ( 3 ) during its operation the Tabularium building was not open to the public. Thus by nature, its archive was closed. The secrecy of its contents was a necessary quality, without which it would not have had power. ( 4 ) Its role as the Tabularium was nonetheless communicated to the public with a nearby inscription (now

(1) This essay has been written on the occasion of the exhibition, Tabularium, curated by Alana Kushnir for Slopes, Melbourne, 20 August – 13 September 2014.

(2) An earlier example is often referred to in contemporary discourse on the archive, which relates to the etymology of the word ‘archive’.

‘Archive’ is derived from the Greek word ἀρχεῖον (arkheion), the home of the ἄρχων (Archon) meaning ‘ruler’ and which in ancient Greece was used to refer to the chief magistrate. Official state documents which were kept in the Archon were interpreted under the authority of the Archon.

Unlike the Roman Tabularium, no arkheion buildings are still in existence.

(3) One of the first examples of the library was the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty’s Royal Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, founded in 3 rd century B.C, which functioned as a center for scholarship and was part of a research institution called the Musaeum of Alexandria. The library was destroyed during the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 B.C. No index of the contents of the library’s collection survives.

(4) Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst argues that traditional archives gained their power from being secret and publicly inaccessible. Wolfgang Ernst, “Archival Times. Tempor(e)alities of media memory” (lecture at the National Library in Oslo, October 6, 2010), 11, accessed 18 July 2014; see more generally Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

(5–7≥)

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lost) which identified it as such. To this day its importance to the ancient Roman State is readily apparent due to its prime physical location – now the location of its remains – on the south-eastern slope of the Capitoline Hill beside the Roman Forum. These remains act as a testament to the ancient origins of an exceedingly popular, multidisciplinary and somewhat fatigued discourse about and around the archive.

The evolution of this archival discourse by no means begins or ends in art theory or practice. Nevertheless, contemporary art exhibitions have become a useful mechanism for artinformed audiences to consume such classic meditations on the notion of the archive as Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, ( 5 ) Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, ( 6 ) and more overtly in its reference to contemporary art practices, Hal Foster’s essay An Archival Impulse. ( 7 ) The 2008 exhibition Archive Fever:

(5) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Originally presented as a lecture on June 5, 1994, at a colloquium in London.

(6) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge And The Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). Originally published in French in 1971.

(8) Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” (press release, 2008), 1, accessed July 18, 2014.

(9) See also, e.g., the 2012 exhibition, Liquid Archive, curated by Geraldine Barlow at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia.

(7) Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004), 3-22.

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Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, which “presented works by leading contemporary artists who use photographic images to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss”, ( 8 ) is the quintessential example of such exhibitions. Specific attention to the realm of the internet in the context of archival discourse was then given in the 2012 exhibition Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Digital Age, curated by Domenico Quaranta. ( 9 ) It presented the artist as an explorer-type, who traverses the terrain of the internet – the unknown – in search of the undiscovered image. Yet in such exhibitions there has been a lack of affinity for what Wolfgang Ernst has described as “the traditional script-based institutional archive”, (10) or in other words, the aforementioned Tabularium. In doing (or rather, not doing) so, they represent a shift in the meaning of the archive in popular culture, to one which is open to the

( 10 ) Ernst, “Archival Times”, 10. Indeed, they are perhaps better characterised as capturing the ‘anarchival’ rather than the ‘archival’ impulse which is discussed by Foster, amongst others.

As Foster explains, ‘[i]n this regard archival art is as much reproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps ‘anarchival impulse’ is the more appropriate phase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” (Hal Foster, “An Anarchival Impulse”, in The Archive (Documents of Contemporary Art), ed. Charles Merewether (London, Cambridge Massachusetts: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), 144).

( 11 ) Foster, “An Anarchival Impulse”, 144.

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public (in terms of both access to and contributions from), which is interchangeable with the notion of a library, or an idiosyncratic collection of things, which accommodates our ever-increasing range of options for storage, and which has even been described as the internet itself.

At the heart of such descriptions as “the megarchive of the Internet”, ( 1 1 ) is the malleable quality of available content.

The information that the internet contains can be added, altered or erased at any given moment. Rachel de Joode’s Hanging Marble, 2014, mimics this condition. While the image which her digital vinyl print depicts is a close-up piece of marble – a material which is assumed to be aged and rigid – it is presented by being draped over a frame, so that the image appears bent and distorted. It takes on a new, objectbased form. Hanging Marble mirrors the internet’s sublime-like façade, where older information can be altered and shaped

A Left: Alana Kushnir, Tabularium Archive, 2014 – ongoing, publications with an online ethos unavailable in digital form, server rack.

Centre: Rachel de Joode, Hanging Marble, 2014, digital print on vinyl, MDF. Right: Katja

Novitskova, Shapeshifter X, 2013 (left) and Shapeshifter V, 2013 (right), broken silicon wafers, epoxy clay, nail polish, appropriated acrylic case, appropriated wooden capital.

Ph: Christo Crocker.

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into newer information, or at least, can appear to do so. This façade is made especially apparent by Ry David Bradley’s observations for his diptych print, Flowers for Ukraine, 2014.

As an experiment, David Bradley altered the Wikipedia page on the Ukraine, ( 1 2 ) replacing the Location of Ukraine map with an image of a flower. Within a few hours another user had replaced the image added by Bradley with the previous Location of Ukraine map. What occurs in this experiment is a literal uncovering of “a stage for struggles for freedom and control, [as Lars Bang Larsen suggests] the Net variously accommodates, on the one hand, individual trajectories and anti-authoritarian forces, and on the other, the potential for the centralization of information and surveillance”. ( 1 3 ) Bradley’s print on suede acts as a form of documentation of his momentary erasure of and addition to the Wikipedia page on the Ukraine. In this way Flowers for Ukraine consciously takes

( 12 ) “Ukraine”, Wikipedia, accessed July 18, 2014. ( 13 ) Lars Bang Larsen, “Introduction – The Unimaginable Globality of Networks”, in Networks (Documents of Contemporary Art), ed. Lars Bang Larsen (London, Cambridge Massachusetts: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2014), 17.

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on a similar role to that of a record document in an archive – it acts as a piece of evidence which suggests that the malleable quality of available content is merely a façade.

While such a record document acts as a form of evidence of a particular condition, other documents can act as evidence of certain content. As part of his ongoing practice Jon Rafman sets out to preserve archives in digital form and uses their content to unveil their ability to construct personal and collective memories. In the video Annals of Time Lost, 2013, Rafman presents a series of shifting, layered images sourced from London’s National Gallery collection, including architectural blueprints, patent drawings and Old Master paintings, as well as images from anime cartoons. For Rafman, creating personal digital archives using collective archives is a way of re-framing loss and preserving the past. ( 1 4 ) What is particularly pertinent in the context of this essay is the

( 14 ) Annals of Time Lost (press release), http:// futuregallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ Jon-Rafman-Annals-of-Time-Lost-PressRelease.pdf, accessed July 18, 2014. ( 15 ) “Internet Archive: Wayback Machine”, accessed July 18, 2014, www.archive.org/web/. Indeed, even if one were to use the Wayback Machine, this option is not fool proof either – websites are excluded, not all tracked website updates are recorded and the numerous law suits which have been brought against the Internet Archive suggests that their efforts

are somewhat precarious. See, e.g., Internet Archive v Shell, 505 F. Supp.2d 755 (2007), available to read at http://www.leagle.com/ decision/20071260505FSupp2d755_11203. xml/INTERNET%20ARCHIVE%20v.%20SHELL, accessed 18 July 2014. ( 16 ) Tom Penney and Florian (Floyd) Mueller, “Playing the Subject (Draft)”, https://www.academia. edu/5084090/Playing_the_Subject_Draft_, 4-5, accessed July 18, 2014.

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reference in the work’s title to time that is lost. When one surfs the internet, the available content is experienced by the user in the present. Unless one specifically uses the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or a similar digital archive to access content, the lack of ability to gain an accurate snapshot of chronological time on the internet is problematic. ( 1 5 ) This issue is also made apparent by David Bradley’s experiment for Flowers for Ukraine, as the time in which the image of the flower is left on the Wikipedia page is lost. It is distinctly unlike the experience of reading a book which has been left untouched for a number of years, as all physical books are products of specific moments in chronological time. Rafman grasps on to such specific moments, attempting to salvage their imperceptibility through the creation of his personal digital archive.

A personal digital archive can also act as a tool for constructing alternative historical narratives which, by virtue of incorporating

B Left: Eloïse Bonneviot, My Forensic Steps 2, 2014, digital print on silk. Centre: Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini, Twenty Plots for Things To Come, 2013 – ongoing (image still), online film, unknown duration. Actor:

Robert Pierson. Programming: John Weir.

Right: Ry David Bradley, Flowers for Ukraine, 2014, ink transfer print on suede.

Ph: Christo Crocker.

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selected images, only maintain selected memories. It is a construction of the self which supports the meaning of the archive as a vehicle for the preservation of memories – a contemporary meaning of the archive which is somewhat different to the traditional one of the ancient Tabularium.

This connection between the construction of the self and the archive as a vehicle for memory is also made apparent by the process of constructing user identities on social networking and dating websites and apps. As Tom Penney suggests, “[s]ocial networking systems may sort or manage us, essentialising a diverse or multiple self, but we willingly produce the content that constructs the ‘types’ they identify for us.” ( 1 6 ) In Penney’s Whorenet, 2014, an interactive iPad app acts as a caricature of the experience of using the existing Hornet App, which is a social network app for gay men. The user is presented with different characters and is able to use a ‘chat’ feature

C Rachel de Joode, Hanging Marble, 2014, digital print on vinyl, MDF. Ph: Christo Crocker.

D Ry David Bradley, Flowers for Ukraine, 2014, ink transfer print on suede. Ph: Christo Crocker.

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which effects the ‘arousal’ of the characters. Each character represents a different ‘type’ adopted by Hornet users so that they (and ⁄ or their content) become more memorable. Social networking and dating websites and apps also perpetuate the contemporary meaning of the archive through their use of the term ‘archive’ itself. For example, Facebook allows you to hide messages from view by opting to ‘archive’ the conversation and Twitter users can download their ‘Twitter archive’. ( 1 7 ) However, such sites should not be understood as digital archives of a user’s personal past. After all, users experience the past on these platforms through today’s filter. As such, it is more appropriate to describe these mechanisms as archives of the present, rather than as archives of the past.

Archives of the present are not however entirely antithetical to such archives of the past. What they share in common is a reliance on a methodical approach to the collection or

( 17 ) Archive’ is also a term which is used by such sites in relation to their collection of personal data. For example, Grindr’s privacy policy notes that “[w]hen we delete any information, it will be deleted from the active database, but may remain in our archives.” (Grindr Privacy Policy, 5.3: Changes to your Personal Data”, last modified July 12, 2013, http://grindr.com/ privacy-policy).

( 18 ) Ernst “Aura and Temporality”, http://www. macba.cat/en/lecture-wolfang-ernst, accessed July 18, 2014. ( 19 ) Eloïse Bonneviot, My Forensic Steps, 2014.

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accumulation of information. As Ernst suggests, “even in virtual worlds, we discover the algorithms of archival provenance.

There is nothing anarchic in the digital world. Every action here is based on precise algorithms.” ( 1 8 ) In her print, My Forensic Steps, 2014, Eloïse Bonneviot lists the forensic steps which she follows to collect information about mountain incidents that occurred in the UK in 2013. These steps include: “1.

Preserve scene… 5. Collect statements…9. Maintain scene as found, 10. Document conditions… …[and] 17. Locate items on the map”. ( 1 9 ) The collected information is then incorporated into her interactive online game Thinking Like a Mountain, 2014 and presented in an irrational way. For example, various weather condition and ground options – which are typically used by rescue agencies in creating their incident reports – are presented as a romantic poem. Any potential for using the information to create a logical narrative is removed. Thinking

( 20 + 21 ) Derrida, Archive Fever, 91.

( 22 ) Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini, artist statement on Twenty Plots for Things to Come, 2013, in e-mail message to author, December 23, 2013.

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Like a Mountain aims to disrupt the ability of the methodical approach of the archive to produce a comprehensible meaning.

It therefore possesses an anarchic quality which is akin to Derrida’s notion of the ‘death drive’ – the desire to destroy the archive. Derrida’s death drive relies on the polar opposite of ‘archive fever’ (“a compulsion, [a] repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive” ( 2 0 ) ) to exist, as he explains, “right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction”. ( 2 1 ) Bonneviot too, relies on her forensic steps – which echo the methodical approach of archiving processes – as a means of gathering information that she then makes incomprehensible.

Derrida’s death drive is a condition which also affects digital archives that are displayed online. The requisite destructive element is the dead or broken weblink, which can obstruct

E Jon Rafman, Annals of Time Lost, 2013 (image still), single channel HD video, 6m 52s.

Ph: Christo Crocker.

F Left: Jon Rafman, Annals of Time Lost, 2013 (image still), single channel HD video, 6m 52s. Centre: Tom Penney, Whorenet, 2014 (image still),iPad app on iPad 2 in iPad mount, programming: Stevie Griffiths. Right: Tom Penney, Selfie, 2014, digital Lustre print face mounted to acrylic. Ph: Christo Crocker.

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access to contents of an archive that are uploaded to a website.

Twenty Plots for Things to Come, 2013 - ongoing, a work by Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini which exists as an online film, has been created using links to online image databases of artifacts from science and technology museums. These images are played in a sequence that is randomly generated by a computer program, with a soundtrack of twenty different voiceovers that is also randomly generated. The duration of the work is unknown, as it will continue to play on the host website until all of the links which it is connected to are broken or dead. The work is consciously designed by the artists to not be visible over time. The artists observe that “through these processes [of augmentation, erasure and reduction], things have turned the world and our everyday existence into something completely different.” ( 2 2 ) Twenty Plots for Things to Come manifests these tendencies and in doing so, erases

( 23 ) Ernst notes that “traditional storage media have been physically inscribed…by writing the information to be stored, literally informing the device” (Ernst “Aura and Temporality”, http:// www.macba.cat/en/lecture-wolfang-ernst, accessed July 18, 2014).

G Eloïse Bonneviot, My Forensic Steps 2, 2014, digital print on silk. Ph: ChristoCrocker.

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the provenance of the depicted artifacts. It is possible that such erasures of provenance will affect the utilitarian value and consequent meaning of museum artifacts. The ability of such objects to mutate into other types of objects is the subject of Katja Novitskova’s Shapeshifters, 2013 – ongoing.

Novitskova constructs knife-like weapons using found silicon wafers which have been printed with circuit boards. Neither the artist or the viewer are made aware of the machine that these silicon computer chips have been created for. Unlike traditional storage media, the information is not physically inscribed in the silicon. ( 2 3 ) Without this property, the printed circuit boards become abstract patterns on the surface of the silicon wafer object. The information which may be contained in the computer chips has become inaccessible. The result of this mutation in the object’s utilitarian value is that its high-tech, manufactured nature assumes a new meaning. It becomes a

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handcrafted, analogue art object whose form is reminiscent of a primitive artifact. Like an old mobile phone which lies switched off and unused at the back of a cupboard, the Shapeshifters series suggests that over time, objects do not only evolve from analogue to digital. Rather, they may also evolve in the reverse.

All forms of evolution are accompanied by forms of loss.

Losing a sense of chronological time in the Information Age – a part of the past – is one such loss. This can be reclaimed through the deliberate sharing and provision of public access to information in tangible, physically inscribed, fixed forms.

Information in these forms can take on a restorative role while still possessing an online ethos, and while still exploring subject matter informed by the ways of the internet. Indeed, the desire to hold onto a sense of chronological time is apparent in artists, writers, curators and others who are affected by the condition of the internet but who nonetheless choose to create content

( 24 ) Derrida, Archive Fever, 9. ( 25 ) By virtue of a regularly updated GoogleDocs document, which is available to view at https:// docs.google.com/document/d/1C8hqwpkFZ iecHtsWu4FIQsGLwSS7A2NxoZkRxMfzzTM/ edit?usp=sharing.

( 26 ) Katja Novitskova, Post-Internet Survival Guide 2010, Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011. ( 27 ) Dragan Espenschied and Olia Lialina, Digital Folklore, Stuttgart: merz & solitude, 2009. ( 28 ) Derrida, Archive Fever, 9.

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in tangible, inscribed, fixed forms. The Tabularium Archive has been initiated by the author of this essay to document the presence of this desire, and to accompany the exhibition of the aforementioned artworks. The Tabularium Archive collates and preserves printed publications created by artists, writers and curators, that have an online ethos but which are not available in digital form. In choosing to collate and present the documents within a single physical space, the project is conscious of its conservativeness. And yet, as Derrida’s states, “…every archive, … is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional… it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion”. ( 2 4 ) What distinguishes the Tabularium Archive from its ancient Roman predecessor is that it is not state-sanctioned – it has been initiated and produced due to the personal fixation of its maker. It gains its power through being presented in an exhibition which is open to the public

H Katja Novitskova, Shapeshifter X, 2013 (left) and Shapeshifter V, 2013 (right), broken silicon wafers, epoxy clay, nail polish, appropriated acrylic case, appropriated wooden capital.

Ph: Christo Crocker.

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and through having its accompanying inventory available for the wider public to view online. ( 2 5 ) The public is given the opportunity to peruse and touch the material, to evaluate the past, present and future significance of the publications in the context of one another, such as Katja Novitskova’s PostInternet Survival Guide 2010 ( 2 6 ) and Dragan Espenschied and Olia Lialina’s Digital Folklore. ( 2 7 ) It is an archive which aspires to provide a worthy response to Derrida’s musings: “Why archive this? Why these investments in paper, in ink, in characters? … Does this merit printing? Aren’t these stories to be had everywhere?” ( 2 8 ) The Tabularium Archive is a project which is built on paper, ink and printing with the premise that the stories it contains should be had everywhere and absorbed by everyone.

The Tabularium Archive returns to a particular system of spatial language - the physical space. Lawrence Lek’s work, Memory

I Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini, Twenty Plots for Things To Come, 2013 – ongoing (image still), online film, unknown duration. Actor: Robert Pierson. Programming: John Weir. Ph: Christo Crocker.

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Palace, 2014, juxtaposes this system of spatial language with its virtual, utopian counterpart. The virtual world he creates combines the imagined architecture of the ancient Roman Tabularium archive with rows of server racks, which are a typical site in present-day data centers. Through the medium of simulated architecture, the viewer experiences a mash-up of these real and hypothetical systems of spatial language and the collision of their varying forms of non-verbal communication.

Within this virtual world, the viewer encounters digital versions of publications from the Tabularium Archive, which are each ‘stored’ in individual server racks. By being made available on Slopes’ and the artist’s website, Memory Palace enables the Tabularium Archive to be experienced virtually, anywhere and by anyone.

In its physical form the Tabularium Archive consciously attempts to capture the sentiments, concerns and preoccupations of the

J Alana Kushnir, Tabularium Archive, 2014 – ongoing, publications with an online ethos unavailable in digital form, server rack.

Ph: Christo Crocker. ( 29 ) See the regularly updated Tabularium Archive inventory document at this Google Docs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C8hqwp kFZiecHtsWu4FIQsGLwSS7A2NxoZkRxMfzzTM/ edit?usp=sharing.

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featured artists, curators and writers at the specific moments in which their publications were created. For this reason its accompanying inventory is ordered according to publication date. ( 2 9 ) This linear approach is in many ways traditional, as it is only one means of recalling the impact of technological developments on the every day in the recent past. And yet, in tracing the history of these developments through an abundance of artistic practices, the narratives which it includes are numerous and diverse. Ultimately, it is hoped that the Archive will gain its power through the sharing and preservation of these narratives. Fortunately, only time will tell if this will be the case.

A — Z

AZ.Namusn.Art (aka Riccardo Fadda) is an art collective founded by Riccardo Fadda (1976). It arose in Porto Torres (Sassari, Italy) in May 2007, after an artistic action in the central square of the town. AZ.Namusn.Art collective is a fluid group of people that come together to create projects designed to shake the conscience.

It is not just a militant group of generic social activism, but an artistic endeavour. Az.Namusn.Art is a floating collective that includes different professionals that operate in specific areas, on specific projects.

They have exhibited extensively in Italy and Europe, in institutions such as Macro in Rome, Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice and the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg, Austria.

Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS, Madrid; MUAC, MEX; BAC, Geneve.

Solo shows in MUSAC, León; SAPS, Mex; DRCLAS, Harvard University, Cambridge; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition; CIFO, Miami; Mor.Charpentier, Paris; Galería Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid; Arratia+Beer Gallery, Berlín. Also in Manifesta 9 (2012); Venice Biennial (2011), San Juan Triennial, PR (2009); Praga Biennial (2005); Istanbul Biennial (2003); Sao Paulo Biennial (2002); Havana Biennial (1997); etc. He has publish the monographic book “Modernidad Tropical”, Musac/Actar/Birkhauser, Barcelona (2010); and the artist book “The Savage Revolutionary.

A Telenovela” (2010) Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña/Fundación para la Cultura Urbana, San Juan ⁄ Caracas; among others collective books, etc.

CHRIS

RETROGRADE STA I R W E L L

Alexander Apóstol Lives and works between Madrid and Caracas. Selected exhibitions in Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tate Modern, London; Bronx Museum, NY; Museo Tamayo, MEX; Witte de With, Rotterdam; ICP, NY; Fundación Jumex, México; PAMM, Miami; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut; NGBK,

Giulia Bassi graduated from the University of Florence with a magisterial thesis supervised by Paul A. Ginsborg entitled Metapolitica. Storia degli esiti politici e semantica del discorso comunista in Italia (1943-1980) [Metapolitics. History and Semantics in the Italian Communist Revolutionary

MASON

A — Z

02

A distorted series of thumps echo down the walls, as Dean, heart pounding in his ears, climbs the stairs two at a time. Reaching the fourth floor landing he finds the old man that may or may not be his old man, heaped across the bottom steps. Dean supposes he might had some kind of coronary or maybe he simply slipped due to a gammy leg, either way the chase is over. Dean catches his breath and puts down the plastic bag he is carrying with a metallic rattle cut short. He leans over the body and with all four fingers cupped slightly, he puts his hand underneath the old man’s nose. There is no breath on his skin. He straightens up his back, bomber jacket bunching up around his shoulders.

The poor bloke is dead.

Now that he is able to get up close, Dean considers that the face, although bloodied and grazed on one side, has a distant familiarity to it. He closes his eyes and tries to dredge up the last image of his father’s looming features from the perspective of a downy-haired six year old self. The recently deceased seems almost certainly too young, despite being struck by the niggling resemblance he saw in the old man movements, back when he was animate.

Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS, AZ.Namusn.Art 0 3 (aka Riccardo Fadda) is an art Madrid; MUAC, MEX; BAC, Geneve. collective founded by Riccardo Solo shows in MUSAC, León;

DeanSAPS, runs aMex; hand DRCLAS, Harvard Fadda (1976). It arose in Porto Cambridge; Torres (Sassari, Italy) inscalp May 2007, across his stubbly as he University, thinks. There is a Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition; CIFO, after an artistic action in the central subtle animal expression to Dean that people Mor.Charpentier, Paris; square of the town. AZ.Namusn.Art Miami; often mistake as a lack of intelligence but is in collective is a fluid group of people Galería Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid; fact a result oftothe naturally aspect Berlín. of Arratia+Beer Gallery, Also in that come together create projectsever-present Manifesta 9 (2012); Venice Biennial his thought process.

Dean’s mind is always fixedly designed to shake the conscience.

San disregard Juan Triennial, PR It linked is not to justhis a militant group ofhe(2011), surroundings, has a keen Praga Biennial (2005); generic social activism, tenses but anof(2009); for those immaterial past and future and artistic endeavour. Az.Namusn.Art Istanbul Biennial (2003); Sao Paulo a general policy not to question why events happen is a floating collective that includes Biennial (2002); Havana Biennial the wayprofessionals they do. But matter(1997); how he tries etc.

He tohas publish the different thatno operate a handle onspecific what projects. is happening at this moment, monographic book “Modernidad inget specific areas, on Musac/Actar/Birkhauser, They have exhibited extensively in Tropical”, he is overwhelmed by the eeriness of the situation Barcelona (2010); and the artist Italy Europe, for and reasons tied in in institutions with his past. such as Macro in Rome, Palazzo book “The Savage Revolutionary.

Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, A Telenovela” (2010) Instituto de

as ifPuertorriqueña/Fundación Dean Cultura S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice and It’s the not follows home every pensioner he sees, clinging la Cultura Urbana, San Juan ⁄ Internationale Sommerakademie für para Caracas; among others collective Bildende to the Kunst hope Salzburg, that thisAustria. time round it’ll be his long lost Pop. Up until now he has books, given etc. precisely zero

consideration to the idea of a family reunion and Alexander Apóstol certainly not one like this, but after seeing G i u l ithe a B old assi Lives and works between Madrid man in passing outside the petrol station notthe half graduated from University of and Caracas.

Selected exhibitions with of a magisterial thesis hour ago, Museum, a morbid took hold him inan Guggenheim NY;curiosity Tate Florence supervised by toting Paul aA. Ginsborg Modern, London; Museum, Half and Dean actedBronx on impulse. cut and entitled Metapolitica. Storia degli NY; Tamayo, MEX; Witte bagMuseo containing a partial six pack of super strength de With, Rotterdam; ICP, NY; esiti politici e semantica del discorso lager through the evening streets, he pursued the Fundación Jumex, México; PAMM, comunista in Italia (1943-1980) man The past Aldrich the shops and across[Metapolitics. the industrial History and Semantics in Miami; Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut; NGBK, the Italian Communist Revolutionary

A — Z

04

estate, running on nothing more than basic brain functions and a vague intent of confrontation.

Now though, as he stands alone with the corpse in the stairwell of the high rise, all his zeal for an argument has drained away and Dean is left only with confusion and despair. A stranger or his blood relation, with another life lived? Why is he here and why now?

Dean’s father left the family unit thirty four years ago, it was assumed by all involved that he had off’ed himself. In the morning after his disappearance a young Dean had found, floating in the kitchen sink, the molten remains of what was thought to be his father’s birth certificate and passport and all the family photos, including the negatives. As a man of few words this was as good a suicide note as any.

His mother never really came to terms with it and had her doubts about his passing. She eventually upheld the pretence of moving on with her life and a succession of new men arrived on the scene, because that’s what she thought Dean needed growing up. Still Dean shunned any sense of paternal longing, the memories of his father became distant and dreamlike, almost as if he never existed at all. He gave no thought to where

Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS, AZ.Namusn.Art 0 5 (aka Riccardo Fadda) is an art Madrid; MUAC, MEX; BAC, Geneve. collective founded by Riccardo Solo shows in MUSAC, León; Mex; DRCLAS, Harvard his father up,SAPS, all that mattered Fadda (1976).had It really arose ended in Porto Torres (Sassari, May 2007, University, Cambridge; Los Angeles was the fact Italy) of hisinabsence. after an artistic action in the central Contemporary Exhibition; CIFO, Mor.Charpentier, Paris; square of the town. AZ.Namusn.Art Miami;

Whether or not this man collective is a fluid group of people Galería Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid; and histogether long gone father are one and the Gallery, same, Berlín. Also in Arratia+Beer that come to create projects Manifesta Dean, with a frustrated expulsion of air9 (2012); has to Venice Biennial designed to shake the conscience.

(2011), Juan Triennial, PR It concede is not just a militant of to that there isgroup no way know San for certain, Praga Biennial (2005); generic activism, an (2009); in fact social the whole thingbut seems bloody stupid. artistic endeavour. Az.Namusn.Art Istanbul Biennial (2003); Sao Paulo He is now hard pressed to imagine what it was he is a floating collective that includes Biennial (2002); Havana Biennial thought might have happened if the man livedpublish the etc. had He has different professionals that operate (1997); enough tospecific speakprojects. to him. monographic Looking at the man“Modernidad book inlong specific areas, on They have exhibited extensively in Tropical”, once more he decides to leave.

No oneMusac/Actar/Birkhauser, has seen Barcelona (2010); and Italy in and institutions himand hereEurope, after all he is sure that someone else, the artist such as Macro in Rome, Palazzo book “The Savage Revolutionary. another resident most likely, will find the body.

Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, A Telenovela” (2010) Instituto de It makes no in difference to the him Cultura now. Dean picks up Puertorriqueña/Fundación S.a.L.E. Docks Venice and his plastic Sommerakademie bag and starts back down the steps. la Cultura Urbana, San Juan ⁄ Internationale für para Caracas; among others collective Bildende Kunst Salzburg, Austria. books, etc. and

He gets halfway

is crossing the landing on the first floor when Alexander Apóstol he stops.

He feels a goading crawling iulia Bassi Lives and works between Madrid sensation G somewhere close toexhibitions the surface of his skin, graduated from he the University of and Caracas. Selected with a nails magisterial thesis up his jacket sleeve and Florence with unkempt inpulls Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tate supervised Modern, London; Museum, scratches a redBronx trail across a faded tattoobyonPaul his A. Ginsborg entitled Metapolitica. Storia degli NY; Museo He Tamayo, MEX; Wittethis, forearm. will remember perhaps every de With, Rotterdam; ICP, NY; esiti politici e semantica del discorso time he climbs a stairwell he will be hit with the Fundación Jumex, México; PAMM, comunista in Italia (1943-1980) recollection of abandoning dead old History man on [Metapolitics. and Semantics in Miami; The Aldrich Contemporarythe theMuseum, fourth floor.

He turns around, readyCommunist at first toRevolutionary the Italian Art Connecticut; NGBK, start the ascend back up, but instead he decides to stretch out his arms and leans backwards over the

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step. The last thing he thinks before gravity carries him onwards is that perhaps, if he is lucky, he might brain himself on a step on the way down and knock the memory of the old man from his mind.

Dean screams when he impacts the concrete steps, his body is pummelled by each jagged projection and his limbs flail uncontrollably on his descend. He tries to grab the railings and stop himself but the momentum is too much. As he nears the bottom he is caught under the eye by a step and his head immediately flourishes into a hot pain that gives way to the throbbing sensation accompanied by the swelling of soft tissue.

When he comes to, Dean is face down on the wet tiled ground floor.

Moving even the slightest, causes an excruciating twinge in his side and he is in no doubt that he has a broken a rib or two. His face feels like an uncomfortable mask and his vision is dark at the edges and distorted, he comes to the realisation that he can only see out of one eye. All about him are cans of beer, their aluminium bodies dented and split, expelling frothed liquid over the stairs and floor. Eventually Dean struggles to his feet, the pain is all encompassing. Holding firmly to

Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS, AZ.Namusn.Art 0 7 (aka Riccardo Fadda) is an art Madrid; MUAC, MEX; BAC, Geneve. collective founded by Riccardo Solo shows in MUSAC, León; SAPS, doors Mex; of DRCLAS, Harvard his side he falls through the double the Fadda (1976).

It arose in Porto Cambridge; Torres Mayoutside 2007, University, high (Sassari, rise andItaly) intointhe world. The evening Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition; CIFO, after action the central air an is artistic cool on his in facial wounds.

He slumps against Mor.Charpentier, Paris; square of the town. AZ.Namusn.Art Miami; a low brick wall for a moment to rest up.

He feels collective is a fluid group of people Galería Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid; dizzy nauseous. at the dust blown Arratia+Beer Gallery, Berlín. Also in that comeand together to createStaring projectsdown Manifesta 9 (2012); pavement, specks blood drip from some partVenice of Biennial designed to shake the of conscience.

San view.

Juan Triennial, PR It his is not militant groupinto of (2011), facejust anda fall squarely his tunnel Praga Biennial (2005); generic socialbeing activism, but an (2009); His whole is concentrating on the difficult artistic endeavour. Az.Namusn.Art Istanbul Biennial (2003); Sao Paulo task of breathing, Dean doesn’t remember is a floating collective that includes Biennial (2002); Havana Biennial breathing being such chore before (1997); now. etc. He has publish the different professionals that aoperate too, aprojects. proteanmonographic thought shifting book in“Modernidad inSomething specific areas,else on specific Musac ⁄ Actar/Birkhauser, They in Tropical”, andhave out exhibited of focus extensively amongst the explosions of pain.

Italy and Europe, Something else in he institutions can’t quite Barcelona recollect, (2010); but thatand the artist such as Macro in Rome, Palazzo book “The Savage Revolutionary. he feels is important he does.

Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, A Telenovela” (2010) Instituto de S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice and the Cultura Puertorriqueña/Fundación Internationale Sommerakademie für para la Cultura Urbana, San Juan ⁄ Caracas; among others collective Bildende Kunst Salzburg, Austria. books, etc.

Alexander Apóstol Lives and works between Madrid and Caracas. Selected exhibitions in Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tate Modern, London; Bronx Museum, NY; Museo Tamayo, MEX; Witte de With, Rotterdam; ICP, NY; Fundación Jumex, México; PAMM, Miami; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut; NGBK,

Giulia Bassi graduated from the University of Florence with a magisterial thesis supervised by Paul A. Ginsborg entitled Metapolitica. Storia degli esiti politici e semantica del discorso comunista in Italia (1943-1980) [Metapolitics. History and Semantics in the Italian Communist Revolutionary

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AZ.Namusn.Art (aka Riccardo Fadda) is an art collective founded by Riccardo Fadda (1976). It arose in Porto Torres (Sassari, Italy) in May 2007, after an artistic action in the central square of the town. AZ.Namusn.Art collective is a fluid group of people that come together to create projects designed to shake the conscience.

It is not just a militant group of generic social activism, but an artistic endeavour. Az.Namusn.Art is a floating collective that includes different professionals that operate in specific areas, on specific projects.

They have exhibited extensively in Italy and Europe, in institutions such as Macro in Rome, Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary in Trevi, S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice and the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg, Austria.

Alexander Apóstol Lives and works between Madrid and Caracas. Selected exhibitions in Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tate Modern, London; Bronx Museum, NY; Museo Tamayo, MEX; Witte de With, Rotterdam; ICP, NY; Fundación Jumex, México; PAMM, Miami; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut; NGBK,

Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS, Madrid; MUAC, MEX; BAC, Geneve.

Solo shows in MUSAC, León; SAPS, Mex; DRCLAS, Harvard University, Cambridge; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition; CIFO, Miami; Mor.Charpentier, Paris; Galería Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid; Arratia+Beer Gallery, Berlín. Also in Manifesta 9 (2012); Venice Biennial (2011), San Juan Triennial, PR (2009); Praga Biennial (2005); Istanbul Biennial (2003); Sao Paulo Biennial (2002); Havana Biennial (1997); etc. He has publish the monographic book “Modernidad Tropical”, Musac ⁄ Actar ⁄ Birkhauser, Barcelona (2010); and the artist book “The Savage Revolutionary.

A Telenovela” (2010) Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña ⁄ Fundación para la Cultura Urbana, San Juan ⁄ Caracas; among others collective books, etc.

Giulia Bassi graduated from the University of Florence with a magisterial thesis supervised by Paul A. Ginsborg entitled Metapolitica. Storia degli esiti politici e semantica del discorso comunista in Italia (1943-1980) [Metapolitics. History and Semantics in the Italian Communist Revolutionary

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Discourse (1943-1980)]. She is a member of the Executive Board and group ‘Storia’ [History] at the Istituto Gramsci Toscano, where she has worked from 2007 to 2012 in the archives of the Florentine Federation of the PCI. She is currently a PhD student in Storia delle Società, delle Istituzioni e del Pensiero. Dal Medioevo all’Età contemporanea [History of the Society, Institutions and Thought. From the Middle Age to the Contemporary Era] at the University of Trieste in co-supervision with the University of Reading, with the project Parole che mobilitano. Il concetto di ‘popolo’ tra storia politica e semantica storica nel partito comunista italiano [Words that mobilize. The Concept of ‘People’ between Political History and Historical Semantics in the Italian Communist Party], with tutors Paolo Ferrari and Federico Faloppa.

Lucy Bayley is currently studying a Middlesex University Studentship The ICA: A Histor y of the Contemporary, a collaborative PhD with Middlesex University and the ICA. By drawing on its archives she will consider the legacy of its interdisciplinary programmes within twentieth century British culture. Lucy

received an AHRC award for her MRes in Cultural Research with the London Consortium in 20112012. Previously, she was a Curator of National Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society where she worked on building UK museum collection through contemporary acquisitions. She has worked at contemporary galleries including The Drawing Room, Peer, and The Serpentine and in 2006 set up her own gallery alongside a production company in Clerkenwell, providing a platform for emerging artists.

Yv o n n e B i a l e k is an art historian and curator. Since 2013 she partakes as Ph.D. Fellow and scholarship holder in the DFG Program “The Photographic Dispositif” at Braunschweig University of Art, Department of Aesthetics & Art History were she prepares her dissertation on “The Installation View. A Photographic Genre between Documentation and Artistic Production”. Also since 2013, she is teaching Theory as a lecturer at the Departement of Integrated Design, University of Arts Bremen. In 2009 she received her Magister Artium with a thesis on “The Use of Photography in

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Francesca Woodman’s Work” from the University and Fine Art Academy of Kassel. She worked for numerous renowned international exhibitions and institutions such as documenta 12 (Kassel), Dia Art Foundation (New York) and GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (Bremen).

Lisa Blackmore obtained her PhD from Birkbeck College in 2011. Her thesis examined the construction of an official discourse of modernity during the military dictatorship in Venezuela (1948-58) through an analysis of visual culture, monumental spaces, government exhibitions, parades and public art. She is currently PostDoctoral Researcher at Universität Zürich, where she is working on midtwentieth century manifestations and sites of aesthetic modernity during periods of political unrest and their critical mediations.

She was Teaching Fellow in Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds (2013-14) and from 200513 she lived in Caracas, where she taught at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Universidad Simón Bolívar and worked as a curator and translator. Her most recent articles have been published

in Estudios: Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Paolo Chiasera (1978 Bologna) is an artist, writer and curator. In 2013, he founded ‘Secondo Stile: nomadic canvasbased artist-run exhibition-space’.

Chiasera is the author of Painting 1: analysis and convergences (2011, Oslo University),The horizon after commodity, notes on perversion (2011, Oslo University), Secondo Stile (2015, upcoming publication). Among the major exhibitions: MACRO (Rome, 2008) MARTa Herford (Herford, 2009) SMAK (Gent,2010), Bergen Kunsthall (Bergen, 2011), MAN (Nuoro, 2014), De Vleeshal (Middelburg, 2014).

Dr Ben Cranfield is Director of the Doctoral Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies and the MRes in Cultural Enquiry at Birkbeck. His work is currently concerned with the idea of experiment in post-war art practice, cultural institutions, archives and curatorial form. In 2007-8 he curated the series 60 Years of Curating at the Institute of

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Contemporar y Arts (ICA), and was contributing editor of How Soon is Now, the ICA’s 60th anniversary publication.

Recent articles include ‘Between Consensus and Anxiety: Curating Transparency at the ICA of the 1950s’ (Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2012), “Not another Museum’: the search for contemporary connection’ (Journal of Visual Culture, 2013) and ‘Students, Artists and the ICA: the revolution within?’ in Resurgence of the Sixties: The Continuing Relevance of the Cultural and Political Watershed (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2010).

System at VIR – Viafarini in Residence (2012, Milan); Engramme at 22,48m² Gallery, (2012, Belleville, Paris).

In 2013, he participated to the 16 th Biennial of Europe and the Mediterranean (Ancona).

He has published on NEW OBSERVATION #130, guest editor: Pedro AH Paixao (2014, New York); OEI Magazine #65 POSTKONST (Stockholm, 2014).

He has co-curated with Cecilia Guida the show Facciamo il Punto at the space Riss(e) (2013, Varese).

Selected residencies: A Natural Oasis (2014, San Marino); Museo Carlo Zauli (2014, Faenza); Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art (2013, Paris); Fondazione Spinola Alessandro Di Pietro Banna per l’Arte (2013, Banna, lives and works in Milan. Among his Turin); VIR – Via Farini in Residence most important solo shows: La table (2012, Milano). basse at the off-site space Bad New Business of Francesco Pantaleone Wo l f g a n g E r n s t Gallery (2014, Milan). Selected group shows include: Interferenze is Full Professor for Media Theories tra Arte e Cinema GLITCH at PAC at the Institute for Musicology (forthcoming, Milan), Zodiaco and Media Studies, Humboldt at CAR drde (2014, Bologna); University, Berlin. He studied Primavera 2 at CNEAI – Centre history, classics, and archaeology; National Édition Art Image (2013, in the 1980s and 1990s his research Chatou); Catch and Glimpse at Filser focused on theory of history, und Grӓf (2013, Munich); On File museology and the cultural archive at Platforma Space – MNAC Annex before growing into the emerging (2013, Bucharest); Constructional discipline of media studies. His

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current fields of research embrace time-based and time-critical media, their techno-mathematical aspects and their “sonic" qualities.

His monographical writings include: Medium Foucault. Weimarer Vorlesungen über Archive, Archäologie, Monumente und Medien (2000); Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung aus Unordnung (2002); Im Namen von Geschichte: Sammeln, Speichern, (Er)zählen (2003); Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts) (2007); Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien (2012); Gleichursprünglichkeit. Zeitwesen und Zeitgegebenheit technischer Medien (2012); Digital Memory and the Archive, edited and with foreword

by Jussi Parikka (2013); Signale aus der Vergangenheit. Eine kleine Geschichtskritik (2013).

Eirini Grigoriadou completed her PhD thesis at University of Barcelona, Spain. Her doctoral thesis “The Archive and the Photographic Typologies. From the New Objectivity to the New Generation of Photographers in Germany: 1920-2009”, supervised by the Chair Professor Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer, received the

«Extraordinary Doctorate Award».

Currently she is Associate Researcher in the project Global Art Archive (GAA) of the Research Group Critic Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Era: New methodologies, concepts and analytical approaches under the direction of Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer at the University of Barcelona, Department of Contemporary Art History. Her publications include “Fragmentos de la historia: Walter Benjamin y Aby Warburg” in Roots&Routes. Research on Visual Culture, “Tipologías, archivos y fotografía en el arte alemán de posguerra: Thomas Ruff y la identidad del retrato fotográfico” in Ars Longa, “La fotografía y la escritura documental del archivo institucional” in Escritura e imagen, (in Press).

Alana Kushnir is a freelance curator and art lawyer based in Melbourne, Australia. She received her BA in Art History and her LLB (Bachelor of Laws), each with First Class Honours, from the University of Melbourne in 2008.

She received her MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2013. Her research is concerned with the relationship

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between curatorial theory and practice, and how contemporary art, curating and fashion practices intersect with the law. She has presented her research in a wide range of contemporary art publications and academic journals, including the Journal of Curatorial Studies and Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Curated exhibitions and other curatorial projects include Tabularium at Slopes, Melbourne (2014), #FFF with Eloïse Bonneviot online at alpha60projects. org (2013), Open Curator Studio at Artspace, Sydney and online at joeyholder.com (2013), Walking Sideways (co-curator) at the ICA, London (2013), Fourth Plinth: Contemporary Monument (co-curator) at the ICA, London (2012 – 2013), Paraproduction at Boetzelaer|Nispen Gallery, Amsterdam (2012), TV Dinners at BUS Projects, Melbourne (2012), Acoustic Mirrors (co-curator) at the Zabludowicz Collection, London (2012). Forthcoming exhibitions include Collection+: Christian Thompson at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2015).

and Art Theory, he attended the Advanced Visual Arts Studies program at Maumaus School of visual Arts, in Lisbon, and completed his studies at the HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main.

In recent years his work has been developing around concepts and practices of destruction expressed in a diversity of media and formats, and has been presented, among other places, at: Gasworks, London (2014); Museu de Serralves, Porto (2014); recyclart, Brussels (2014); Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2013); Lampione, Frankfurt am Main (2013); Nam June Paik Art Centre, Gyeonggi-do (2010); Ve.Sch Raum, Vienna (2008); Formcontent, London (2007).

Robert Luzar is an artist, writer and researcher currently based in Toronto, Canada.

He explores crossovers of live-art and drawing-based practices with notions of multiplicity, materiality and ephemerality. He writes on art and critical theory and exhibits his works globally. He has exhibited Pedro Lagoa in spaces such as the Whitechapel is a visual artist currently based in Gallery (England), Talbot Rice Lisbon. With a formation in areas Gallery (Scotland), Orillia Museum such as Museology, Literature, of Art and History (Canada)

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Torrance Art Museum (USA), KCCC (Lithuania), and Künstlerhaus Dortmund (Germany); and has published in journals such as Desearch and Artfractures.(www. robertluzar.com) Chris Mason lives and writes in Essex. His stories have been performed by White Rabbit and published by The Pygmy Giant.

He won the 100 Minutes with Spread the Word competition in 2013.

Anne Massey is based at Middlesex University and has been fascinated by the history of the ICA for over thirty years.

Her book The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture, 1945-59 (Manchester University Press, 1995) has been called ‘groundbreaking ‘ by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Out of the Ivor y Tower: the Independent Group and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press, 2013) has just been published. She was guest editor for ‘The Independent Group Issue’, Journal of Visual Culture, August 2013 and is the author, with an Introduction by Gregor Muir, of the ICA’s new book, ICA London, 1946-68.

E m i l i o Va v a r e l l a was born in Monfalcone (Italy) in 1989. His artistic practice focuses on political philosophy and contemporary technological power.

Through the use of new media he highlights the ambiguous spaces and hidden structures of power.

He has worked with holographic installations of collective memories, drones, Google Street View technology and has written memories into the ASCII code of vintage family photos. He has studied in Sicily and Barcelona and completed a B.A. at the University of Bologna. In 2013 he completed an MFA from Iuav University of Venice while also studying abroad at the Bezalel Academy of Tel Aviv and Bilgi University of Istanbul. Emilio’s work has been recently shown at: EYEBEAM, SIGGRAPH, GLITCH Festival, EMAF Festival, Mediterranea16, Boston Cyberarts, Jarach Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina. His work has been published in: ARTFORUM, Flash Art, Leonardo and WIRED. He currently lives and works in New York.

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