Big Archive - Art from Bureaucracy

The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the "living" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways - from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's "anemic archive" of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive - as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art - and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.

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"The Big Archive is a wonderfully erudite study of the avant-garde's anti-archival strategies that aim to subvert the structure and function of its nineteenth-century "hybrid institution." Spieker's arguments are often beguilingly clever, at times devilishly so." - Craig Leonard, Prefix Photo