1

ART AND ARCHIVE, 1920-2010

Genealogies, typologies and discontinuities

Anna Maria Guasch

Professor Art History
University of Barcelona

Akal/Series on Contemporary Art, Madrid, 2011.

INDEX

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. THE GENESIS OF THE ARCHIVAL PARADIGM
The archive’s two “machines”
- The provenance archive
- Freud’s psychoanalytic theory as a model of the archival system.
2. THE PROTO-ARCHIVE IN LITERARY, HISTORIOGRAPHIC AND
ARTISTIC PRACTICES: 1920-1939
A first approximation to the archive: Walter Benjamin’s Passages
The epistemological model of Aby Warburg´s Mnemosyne-Atlas
The photographic archives
- Eugène Atget, pioneer in archival photography
- August Sander’s photographic archives.
Art and the archive: first uses
-Hannah Höch: from the photomontage to the archival album.
 2

- Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp: two versions of the proto-

type.
3. THE ARCHIVE, MEMORY AND CONCEPTUAL ART:1960-1989
The conceptualisation of the archive
The archive and archeology: Michel Foucault
The archive and reality: memory, industry, trauma.
- Bernd & Hillary Becher: archive and series
- Gerhard Richter: archive and atlas
- Christian Boltanski: archive and trauma
- Annette Messager: archive and album
From the conceptual tautology to the archive as an accumulation of data
- Robert Morris and Art & Language: the archive as a tautological
structure.
- Hanne Darboven : the encyclopedic archive
- On Kawara: archiving time
- Stanley Brown: the archive as measurement
4.THE ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ACCUMULATIONS: 1969-1989
Repetitive structures, inventories and classifications
- John Baldessari: the archive as a montage
- Douglas Huebler: the absurd archive
- Ed Ruscha: the book-archive
- Hans Peter Feldmann: the imaginary archive
Archive and accumulation
-Andy Warhol: the time capsules
- Dieter Roth: an archive of waste
5. DECONSTRUCTION, CORRELATIONS AND TECHNO-CULTURAL
NETWORKS:1990-2010
Jacques Derrida and “the archive fever”
- The archive’s material nature
- The archive’s immaterial nature
Archival theories derived from Derrida
 3

- Allan Sekula: the photographic archive

- Benjamin Buchloh : the anomic archive
- Hal Foster: the archival impulse
- Arjun Appadurai: the archive as aspiration
Exhibitions on the archive
- Deep Storage. Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art.
- Voilà. Le monde dans la tête
- Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists
-Archive Fever. Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
6. THE ARCHIVE AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY: 1989-2010
Initial contributions: Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Antoni Muntadas, Vera
Frenkel, Thomas Demand, Andrea Fraser
Artistic typologies under the “archive fever”
- Archive and ethnography: Mark Dion
-Archive, archeology and photography: Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth,
Andreas Gursky , Zoe Leonard, Peter Piller, Joachim Schmid
- The archive as text: Isidoro Valcárcel Medina
- The archive, halfway between the thesaurus and the index: Pedro G.
Romero, Ignasi Aballí, David Bunn
- The infinite archive. The digital and virtual image: Arnold Dreyblatt,
Daniel García Andújar
- The meta-archive and the archive of archives: Montserrat Soto
The archive´s political use and the “local memories”: Fernando Bryce,
Rosangela Rennò, The Atlas Group, Francesc Abad
EPILOGUE
THE FUTURE ARCHIVE
 4

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first intention of this book was to use case study analyses to
theoretically approach the relationship between art and the archive along the
20th Century and early years of the 21st Century. However, due to the topic’s
level of complexity and the impossibility of systematizing it in a pure
theoretical approach, it has been transformed –following Foucault’s line of
thought– into an archaeological and genealogical history of one of the least
explored episodes in its entirety (although many specific articles have been
published on the matter), of 20-21st century art: the sporadically lineal but
usually discontinuous, paradoxical and counter-discursive relationship
between art and the archive.
The idea, or more accurately, the need to pose the problem, was born
out of the debates derived from the doctorate course I gave at the University
of Barcelona in 2002-2003 and the summer course given at the Complutense
University of El Escorial in 2004. It was further developed during different
research residencies as a scholar at the Getty Research Institute of Los
Angeles in 2003, as a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York
during 2005 and 2006, and especially as a researcher at the Getty Research
Institute in 2007 and 2008. In that last year and invited by Mariano de Santa
Ana and Fernando Estévez, I had the opportunity, along with other
colleagues, to propose the relationships between art and the archive at the
seminar The archive’s memories and oblivions held at the Atlantic Centre of
Modern Art in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.1 This book’s final draft was
possible thanks to a new residency program at the Getty Research Institute of
Los Angeles in 2009 funded by the research grant «Salvador de Madariaga»
awarded by the Ministry of Science and Education.

1
See Fernando Estévez González and Mariano de Santa Ana (eds.), Memorias y
olvidos del archive. Madrid/ Las Palmas de Gran Canaria / Santa Cruz de Tenerife,
Lampreave / Atlantic Centre of Modern Art /Museum of History and Anthropology of
Tenerife (press).
 5

In Materia.Revista d´Art, a journal issued by the University of

Barcelona’s Art History Department, I published, in 2005, my thoughts on the
matter for the first time2. Four years later, Siruela editorial published the book
Autobiografías visuales. Del archivo al índice, included in the Azul Minima
collection directed by the professor Juan Antonio Ramírez. In it, I presented –
in an autobiographical conceptual framework– On Kawara´s and Hanne
Darboven´s contributions to the notion of the archive in artistic practices.
In my current book´s research process developed since 2002 until
2009, I had the opportunity to present the project, receive support, hold
enlightening debates, and gather important documentary material from
Thomas Crow and Thomas Gaehtgens (directors of the Getty Research
Institute), Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Charles Merewether, Serge
Guilbaut, Juan José Lahuerta, Jorge Blasco and Mariano de Santa Ana.
On another note, I also want thank Alex Bauzà and particularly Erini
Grigoriadau for all their help and further highlight my fructiferous relationship
with Andrea Giunta, professor of Latin-American Art at the University of Texas
at Austin, with whom I participated at the 2nd Latin-American International
Forum for Emerging Scholars revolving around the theme Art-Archives: Latin-
America and other beyond (October 2010), a collaboration between the
University of Texas, the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the
University of Barcelona. Last but not least, I want to mention my involvement
with two international research groups working on the archive subject: The
Contemporary Art and the Archive Research Group (CARGO), an
independent association of artists, writers and curators based at the Faculty of
Art and Design of Monash University in Melbourne (Australia), and the
research groups related to the digital archive MAP–Media Art Platform, linked
to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Roskilde in Denmark, and Beyond the
Archive: Bit Mapping, conducted by Wolfgang Ernst, media theorist and
professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, for whom, sustaining an
archaeological perspective of the media, cyberspace is more interested on

2
Anna Maria Guasch, «Los lugares de la memoria: el arte de archivar y recordar»,
Materia. Revista d’ Art 5 (2005), p. 157-183.
 6

bits than on images, sounds or texts.

It may seem obvious and even inappropriate to state that art can not
exist without artists or art history without art. Notwithstanding, I want to
highlight how enriching it was for me to share a complicity and knowledge with
Antoni Muntadas, Pedro G. Romero, Ignasi Aballí, Francesc Abad, Daniel
García Andújar, Montserrat Soto and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. In a book
involving issues of hypertrophic memory and registry, we are fortunate when
the software repositories are vital and accessible loci.
Finally, I must thank Jesús Espino, editor in chief of Akal Publishing
House, for his efforts and care in the book’s publication, Joan Sureda for his
constant support and blind faith in my work, and Ramón Akal, director of Akal,
for repeatedly demonstrating his trust on my intellectual production, and for
his generosity and constant support in my role as editor of the
Akal/Contemporary Art collection.

Barcelona, 22nd December 2010

INTRODUCTION

Art of the first avant-gardes is commonly analyzed under two big

paradigms1.One refers to one-of-a-kind artworks with a unified conception and
execution; a paradigm characteristic of the historical avant-garde’s languages
and different isms from Fauvism and analytical Cubism to Neo-plasticism and
Constructivism. Whereas its relevance lies in the formal rupture, its
singularity derives from its shock effect. The other great paradigm regards the
multiplicity and reversibility of the artistic object dominated by a discontinuity
between the space and the medium, as is exemplified by the collage and

1
The notion of «paradigm» is used as defined by Michel Foucault to designate an
object of knowledge in terms of problematization, mechanism of power, discursive
formation; and from a more general perspective, apprehension, understood as all
those knowledge effects and procedures that a «specific field is willing to accept at a
particular time».See Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum. Sur la méthode, Paris,
Librairie Philosofique J.Vrin, 2008, p. 10.
 7

photomontage. It is also the paradigm of the object’s fissures and disparities

or, more precisely, the destruction of the traditional canons used to define the
artistic object, as is seen in Dadaism and to a certain degree also in
Surrealism.
Although these two paradigms evidently do not exhaust all possible
artistic proposals and typologies, they do become crucial for defining the
same. Notwithstanding, there are types of projects or alleged artists excluded
from these fields and which configure a third paradigm denominated, in a
general sense, the archival paradigm which entails a specific and coherent
line of work. As championed by Benjamin Buchloh –one of the first to present
a critical reflection on the relationships between contemporary art and the
archive–, this paradigm implies an artistic creation based on a mechanical
sequence, on an endless repetitive litany of reproduction which develops an
“aesthetic of administrative and legal organisation”2 based on strict formal
rigor and absolute structural coherence. In regard to the aura of an object or
its destruction –a creative problem embraced by the first two paradigms– the
archival paradigm refers to the rite du passage occurring from the object to
the information support and from the museum-mausoleum logic to the logic of
the archive. To rephrase, whereas the first two paradigms connote the
transgressor spirit of the artistic and social utopia so characteristic of the early
1900s, the archival paradigm –that chronologically overlaps with the other
two– manifests and seemingly forms part of a bureaucratic conformity.
Aimed at studying this paradigm, the book attempts to search for its
sources, precedents, genealogy, development, and examples throughout the
20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the work of visual artists who have used
the archive to record, collect, store and create images and consequently
create inventories, thesaurus, atlases or albums. These artists further use the
archive as a bridge between memory and the written word and as a fertile
territory to carry out a theoretical and historical scrutiny.
Evidently, determining the difference between storing or collecting and
archiving, is key for understanding this third paradigm’s scope and relevance

2
Benjamin Buchloh, «Atlas/Archive», in Alex Coles (ed.), The Optic of Walter
Benjamin, vol. III, London, Black Dog Publishing Limited, 1999, p. 32.
 8

within contemporary art. Whereas the former two consist in assigning a place
or depositing an image, object or thing in an exterior place, the notion of
archive entails a consignment. As pointed out by Derrida, the archontic
principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation3, and the archive, as
such, gathers the functions of unification, identification and classification. Its
modus operandi is neither amorphous nor indeterminate but rather aims to
coordinate a single corpus in a system or a synchrony of previously selected
elements which articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s –opposite to our current era
dominated by digital and cyber archives– the archive was envisioned through
the image of a dusty space or as an inert repository of historical artifacts,
spaces and objects. In spite of this, during the aforementioned years, the
archival proposals within the artistic field began to act as an active discursive
system establishing new temporality relations between the past, the present
and the future, in what has been denominated the future perfect tense. As
pointed out by Derrida, «the question surrounding the archive is not a
question of the past […]of a concept dealing with the past that may or not be
at our disposal, an achievable concept of the archive. It is a question of the
future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a
promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: its true meaning will
only be known in times to come. Perhaps»4. Within this typological model of
knowledge that according to Vanda Zajko5 is suggested by Derrida, the
implicit dimension of temporality does not define a linear progression that
goes from the past to the present where the past is dominant. Quite the
opposite, this dimension emphasizes the active role of the present when it
comes to defining and shaping the past.

Brief state of the studied problem

3
Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne, París, Galilée, 1995
4
Ibid., p. 36
5
Vanda Zajko, «Myth as archive», History of Human Sciences 11, 4 (1998), p. 109.
 9

As aforementioned, Benjamin Buchloh –closely following artist and

6
theoretician Allan Sekula and his study of the relations between the archive
and police photography– was one of the first historians to study the archival
paradigm in contemporary art. This is manifested in the catalogue produced
for the first exhibit dedicated to this subject matter and shown in 1998 in three
German venues (Munich, Berlin and Düsseldorf) and in New York and Seattle
the subsequent year. The exhibition, entitled Deep Storage. Collecting,
Storing, and Archiving in Art, recognized the act of storing and archiving as an
image, metaphor and process within contemporary art. Buchloh´s input was
elaborated in his article Atlas, Warburg’s Paragon? The End of Collage and
Photomontage in Postwar Europe7. In its Atlas section, he analyzed the work
of European artists -or collectors of images- during the 1960s, including the
stunning, homogenous and continuous work of Bernd & Hilla Becher and the
heterogeneous and discontinuous paintings of Gerhard Richter8.
All of this took place only a few years after Jacques Derrida´s seminal
essay Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne9 (first published in French in
1995 and in English a year later), which placed the archival paradigm on the
table. Its immediate followers saw it as an exercise of postmodern
appropriation partially rooted in Walter Benjamin´s writings, particularly his
book Einbahnstraße (1928) and Das Passagen-Werk10 (published in English

6
Allan Sekula, «The Body and the Archive», October 39 (Winter 1986), pp. 3-64.
7
Benjamin Buchloh, «Warburg’s Paragon? The End of Collage and Photomontage in
Postwar Europe», Deep Storage. Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art (cat. exp.),
Nueva York, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and Seattle, Henry Art Gallery, 1998-
1999, pp. 50-60.
8
Although Benjamin Buchloh was one of the first to reflect on the archival paradigm,
he has gone by unnoticed in the general historical posits of contemporary art which
main objective has been a methodological redefinition, like in the case of Art Since
1900, which sections, chapters and discussion forums completely neglect the archive
concept. See Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss,
Art Since1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London, Thames and
Hudson, 2004.
9
J. Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne, cit.
10
Walter Benjamin, One-way street, and Other Writings, London, NLB, 1979 and The
 10

in 1999), and in Michaels Foucault’s text L’Archéologie du savoir11.

From here on, both Europe and the United States began to witness
frequent art-archive postulations manifested in different research genres and
formats (seminars, journal articles and exhibitions), as is exemplified by its
inclusion on the panel entitled Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the
Museum and the Archive within the 200112 annual meeting hosted by the
College Art Association of Chicago. This event proved the emergent rise of
archival types in the artistic practices of the 1990s and the interest it aroused
in theoreticians such as Hal Foster who in his article Archives of Modern Art13
described Michel Foucault as the person responsible for introducing the
archive notion in contemporary philosophical reflection. Moreover, in his
essay The Archival Impulse14, Foster broadened the archival impulse to the
works of Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon,
Liam Gillick, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Mark Dion and
Renée Green15.
While anthologies on the archive began to be published in the United
States, such as Charles Merewether’s text (synthetically and significantly
entitled Archive16), European studies were involved in events such as the

Arcades Project (based on the German volume Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), Cambridge, Mass.,
Belknap Press, 1999.
11
Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, París, Gallimard, 1969
12
See Visual Resources. International Journal of Documentation XVIII, 2 (June
2002).
13
Hal Foster, «Archives of Modern Art», October 99 (Winter 2002), pp. 81-95. Article
reproduced in Design and Crime (and other diatribes), London and New York, Verso,
2002, pp. 65-82.
14
Hal Foster, «The Archival Impulse», October 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 3-22.
15
According to Foster, op. cit., the works of the listed artists have a common
denominator that consists in converting historical information -often lost or
misplaced- into physical presence. To this end, they work with found images, objects,
texts and installations using a non-hierarchised system, which, according to the
author, is uncommon in contemporary art.
16
Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive, Documents of Contemporary Art, London
and Cambridge, Mass.,Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2006.
 11

seminar Registros imposibles. El mal de archive, part of the 12th Conference

on Image Studies organized by Beatriz Herráez and Sergio Rubira in Madrid
(2005)17, and open investigations including Culturas de Archivo (1st and 2nd
part, www.culturasdearchivo.org), developed by Nuria Enguita and Jorge
Blasco at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona. These studies aimed at
analysing the archive’s repercussion regarding the ways information and
knowledge are accessed18.
Although this matter is further elaborated throughout the book, it is
relevant to point out several international encounters including The Visual
Archive: History, Evidence and Make Believe, held at the Tate Modern of
London in 2004, the project Curating Degree Zero Archive
(www.curatingdegreezero.org), which includes an archive, a traveling show
and a web page aimed at compiling and filing the catalogues related with the
work of over more than 100 international curators (2008), and finally, several
publications such as Re_Action: The Digital Archive Experience (2009)19. Also
worth mentioning is the symposium Archive/Counter Archive (Prato, 2009)20,

17
Beatriz Herráez y Sergio Rubira (eds.), Registros imposibles. El mal de archivo, XII
Jornadas de Estudio de la Imagen, Madrid, Consejería de Cultura y Deportes,
Comunidad de Madrid, 2006.
18
As championed by Jorge Blasco: «As a support and exhibitive montage, Culturas
de Archivo is inscribed in a biased historiography where the majority of systems that
organise images and texts share a common genealogy. A project where the theatres
and palaces of renaissance memory, the cabinets of curiosities, the first scientific
exhibitions, the initial photographic rooms, the propagandistic shows and the close
representations of the Holocaust cross the line between the archive and the
exhibition». See Jorge Blasco and Nuria Enguita, Culturas de Archivo (I and II),
Salamanca, Editorial of the Salamanca University, and Barcelona, Antoni Tàpies
Foundation, 2002 and 2005 respectively.
19
The book Re_Action: The Digital Archive Experience. Renegotiating the
Competences of the Archive and the (Art) Museum in the 21st Century, ed. Morten
Sondergaard, Copenhague, Aalborg University Press, 2009, analyses the challenges
of the archive and the museum in the digital era. See also to Total_Action. Art in the
New Media Landscape (cat. exp.), Roskilde, Denmark, October-November 2008.
20
The symposium and web project Archive/Counter Archive. Exploring relations
between contemporary art and the archive, a collaborative work carried out between
the Faculty Art & Design of Monash University in Melbourne (Australia) and the
Centre for Drawing of the University of Arts in London, set out a series of issues by
which contemporary artists deal with the archive either as a source or form; all of this
with a special emphasis in the relations between contemporary art and the archive in
 12

an attempt to update the archive fever based on the presumption that

globalization’s effects, in its almost infinite fluxes of information, frustrate the
possibility of drawing a map of the world and therefore make it necessary to
create classification systems that can allow the recovery of a reliable memory
capable of being delimited.

Operative field of Art and archive

From the state of the point at issue, which evidences an indubitable

and progressive crescendo, we move away from our initial purpose of
studying the artistic oeuvres related to the archive’s strategies during the
1990s, and instead attempt to outline a history by deconstructing and
encoding concepts never before properly analyzed neither diachronically nor
synchronically until now, with the ultimate purpose of drawing an accurate
map of the archival practices occurring from the 20th century until our present
time.
This purpose inevitably causes the need to define, delimit and specify
the epistemological field which, based on theoretical, philosophical, literary
and psychoanalytical contributions, has upheld this third paradigm’s definition.
A distinction between the archival practices and the acts of storing, collecting
and accumulating that do not correspond to the aforementioned consignment
protocols is also pertinent. One must not forget that it is precisely that
principle of consignation corresponding to the documental or monumental
aspect of memory as hypomnema (making a distinction between mneme or
anamensis –the living memory, spontaneous, the result of internal
experience– and hypomnema –the act of remembering–) what allows the
archive to be understood as a mnemotechnic supplement that preserves
memory and rescues it from oblivion, amnesia, destruction and annihilation to
the extent of becoming a true memorandum.

areas familiarised with historical traumas and ruptures. The symposium was
celebrated at the Monash Center in Prato (Italy) during July 10th and 11th 2009.
 13

1. THE GENESIS OF THE ARCHIVAL PARADIGM

The archive’s two “machines”

As revealed by the main archival projects developed during the early

1900s in the fields of human sciences and artistic creativity, exemplified,
among others, by Walter Benjamin’s literary montage, Aby Warburg´s visual
montage and the photographic archives of the German photographers August
Sander, Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger Patzsch, the contemporary archive
has operated through two machines or modus operandi: one that emphasizes
the regulative principle or nomos and a topographic order, and another which
highlights the processes stemmed from the contradictory actions of storing
and safeguarding –while at the same time forgetting and erasing– the
vestiges of the past, a discontinuous and sometimes impulsive drive that acts
according to an anomic principle (lawless).
The mentioned projects either follow the principles of origin,
homogeneity and continuity, in other words the order of the law, like is the
case of Walter Benjamin and August Sander, or, on the contrary, identify with
the anomic archive’s heterogeneous and discontinuous impulse, as is the
case of Aby Warburg, and, within the visual arts field, the dissimilar but
coincidental proposals of Kasimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp and Hannah
Höch. Additionally, the archive’s presence in the artistic production of the
1970s was evident in both modus operandi, manifested on the one hand by
the works of Bernd & Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas
Gursky characterized by their continuity and homogeneity, and on the other
by Ritcher´s heterogeneous and discontinuous paintings.
These modus further explain the archive’s two machines in relation to
its physical nature: the archive joined to an objective culture and the logic of
material memory systems, and the archive based on virtual information
following a flexible, unstable and nonlinear rationality distant from any
hierarchisation. Upon analyzing possible repercussions of Freud’s mystic
writing pad (1925), Derrida himself wondered if the psychic apparatus’s
structure (that system associated by Freud to the mystic writing pad) could
resist the archive’s techno-scientific evolution. The question raised was: could
 14

the psychic apparatus be more accurately represented by the different

technological instruments used to archive and reproduce (the-so-called
prosthetic memory or simulacrum of memory), tools, on the other hand, far
more refined than the mystic writing pad1? However, this interesting question
posed by Derrida in 1994 was superseded by the mystic writing pad’s own
technological generations.

The provenance archive

Unlike a library, the archive’s modus operandi is not based on a

semantic or thematic order but rather on the so-called Provenienzprinzip or
«principle of provenance», which, even though it derives from the proposals
suggested by historian and filing clerk Philipp Ernst Spieß to organize the
secret archives of the Bavarian castle of Plassenburg, it was only fully
implemented during the mid 1900s, in France by Natalis de Wailly who
reorganized the Archives du Royaume and the Bibliothèque Impériale, and in
central Europe with Berlin’s Geheimes Staats-Archiv (1881). Said principle
stipulates that the documents must be arranged in strict concordance with the
order in which they were accumulated in the place of origin before being
transferred to the archive. This principle asserts that «origin must benefit the
place of provenance and take priority over its meaning», hence defines the
archive as a neutral location suitable for storing records and documents,
allowing the users to return to the conditions in which they were created, to
the mediums in which they were produced, to the contexts that withheld them
and to the techniques that enabled its emergence2. Based on this principle,
the archive –unlike the collection or group of documents produced with criteria

1
Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne, París, Galilée, 1995.
We have consulted the Spanish edition: Mal de archivo: una impresión freudiana,
Madrid, Trotta, 1997, p. 32.
2
See Sven Spieker, «1881. Matters of Provenance (Picking up after Hegel)», in The
Big Archive. Art from bureaucracy, Cambridge, Mass., and London The MIT
Press,2008, pp. 17-18. Also see Wolfgang Ernst, «The Art of Archive», in Helen
Adkins (ed.), For the Archive of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Akademie der
Künste/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2005, p. 93.
 15

not reliant on the source– operates as an inert repository where documents

are organized or stored. It is only through the reading of these documents
(always fragmentary events) how the historian is able to access and
reconstruct the past based on the presumption that both the present and the
future are contained in this past.
As pointed out by Mary Ann Doane3, a big part of 20th century
historiography succumbed to the contradictory desire of analyzing the present
from documents, remains, survivals, ruins and fossils, in summary, traces of
the past that leak into the present through the archive. It is a way of
understanding the archive and a history shared by a good part of 19th century
German historians such as Johann Gustav Droysen and mainly Leopold von
Ranke4, who, beyond all melancholic remembrances of the past, attempted to
reproduce historical stories based on the archive and its documents instead of
on the past, an issue referred by Ranke -opposite to Hegel’s position and
concept of “philosophy of history”- as the correct point of view.
Notwithstanding, the insistence on primary source documents and its will to
work with fragments beyond any metaphysics and attempts to formulate
unifying theories (in fact Ranke used quotes or factual events as primary
sources) led to a transformation of the archive, not so much into a bridge
between the present and the past, but rather into a reminder that anything can
be archived provided that it is a residual, incomplete or fragmented material.

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory as a model of the archival system

On account of the rationality implicit in the provenance archive’s

modus, (which, parenthetically, unsettled Nietzsche5) the archive can also be

3
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 82.
4
Leopold von Ranke is considered a pioneer of scientific history since he posed
historical facts not through the ideas, like Hegel, but rather based on the archive’s
direct sources (memoirs, diaries, letters, diplomatic expeditions and first-hand
testimonies of eye witnesses) which must not be judged by the historian. His concept
of “historical objectivity” was refuted by the also mentioned Johann Gustav Droysen.
5
In the text «Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben» (1874) Nietzsche
 16

understood in relation to psychoanalysis and the unconscious theory coined

by Freud. In this sense, it is formulated as a theory of memory due to the way
in which impressions are inscribed in the psyche and by how the psyche
functions as a slate or pad prepared to receive the imprints of a certain type of
writing.
Such interpretation was delivered by Jacques Derrida in the
conference Mal d’archive: una impression freudienne given in June 1994 at
the North London Freud House within the framework of the international
colloquium Memory: The Question of Archives, organized under the auspices
of the Freud Museum’s Société internationale d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et
de la Psychanalyse and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Derrida illustrated the
relationship between the archive notion and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory,
coming to the conclusion –based on an analogy between the unconscious
and memory– that psychoanalysis ultimately proposed a new theory of the
archive. In fact, in the text Notiz über den «Wunderblock» (A Note Upon the
Mystic Writing Pad) written in 19257, Freud presented an accurate analogy
between the psyche and the archive carried out on the premise that memory
traces (Erinnerungsspuren) are not permanently accumulated in our
consciousness but rather in subjacent memory systems, as occurs with the
drawings made in the mystic writing pad or Wunderblock, a children’s toy
(comparable to a modern PDA) fundamentally consisting of a two-surface
board: a lower, subjacent and invisible sheet with a transparent and visible
tablet placed on top. The user can write on it with a stylus or any other pointed
instrument and the drawing “magically” appears on the lower surface which is
visible due to the transparency of the first. The traces disappear by separating
the two surfaces.
The upper surface corresponds to our conscious perception, that which

expressed his inconformity with an era where everything, including the present, was
treated as historical. We consulted the English version «On the Utility and Liability of
History in Life», published in Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations,
Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1995.
7
We have consulted the English version Sigmund Freud, «A note Upon the Mystic
Writing Pad» (1925), included in The Standard Edition of Freud’s Works, vol. 19, ed.
James Strachey, London The Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 227-232.
 17

observes the stimulus but does not retain it since the permanent traces
(Dauerspuren) of the stimulus –just like the drawings or indentations produced
by the stylus on the mystic writing pad– are trapped in the unconscious
mnemonic system laid under the conscious layer. However, whereas the
mystic writing pad does not retain these drawings, the psyche acts like an
archive where what disappears or becomes illegible is always stored and
recorded, therefore nothing is permanently erased or lost. Consequently, it is
possible to emphasize the writing’s dominance over perception in terms of
describing the unconscious and, by extension, the construction of memory.
Freud affirms that pure perception does not exist; writing is always a system
of relations between different layers: of the mystic writing pad, of the psyche,
of society, of the world8.
As pointed out by Derrida, in the crux of psychoanalytical theory there
is an archival-based structure where what is written and collected by
perception both at a conscious and unconscious level is systematized
according to recognizable experiences that may be recalled and ultimately
archived. In this sense, it is interesting to point out that, although structurally
speaking there is a certain affinity between Freud’s archival model9 and the
archives derived from the provenance principle, these are distinguished
basically by what Derrida calls archive fever, in other words, a destruction
drive, the archiviolithic force that erodes the archive’s primary requirement:
the existence of an external consignation place.
In any case, the psychoanalytical discourse on the archive –imitating
an archaeological excavation– not only pertains to the storage of
“impressions” and the coding of “inscriptions”, but also relates to censure and
repression and ultimately to the elimination of records; an aggression,
suppression or destruction that opposes the archive’s initial impulse of
preservation and incites forgetfulness, amnesia and the annihilation of

8
Jacques Derrida, «Freud et la scène de l’écriture», cit., p. 335.
9
Just as the 19th century archive allows the historian to reconstruct an “anatomy of
another place” more than history per se, psychoanalysis is less interested in the
meaning of the patient’s words than in the “territory’s geography” from which they
emerge. See Sven Spieker, The Big Archive, cit., p. 49.
 18

memory, as mneme or anamnesis. In this case and with an inverse reading, in

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory10, the archive as hypomnema, as consignation,
as documentary or monumental apparatus, as mnemotechnical supplement or
representative, is consequence of a counteroffensive against the threat of a
destruction drive or effacement of memory.

10
See David F. Bell, «Infinite Archives», SubStance 33, 3 (2004), p. 149.