The Archive as Producer (Reading Response 5)

Archival practice is a way to fragment and destabilize memory as recorded or history as written. Jae Emerling begins discussion on the archive reference to The Writing on the Wall projections by Shimon Attie in Berlin. These works embody the idea that the archive presents the co-existence of the past and the present. By bringing the past into the present, Attie examines the continuity of psychological, political, and socio-cultural affects. Emerling, on the other hand, describes Allan Sekula’s work as viewing the archive through a materialist cultural historical lens. Here, the photographic archive exists as a sign of bourgeois power connected to knowledge. In essence, the archive loses context through the rearrangement into a historical narrative. The Family of Man was a photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen and designed by Paul Rudolph. The exhibition attempted to use photography as a kind of “universal language.” By doing so, the exhibition was homogenized, fictional, ideological, and utopian. It presented the “universal narrative” of father as power and authority and stripped the authorships of works to appear more archival. By creating the appearance of archive, the exhibition created the same rearranged historical narrative described in reference to Sekula. The archive is therefore a method to create the image of empirical evidence of “universal themes.” It is a way of projecting norms through visual rhetoric. Norms are again projected through the discussion of photography during imperialist/colonialist regimes of Europe and America. Physiognomy is a pseudo-science which examines the human face to indicate moral character. Photographic portraiture acted as “scientific medium” which archived racial/social typing. Again, the archive was used to rewrite a narrative about reality through documentary style and bourgeois authority. Barthes’ discussion on connotation and denotation is brought up in terms of the nineteenth century myth of racial difference. The connotative meanings of otherness which rely on cultural and historical contexts appear to be denotative or literal. The archive as a medium proves to re-represent reality by stereotyping and extending social hierarchy, because of those who have the means to control the archive itself (rich white males).

Emerling extends the chapter by discussing the relationship between Bernd and Hilla Becher with Michael Fried and his views on Minimalism. Fried sees Minimalism as a theatrical performance between the viewer and the work. While the Bechers' work is both Minimalist and Conceptualist, Fried reads it as ontological and epistemological. The work of the Bechers proves to be read in many different ways from anti-aesthetic, to documentary, to ideological, or geographical. 

The Gloss on Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, reconnects the archive with discourse and archaelogy, describing the archive as determining the appearance of statements.