Someone and the Ark Hive

What belongs in an archive? Everything that someone does not wish to forget and everything that someone believes will hold the key to the future. … In even the most diligently designed and strictly maintained archive, beside the birth certificates, land deeds, and public records, there must be room for contingency, for those things that may acquire a significance retroactively, alongside the flotsam of life and the hidden collections that may never fit within anyone’s research agenda, official history, or private version of the world.

This is all from an essay, Deep in the Archive by Ulrich Baer in Aperture 193 (Winter 2008):

… In the stacks there hovers the sense that these records of lives lived with hope, longing, and desire have all succumbed to the tooth of time. The archive seems to tinge its subjects with death: what is found in the archive bears testimony, first and foremost, to everything that could not be collected but was lost. In the silence of the archive, researchers try to grasp the texture of lives from the remains left here, on this sheet, in this box, on this clean table, and now for their eyes only.

… Photography as a medium, like the archive as a concept and place, has been characterized as “entombing” its subjects in advance of their actual deaths. Photographs have been understood by a distinguished lineage of thinkers, from Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, as inherently dialectical but ultimately melancholic. In this century-long view, photographs extricate their subjects from the flux of time to underscore that these photographed beings no longer exist in their original context. Underplayed in these melancholic interpretations of both photography and archives is the potential role of the contingent elements. Such interpretations often miss the fact that the archive and the photograph both offer the strategic or accidental possibility of opening up new worlds, or of offering new historical identities.

[ ... ]

We enter the archive as researchers or historians in search of a document, a deed, a letter, or a file that will lay our search to rest, just as life contains a “death drive” that moves us toward equilibrium and stasis. The death drive, it bears remembering, is ultimately a productive drive that attaches itself to any activity that seeks to establish an absolute authority or origin. We dig for an original that will fulfill our quest by its sheer existence; the archive is meant to store that which will finally be self-evident. Derrida analyzes this drive for an original, self-evident document or object as the search for the moment when the archive becomes irrelevant, and its purpose and existence is destroyed. This is the moment, in films and novels, when the researcher runs triumphantly past dusty files and the stunned archivists, waving in her hand the record that refutes what everybody (usually a packed courtroom audience, a jury, and an exasperated judge) had assumed to be the truth. She never looks back to the archive that has now served its function, and is now rendered obsolete by that which it contains.

The fact that “ things … may acquire a significance retroactively” is problematic in art. Did the artist do it by accident, or was there subconscious awareness? See my post of a few days ago on Stieglitz’s photography.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/