Thematic Trimester 1: Short Circuiting the Archive
Thematic Project Description
thanks to: Tina Bastajian
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.
Tutors
Tina Bastajian is a film/new media artist, researcher and archival dramaturgist born in Los Angeles and raised as a filmmaker in San Francisco. Currently she is a researcher at the University of Amsterdam's School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). In tandem she is working in praxis and theory to chart and interrogate subjective mapping tendencies in locative media practices that is further explored in her interactive documentary work, Coffee Deposits:Topologies of Chance (2010) that extends to locative ‘post-scripts’ via QR code, geo-caching and augmented reality tactics. Themes of the fragment, translation, and the trace are also intrinsic to her work within experimental, exilic and diasporan film. Other aspects of her research have focused on strategies of documentation, preservation and re-presentation of historical performative film works (Expanded Cinema), informing her project that re-traced the Amsterdam underground film venue and movement Electric Cinema (circa 1969-1975) through a series of interviews, texts, curated programs (International Film Festival Rotterdam, Electric Cinema ReDux) and its subsequent documentation of performances. Her work has been shown at festivals, galleries and museums including: IDFA, San Francisco International Film Festival; YYZ Gallery, Toronto; CinemaEast NYC; Smart Project Space gallery, Amsterdam; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Beirut International Film Festival; The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Montreal; and De Filmhuis in Den Haag.
Annet Dekker is an independent researcher, curator and writer. She is interested in the influence of technology, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. Currently she is core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and researcher digital preservation at Tate in London. In 2009 she initiated aaaan.net with Annette Wolfsberger; they coordinate artists-in-residences and set up strategic and sustainable collaborations with (inter)national arts organisations. Previously she worked as web curator for SKOR (2010–12), was programme manager at Virtueel Platform (2008–10), head of exhibitions, education and artists-in-residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (1999–08), and editor of several publications on digital art and issues of preservation. In 2014 she completed a Ph.D. research at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University in London, titled Enabling the Future, or How to Survive FOREVER. A study of networks, processes and ambiguity in net art and the need for an expanded practice of conservation.
Schedule
Unless otherwise specified, Seminars will take place on Mondays.
Preliminary schedule: changes are likely to take place, so keep an idea out to this page and the calender !
Programme planning
Thursday 18 September
class 1 A – Introduction + guest Özge Çelikaslan
11:15 - 17:30
reading:
readers/presenters: all - a 500 word essay needs to be ready and on your dedicated wiki page by Wednesday 17 October.
Monday 22 September
class 2 A – Archive 1 + screenings
reading:
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. And the Discourse on Language. New York: Vintage Books (1972 - edition 2010):
Introduction (pp.3-17) + The historical a priori and the archive (pp.126-131)
- Jacques Derrida (1995) Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. pp. 9-21. [1]
readers/presenters:
Monday 29 September
class 3 T – Visit to Eye in Amsterdam for masterclass by Anthony McCall
reading:
readers/presenters: benjamin li, allison ann, arantxa gonlag
Monday 6 October
class 4 T – Tactical absence, visibility and multiplicity + guest Margaret Tali
reading:
readers/presenters: solange frankort, cihad caner
Monday 13 October
class 5 T – Challenging (collaborating) with(in) Archives/Collections + visit Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam
reading:
readers/presenters:
Monday 27 October
class 6 A – Originality / aura / copy + screenings
reading:
readers/presenters:
Monday 3 November
class 7 A – Networks and circulation
reading:
readers/presenters: Julie Boschat Thorez
Monday 10 November
class 8 A+T – In the dark + visit to Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg
reading:
readers/presenters:
Monday 17 November
class 9 T - Process, Document and Materiality
reading:
readers/presenters:
Monday 24 November
class 10 T - Slippages: Malleable, Modular and Migratory + screenings
reading:
readers/presenters:
Monday 8 December
class 11 A+T - Evaluation / Discussion / Presentations of assignment