Summary –Hal Foster

In this essay examines three contemporary artists whose work uses the concept of archives, he choose to look at Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean while there are many artists use archival today.

The first and probably the most notable function of archival art is to “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end elaborate on the found image, object, and favor the installation format. Foster suggests that while art has absorbed much of the language of the digital age, like “inventory,” “sample,” “share,” and “interactivity,” archival art remains an obstinately physical calling for “human interpretation, not mechanic reprocessing.

The three artists he mentioned made very different archival works. The first he pointed is Thomas Hirschhorn who creates direct sculptures, altars, kiosks, and monuments. Each of these installations focuses on historical figures, such as artists and philosophers, and attempt to “expose different audiences to alternative archives of public culture. Tacita Dean uses many mediums to recall “lost souls” in her work. Foster notes that archival artists are “often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects” a theme undoubtedly present in Dean’s work, she presents the past as always incomplete. In one example of her work she retraces the steps of a stowaway girl and records the coincidences that seem to echo the girls journey that ended in a shipwreck. The last artist Foster discusses is Sam Durant. Durant is similar to Dean in that he uses multiple mediums in this work but differs in that his source material is much more eclectic pulling from the histories of rock-and-roll, art, architecture, literature, social activism, as well as others. He often pairs these materials in a way that seems to encourage disorder. One example is his citing of Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed installed on the campus of Kent State, the site of the shooting of four students by National Guardsman.

The move to turn excavation sites into construction sites is welcome in another way too, it suggest a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic.