HOMEPAGE INTRODUCTION MEMORY TIME PERSPECTIVE HISTORY BANANA CINNAMON PANCAKES REVIEW TRACK

HISTORY

ABOUT HISTORY:

Part of recording history is by keeping an archive. An archive is a collection of visual and written records for documentation purposes. It serves as a memory aid and allows for easy access to information. It can be called a "storehouse of memory" of some sort.[1]

Part of recording history is by keeping an archive. An archive is a collection of visual and written records for documentation purposes. It serves as a memory aid and allows for easy access to information. It can be called a "storehouse of memory" of some sort.[1]

A modern version of an archive is a digital database. Here, the information is not stored hierarchically and it is rather unstructured compared to a physical archive. However, they do enable for large quantities of information to be stored.[2]

The concept of an archive relates to art in several ways. For instance with performance art and landscape art, artists relied on documentation to record their works for future generations. In some cases, artists used the structure of an archive as the starting point of their artwork. This is often in the form of Installation Art.[3] According to Hall Foster in his publication An Archival Impulse, one of the functions of archival art is to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.[4]

The starting point of Mark Dion's Cabinet of Curiosities is the origin of museums and their collections. The artist made it in collaboration with students from the Vassar College, who were allowed to go through the entire archives of Vassari's different departments to make a new collection for the Cabinet of Curiosities. Here, history is not shown in a linear manner.[5]
  1. Jean Robertson, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of contemporary art: visual art after 1980: FIFTH EDITION (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 192.
  2. Ibid, 193.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October Vol. 110 (October 2004): 4, https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379847.
  5. Vassar CAAD, Mark Dion's 'Cabinet of Curiosities'. Youtube. March 23, 2017. 3:12,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-mbyuoT7A0.
Theodore Gericault_The Raft of the Medusa Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa/Le Radeau de la Méduse, 1819. Oil on canvas, 491 x 716 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Arch of Constantine Arch of Constantine, AD 315. Marble, Rome.
Julie Mehretu_Emperical Construction Julie Mehretu, Emperical Construction, Istanbul, 2003. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 304 x 457 cm, MoMA, Manhattan.
Tracey Emin_May Dodge, My Nan Travey Emin, May Dodge, My Nan, 1963-1993. Wooden box, glass, dool and 5 works on paper, photographs, ink, printed papers and wool, 162 x 182 x 181 mm, Tate, London.
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