Issue 4/2012 - Leben im Archiv


Between critique and nostalgia

An interview with Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez about the rampant »mal d’archive«

J. Emil Sennewald


In art, is the archive more than an aesthetic tool? Can it be used to create something of current relevance? What kinds of innovative artistic work are being done with archives? Do they provide remedies for the »archive fever« that has beset curators for some time, in France as well? This conversation with the curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, who in the past few years has worked extensively in connection with artistic approaches to eastern European archives, shows that it is not the documents that go to make up an archive.
Telegrammes hang on the wall, decorated with coloured highlighter markings. Next to them are small paintings and in front two miniature derricks fitted into one another. In »Two Archives« (2011), Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi link the collection of western art in the Tehran Museum of Modern Art of 1977 and the gradual advent of British Petroleum in Iran from 1901 – two developments that have decisively »modernised« the country. The work can be seen until December 9 2012 during the Breton biennial »Les Ateliers de Rennes«. Visitors stand baffled in front of these oddments. The critical intention of the work only becomes apparent after much secondary reading. What is emphasised is the aesthetics of the old document, the absurdity of a deportment once felt to be »modern«.
Political reality, marginalisation in society and the artistic approach to these themes are Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez's main focuses. The Slovenian-born curator is the co-director of the experimental art space Laboratoires d'Aubervillers in the north of Paris and the co-organiser (with Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières) of »Something You Should Know«, a series of events at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) that received wide attention. For her graduation at the EHESS (under Patricia Falguières), the 36-year-old Petrešin-Bachelez examined self-insitutionalisation and self-historicisation as artistic strategies in Slovenia between 1980 and 2005. This also taught her, she said, that »it is not the document that is at the focus of an archive, but its reactivation and its performativity. It is not enough to convey the impression of looking back into the past, just as it is not enough to make an exhibition that is based on perfect art-historical references, but turns its art exhibits into static pieces of evidence.«
In 2010, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez worked on the large exhibition »Les promesses du passé« at the Centre Pompidou as associate curator. As so often is the case in France's national museum of modernity, this retrospective view curated by Christine Macel and Joanna Mytkowska also exhibited its products still and motionless, like items in an art history warehouse. Exceptions could be found in »Sources, archives, documents et films«, the section of the exhibition in espace 315 for which Petrešin-Bachelez was responsible. Here, in an amazing cardboard structure shaped into an agora by the Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih, archived material and the present were combined. Visitors possessed of plenty of curiosity and staying power were able to see abundant material, photos and documents. And to learn, among other things, that the Polish critic Anka Ptaszkowska, together with her partner Eustache Kosskowski, started up the Gallery 1-38 in 1972 in the cellar of a Paris apartment with the help of Daniel Buren, and put on rotating exhibitions (Gallery 1, 2 etc.) according to a mathematical system. There was plenty to find out about Pierre Restany's relationship with eastern Europe and the influence on his work as a Paris curator and art critic. And visitors could also see the Paris Biennial, initiated in 1959 by André Malraux and bankrupt by 1985, as a political factor for artists in countries that suffered under dictatorial regimes.
A fact that is currently also under examination by the young art historian Hélène Meisel. As part of the »Belleville-Biennale« (15 September to 20 October 2012), she has »reactivated« a work from the archives of the Biennale de Paris that was exhibited in 1973 by the Hungarian Fluxus protagonist Tamás St. Auby. In addition, she has photographed a slide show that is stored in the Kandinsky Library in the Centre Pompidou. »Le passé est maintenant«, one slide tells us – the past is now. In 1977, Ángel Kalenberg projected slides onto the entrance of the Latin American section of the Biennale de Paris that he curated. Giving a reminder of this as part of a local art festival that has taken the name of »biennale« with more than a touch of irony says a lot about the current interest in archives in the French art scene.
This interest is motivated by two conflicting impulses: the fight against suppression, and nostalgia. With this recalling of the almost forgotten Paris biennial, today's big events such as the Biennale de Lyon and the Triennale in Paris are set in a historical, political context. Only in this way can it be understood to what extent they were informed by political and institutional interests. But reconstructing works from the 1970s is also fascinating. Visitors gaze spellbound at the finds, enjoy the seemingly naive nonchalance of many presentations and are amazed at »how contemporary people were even back then«, as one viewer of Kalenberg's slide show put it.
For Petrešin-Bachelez, however, the main question lies elsewhere: »What happens when institutions do not exist, or turn their backs? In Western art history, as Boris Groys already set out in >Logik der Sammlung< (>Logic of the Collection<) in 1997, institutional critique rode on the back of an art market that was gaining in importance. In the former Eastern Bloc states, there were no structures offering concept art any form of friction. From the 1990s onwards, many artists created their institutions themselves, sometimes without real locations. With the advent of the new millennium, special associations or legal structures had to be set up if regular financial backing from the ministry were to be granted.« This meant that they turned the term »archive« upside down; even its root, the Greek word »archon«, refers to a state institution that preserves documents coming from various sources in the interests of a general order. If the state fails to fulfil its responsibility of institutionally maintaining the availability of documents from which a society can derive itself, the search for identity falls to the individual. But this completely throws into disarray the archive's main function as an institution: the border between individual collecting mania and the public weal can now no longer clearly be discerned. Since 1992, for example, there has been the P.A.R.AS.I.T.E. museum of contemporary art run by Tadej Pogačar. According to the artist's own description, the project was intended to establish artistic networks and »to live from the juices of the existing art system«. As Pogačar wrote in a text in 1998, the absence of an observing eye is just as important for art as for it to be perceived by a public. Instead of real art, he says, his museum is more interested in fictitious artistic practices that »provide a different view of reality and free us from our blindness«1.
»In this, as in many other projects, a tangible attempt is being made to formulate a (post-)socialist response to Western institutional critique and to rethink art as a socio-critical process that changes reality«, Petrešin-Bachelez says. At the same time, she adds, these approaches are characterised by her own obsessions, »by the often fatiguing, self-sacrificing work of preserving, sorting, collection, auto-documentation«. From self-presentation to solipsism is only a small step, especially as every new context, every rereading of that which is documented, changes and reinterprets it in the reconstruction. »Every archive, every collection of things – here I am thinking of personal collections of documents as well as those in public institutions – and every individual with his or her intentions and goals always has recipients as well«, the curator says. For example, in a French context, the name Tamás St. Auby, just one of the many pseudonyms of the artist Tamás Szentjóby, born in Hungary in 1944, in which the dot as a sign of omission intimates his daring use of gaps and spaces as an artistic device, takes on a religious connotation with relation to a saint that would possibly run contrary to the artist's own intentions. In other words, if one wanted to preserve a self-presentation by means of the archive the archive, it would not be enough to simply archive works: they must also undergo constant recontextualisation. »The artistic strategies that I have observed in the work of Lia Perjovschi, IRWIN or Tamás St. Auby have a great deal to do with correcting existing art history. But this is always done in different ways. Zofia Kulik has made a modest selection in the form of enormous collages made up of ephemeralia from the art world: invitation cards, leaflets and mini-manifestos from the seventies' concept-art scene in Poland, to which she belonged herself. IRWIN, on the other hand, in their long-duration project >East Art Map<, have made a selection with the same intention by inviting a large number of curators.« The formulation of identity by means of a personal archive is only ensured as long as the living connections on which it is dependent still exist.
»As exemplified by Zofia Kulik or Lia Perjovschi, there were private archives at first; they contain a lot of subjective, personal material. In the course of its compilation, the artistic archive also develops a momentum of its own, becomes a kind of living creature with which the archivist lives and maintains an inter-subjective relationship. This also reflects the enormous importance of communication, the friendly connection with other artists: work in groups was extremely important for them.«
Has her evaluation of the archive changed in the wake of the political changes in the past few years? »I am convinced today«, Petrešin Bachelez says animatedly, »that the only sensible reason to become involved with archives is to make them useful. In every aspect to do with archives, the most important question is: How can they be made accessible? Archives are nothing without a third party who reactivates them, alongside those who created the material and those who look after it. How this happens and what criteria are used in the selection and reconstruction – that is the question that must be discussed and that every archive-based form of exhibition must face. And what was already valid for the development of new artistic forms of archive in the former Eastern Bloc countries applies here too: their quality and effectiveness depends as much on the personal effort that goes into them as on their inter-subjective capacity. Archives and their preservation are the result of friendships, cooperative partnerships and communication.«
The archive, as an organic structure that evolves its own laws, not only absorbs and releases information, but also shapes its own users. »There is a type of attention that is triggered by the archive. This goes for the artists and the scholars who turn to the archive. I find the artistic attention particularly interesting because it – like every subjective gaze – is guided by an individual and his/her specific predilections and sometimes lets itself follow the logic of the archive.«
This observation raises the question of where curators stand in relation to the archive and artistic activity involving archives. Don't they themselves become part of an archive machine that gains historical meaning through its users? »What are all the things that can be an archive: a library perhaps - but an exhibition? Certainly not just that; a book, a review, a performance can fulfil archival tasks.«
Curators are also struck down by the »mal d'archive«, as Derrida described it: it turns the things it preserves into witnesses of the past, at the same time constructing and shifting the past into currently relevant political, symbolic power structures. Up to the start of this year, »L'institut d'archives sauvages«, the »Institute of the Wild Archives«, showed works from Anna Oppermann to Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige in Villa Arson to demonstrate how artists operate with archives, developing new forms. The exhibition was the outcome of a research programme on the archive run in collaboration with HEAD in Geneva. »L'oeuvre et ses archives« at CATP Bordeaux (until 9 December 2012), which documents three works (Daniel Buren, Mario Merz, Claude Rutault) and the changes in them in the course of their exhibition history, seems almost like a footnote to it. Centre stage is still given to the question of how the object can become the witness to a historical context and gain meaning.
In a series of articles for the internet magazine »e-flux« in 2010, »whose third part is still missing«, as she apologetically explains, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez presented innovative forms of archive.2 »Of course, that is an ironic title, because anything that could be formally innovative and therefore politically effective by changing the categories of what can be seen and said, as Rancière put it, is in the end returned to within conventional schemes by an art exhibition or a lecture.« But, she says, in view of artistic strategies of self-historicisation, self-institutionalisation and therefore of artists' search for identity, it is a matter also of asking whether and how a European history of art can be shared. »It is barely possible today to talk about >artists< in general, because worldwide there are very different individuals taking part in the discourse that we call contemporary art. So I would talk more about >artists in the former Eastern European and Arab world< when it is the political significance of the archive that is under discussion.«
This significance, she stresses, is never a question of archiving alone, »but depends on how the archive is made alive, useful. >Living Archives< consist of relations and actions that result from documentation, as the exhibition series of this name from 2005 to 2009 in the Van Abbemuseum showed. With the article, I wanted to show that artists have been working on the question of the constructive potential of archives for a long time and that they set out from very personal, existential points of approach while so doing,« she says. She uses examples from the former Eastern Bloc, the Middle East and South America to explain how essential the »archival impulse«, as Hal Foster called it in 2004, is for artists when societies and systems are breaking up around them.3
»The series of articles was inspired by a visit to an exhibition, >Interrupted Histories<, in the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana in 2006. For me, this compilation of artistic strategies of archiving in eastern Europe, curated by Zdenka Badovinac, is the most complete and stimulating one to date. Above all, it shows that artists like the Slovenian IRWIN group, the Romanian artist Lia Perjovschi or the Romanian group subREAL (Calin Dan, Josif Király) create their own context, and how they do it.« Where there are no institutions around to provide a framework for art, where there is no art history to order the works and no art criticism to give them a voice, they need a »Selberlebensbeschreibung« [»Self-Life Description«], to apply the title of Jean Paul's novel to the paradoxical situation of isolated artists who are simultaneously authors and viewers, producers and critical consumers of their works.
Since the late 1980s, varying forms of artistic archive have come into being. For example, in 2001, the above-mentioned Tamás St. Auby set up his »Portable Intelligence Increase Museum«, in which he keeps, in digitised form, 1,100 little-known artistic works that were suppressed at the time they were created. Lia Perjovschi collected items for her »Contemporary Art Archive/Center for Art Analysis« for 20 years; it fulfils both a historical and a networking function. In 2010, it was temporarily closed because she, along with other artists, was driven out of her rooms in the Bucharest Academy of Art. At present, the project is housed in her new studio in Sibiu.4 »Then, in 2001, there came the >East Art Map<5 from IRWIN, which documents around 50 years of art history«, Petrešin-Bachelez continues. »Vyacheslav Akhunov, who is currently also being shown at documenta – which, by the way, leaves me speechless by the lack of breadth of its curatorial input - began in 1978 to exhibit miniature models of all his art works. Of course, Walid Raad's >A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art< or Akram Zaatari's work, which led among other things to the Arab Image Foundation, must also be mentioned. Raad and Zaatari, like many other artists in the Middle East, make a big contribution to the analysis of historical and contemporary Lebanese society with a sometimes very subjective viewpoint. What interests me is to see what the artists make out of this: how they activate these forms and archive them in such a way that they remain effective.«
Whether a »scar between the past and the present« forms in the interior of the archive, as Okwui Enwezor hoped, in a still conciliatory vein, in his text with the Derrida-inspired title »Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art«, which appeared on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in the International Center of Photography in New York, is still independent of how the archive is used.6 In this year, at the triennial in the Palais de Tokyo that he staged, Enwezor made the impression of a curator who leaves his artists behind along with the public – lost in the archive. »There are other things than archive documents«, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez says, »traces, objects, personal narratives, which can also form the scars of which Enwezor speaks. But archives are, so to speak, the legitimate and physical containers in which such scars wait to be formed. I think that another important aspect is people, who again promote the view of which I have already spoken – that of using and >performing< the archive. Archives are the enormous embodiment of a potential that is waiting to be translated, presented, interpreted or discovered – and that is possible because every person looks at things from his or her own perspective. Artists, like other citizens, are individuals whose sometimes obsessive digging-about in half-forgotten or less visible material resembles the work of activists that want to change the order of things, the way in which things that can be felt, thought and said is shared out. Artists do this in aesthetic fields and areas of knowledge, in the field of art, but they often do it with the intention of drawing attention to the fact that art historians have left their job half undone – when the political climate changes, art history should be rewritten.«

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

1 Tadej Pogačar, P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. museum of contemporary art and new parasitism; http://www.worldofart.org/english/98/98poga2.htm; also see Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia. Cambridge/London 2009.
2 See http://www.e-flux.com/journal/innovative-forms-of-archives-part-one-exhibitions-events-books-museums-and-lia-perjovschi’s-contemporary-art-archive/
3 See Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse//2004, in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive. Cambridge/London 2006, pp. 143–148.
4 See http://mappingromanianart.blogspot.fr/2011/01/archive-fever-and-east-part-3_06.html
5 See http://www.eastartmap.org
6 See Okwui Enwezor, Archive fever: photography between history and the monument. In Enwezor (ed.), Archive fever: uses of the document in contemporary art. New York: International Center of Photography 2008, pp. 11–51.