An Archival Impulse Hal Foster, Clock Time Rosalind Krauss

Summary:

An Archival Impulse 

Hal Foster

In An Archival Impulse Hal Foster discusses how the archive has become a popular form again since it first emerged in the pre-war period. Foster explores the presence of archival art in contemporary art through the use of three contemporary artists Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant all working with the archive in completely different ways.  Archival art makes the historical, lost or forgotten physically present.  This can take many forms with most artists favoring the medium of installation. Showing the diversity in how the archive can be sourced and presented.Hirschhorn works in public spaces creating his sculptures, altart, kiosks and monuments and aims to "connect what can not be connected." Dean finds forgotten historical stories ,researching and re-enacting the found information this can create unfinished work or ongoing as what she finds grows. Dean is drawn to stories about abandonment and failure this is the opposite of Hirschhorn’s  art that is about known cultural figures like artists and writers.  Durant shows the struggle between the upper class of design and the working class through multiple mediums like drawing, photography and installation in unusual ways.Similar to a museum they are piecing together and trying to create what has been lost or found from there world. To bring together the missing pieces information their art making is a collection or ramifications of this information. 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’.

Summary: 

Clock Time 

Rosalind Krauss

This essay talks about Christin Marclay's different choice of medium. Christin Marclay is a video artist using commercial film as his medium.  In his work Video Quartet sound is used, to make silence heightened and uses time in his recent work The Clock displayed recently at the MCA . Christin has selected sections from commercial films showing a clock and placed them in a way as to form a clock that plays for 24hours running combination of film clips which relate to each exact time of day. He makes a clock by using clocks but The Clock in ‘real time’ does not correspond to that of the original film that they were extracted from.It engages the audience makes them think about time and the space they are in, but while watching the work they also loose track of time by thinking about it. Featuring shots of actors reactions to time, this makes the audience look at their watch, seeing it is the same time,bring up the question  of reaction should there reaction be the same ? The Clock creates a new medium, time. Combining the time in movies reel time into the real time of the current, humanizes the fictional movies by putting them in the present creating a new film medium.