Artist as Archivist.

The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy

By Sven Spieker

MIT Press, 2008

228 pp./$24.95 (hb)

In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker explores connections between information science and art-making. Many contemporary artists interrogate how ideas are produced, stored, retrieved, and become accepted as true. This was a major theme of Documents 11, the biennale held in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, curated by Okwui Enwezor. The theme was explored more fully by Enwezor in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008), as well as Charles Merewether's The Archive (2006). The fact that an earlier generation of artists were also interested in these ideas, however, is less well known, and Spieker attempts to rectify this. In his own words: "I contend that the use of archives in late-twentieth-century art reacts in a variety of ways to the assault by the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes on the nineteenth-century objectification (and fetishization) of linear time and historical process" (1). The Big Archive is thus, fundamentally, an attempt to find historical precedents for the art-making of today.

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Richard Pearce-Moses, writing for the Society of American Archivists, defines archives as:

Spieker, however, explores the conceptual limits of archiving. He points out that within the artistic community, "there seems to be little consensus as to what an archive is, how it might be distinguished from other types of collections, and, most importantly, how its relationship with earlier twentieth-century art, most notably with the historical avant-gardes, might be framed" (4-5). In response, he has produced this book-length essay with winding turns. Unfortunately, the density of his writing obscures the argument, and the book will be difficult to understand--even by readers well-versed in contemporary thought. Indeed, the analytical material is abstract and presupposes fluency with psychoanalytic, poststructural, and semiotic theories.

The production values of the book are mid-range, but the volume will likely be inspiring to members of the art community whose work is fundamentally about information processing. The book contains black-and-white illustrations and endnotes but no bibliography or index of names. Of the illustrations, Spieker has admirably reproduced little-studied material by well-known artists. The book includes numerous examples produced during World War I and the inter-war period.

Highlights include a photograph of and prints from the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris from 1924 to 1925. This institution archived people's dreams and published the journal La Revolution surrealiste. Additional highlights include works by El Lissitzky and other members of the Russian avant-garde, who condemned archives as the source of "paltry Utopias" in 1921 (105).

Each chapter is a case study, and we will use Marcel Duchamp as a representative example. Although best-known for exhibiting his Fountain of 1917--a porcelain urinal--Spieker explains that he also produced readymades and assemblages that focus on information and the modern office. These include handwriting on plastic (Recette, 1918), reproductions of paychecks (Tzanck Check, 1919), and a portable Underwood typewriter (Traveller's Folding Item, 1916). Spieker frames these examples in semiotic terms, noting that:

The 1930s through the 1950s are glossed over in the book, and intense scrutiny resumes with contemporary art. Spieker understands Andy Warhol's "Time Capsules" (1974-87) as a literal archive--they are a series of boxes filled, beginning in 1974, with the objects that cluttered Warhol's desk. Works of art by Gerhard Richter, Walid Ra'ad, and Boris Mikhailov composed of numerous images assembled together are compared to photo archives. The book ends with artists who explore the conceptual limits of archival practices. For example, Andrea Eraser's Information Room: (1998) grants the public open access to rummage through normally restricted collections at the Kunsthalle Bern. Susan Hiller's From the Freud Museum (1991-97) mixes true artifacts owned by Sigmund Freud with found objects. Thomas Demand's Archive (1995) is a room filled with empty archival boxes.

While the works of art that fill the pages of The Big Archive are not visually decadent, they are nonetheless bold. They take the concept of an archive--a paradigm of rational order and usefulness--and undermine cornerstones of the profession: objectivity, trust, authenticity, integrity, openness, privacy, and lawfulness. (2) As viewers we are invited to contemplate how our culture depends upon its information, and are left unsettled by chaotic, irrational, deceptive, and empty alternatives.

TRAVIS NYGARD is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is writing a dissertation on the visual culture of American agribusiness.

ALEC SONSTEBY holds an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is employed as a reference librarian at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

NOTES (1.) A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology; available online at www.archivists.org/glossary/). (2.) The Code of Ethics for Archivists; available online at www.archivists.org/governance/handbook/app_ethics.asp).

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