Second, I am interested in the way the mediating role played by the archive in the institutional critique initiated by the early 20th-century avant-gardes and continued on its own terms by the post-war neo-avant-garde. If the early 20th-century avant-garde, as Peter Bürger has argued, attacked the autonomy of art as an institution—especially the art museum—it did so by negating a historically specific precedent, the archive of the 19th century with its belief in the autonomous registration of contingent time and the hope that the present moment—contingency itself—might become subject to hermeneutic reading. In the 19th century, the role of archives changed from being depositories of legal titles into a space where historians hoped to find the sediments of time itself. Not history, I might add, but time in flux, time ongoing, and time present. However, where 19th-century archivists framed contingency by appeals to readability and hermeneutics, early 20th-century artists—Dadaists, Constructivists, Surrealists—favored discontinuous, non-linear archives that resist hermeneutic reading and ordered representation. As I demonstrate in the first part of this book, the avant-garde effected its critique of the 19th-century archive by pointing out that contingency and chance may affect its operations at every level (Duchamp); by compiling collections of moments in time that elude the traditional archive (early Surrealism); and by challenging, at least tentatively, the Newtonian underpinnings of the archive’s topography and its optical correlatives by way of film (El Lissitzky, Eisenstein).

Third, I want to explore the relevance of the archive for our understanding of a specifically modern visuality. To the avant-garde, the archive was less an archaeological institution for the preservation of traces of the past—itself a product of the 19th century’s tendency to equate analysis with a process of decomposition that breaks down everything into smaller and smaller segments—than a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relationship with time. As Rosalind Krauss has argued, any assessment of the avant-garde’s attack against the autonomy of art—specifically, the art museum—would be incomplete if it did not consider that autonomy’s visual and cognitive corollaries.⁶ Modern visuality is often identified with an ideally empty gaze that knows no objects and no subjects, what Foucault referred to as the “bright, distant, open naivety of the gaze.”⁷ To assess the avant-garde’s attack against this kind of autonomy—which, according to Krauss, reached its apex in impressionism and neo-impressionism—is to confront a model of seeing—cognitive, physiological, aesthetic—to which the archive may be central not as an ideally empty grid or matrix waiting to be filled with objects but as a place to which these objects return ready-made.⁸ What this suggests is that the untrammeled purity of modernism, its devotion to origin as an absolute departure—the famous “clean slate”—can function only to the extent that we marginalize the archive on which it is founded. In this reading, the archive is not only a historically and technically concrete bureaucratic institution—it is that, too⁹ —but an index of the reconfiguration of the relationship between space, time, and representation.

The earliest avant-garde challenge to the 19th-century archive was Dada montage and (de-)assemblage. When Francis Picabia smashed a Swiss clock, dipped its parts in ink and imprinted their outline on paper (Alarm Clock I, 1919), he transformed a functioning mechanism into an archive of its parts by means of reproduction, thus enabling these parts to enter into new sets of relations. That these relations did not simply mimic those of the functioning clock—of time measured and tamed by regularity—is hardly surprising. Picabia’s procedure has crucial implications for time keeping, a task with which archives, and clocks, are associated. If clocks are invested in an understanding of time as a linear progression of moments, Picabia's collection of reproduced mechanical parts suggests an archive based on return and reproduction.



What Walter Benjamin called Dadaist Wortsalad (“word salad”) and Bildsalat (“image salad”) emerged from the central tensions that structure the modern archive, its precarious oscillation between narrative and contingency. As abstractions that treat the items nailed or glued to the picture plane as so many elements of a formal language of abstraction, Dadaist montage belongs squarely in the tradition of the non-archival sphere. However, as investigations into the relationship between image and picture plane, they must count as crucial forerunners of a kind of “archival” modernism—not by simply endorsing the 19th-century archive but rather by critiquing and subverting it. Made of recycled trash—from pieces of cloth to found wood to newspaper clippings, reproduced photographs, and playing cards—stacked up on a supporting base in a pseudo-archaeological fashion, these works may be read as reaction formations to the traumatizing paper jam that occurred in the wake of the First World War (no other event in history had generated as much paperwork). According to Benjamin, whose assessment of the art of his time is eminently administrative, Dadaist collages and assemblages constitute an appeal to the authentic disorder of the real. They are born from the realization that the establishment of order has become an impossibility: “They mounted old rags, tram tickets, pieces of glass, buttons, matches and were saying: You can no longer handle reality. Not this little pile of garbage and not the troop movements, the flu epidemic and the banknotes.”¹⁰ If Dadaist montage challenges the call to order, the general mathesis that underlies traditional art, it also challenges the idea that the production of the new proceeds as part of a kind of tabula rasa, a zero-point of time without allegiance to the past and directed exclusively towards the future.¹¹ As reproductions that rely on cuts and the montage of individual shots, these collages and assemblages function as examples of Heideggerian Entbergen. ¹² More crucial, however, for my purposes here is the way in which they are analytical of the relationship between the picture plane (the archive) and what it stores. For example, the layers of carefully cut and arranged shapes in the collages by Kurt Schwitters—who considered the forms issued by the post office the “ultimate” form of reality and derived the sounds of his Ursonate from the (abbreviated) words on company signs and office letterhead¹³ --all point to the same supporting base, a substratum without which no archive could exist. Yet in pointing to it, these shapes also obscure that base at every step, making us wonder what is ground and what is image. At times, Schwitters even uses one of his own paintings as the supporting base for his assemblages, a procedure that is designed to thwart further our expectation that the supporting base, much like an empty canvas, could be conceived as a kind of virgin soil or grid on which an image comes to rest.