Awards

• Winner of AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Show Design Awards: Trade Illustrated Category 2009.
• Winner of Winner, Scholarly Illustrated Category, 2009 AAUP Book, Journal, and Jacket Show 2009

Overview

"The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art. The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the ""living"" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways -- from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's ""anemic archive"" of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive -- as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art -- and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism. Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process. 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."

Full Product Details

9780262195706

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Big Archive is a wonderfully erudite study of the avant-garde's anti-archival strategies that aim to subvert the structure and function of its nineteenth-century hybrid institution. Spieker's arguments are often beguilingly clever, at times devilishly so. -- Craig Leonard Prefix Photo

The Big Archive is a wonderfully erudite study of the avant-garde s anti-archival strategies that aim to subvert the structure and function of its nineteenth-century hybrid institution. Spieker s arguments are often beguilingly clever, at times devilishly so. Craig Leonard Prefix Photo

"The Big Archive is a wonderfully erudite study of the avant-garde's anti-archival strategies that aim to subvert the structure and function of its nineteenth-century ""hybrid institution."" Spieker's arguments are often beguilingly clever, at times devilishly so. -- Craig Leonard * Prefix Photo *"

The Big Archive features an impressive cast of characters: Sigmund Freud, Marcel Duchamp, Alexandr Rodchenko, Andy Warhol, Sophie Calle--all masterfully catalogued and filed into Sven Spieker's meta-archival project. This original and carefully crafted book reveals the extent to which modernity produced and was produced by archival technologies ranging from Wunderblocks to typewriters, from boites-en-valise to filing cabinets. Required reading for scholars working in the fields of psychoanalysis, media theory, and conceptual art. --Ruben Gallo, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University

Author Information

Sven Spieker teaches in the Comparative Literature Program and the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal devoted to Central and Eastern European visual culture.

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