Thematic Trimester1 2014/2015

Thematic Project Description

Short Circuiting the Archive

In December 2013, the publisher New Documents presented the new volume Walter Benjamin: Recent Writings 1986-2013. The collection contains the transcript of one of Benjamin’s first lectures, Mondrian ’63-‘96. Many years after his death, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) reappeared in public in 1986 before an audience at the Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Questioning the epistemological values of copies, in his lecture he presented several Piet Mondrians dating from 1963 to 1996. The event was in conjunction with the exhibition The Last Futurist Exhibition, by Kasimir Malevich, first presented in a private apartment in 1985 in Belgrade and next at the Gallery Škuc, Ljubljana in 1986, as well as The International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show) 1993, which was first shown in Belgrade, in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art (1986), and afterwards again in Ljubljana (1986). The latter exhibition represented artworks from the Armory Show that was held in New York in 1913, along with a representative selection of copies of avant-garde and various modernist artistic movements. The artworks were signed with the names of the artists that the paintings supposedly belonged to, from Matisse to Carl Andre, but dated differently 1905, 1913, 1932, 1969, 1988, 1990 and 2019. The impossibility to view these artists in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, accompanied by exhibition materials stating that the exhibition was taking place in New York in 1993, and that the show was organised by the (dead) Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich were suspect to say the least.

These events were not attempts to copy original paintings, or create forgeries. The artists behind the project, who remained anonymous, tried to (re)create the foundations of a system of art that is known as contemporary art today. The copy is here not anymore a mere replica; it is more complex and multi-layered, triggering additional meanings. As Benjamin mentioned near the end of his lecture:

"Even those so-called answers, which we have arrived at in this lecture, are only conditional answers. They are based on assumptions and not on facts. The only true facts are these paintings, which stand in front of us. Such simple paintings and such complicated questions. We still don’t know who is the author of these paintings, when they originated and what is their meaning. They rely neither on the co-ordinates of time, nor on co-ordinates of identity, nor on co-ordinates of meaning. They simply hover, and the only comprehensible sense of their existence, which we can accept with certainty are these questions themselves".

The idea of the copy, or appropriation, is well exemplified in art’s history, for example through the works by Sherrie Levin, Eva and Franco Mattes or David Diao. Adding to these examples, but now also reifying the erasure of the artist’s body, these projects question the current, canonized foundations of art: the identity of the artists and their work, the meaning and significance of the work, and its interpretation. As such, they use the past to critically address today’s narratives. Moreover, combining the past and the future in the present, time is presented here as circular. Without the difference between past and future, everything is present. This ‘constant present’, a result of constant copying, recalls Paul Virilio’s analysis of today’s computerised world: “the decisive end of the present period of art, when an old system (which could be a new one under altered circumstances) is returning to art. (...) The three tenses of decisive action: past, present and future, have been surreptitiously replaced by two tenses: real time and delayed time, the future having meanwhile disappeared via computer programming and, on the other hand, in the corruption of this so-called ‘real’ time which simultaneously contains both a part of the present and a part of the immediate future”.

In the course we will focus on such different strategies or methods that present history as a story that also mirrors certain affinities with the notion of the archive; a subjectively constructed narrative that orders diverse phenomena into a coherent vision of the past. Eliding the boundaries between historical fact and fiction, the copy is just one way to confront forms of historicity and anti-historicity. Through modes of iteration — the copy, the leak and other permutations can short-circuit, defy, disrupt and subsume archival activities to transfer the undocumentability of war and trauma, and the limits of historical representation. Repetition is another, returning again and again to the same subjects, ideas will start to bleed together forming (new) narratives. The question is how to deal with such tactics? Do they lead to an abandonment of stories, or art for that matter? Can they stimulate uncharted voices that might provoke and unravel existing cultural and political structures? Or, can they be exposed by not looking at the narrative itself but rather through the process of how narratives come into being? Distributed or existing within dispersed networks, what kinds of organisations are adequate for presentation, dissemination or preservation?

The course will critically address these and related questions while looking at a diverse set of examples both historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical. The thematic project is divided in different clusters that will address and explore archival theories and practices, interweaving tangible and oblique approaches. Moving from databases, to unconventional strategies and into the condition of the copy and the leak. Next to weekly lectures and discussions there will be workshops, guest appearances, screenings and visits to exhibitions. The exact program will be updated along the course.

class 11 T - Slippages: Malleable, Modular and Migratory + screenings

reading:

readers/presenters:

Monday 1 December

class 12 A+T - Evaluation / Discussion / Presentations of assignment