As a depository of civic record and social history whose very name derives from the Greek word for town hall, the archive would seem to be a public entity, yet it is stocked with the personal, even intimate, artifacts of private lives. It is this inherent tension between public and private which inaugurates, for Derrida, an inquiry into the human impulse to preserve, through technology as well as tradition, both a historical and a psychic past. What emerges is a marvelous expansive work, engaging at once Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism in a profound reflection on the real, the unreal, and the virtual.
Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever presents works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists in the exhibition include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson, and Vivan Sundaram, among others.
Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there. Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive—and what counts as history—as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized. Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé Sentilles
Refiguring the Archive at once expresses cutting-edge debates on `the archive' in South Africa and internationally, and pushes the boundaries of those debates. It brings together prominent thinkers from a range of disciplines, mainly South Africans but a number from other countries. Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as holding the past. The contributors to this book question this orthodoxy, unfolding the ways in which archives construct, sanctify, and bury pasts. In his contribution, Jacques Derrida (an instantly recognisable name in intellectual discourse worldwide) shows how remembering can never be separated from forgetting, and argues that the archive is about the future rather than the past. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the degree to which thinking about archives is embracing new realities and new possibilities. The book expresses a confidence in claiming for archival discourse previously unentered terrains. It serves as an early manual for a time that has already begun.
In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an originaland sometimes irreverentinvestigation into how modern historiography has developed. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material worldinherited from the nineteenth centurywith which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world. Steedman begins by asserting that in recent years much attention has been paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences; she calls this practice "archivization." By definition, the archive is the repository of "that which will not go away," and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the "matter of history" can never go away or be erased. This unique work will be welcomed by all historians who want to think about what it is they do.
You thought you knew everything there was to know about the world's favorite game of Pocket Monsters, right? Think again! Because in your very hands is the ULTIMATE Pokemon guide, jam-packed with more fun facts and cool information than you ever thought possible! Now, expert gaming author Hank Schlesinger brings you very the latest on: --Everything you ever wanted to know about the Yellow, Red and Blue versions of Pokemon --Pokemon trading cards, the Pokemon TV show, and the new Pokemon movie --Hints, tips, tricks, winning combinations and super trading advice from kids just like you, who have become Pokemon masters --All the newest Pokemon offshoots, including Pokemon Snap, Super Smash Bros., Pokemon Pinball, and more --Listings of hundreds of awesome Pokemon websites --Plus: tons of cool info, hilarious jokes, fabulous lists (including "How to Tell If You're a Pokemon Fanatic"), interesting Poke trivia, and much more! Special bonus! Exclusive profile of the actor who plays the voice of James, Brock, and many other of your favorite Pokemon on the "Pokemon" animated series! Pokemon Fever has not been authorized or endorsed by Nintendo or anyone else involved in the creation, manufacture or distribution of Pokemon games, the preparation or broadcast of the "Pokemon" television show, or the creation or production of the Pokemon movie.
In the 1950s, fourteen-year-old Elena Padilla and her father move into a haunted house in Duston, Arizona, where only Elena can see and help the ghost of the young girl who died there.
"Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies - the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art."--BOOK JACKET.
