This phenomenon (or movement?) is too widespread and patchy, and too rich, to be clearly identified. But it is common to artists ranging from Joachim Koester to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Walid Raad, Zoe Leonard, Danh Vo, Peter Friedl, Haris Epaminonda and Robert Kusmirowski. It was also at the heart of exhibitions such as "Archive Fever", held at the ICA in New York last year, and "Modernism as a Ruin: an Archaeology of the Present" at the Generali Foundation in Vienna. Artists and curators are no longer limiting themselves to using history as a source of inspiration, but are adopting it as a repertoire of contents and a context for their activities, turning historiography and archives (which represent the sensitive format of history) into the forming principle of their work.
Re-enactments and the reconstruction of historical settings, catalogues of documents and exhibitions of artefacts in museum cases are all practices with a clear aim: at a time when the multiplication of information ironically tends to push things into the background, the artist's role can become one of supplementing the official history, showing what it does not reveal or indeed conceals. These practices fall midway between the objet trouvé and institutional criticism: a museum (or something similar) is recreated in another context, hijacking contemporary art as a vehicle to spread information in the name of some sort of historico-political justice, "giving a voice to the vanquished", doing outside the museum what, for a variety of reasons, the museum does not do. It is also a modest step whereby artists stop being hypothetical creators and select snippets from the past that are filtered via their aesthetic and offered up to the public.
What exactly is the significance of this desire to delve into the past? It is not a search for some form of origin or root, an approach linked to modernist universalism, but an unearthing of shreds of meaning, episodes and holes in the fabric of official narration. This certainly fruitful trend, however, displays at least a couple of problems. The first is linked to convenience: it is very hard to see your artistic work ignored, or criticised, when it merely aims to "draw attention" to a previously little-known historical event of objective importance. In this sense, the historiographic approach runs the risk of being an extra-artistic justification, an appropriation of merit, or a sort of alibi.
Above all, however, the legitimacy of a project that works on the past (its injustices, omissions and falsehoods) predominantly seems to exempt those who carry out this task with the aim of imagining a future, as the critic Dieter Roelstraete pointed out in the e-flux journal article that triggered this debate. There is a risk that every extra effort put into building up archives – however important their potential contents – is one less effort made to construct what may one day fill it.
Vincenzo Latronico
Novelist