...Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
—Percy Shelley, Ozymandias
The Romantics conjecture that human beings possess an innate desire for infinity and therefore can never be satisfied with the finite. This desire was the beginning of collecting and sorting. Eventually this act built the archive which housed historical and cultural memory. Jaques Derrida mentions the opposing human desire: the drive which pushes us to destroy and corrupt the archive through silence and forgetting. This violent clash is replete with purposeful and accidental omissions and additions.
Boris Groys defines the cultural archive as those that have been incorporated into the system to be preserved and presented. In contrast, the unconventional, the unvalued, the unsuccessful, the annoying, the unspoken, he calls the profane realm. Strategically shifting the contents of the two is an act of valuation, only able to be performed by those in power. These arbiters of cultural value and users of cultural privilege act through production of narratives and alteration of memories. The contents, then constantly compete to be shifted; for the right to be retained, collected, and displayed. Propaganda from an expedition, a creation of a list, a simple shutter pressing—a possession of the landscape—synchronize and unify the archive, which enables the expansion of imperial colonization, the manipulation of ideology, and the solidification of modes of production and distribution.
“The Archival Impulse: An Exercise in Counter-Narrative and Counter-Memory” brings together the recent practices of six artists to activate the more complex connections between archives and identity, memory and history through artistic interventions. The exhibition is not only a focused discussion of artistic practices that use the archive as a medium and form, but also provides new interpretative contexts for the shifting power relations and cultural values behind archivalization. The works take on iconographic, taxonomic, indexical, typological, or archaeological qualities. They are either appropriated, extracted, and collaged, or showcased, superimposed, and compiled; translating the archival material into aesthetic principles and artistic patterns into historicized construction. Some testify to certain unidentified labor. Some confess to memories that are forced into oblivion.
A deer antler and a fractured rib of a saber-toothed tiger—Liu Beining's installation, Stitching, Pointing, introduces the exhibition. The work refers to the archive as an extension of memory and trauma. Hu Yun's artistic practice is often rooted in the self- positioning of an individual in the course of history, intervening in the broader colonial and cross-cultural context through the codification and re-imagination of historical facts and primary documents. Based on photographs taken by Alfred A. Hart, the official photographer of the Central Pacific Railroad, Andong Zheng searches for relics left by migrant workers in the American West. He identifies, remakes and documents the forensic scenes to counter the limited constructed narratives in the photographic archives. Lishuang Xu focuses on the marginalized workers of the art industry by linking invisible labor within art creation and knowledge production through the thread of “boxes.”
Multi-channel video installation Frosty Morning exemplifies how archives are transmitted, preserved, and transformed in new digital communication systems. After compiling every front page of The New York Times from the last 6 years, Shi Zheng trained an Artificial Neural Network to “read” it, generating blurred, illegible images that come infinitely close to reality. aaajiao’s work displays the difficult relationships between personal memories, collective memories, and online memories. In a time when our physical and virtual identities are squeezed into such small spaces, remembering itself becomes more important than ever.
The metaphors and symbols carried by the archive are constructively hidden behind it. Therefore they cannot be directly observed. In order to enter this dark and opaque depth, the artists try to find the gaps between public and private, documentation and commentary, and power and subordination. Many of the responses to the questions posed by the exhibition are not entirely smooth, but full of tension and sometimes physically demanding. How does one discover the thin connections within the canon? How does one construct different planes of the reality within the historical a priori? How does one stand inside the rules so that the others and the outsiders are revealed? One needs to be cautious with the fact that the works in the exhibition are inevitably selected and speculated. They are temporarily gathered together in the appearance of cultural objects as narrated by the curator. As the thread that ties them all together, these issues will be discussed here, briefly, and forgotten with time.