Reading Archives

With this blog, I am planning to offer, as regularly as possible, critical observations on the scholarly and popular literature analyzing the nature of archives or contributing to our understanding of archives in society. I hope this blog will be of assistance to anyone, especially faculty and graduate students, interested in understanding archives and their importance to society.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Deep in the Archive


Ulrich Baer. “Deep in the Archive,” Aperture, Issue No. 193 (Winter 2008): 54-9.

Allen C. Benson
Doctoral Student, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences

Why did Ulrich Baer, a comparative literature professor at NYU, choose to publish his essay on archives in Aperture, a premier photography journal? Baer is concerned with artists who engage with the archive to mobilize what Jacques Derrida termed “Mal d’archive.” While the archivist exercises the power of the document, “imposing order on contingency,” Baer argues that contingency must not be entirely ruled out. He introduces artists who turn to the archive as both “metaphor and treasure trove,” expanding the traditional role of the archive and the photograph beyond their original purpose. He highlights the idea that artists who redirect the photograph’s and archive’s originally stated intention raise the possibility of finding new life in the archive and the photograph.

Baer begins his essay by examining parallels between the archive and the photograph. Both, he claims, “extricate their subjects from the flux of time,” entombing them before they have died; both preserve knowledge and “transmit culturally and historically specific modes of remembrance.” Baer describes the archive as a place where we classify, label, and store things we do not want to forget, or that help us understand the present, or that we believe may tell us something about the future. There is a sense of melancholy surrounding the photograph and the archive because they represent countless records, objects and images that were not collected, but were lost.

Baer brings to light a less conspicuous aspect of these phenomena, the notion that there is room in the archive and the photograph for contingency, for discovering something new and for understanding later what may not be apparent today. He turns to the subject of art and how some artists in recent years have been drawn to the archive for their inspiration because of its melancholic nature and its collections of traumatic evidence. To paraphrase Derrida, there is a feverish desire for the archive, not so much to enter and use it, but to have it. Baer echoes his own experience as an archival researcher (briefly touched upon at the end of his essay), tumbling first into the traumatic past found in the letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, which he abandoned in favor of the “Rilkean archives of transcendence and joy.”

These introductory remarks serve as backdrop for the heart of Baer’s essay, which examines a handful of artists who engage with, in and around the archive. He explores their modes of engagement and how different these artists are from researchers who enter through the front door with proper IDs and research questions. Baer claims they “enter like a virus and bring the archive down from within.”

Baer begins by describing a modality he calls constructed, introducing the work of artists like Zoe Leonard who offer alternative ways of remembering history by highlighting the “fetish character of memory in postmodern culture.” Writer and director of “The Watermelon Woman,” Cheryl Dunye, conceived an imaginary black Hollywood actress and blues singer named Fae Richards, asking Leonard to fabricate The Fae Richards Photo Archive to help add realism to this fake documentary. Baer suggests this offers “an alternative way of remembering and archiving experiences that have not been officially retained or chronicled, or that have been deliberately excluded from official versions of collective history.”

Baer then discusses a modality he calls unremembered and introduces the work of artist Ilán Lieberman who carefully redraws miniature photographs of missing children that were published in Mexican newspapers. Photographs like these soon become ephemeral, either because searching proves futile or the child is found. By recreating the photographs, or what Baer calls “creating a virtual archives,” Lieberman is able to “ensure the possibility of testimony and recollection in an age that creates, uses, and discards images with equal ease.”

The last modality Baer describes is the redemption modality. Baer draws attention to artists who “refashion material from existing archives to tell new or alternative stories that may contradict or substantially revise a given collection’s original intentions.” He offers as an example the archived color slides of Jewish life in the Lodz Ghetto taken from a Nazi photographer’s perspective presenting a melancholic, “dominant narrative of hopelessness and victimization.” Baer explains how this intentional avoidance of contrary views has led some historians to regard the photograph as ‘a document of destruction.’ But the photograph can be something more. Polish filmmaker Dariusz Jabłoński reframed many of these same images in his film Fotoamator (1998), focusing on picture elements that the camera accidentally captured. For example, there is a photograph showing a German official inspecting a rack of ties “sold for survival by Jews deported to the ghetto from Western Europe.” Jabłoński zooms his lens in on one staged photo to lay bare the face of a boy who was not meant to be seen.

In Baer’s closing remarks he points to Freud’s conception of memory, claiming that memory is prone to these same distortions. He briefly touches upon Michel Foucault’s analysis of how facts and events shape personal and collective memory as much as the “symbolic order available to express, record, and recall them.” This, Baer concludes, is why contemporary artists working in and around the archive place their attention on “how events are shaped by different forms and modes of representation, and by different media.”

2 Comments:

At 12:38 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Why did Ulrich Baer, a comparative literature professor at NYU, choose to publish his essay on archives in Aperture, a premier photography journal?"
-----------
Aperture Foundation opened a large gallery/bookstore a few years ago in Chelsea art district very near to NYU Washington Square.

No longer just a German professor,
http://www.nyu.edu/provost/about.office/bio.baer.html
..."Recently appointed Vice Provost for Globalization and Multicultural Affairs in January 2008. In that role, he has responsibility for global sites abroad and some multicultural institutes and centers." "Born in Germany, he received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1991 and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1995" ..."Uli first came to NYU as an assistant professor in the Department of German in 1996"
------------
I had some difficulty understanding (not so unusual for me) some of these comments about the 'mal d'archive'
in this review of Baer's piece.
Many comments seem to contradict on several themes, perhaps that is his point (?) , but it does not seem to come to any conclusions either.

I have not yet read the full article but had some questions about seeming contradictions in his themes discussed below:

"He introduces artists who turn to the archive as both “metaphor and treasure trove,” expanding the traditional role of the archive and the photograph beyond their original purpose. He highlights the idea that artists who redirect the photograph’s and archive’s originally stated intention raise the possibility of finding new life in the archive and the photograph."

"new life" in what way? --questions, including both facts and distortions?


"Baer describes the archive as a place where we classify, label, and store things we do not want to forget, or that help us understand the present, or that we believe may tell us something about the future. There is a sense of melancholy surrounding the photograph and the archive because they represent countless records, objects and images that were not collected, but were lost. "


Yes , but then it states...

. "Baer echoes his own experience as an archival researcher (briefly touched upon at the end of his essay), tumbling first into the traumatic past found in the letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, which he abandoned in favor of the “Rilkean archives of transcendence and joy.”.."

So we conclude he is an 'artist' rather than a 'researcher' ? Why has he abandoned Arendt and Scholem in favor of just the transcendence and joy of Rilke in the archives?

It just seems at times esp contradictory and that is fine-- but it leaves me with more questions.

A final point I found some issue with was describing the 'redemption" modality described by Baer:

"These introductory remarks serve as backdrop for the heart of Baer’s essay, which examines a handful of artists who engage with, in and around the archive. He explores their modes of engagement and how different these artists are from researchers who enter through the front door with proper IDs and research questions. Baer claims they “enter like a virus and bring the archive down from within.”

"The last modality Baer describes is the redemption modality. Baer draws attention to artists who “refashion material from existing archives to tell new or alternative stories that may contradict or substantially revise a given collection’s original intentions.” He offers as an example the archived color slides of Jewish life in the Lodz Ghetto taken from a Nazi photographer’s perspective presenting a melancholic, “dominant narrative of hopelessness and victimization.” Baer explains how this intentional avoidance of contrary views has led some historians to regard the photograph as ‘a document of destruction.’ But the photograph can be something more. Polish filmmaker Dariusz Jabłoński reframed many of these same images in his film Fotoamator (1998), focusing on picture elements that the camera accidentally captured. For example, there is a photograph showing a German official inspecting a rack of ties “sold for survival by Jews deported to the ghetto from Western Europe.” Jabłoński zooms his lens in on one staged photo to lay bare the face of a boy who was not meant to be seen. ..."

this part: "Baer explains how this intentional avoidance of contrary views has led some historians to regard the photograph as ‘a document of destruction."

Baer, born in Germany esp., how exactly was this "intentional avoidance of contrary views" been explained in his article I wonder. It just seems a real "mal d'archive" point but maybe in a different way.




..."In Baer’s closing remarks he points to Freud’s conception of memory, claiming that memory is prone to these same distortions. "

okay--yes

..."This, Baer concludes, is why contemporary artists working in and around the archive place their attention on “how events are shaped by different forms and modes of representation, and by different media.” "

Artists/photographers can take liberties that archivists can and should not-? okay too

NYU's History program offers archival management programs too so perhaps he can collaborate with their perspectives as well
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.gradprog.archives.faculty.html


the dept blurb also mentioned his other publications edited on 9/11 themes as well, among other research interests :
"His books include: "Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan" (2000) "Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma" (2002), "110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11" (editor; 2002), "The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke" (editor and translator; 2005), and the forthcoming "The Rilke Alphabet" (2006). He has taught courses on the poetics of witnessing, the notion of innocence and trauma in literature and the visual arts, and comparative readings of modernist poetry, and written articles on the poetry of the Holocaust, contemporary German novels dealing with the Nazi past, and various aspects of the history and theory of photography, including an essay on French photographer Suzanne Doppelt co-authored with Avital Ronell for Artforum. As a contributing editor of New German Critique, he has co-edited with Amir Eshel a special volume on Paul Celan for that journal. He has been the recipient of a Getty Post-Doctoral Fellowship, a Humboldt-Fellowship, and twice (1998 and 2003) of NYU's Golden Dozen Award for excellence in teaching. His current projects include a book-length study of sublimation and desire co-authored with Eckart Goebel of NYU's German Department, a study of 19th and 20th representations of the clouds, and the edition of five small books of selections from Rilke's letters for Insel Verlag in Germany."

How do you study representations of clouds? It only took 4 years after his BA to earn his PhD--now thats also something to look at in comp lit -- awesome!!! We are all in the wrong field maybe, but collaboration is good.

 
At 9:45 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"These introductory remarks serve as backdrop for the heart of Baer’s essay, which examines a handful of artists who engage with, in and around the archive. He explores their modes of engagement and how different these artists are from researchers who enter through the front door with proper IDs and research questions. Baer claims they “enter like a virus and bring the archive down from within.” ..."

More on the idea of 'virality' in academic discussion, from a recent post this week in the Chronicle --

February 6, 2009
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3601/on-twitter-academic-debates-fall-short

"On Twitter, Academic Debates Fall Short"

"The Ed Techie, an education blogger, tried to have a debate with colleagues using Twitter, the micro-messaging service. The Ed Techie, also known as Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University in Britain, tried to get people talking about “virality” as an educational tool. The idea of virality, as he defined it, was an idea that causes people to react because it neatly encapsulates a concept."

"It didn’t work, he says. “Although the inputs I had were good (and thank you to those who contributed), it didn’t really take off. In short, my debate around virality didn’t go viral,” he says in a new blog post. "...

 

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