Telling Stories about Feminist Art in Socialist Europe. Or the Archive as a Place of Cross-Generational Remaking (original) (raw)
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Woman's Reappearance. Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art - Feminist Perspectives
Feminist Review, n. 105, November 2013: 21-47, 2013
"Recent debates in the field of contemporary art have underlined the political importance of creative reworkings of the past, especially for those subjects that have been traditionally marginalised. A feminist perspective has been nevertheless quite absent from such debates. This article addresses feminist uses of archival documents in the visual arts through the analysis of three works produced in the past two decades: The Fae Richard’s Photo Archive (1997) by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, Some Chance Operations (1998) by Renée Green and Queen of the Artists’ Studios (2004–2007) by Andrea Geyer. These works share an interest for women’s histories and representations by composing a series of documents (both factual and fictive) into complex narratives where history and subjectivity intersect. Keywords: archive; feminist genealogies; women’s history; visual arts "
institutions showing a particular interest in the early feminist practices of women artists from this region. Are Eastern European feminist conceptual practices "returning" to the Western map as just another commodified art practice within late capitalism or is the introduction of an Eastern European artist here and there into major overview exhibitions simply a way of fulfilling a quota of political correctness? Will such an approach contribute to the absorption of Eastern European practices and narratives of art history into the "big narrative of twentieth century Western art history"? Where, in your opinion, is this impulse coming from? What is the role played by "nostalgia" in this and how has this retroactive "historicisation" influenced a general perception of early feminist practices?
Introduction to "Archives and Disobedience. Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe"
This anthology deals with the role of archives in visual culture, art and public discourse. It includes theoretical and artistic contributions that tackle archives from different critical positions. Archive is understood here as a form of governing and a means of identity politics that controls the dominant system of values, behaviour of people, use of language and subjectivity. This approach dwells on presupposition that archives as discursive practices not only preserve and accumulate knowledge, but also shape and create subject and object positions. Visual culture used by artists and social movements has acquired new tactics of intervention that the texts discuss, sheding new light to the roles of images in the course of social transformation. The notions of ‘archive’ and ‘disobedience’ offer a theoretical perspective through which the book focuses on these complex changes. The texts discuss particular agencies related to visual archives, archival time and its swallowing, the notions of aestheticisation and politicisation, the operations of categorisation and criminalisation, the roles of spectrality and counter-archives. "Archives and Disobedience" includes contributions by Tina Bastajian, Achille Mbembe, Marina Gržinić, Andrej Kurnik, Vesna Madžoski, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Anu Pennanen, Marko Raat, Oliver Laas, Margaret Tali, Tanel Rander ja Anna-Stina Treumund.
Lacunar Affections: A Study About The Poetics Of The Archive And The Anarchival Impulse
CIRN Prato Conference Proceeding - Special Stream: Art as Archive: Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive, 2017
The research that led to this article started at an archive and went back to it. I say this because there was an actual archive that perpetuated throughout my whole study, which was the archive of my father, who passed away in 2004. Since then – and even before I can recall - my intention in working with documents, found images, and memorabilias as plastic material has influenced both my practice and theoretical researches. For this paper, I propose a recollection of investigations that I had conducted over the last years, focusing on the possibilities of thinking new ways of investment for the contemporary artist who works with archival material. Through the figure of the lacuna – which is essential for comprehending the possibility of a poetic dimension in archives – I've researched the potentialities of the anarchival impulse as it was proposed by Hal Foster (2004), in relation with the archive fever and the archival impulse discussed by Jacques Derrida (2001). As I visited the writings of Jacques Derrida, Maurício Lissovsky, Arlette Farge, Lucia Castello Branco, Georges Didi-Huberman and Maurice Blanchot, I saw myself emerged in a sea of theories that pervades the universe of the archive. Through them, I investigated with a critical review the documental power and probatory value of archives – and of images as such. For this article, I've evoked works of contemporary artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Susan Hiller, Lorena Giullén Vaschetti, Walid Ra’ad and Cristina de Middel. Being an artist myself, it seemed perfectly natural that I should work with my own production, but never forget those who came before me.The intention of this paper is, thus, to elaborate on the affections (pathos) that images and documents of an archive recall and the gestures that they urge when we are working within their gaps.
The influence of contemporary art on the modern notion of archive
Digithum, 2013
In this article, I argue that contemporary art has played an essential role both in the transformation of contemporary archives and within the framework of the archival turn (for example, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler discusses the archival turn in the context of colonial studies, and authors such as Terry Cook and Eric Ketelaar use the term in the field of archival science). More specifically, I will explore this influence from the viewpoint of different artistic movements before concluding with visual art and a case study of the installation Arxiu d'arxius (Archive of archives, 1998-2006), a personal archive by the Catalan artist Montserrat Soto. The aim is to analyse how art has both changed how documents are created and displayed and provided new ways of organizing information and transmitting cultural memory, especially with regard to documenting aspects of history associated with pain, oppression and war (generally drawing on oral memory) and with certain groups (women, slaves and minority indigenous communities) that have been excluded from the documentary repositories of traditional archives, whether due to institutional neglect or because they were inevitably silenced and censored. To this end, I will first offer a brief overview of the origin and evolution of the concept of archive up to the present day, highlighting the main transformations it has undergone. I will then argue that contemporary art has engaged intensively with the idea of document storage and memory. Finally, building on these premises, I will analyse the three archives included in Arxiu d'arxius that are based on oral memory: the archive of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War; the archive of American slavery; and the archive of the Aboriginal Australian community.