The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy

Abstract

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 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 -- Dust jacket.

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