Sven Spieker, “Introduction,” from The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy. © MIT Press, 2007. In press.

The book investigates the archive—understood both as a bureaucratic institution and as an index of evolving attitudes towards contingent time in art and science—as a crucible of 20th-century art. Its main thesis is that the use of archives in late 20th-century neo-avant-garde art responds, in a broad variety of ways, to the attack unleashed by the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century against 19th-century historicism and its objectification of historical process. I came to the topic of the archive and its involvement with art by way of my interest in contemporary art in formerly Communist Eastern and Central Europe, a region where everyone to varying degrees lived in the shadow of the (state) archive and where the question of archives was (is) therefore anything but academic. Perhaps the most important insight I took away from my interest in archives in Eastern and Central Europe was that an archive is not simply a home for memories.¹ Archives do not help us remember, they remind us of what we have never possessed in the first place. If that is a paradox, it is the perhaps paradox of modernism itself, if by this term we mean a set of protocols that govern the production of culture from a place that is by definition not the place of the subject, not simply our place.

The archive may be an arkheion—the official residence of those who guard its holdings—but that does not mean that it is a domus, François Lyotard’s shorthand for human life lived within the fold of narrative. In the domus, “there are stories: the generations, the locality, the seasons, wisdom and madness. The story makes beginning and end rhyme, scars over the interruptions.”² In Lyotard’s scheme, the counter-place to the rural domus with its living tradition of therapeutic storytelling is the city (the space of the arkheion) where houses are not homes (Heime) but archives, offices, and bureaucracies and where the transmission of culture is a matter not of narrative but of lists. To understand the difference between the arkheion and the domus is to grasp that in the archive, writing is not at the service of memory. In fact, as Freud demonstrated in his essay “Moses and Monotheism,” the writing of history served as a tool for the repression of memory for a very long time. According to Freud’s speculation, it was after their exodus from Egypt, and in the wake of their presumed murder of Moses, that there arose in the Jewish people the desire to archivize their own collective past, “the desire to write history.”³ Yet the urge to write did not in this case signify a readiness to confront the traumatic murder; on the contrary, the writing of history kept that trauma from surfacing in the collective consciousness: “[I]t was to be a long time before historical writing realized that it was pledged to unswerving truthfulness.”⁴ The establishment of an archive is not synonymous with the willingness or even the ability to confront what it stores.
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