DEEP IN THE ARCHIVE

Author(s): Ulrich Baer

Source: Aperture , Winter 2008, No. 193 (Winter 2008), pp. 54-59
Published by: Aperture Foundation, Inc.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24473508

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-ESSAY
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DEEP U
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IN
THE
ARCHIVE
by Ulrich Baer

What belongs in an archi

to forget and everything
future. Countless records
hope that a yet-to-be-de
how the future will be li
whose meaning may not
classified, labeled, and fi
strictly maintained arch
and public records, there
that may acquire a signif
of life and the hidden co
research agenda, official
Other archives are establ
or design the future but
Emanuel Ringelblum's On
Ghetto during World Wa
for the future and despa
of objectively recording
has mutated into a purel
mundane incidents are tinged with profound melancholia. The Oneg understood by a distinguished lineage of thinkers, from Siegfried
Shabbat archive only very obliquely charts a path for new life; it mostly Kracauer and Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag,
commemorates great loss. as inherently dialectical but ultimately melancholic. In this century
Even for archives established under less harrowing conditions, long view, photographs extricate their su
the original intention of recording for the future becomes clouded by to underscore that these photograph
melancholia. In the stacks there hovers the sense that these records original context. Underplayed in these
of lives lived with hope, longing, and desire have all succumbed to both photography and archives is the p
the tooth of time. The archive seems to tinge its subjects with death: elements. Such interpretations often
what is found in the archive bears testimony, first and foremost, to and the photograph both offer the st
everything that could not be collected but was lost. In the silence of opening up new worlds, or of offerin

j-f / www.apertLire.org

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 This content downloaded from
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 Veronica Cristina Ochoa Ortiz Andrea Munoz Miranda Angel Nandxo Guerra Cruz Miguel Ortiz Ortiz Andoni Escobar Vazquez
Age: 17 years Age: 12 years Age: 13 years Age: 14 years Age: 1 year
Height: No information Particular characteristics: Does not Height: 5.54 feet Height: 4.75 feet Height: 315 inches
Particular characteristics: No information pronounce the letter "R" correctly Hair: Straight, black Particular characteristics: Has Hair. Straight, long, light brown
Date of disappearance: Huizachez, Sinaloa, Date of disappearance: El Jardi'n Particular characteristics: Scar on left language difficulties rf" rowj1
Date of disappearance: Jesus de Monte
August 8, 2004. neighborhood, Municipality of Matamoros, side of forehead Date of disappearance: Alvaro Obregon
neighborhood, Huixquilucan,
State of Puebla, January 23, 2006. Date of disappearance: Ceylan neighborhood, Borough of Iztapalapa, State of Mexico December 23 2005
neighborhood, Tlanepantla, State of Mexico City, February 15, 2005.
Mexico, July 28, 2005.

In recent years, many artists have turned toward the archive as Third, artists may refashion material from existing archives to tell
both metaphor and treasure trove. Often these artists have proven new or alternative stories that may contradict or substantially revise
overly susceptible to the melancholic air of the archives, swooning a given collection's original intentions. In Fotoamator(Photographer),
over the past as if everything ever put in a collection were inherently a 1998 documentary film about color slides taken by a Nazi
traumatic. In such engagements, artists often approach the archive photographer, Walter Genewein, in the Lodz Ghetto in the 1940s,
as a symbolic or evidentiary access to traumatic memory—but this Polish filmmaker Dariusz Jablonski reframes archival material meant
conception of the archive is, I would suggest, limiting. There are also to document Jewish life in a ghetto from a Nazi perspective, rescuing
archives of joy and life, and it is sometimes possible to exhume hope this material from its original intent, redeeming the past from a single,
from among the ashes. dominant narrative of hopelessness and victimization. In one color
Artists currently engage with archives in three major ways. First, photograph, staged by the Nazi phot
artists like Christian Boltanski use, exaggerate, and make ironic inspecting ties sold for survival by Jews deported to the ghetto
the trope of archiving to highlight the fetish character of memory from Western Europe, Jablonski zooms in on the hidden face of a
in postmodern culture. In a similar vein, artist Zoe Leonard's The boy behind the fence. The boy was not supposed to be seen; Nazi
Fae Richards Photo Archive (made for Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film ideology, violence, and the photographer's viewfinder all conspired
The Watermelon Woman) is a fabricated photo-archive of a fictional to erase this face from memory forever. But the photograph is not
actress. While Boltanski's work (e.g. Reserve: Detective III [1987]) only a document of destruction, as some historians have argued,
stresses—though itself is not immune to—contemporary culture's The camera accidentally captured the image of the boy in this
fetishistic obsession with trauma as holding the keyto a hidden truth, otherwise staged picture. To highlight this contingency means to read
Leonard's fabricates an origin and archive to show how such fictional photography not melancholically but as a medium that can compel
pasts might support a "real" and lived identity beyond the available us, as contemporary viewers, to take responsibility for the future
categories of the present. Both projects offer alternative ways of toward which the photographed boy is looking,
remembering and archiving experiences that have not been officially In a different genre, photographer Lyle Ashton Harris's wall-sized
retained or chronicled, or that have been deliberately excluded from collage Blow Up (2004-06) juxtaposes a variety of images, including
official versions of collective history. an Italian soccer star receiving a massage from an African masseur
Other artists, such as llan Lieberman, create archives of events and Manet's 1863 Olympia, with Harris's own photographs and
that otherwise register only fleetingly in a media-and image-saturated images of older works to show how we, as a collective, reconfigure
culture. In his Nino Perdido (Lost child; 2005-08), Lieberman
PAGE 54: Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, seventy-eight
painstakingly redraws the miniaturized photographs of missing PA<"E 54: Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, seventy-eight
... . ... gelatin-silver prints and four chromogenic color
gelatin-silver prints and prints color
four chromogenic (detail), 1993-96;
prints (detail), 1993-96;
children in Mexican newspapers; his craft restores imagination to
PAGE 55: Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #7, unique Polaroid, 2002; THIS
these images. By creating a virtual archive of images destined for .... ... ... ...- ... .. . ..... ... . _ .
& PAGE: llan Lieberman, Nino
PAGE: Man perdidoNino
Lieberman, (Lost child),
perdido five
(Lost drawings
child), fromfrom
five drawings a a
oblivion either because the search proved futile or the child was
larger larger
series, series,
graphite graphite
on paper, 2005-08;on paper,Walter
OPPOSITE: 2005-08; OPPOSITE: Walter Genew
Genewein,
recovered, Lieberman insists that archives continue to ensure the Trade, Lodz
Trade, Ghetto,
Lodz Ghetto,Poland,
Poland,1940-44.
1940-44.

possibility of testimony and recollection in an age that creates, uses, Leonard: © Zoe Leonard/Whitney Museum
Leonard: © Zoe of American
Leonard/Whitney MuseumArt, New York,
of American installation
Art, New photograph
York, installation by by
photograph Geoffrey
Geoffrey Clements;
Clements:
Ashton
Ashton Harris:
Harris: courtesy
courtesy the
theartist/CRG
artist/CRGGallery,
Gallery,New
NewYork;
York;Lieberman:
Lieberman:
courtesy
courtesy
thethe
artist;
artist:
Genewein:
Genewein:
© Jewish
© Jewish
Museum
Museum
and discards images with equal ease. Frankfurt am Main/Collection Genewein
Frankfurt am Main/Collection Genewein

56 / www.aperture.org

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the inscription of race into culture depending on changing mores. the prosecutor Gideon Hauser researched tens of thousands of
Harris's concerns did not, of course, inform the original production documents to locate a single directive signed by the accused ordering
and collection of the several images included in Blow Up in which the murder or naming the camps as sites of extermination. One piece
difference between races is depicted as natural, immutable, non- of paper could undermine Eichmann's own laboriously constructed
negotiable and yet peripheral to the image—but in the overall collage defense. Eichmann researched the same archives in an effort to
the racial issue is culturally specific, negotiable, elusive, and yet prove that high-level decisions had been deliberately kept from him
central to each image. In his series Billies and Memoirs of Hadrian and that he had been only an unwitting cog in the Nazi's crimes,
(both 2002), Harris draws on the American repertoire of stagings of Proof of either of these two stories leading to a verdict could come
gender and race to reveal meanings that were not intended at the from a document that would otherwise contain nothing exceptional,
time of this repertoire's creation. Harris first goes gently into cultural The question of what enters an archive is never as important as what
stereotypes, then coaxes them into the light before his camera, will find its way back out into the light.
and then, violently, opens them up from within: his open mouth— An archive imposes order on contingency but, again, must not
glossy in Billies and shiny with blood in Memoirs of Hadrian—is the entirely rule it out. Its mission must be as precise as possible
punctum of his photographs. The mouth, like the camera for Harris, while allowing for everything that would expand the framing of
opens these figures taken from the repertoire of distinctly U.S.- its objective. In the late 1970s, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson was
American lives to an uncharted future. Harris opens these images appointed project director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London,
to their subject's afterlife. Through his impersonations of the diva He was subsequently let go when he published articles that would
and the boxer, Harris allows something to persist beyond traditional culminate in his book The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression
configurations of the archive, including academic notions of gender of the Seduction Theory (1984), in which Masson avers that Freud
and race as the straightjackets of social identity. Best understood retracted his claim of sexual abuse of young girls by adult men
in the context of Diana Taylor's profound vision of performance to protect his career in Vienna, and instead formulated a theory
and repertoire as nonarchival possibilities of transferring cultural that these girls' stories were psychosomatic fabrications. Masson
knowledge (as iterated in her 2003 book The Archive and the had discovered something in the archive that its board considered
Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas), Harris's defamatory. Several years later, without directly referring to the
"alienated" (in the Brechtian sense) self-portraits offer possibilities scandal surrounding Masson's publication, Derrida suggested that
of sublime invention from within their tight spaces. Intimately familiar the struggle against contingency contains an irrepressible impulse
with the claim of the so-called Pictures Generation that we have for destruction (akin to the Freudian death drive) that is internal to the
enough images and do not need new ones, Harris finds new life archive. We enter the archive as researchers or historians in search
within the archive, the repertoire, and the photograph. Jablohski's of a document, a deed, a letter, or a file that will lay our search to rest,
Fotoamator and Harris's Blow Up chart new ways of looking at the just as life contains a "death drive" that moves us toward equilibrium
past, and reveal how the content of an archive and what is seen in and stasis. The death drive, it bears remembering, is ultimately a
a photograph remain capable of redirecting the archive's and the productive drive that attaches itself to any activity that seeks to
photograph's original purpose and stated intention. establish an absolute authority or origin. We dig for an original that
These three artistic modes of engagement with the archive— will fulfill our quest by its sheer existence; the archive is meant to
the fabricated or constructed archive, the archive of the store thatwhich will finally be self-evident. Derrida analyzes this drive
unremembered, and the archive's redemption for new life—are
never fully distinct from one another. But all artistic practices of
archival engagement mobilize what Jacques Derrida termed "mal
d'archives" (in his 1995 book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression);
many examples were seen earlier this year in Okwui Enwezor's
exhibition Archive Fever at New York's International Center of

Photography. Artists do not gain access to the archive through the

front door, equipped with proper IDs, a well-formulated research
question, and full sponsorship. They enter like a virus and bring
the archive down from within.

To conduct research in an archive means to acknowledge that

something contained therein might undo the question that brought
one here in the first place. During Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem

no. !<■);>, aperture / 57

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 for an original, self-evident document or object as the search months of work and found, on that Monday afternoon in the
for the moment when the archive becomes irrelevant, and basement library of the New School for Social Research in
its purpose and existence is destroyed. This is the moment, New York, original phrasing that deviated from the letters
in films and novels, when the researcher runs triumphantly between Arendt and Scholem reprinted in various books.
past dusty files and the stunned archivists, waving in her Since Scholem accused Arendt of lacking a basic love
hand the record that refutes what everybody (usually a for the people whose suffering was also at stake in the
packed courtroom audience, a jury, and an exasperated trial, everything here depended on the precise wording of
judge) had assumed to be the truth. She never looks back their angry exchange. And here was a letter where Arendt
to the archive that has now served its function, and is now wrote something slightly—but notably—different from what
rendered obsolete by that which it contains. everyone had been discussing for years. I left the archive
For Derrida, this impulse toward the archive's destruction that night with a sense of weighty responsibility: the record
is inextricably linked to the archive's institution and governing had to be corrected, and the terms of the debate about
principle. Prompted by a visit to the Freud Archive in London guilt and identity would have to be adjusted.
(where Freud's personal library and collection of artifacts We are still in the process of recording what happened the
were moved after the Nazis drove him out of Vienna in 1939), following day.
Derrida identifies the founding idea of an archive as the desire I have not returned to the New School library. I abandoned
for unmitigated access to the truth. Freud at one point likens my project on Arendt. I went to other archives, containing
his own work to that of an archaeologist who joyfully exclaims private letters written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who
"Saxa loquuntur" (The stones speak). Derrida argues that sought to find transcendence in modernity through the figure
every visit to an archive is motivated by this hope that the and experience of love. I read love letters heaped in boxes
material will present the truth on its own terms. titled "66/1951. bHS Ger 38.2" and the like, letters that
All the artists making work in, with, or about archives today revealed Rilke's process of creating the sense of a beyond
operate in the wake of Freud's conception of memory as in descriptions of everyday things and experiences through
pronetodistortion, revision, and possibly redemption through the careful manipulation of ordinary language. I found an
certain analytic methods and the contingencies of language, archive of joy and ecstasy to be had in this world without
and in the wake of Derrida's systematic examination of the the scaffolding of religious or ideological transcendence.
splitting of the origin that is operative in every conceptual I might have thought that my trajectory, from the
system and actual archive. The understanding of the archive records of a traumatic past to the Rilkean archives of
as offering access to otherwise inaccessible histories can transcendence and joy, is not entirely atypical. But I find
be traced, beyond the works of Freud and Derrida, to a this move from the archive of trauma to an archive of joy to
third major conception of memory in its relation to public be rare. It is a precarious undertaking, of course. You can
institutions. This is Michel Foucault's analysis of the ways witness its delicacy in some of the images in Leonard's Fae
in which personal and collective memory is shaped as much Richards Photo Archive, or in Flarris's poignant Billies, in
by facts and events as by the symbolic order available to which the photographer inserts himself as his own subject
express, record, and recall them. For this reason, much into a collective memory without vanishing there. These
contemporary artistic attention is placed on how events are projects are destined to end up in an archive of someone
shaped by different forms and modes of representation, else's devising, or to be bypassed and forgotten in other
and by different media. ways. For the moment, The Fae Richards Photo Archive
and Flarris's photographs may chart a path for someone
experienced my own minor case of archive fever on to construct his or her own archive of light, of hope, and
September 10, 2001.1 had spent hours leafing through the of shadings of life as yet unlived, and may allow us to see
letters exchanged between Hannah Arendt and Gershom the past not as something static but as something yet to
Scholem about Arendt's polemical essays on the Eichmann be delivered. ©
trials. Before me stretched the prospect of a long-awaited
sabbatical, structured only by a signed contract for a Christian Boltanskl,
Christian Boltanski, Reserve-Detective
Reserve-Detective III, III,
wood wood shelves
shelves with with
book on Arendt's trial coverage and its implication for our cardboard boxes,
cardboard boxes, photographs,
photographs, and framed
and framed collages,
collages, 1987. 1987.
post-1960s understanding of civil rights. I was ready for Courtesy Marian
CourtesyGoodman Gallery,
Marian Goodman New
Gallery, New York
York

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