In this essay Hal Foster discusses the presence of archival
art in contemporary art through the use of three contemporary artists, Thomas
Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean - who share the same notions of ‘artistic
practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and
events in modern art, philosophy, and history’.
The main purpose of archival art is to ‘make historical
information, often lost or displayed, physically present. To this end they
elaborate on the found image, object and text, and favour the installation
format’. Artists often use ambiguous references and as these sources are often
found, archival art can be seen as art of ‘post-production’. The information so
easily available on the internet as ‘virtual readymade’ ‘might imply that (this
source is) the ideal medium of archival art’. However archival art are not databases,
and are ‘fragmentary rather than fungible’ so as to remain for ‘human
interpretation, not machinic reprocessing’.
Archival art can also be seen with likeness to museums,
however the primary distinction between the two is that these artists ‘are not
concerned with critiques of representational totality and institutional
integrity.’ Another point behind what archival art is that it ‘not only draws
in informational archives but produces them as well... (where) all archival
materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’. Archival art placing its found materials
within a new context, whether with private or public collections, within a new
situation so it can be read in its own way by the viewer.
Archival art attempts to relate and ‘connect what cannot be connected’,
from the desire ‘to recoup failed visions in art, philosophy, and everyday life
into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform
the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia’.
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