Currently Reading: Documents of Contemporary Art: The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (Whitechapel / The MIT Press, 2006)
I’ve been researching artists’ use of the archive and archival practice in relation to rubbish.
The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
This anthology explores ways in which the archive has become central in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory, testimony and identity. Surveying the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive, as both idea and as physical presence, this publication includes writings by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Hal Foster and many others, and essays on the archival practice of such artists as Gerhard Richter, Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Christian Boltanski, Renée Green and The Atlas Group.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/cat…
From Derrida’s Archive Fever: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion; the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation.” (p.13)
On Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1977) – scraps of rubbish bound and archives with numbered commentaries. Currently installed in the permanent collection on Norway’s’ National Museum.
“Ilya Kabakov’s first installation in a Moscow apartment at the start of the perestroika period; reconstructing imaginary vestiges of commu7ncal apartment life, arose from his view of the almost existential pathos that garbage symbolized. […] Accumulations of the discarded and useless can undermine the valorization of remembrance, as opposed to forgetting as much as they render absurd the process of making meaningful.” (p.10)
Kabakov is quoted on p.32 and p.37 respectively: “A Dump: The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with ne ends or borders, an inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbage. This whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections and fragments of cultures.” […] A dump not only devours everything, preserving forever, but one might say it continually generates something: this is where some kind of shoots come from for new project, ideas, a certain enthusiasm arises, hopes for rebirth of something, thgouh it is well-known that all of this will be covered with new layers of garbage.”
On Warhol’s time capsules and indiscriminate collecting of everything connected to his life and work, he is quoted in TRACES (p.31) on having everything your own separate in a closet: “Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it away.”
