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Since technological, philosophical and historical developments contributed to an increased reflection and attention to the archive as place and as notion in the second part of the twentieth century, it would be easy to conclude that contemporary art was just one among a number of different fields affected by this general surge of archival interest. However, the connections between post-war art and archive are so significant that the archive art phenomenon can be approached as a useful raster through which to understand not just specific
contemporary conditions. In this respect, one of Godfrey’s insights in setting out the terms under which ‘artists as historians’ are now gaining significance, concerns an important paradox, one relevant to the question of how Colin Graham’s comments on Post-Troubles archival art might relate to broader strains of similar practice. Godfrey notes, firstly, that ‘it is important not to lose sight of the localised conditions’ that many of his selected examples ‘confront’.27 A good example here, he claims, is the issue of post-Communist memory that is central to the Albanian
mid-1920s. The flow of unhindered language received from the unconscious is therefore also processed, filed, and registered, and technologised by the Bureau. Sven Spieker perceptively detailed this aspect of early surrealism in The Big Archive: Art from the Bureaucracy (2008), which discussed the activities of the Centrale as ‘The Bureaucracy of the Unconscious’. Characterising the image of Simone typing, he proffered, ‘Nowhere was early surrealism as close to the office as in the practise of automatic
position she or he takes up in relation to history, institutions, archives, art or life? To consider these questions, I look to the performances of the Kipper Kids, both live and for video, to explore and theorise the specific sensibility they espouse in their on- and off-stage antics, supported by interviews with the artists and a critical engagement with the politics of extremity, of violence and of sabotage. In this chapter’s close, the film K. O. Kippers (1988) narrates and metaphorises a provocative and uncontainable development of the anti-aesthetic in their
overreach (which is by no means limited to the United States, even though this study is) has broadly chilling effects, which can still be felt today from the newsstand to the academy. This book seeks to change that in some small way by taking cues from contemporary artists who have quarried the archives, art, and visual and material cultures of historic gay and lesbian leather communities. They have been on the frontlines of research, and in my mind are greatly, if not wholly, responsible for the incipient recuperation of historic leather aesthetics we are witnessing
, 1978), 168–195: 174. See also, Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,’ in Writing and Difference, 232–250. 4 English translations of Artaud’s work were often placed on the walls adjacent to the artwork. 5 In her interview with Jo Anna Isaak, Spero discusses the papers she used for Codex Artaud: ‘I used these archival art papers that were around the studio and glued them together. They are all different types of paper. The first and fourth piece are the same, the second is French vellum, a tracing paper.’ See ‘Jo Anna Isaak in
themselves with the symptoms of totalitarianism, one may also add a much simpler observation: their reaffirmation of new petit bourgeois attitudes and habits restated now officially through postsocialist contemporary art – the art of the new elites of the transition period. It is not only that the rhetoric of antipolitics, or the institutional structures developed under late socialism (art archives, art venues, dedicated and educated audiences, samizdat and tamizdat publications together with their readers) are all made