부산대학교 도서관

Chapter 8 ties the art historical discussion of a shift in the artwork’s relationship to art history (Arthur Danto, Hans Belting) to considerations of presentism (François Hartog). The institutional understanding of art entails a lack of grounding in a teleological art history, since the artwork’s identity as art is now considered to be grounded in a set of networks in the present. The terminology of the ‘contemporary’ and ‘contemporaneity’ (Boris Groys, David Joselit, Dan Karlholm, Terry Smith, Christine Ross) as well as the terminology of ‘turns’ are shown to be enmeshed with the notion of the archive in significant ways. Although presentism would at first glance seem contrary to the archive art phenomenon, with its interest in, almost obsession with, history, the book’s final chapter shows how notions such as presentism and ‘history’ can be productively used for analysing the kind of interest in history that is associated with archive art. The chapter gets back to the practice of returning to works from the 1960s and 1970s by artists in the 1990s and early 2000s that has been discussed in previous chapters, and considers the temporal implications of such artworks.
Art + archive: Understanding the archival turn in contemporary art examines the meaning and function of the notion of the archive in art writing and artistic practices c. 1995–2015. The book takes on one of the most persistent buzzwords in the international artworld, adding nuance and context to a much-discussed but under-analysed topic.The study’s first part outlines key texts about archive art, the interdisciplinary theories these build on, and the specific meaning the archive comes to have when it is brought into the artworld. The second part examines the archive art phenomenon in relation to materiality, research, critique, curating and temporality. Instead of approaching the archive as an already defined conceptual tool for analysing art, the book rethinks the so-called archival turn, showing how the archive is used to point to, theorise and make sense of a number of different conditions and concerns deemed to be urgent and important at the turn of the twenty-first century. These include the far-reaching implications of technological changes; the prevalence of different forms of critique of normative structures; changes to the view of the art object; and the increasing academicisation of artistic practices. This book shows that the archive is adaptable and elastic, but that it is also loaded with a great deal of theoretical baggage. It clarifies why, how and with what consequences the archive is referenced and mobilised by contemporary artists and art writers.