Suely Rolnik E-Book

Suely Rolnik

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 80

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

 In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat das Interesse des Kunstbetriebs an Archiven mehr und mehr zugenommen und sich zu einem regelrechten »Archivierungszwang« entwickelt. Suely Rolnik beschreibt in ihrem Text die Wurzel dieser Tendenz in der Konzeptkunst der 1960er und 70er Jahre, mit Fokus auf den Ländern Lateinamerikas, die von Militärdiktaturen beherrscht wurden. Eine Ursache hierfür sieht sie in der »kolonialen Verdrängung«, die wie die Diktaturen ein tiefgehendes Trauma in diesen Ländern hinterlassen und zu einer Spaltung zwischen dem Poetischen und dem Politischen geführt hat, fortgeführt im Missverständnis der »offiziellen« Kunstgeschichte, die die dort vorzufindenden künstlerischen Praktiken im Sinne einer »politischen« oder »ideologischen Konzeptkunst« deutet. Vor diesem Hintergrund bricht der Wille hervor, sich den Archiven erneut zuzuwenden und die Verschmelzung der poetischen mit den politischen Kräften zu reaktivieren.    Die Psychoanalytikerin, Kuratorin und Kulturkritikerin Suely Rolnik lebt in Brasilien.       Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch    

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº022: Suely Rolnik

Archive Mania / Archivmanie

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Member of Core Agent Group, Head of Department /

Mitglied der Agenten-Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

Editorial Assistant / Redaktionsassistentin: Cordelia Marten

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Melissa Larner

English Proofreading / Englisches Korrektorat: Sam Frank

Translation / Übersetzung: Pablo Lafuente

Graphic Design / Grafische Gestaltung: Leftloft

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Christine Emter

E-Book Implementation / E-Book-Produktion: LVD GmbH, Berlin

© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;

Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Suely Rolnik

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Dar ul-Aman Palace, 2010 (detail / Detail),

© Mariam Ghani; p. / S. 2: © Suely Rolnik, photo / Foto: Rodrigo Araújo

documenta und Museum Fridericianum

Veranstaltungs-GmbH

Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.documenta.de

Chief Executive Officer / Geschäftsführer: Bernd Leifeld

Published by / Erschienen im

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.hatjecantz.com

ISBN 978-3-7757-3051-8 (E-Book)

ISBN 978-3-7757-2871-3 (Print)

Gefördert durch die

funded by the German Federal

Cultural Foundation

We cannot be held responsible for external links; the content of external links is the full responsibility of the operators of these sites. / Für externe Links können wir keine Haftung übernehmen. Die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich von deren Betreiber zu verantworten.

Archive for an Event-Oeuvre:

Project for Activating the Body’s Memory

of an Art Work and its Context, 2003–11 /

Archiv für ein Event-Œuvre. Projekt zur

Aktivierung des Körpergedächtnisses eines

Kunstwerks und seines Kontextes, 2003–2011

Suely RolnikArchive Mania /Archivmanie

Suely RolnikArchive Mania

If the past insists, it is because of life’s unavoidable demand to activate in the present the seeds of its buried futures.

—Walter Benjamin,Psychography1

There is culture, and that is the rule. There is exception, and that is art. Everything tells the rule: cigarettes, computers, T-shirts, television, tourism, war. Nothing says the exception. That is not said. It is written, composed, painted, filmed. Or it is lived. And it is then the art of living. It is of the nature of the rule to desire the death of exception.

—Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo 2

The globalized art world has been overtaken in recent decades by a true compulsion to archive—a compulsion that includes anything from academic research into preexisting archives or those still to be constructed, through exhibitions fully or in part based on them, to frantic competition among private collectors and museums in the acquisition of these new objects of desire. Without a doubt, this phenomenon is not the result of chance.

In view of this, it is urgent that we problematize the politics of archiving, since there are many different ways of approaching those artistic practices that are being archived. Such politics should be distinguished on the basis of the poetic force that an archiving device can transmit rather than on that of its technical or methodological choices. I am referring here to their ability to enable the archived practices to activate sensible experiences in the present, necessarily different from those that were originally lived, but with an equivalent critical-poetic density. Facing this issue, a question immediately emerges: How can we conceive of an inventory that is able to carry this potential in itself—that is, an archive “for” and not “about” artistic experience or its mere cataloguing in an allegedly objective manner?

This distinction can be explored according to at least two sets of questions. The first refers to the kind of poetics that are being catalogued: Which poetics are these exactly? Do they share common traits? Do they originate from similar historical contexts? What does it mean to catalogue poetics, and how is this operation different from the cataloguing of objects or documents? The second set of questions refers to the situation that has given rise to the current archive fever: What is the cause of the emergence of such desire today? What different politics of desire has given impulse to the many initiatives focused on archives, their emergence and means of production, presentation, circulation, and acquisition? In what follows, I aim to propose some clues to answering these questions.

Let us begin with the undeniable fact that there exists a privileged object of this yearning for the archive: the broad spectrum of artistic practices framed by the label “Conceptualism,” which were developed throughout the world during the 1960s and 1970s. Such practices, as well as others that shared a similar daring attitude in relation to the standards of their time, are the result of a phenomenon that starts at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth: an accumulation of imperceptible tectonic movements within the art world that reached a threshold during those years and resulted in works that, by making such movements sensible, completely reconfigured the artistic landscape. This is the context in which the artists subsequently referred to as “Conceptual” emerge, adopting as the subject of their research the way in which the “art system” determines their creations. Their focus is on the diverse levels of such a system: from the spaces where the works are exhibited, to the categories and genres that the (official) history of art uses to qualify them, and to their media, supports, etc. The making critically explicit of such limitations within the artworks themselves provided at that moment in history a key orientation to artistic practice in search of lines of flight from such established boundaries. This operation provides the core to the poetics of those artistic proposals, and the conditions for the potency of their thinking—here resides the vitality of those artworks and the virus that they carry.

But the compulsion to archive hasn’t extended to every artistic practice that emerged during those decades. The compulsion’s main focus is on artistic proposals made outside of the axis formed by Western Europe and the U.S.—especially proposals originating in Latin America, in countries then under military rule. Such practices have been incorporated into the art history that has been written from within the Western Europe–U.S. axis—an art history that has become the hegemonic discourse and defines the boundaries of the international art context. This is the perspective from which artistic production made elsewhere is interpreted and categorized today, which tends to distort the reading of such practices and generate toxic effects in their reception and dissemination.

The Spell Is Broken

For the past few decades, due to the advance of globalization, a demystification of that art history has been taking place. Such a phenomenon is part of a broader one, a process by which the previously idealizing view of the dominant culture that was held by other cultures—cultures that were until then under its influence—progressively fades. The spell that kept them captive has been broken, and with it the impediments it set to the possibility of elaborating their own experiences, with their own texture and density, and with the peculiarity of their own politics of production of knowledge.

A whole world, instituted by that hegemonic thought, is being destabilized. Its territory is being transformed from underground, its cartography modified, its limits redrawn. A process is beginning in which the cultures that until then had been suffocated are being reactivated, and new sensibilities introduced in the construction of the present, giving a cue to different modes of response. If we consider exclusively the two extreme positions, at the most reactive pole we find all kinds of fundamentalisms—movements that create the fiction of an originary identity that is lived as truth and that shapes subjectivity. In the hegemonic countries, this movement manifests itself in the form of xenophobia. In the specific case of Western Europe, the tendency has intensified in recent years to a dangerous degree, like a swan song responding to the announced death of such hegemony. Behind this mirage of an identitarian essence there is a denial of the experience of a multiple and variable alterity, and of the subjective and cultural flexibility that such alterity demands—phenomena that are the result of globalization. Simultaneously, at the most active pole, a whole range of inventions of the present are being produced. They are motivated, in contrast, by an opening up to the plurality of cultural others, and to the brushes and tensions that result from the collision with the new panorama in each particular context, chiefly with the cultural experiences inscribed in the bodies that inhabit it. As either one of these two positions advances, its opposite gains in intensity. Evidently, these two extremes do not exist in a pure state—what actually exists are different types of forces that manifest themselves in a range of different shades between the active and reactive poles, interacting in a vast cultural melting pot. Through this dynamic, the forms of transnational society are shaped.