If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians, had not seen things with your eyes, you could not report them in writing. And if you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to be understood… Now tell me which is nearer to the actual man: the name of man or the image of the man. The name of man differs in different countries, but his form is never changed but by death…
Leonardo Da Vinci, The Paragone of Painting and Poetry 1500
The course intends to explore the specificities, but also the close family relationships of museums and archives (libraries, as well). It will survey the ways in which memory institutions shape “collective memory”. The focus will be on the (image and imagination) of the Archive in the past half century: first, on the era of the explosion of the memory epidemic and fascination with archives and archival documents, and then on the developments of the past decades, disillusionment with authority and authenticity, the tragedy of the Archive.
In the so-called “archival turn” of the last decades of the
twentieth century, artists played a decisive role in fictionalization, and museumification of the
Archive. Archives supplied both the model and the material for pseudo-documentaries,
artistic projects with fictionalized gestures totoward
history, playing with reality-effect.
effects. This turn to the archive, the popularity of archive-based
art projects, while making the Archive a fascinating, intellectually
and artistically important object/thing/topic/notion/and problem, at the same
time, proved to be, in a paradoxical way, detrimental forto
the credibility of the archival institution, helped in
undermininghelping to undermine trust in archival
documents, and
historical facts. Nothing kept in the archives should be taken too
seriously; anyone can tamper with the documents; what counts is not the
historical authenticity but the persuasive, aesthetically satisfying outcome of
the artist’s work.
Members of the class will becomeget acquainted with theoretical approaches toworks on the history and present problems of archives, historical memory, the role of archives in memory politics, and the controversial role artists have played in both the turn to and the turn away from archives. Artistic explorations
Explorations of the Archive usually turn words into images,;
changing the context, the “aura”, the materiality, the possible methods of
authentication in the course of this transposition. One of the core problems of
the class will be to explore the possibilities, and also the limits of turning
words into images, textual documents into visuals. We will deal with words, texts,
the tension between literal meaning and figurative excesses, with energeia,
the active, activating quality of images, the evocative character of both textual
documents and artifacts. The class follows a selected history: the utopia of collecting,
preserving, and presenting words, images, information, ephemeral happenstances,
or events of the past; efforts of turning textual documents into visual
objects, icons, memorials, monuments, installations, moving images. As
Aristotle wrote in Poetics: “A verbal representation was said to be
persuasive when it gave the impression that it might have been alive”. Examples
and practices inside and outside the archives will be studied: the myths and problems
of photographic images; map making (cartographic and anatomical); visualization
as analytical tool in science; political gestures and propaganda, visualizing notions
political statements, mis-(and dis-) information by images; the use of images
as forensic evidence and in legal procedure, especially in grave violations of
human rights; etc.
Members of the class will face the problems of the difficulties of authenticating archival or artistically tempered documents; the gains and losses (of authenticity, evidentiary value, and authority) of turning textual documents into images; whether documents turned into images make it difficult to grasp the historicity of texts at a time when the division that separated textual from visual traces of events is becoming thinner by the day.
One of the key notions/subjects, and problems analyzed during the term is ekphrasis, (vivid) verbal description of an image or work of (visual) art, the adverse movement of turning words into images: turning images into words. Analyzing the use and theoretical approaches to ekphrasis sheds light on the complex and complicated relationship between textual and visual documents. The class will read texts, watch images and works of art, including installations, films, and theatrical performances, and will reflect on the different approaches of representation.
- Instructor: Istvan Rev