About
THE ARCHIVE IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE ARCHIVE! Archival theory and practice in the artworld since 1990s. Although it is difficult to assign a precise starting date to the so called archival turn, it has now been underway for several decades—remarkably long for the notoriously fickle art world. What were its historical and theoretical foundations? What distinguishes the archival turn within an art context from parallel developments in neighboring disciplines such as literature, history, and cultural studies? This course is largely based on my 2022 book "Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art", while also taking into account shifts in artistic practice and theory that have occurred since its publication. It provides participants with a foundation in the historical trajectories and theoretical frameworks underpinning the sustained interest in archives among artists, writers, critics, and curators and situates the emergence of the archive within social, technological, philosophical, and art-historical contexts. Through close readings of key texts in archival theory, the course examines how these ideas entered the artworld in the mid 1990s and how they were transformed in the process. Drawing on a wide range of artworks, and broad phenomnea in the artworld, it aims to deepen participants’ understanding of what is often left unformulated in writing about archives, thus developing analytical tools for examining important nuances and distinctions among different formats, stages, terminologies, and references within the so called archival turn.