The Archive

In the modern era, the archive--official or personal--has become the most
significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored,
and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields
as anthropology, critical theory, history, and, especially, recent art. Traces and
testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of
the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration
of the authority given the archive--no longer viewed as a neutral, transparent site
of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself.This volume surveys the
full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the
archive--as idea and as physical presence--from Freud's "mystic writing pad" to
Derrida's "archive fever"; from Christian Boltanski's first autobiographical
explorations of archival material in the 1960s to the practice of artists as various
as Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirshhorn, Renée Green, and The Atlas Group in
the present.Not for sale in the UK and Europe.