![]() ![]() Through her invented character, Leonard began a conversation about very real issues that risked being forgotten. Using film stills, publicity materials, photographs, and recollections, Leonard creates a rich history culled from the real lives and stories of black women in the early days of Hollywood. Zoe Leonard created the fictional Fae Richards, an acclaimed black actress and singer who “lived” from 1908 to 1973, for her synonomous archive dedicated to the “legendary” figure. This fall Jill Magid, meanwhile, mounted a show at Art in General dedicated to the work of Mexican architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Luis Barragán (1902–1988).Ī detail of Zoe Leonard's archive related to the fictional singer Fiona RaeĪ number of artists primarily use the archive as a framing device in order to realize invented characters or events. The final work, for Antonio Gramsci, was mounted last summer within a housing project in the Bronx, and served as a community center as well as informational site about the Marxist thinker. He created one for Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam in 1999, one for Gilles Deleuze in Avignon in 2000, then one for Georges Bataille in Kassel, Germany, in 2002. The projects of Thomas Hirschhorn are a prime example: for the past 15 years, the Swiss artist has raised monuments to his favorite philosophers, using archival material about each figure to create interactive installations. Often archival art pays homage to a historical figure in the form of a monument, or by using the figure's life and/or work as an organizing theme. Thomas Hirschhorn's 2013 Gramsci Monument Kennedy's casket being transported to Arlington-and who continued this emphasis through his 2013 Venice Biennale, which displayed such archives as a group of hundreds of small model houses built by an Austrian insurance clerk named Peter Fritz. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s much-praised dOCUMENTA (13) featured an extensive use of archives, and artists who employ archives, as well. More recently biennial curators have also given prominence to historical archives in their shows, most famously Massimiliano Gioni, whose Gwangju Biennale incorporated an enormous amount of documentary materials-from photographs of the victims of atrocities in Cambodia to Paul Fusco's photos of Robert F. The landmark show included artists among the likes of Glenn Ligon, Thomas Ruff, Andy Warhol, Stan Douglas, and Robert Morris. The curator Okwui Enwezor's provocative 2008 exhibition at the International Center of Photography “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” (the title of which references philosopher Jacques Derrida's 1995 book, Archive Fever) highlighted numerous examples of artists who employ archival documents in their work. Often archival art calls upon the idea of institution or museum as a storehouse-a treasure trove of archives by definition-but, in addition, many museum curators have been major forces in fueling discussion about the archive in the work of artists today. Paul Fusco's RFK: Funeral Train USA Tour (1968) To this end elaborate on the found image, object, and favor the installation format.” Whether this happens in the form of projects dealing with real archival material or artworks in which artists use the archive as a theme (sometimes even inventing material), the idea of the archive continues to be an undeniable force and organizing structure in exhibitions today. Here we break down the basics of this complicated yet intensely contemporary genre, which easily elides from the hyper-researched to the totally surreal. The art historian Hal Foster's 2004 essay "The Archival Impulse" defined archival art as a genre that “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. Of course, the archive is hardly a new theme in contemporary art. And if that's not enough, just wait for the Whitney Biennial to open in March. From Group Material co-founder Julie Ault's personal art collection from the 1980s and '90s on view at Artists Space to Fiona Tan's film of the Sir John Soane Museum's antiquities collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (echoing Alain Resnais's great 1956 documentary of Paris's national library, "Toute la mémoire du monde") to the Museum of the City of New York's upcoming show of graffiti art collected by the late artist Martin Wong, artists and institutions are devoting considerable efforts to showing groups of historical art objects gathered through an idiosyncratic personal vision-with that act of curation being foregrounded as an artistic gesture. In case you haven't noticed, archives are all the rage in the art world these days.
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