HAL FOSTER - An Archival Impulse

Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith

Still from Hollywood Burn, 2011
Digital video, sound, 16:9
Duration: 52 min


     Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse” is a critical framework of understanding artists’ practice in archival art. Foster focuses on Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tactica Dean  who share the notion of their artistic practice as an idiosyncratic.  Archival art is hardly new, it has been active since the prewar period (where there was a focus political and technological archival art), and postwar period (appropriation) and even now in contemporary art (with the internet becoming a prominent factor in our daily lives).

Archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present - bringing something previously lost to the forefront. The artists use the found image, object, and text, as well as installation. Some artists draw inspiration from visual narratives, or rather, films. Douglas Gordon creates these “time readymades” that are drawn from the archives of mass culture. In contemporary art, it has become even more accessible for artists and even the public to get ahold of ‘the Hollywood archives’. Contemporary artists that form Soda Jerk take advantage of the internet, recreating memorable film scenes that allows viewers to engage with those films in a different way. This can also be seen in Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). 

Hal Foster explores the postmodernists complications of originality and authorship. We are shown archival art at its darkest. There has been a slight shift of the archival, a different view in contemporary art that does not explore this darkness. We can see this through the mega-archive of the internet.  There is a human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing. The archives are not indiscriminate, they are indeterminant. The archival art has become about the preproduction as much as the postproduction. The artists choose archives that are unfulfilled or incomplete that leaves a air of uncertainty and a continuous incomplete cycle of the archives. 

There is a clear distinction of the artist-as-archivist and the artist-as-curator. The archivist’s toy with the ‘museum collection’. The archivists orientation of their art is  more “‘institutive’ than ‘destructive,’ more ‘legislative’ than ‘transgressive.’” Foster has observed that the museum's reputation has been ruined, that in the public sphere they are a orderly, logical and aesthetically consistent in their displays. With this in mind the archivist’s may bring forth the dusty archives hidden within the museums but still retain the museums coherent system of presentation. 

It is important to note that there is a constant continuation of archival art. They are forever being produced, whether “found or constructed, factual yet fictive, or public yet private.”