Field Notes
Dieter Roelstraete
He who seeks to approach
his own buried past must conduct
himself like a man digging.
—Walter Benjamin,
“Excavation and Memory”1
—Friedrich Nietzsche,
What if the vanguard
were to become the remnant?
—Terry Eagleton,
The Illusion of Postmodernism3
14
Of what use, then, is the
monumentalistic conception of
the past, engagement with
the classic and rare of earlier
times, to the man of the present?
He learns from it that the
greatness that once existed was
in any event once possible
and may thus be possible again.
“On the Uses and Disadvantages
of History for Life” 2
One of the defining ironies of our
time is that so much of the
vanguard art production—the art
that is most closely aligned with
the boundary-pushing, experiment-
prone, horizon-expanding
tradition of progressive culture,
and with the avant-garde’s
traditional claims to “newness”
in particular—should be so
preoccupied, both in its choice of
subject matter and its choice
of techniques, in both form and
content, with the old, the outdated,
the outmoded—with the past.
In other words still: it is one of
the defining ironies of our time
that the one sector of culture most
commonly associated with
looking forward should appear so
consumed by a passion for
15
 1 Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and
Memory,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2,
1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney
Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 576.
Benjamin continues: “Above all, he must
not be afraid to return again and again to the
same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth,
to turn it over as one turns over soil. For
the ‘matter itself’ is no more than the strata
which yield their long-sought secrets only
to the most meticulous investigation.
That is to say, they yield those images that,
severed from all earlier associations, reside as
treasures in the sober rooms of our later
insights.” It is indeed fitting that the present
essay, as a consideration of a certain historio-
graphic impulse in contemporary art that
regularly takes on a decidedly archaeological
guise, should begin with a quote by Walter
Benjamin—quite possibly the twentieth
century’s most widely quoted thinker (in
the adjoining realms of art criticism and
cultural studies, at least), whose oeuvre has
itself become something of an overcrowded
archaeological excavation site in recent
decades. In the words of Peter Osborne, an
expert on the subject of Benjaminiana:
“Benjamin’s prose breeds commentary like
vaccine in a lab.” Radical Philosophy, no. 88
(March/April 1998): 28. Why a relatively minor
philosopher, who for the longest time
languished in the historical margins of his
discipline, should have become such a pivotal
philosophical reference in the expanded
field of cultural practice and theory in the last
quarter of the twentieth century is a question
that can be answered in part by way of a
detour through Benjamin’s own predilection
for archaeological metaphors and archivo-
museological allegories: like archaeology,
his thought is mainly concerned with fragments,
shards, traces—the residual flotsam and jetsam
of history. (His unfinished—and purposely
unfinishable—magnum opus Das Passagen-Werk
[Arcades project] primarily exists as an
eight-hundred-page treasure trove of fragmen-
tary notes.) Fragmentation being the core
quality of much contemporary (cultural)
experience, it is only logical that Benjamin,
16
as the theorist par excellence of the fragment,
should have become the foremost thinker
of our time: no philosophy is better equipped
to capture the imagination of our rudderless,
scattered zeitgeist than a philosophy of
fragments and fragmentation. (We will be
returning to the Benjaminian rhetoric of the
fragment and fragmentation in due time.)
And of course, it is in part also precisely because
Benjamin was considered a minor thinker
for a relatively long time that he can now be
viewed as a major thinker in disguise.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses
and Disadvantages of History for Life,”
in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69.
3 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of
Postmodernism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), 1.
4 “Make it new!” in the immortal,
talismanic words of Ezra Pound—one of many
mottoes associated with the inauguration
of the modernist movement in art. (One could
also think here of the paean to newness
and the feverish denunciation of the old—
in particular “old pictures”—contained in F. T.
Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” [1909], notori-
ous for its provocative call to destroy libraries
and museums, as they are the prime
repositories of the old, alike.) The “traditional
claims to newness” mentioned earlier in
the text is in reference, of course, to Harold
Rosenberg’s pioneering study The Tradition of
the New from 1959. The preface to Rosenberg’s
book contains the memorable statement,
“exactly one hundred years have passed since
Baudelaire invited fugitives from the too-small
world of memory to come aboard for his
voyage in search of the new.” The cultural
condition diagnosed in these pages could best
be described, I believe, by letting “memory”
and “new” trade places in Rosenberg’s winged
words. See The Tradition of the New (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1994), 9.
FIELD NOTES
looking not just the proverbial other way but in the opposite
direction—backward. Indeed, one of the dominant trends in the art
of the last decade or so—we will be coming back to the issue of
chronology, of the precise dating of this development, shortly—
has revolved around the radical reconsideration and reformulation
of art’s relationship to history, both its own (“art history”) and that
of others (“history” proper): a volte-face from denial, the standard
reflex of the modern as such, to embrace.4

David Zwirner, New York and London.

Film stills, Overture, 1986.
16 mm film loop installation

Courtesy of the artist and

(black-and-white, sound).
STA N DOUGL AS

ROELSTRAETE 17
5 Although it falls outside of the
immediate scope of the present essay to
theorize this particular distinction, suffice it
to point out the parodic essence of much
postmodern art as one of the distinguishing
features in question. In contrast, pastiche
and persiflage are rarely key ingredients of
the current art’s relationship to history;
indeed, much of its quasi-academic sérieux and
overall sincerity is perhaps better understood
as a critical rebuttal of the irreverence
with which history was customarily handled
in postmodernism’s delirious pop aesthetic—
a point to which we shall be returning shortly.

6 “The Way of the Shovel” was first used

to title an essay I wrote that was published
online, in e-flux journal, in spring 2009. That the
publication of said essay, the first of a number
of texts in which I have scrutinized the
relationship between contemporary art and the
historiographic and/or retrospective impulse,
touched a nerve quickly became clear to me
when it was reprinted twice in a mere matter
of months, first in Christine Macel, ed.,
Les promesses du passé: Une histoire discontinue
de l’art dans l’ex-Europe de l’Est [The promises of
the past: a discontinuous history of art in
former Eastern Europe] (Paris: Editions Centre
Georges Pompidou, 2010), and later also in
Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, and Brian Kuan
Wood, ed., e-flux journal reader 2009 (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2010). Other requests for
reprints followed, and it is probably the single
most quoted or referenced essay I have
ever written. The current essay is based in part
on that text (and, it should be added, its sequel
“After the Historiographic Turn: Current
Findings,” published online, in e-flux journal,
in summer 2009), an expanded version of which
also reappeared on a poster accompanying
an exhibition I curated at the Ursula Blickle
Stiftung in Kraichtal, Germany, in fall 2010.
This exhibition, titled simply The Archaeologists,
featured work by five artists represented in
The Way of the Shovel.

18 FIELD NOTES
It is this historioraphic impulse, a passion for historicizing and
a penchant for digging up the past—one that, crucially, is
clearly distinct from the postmodern enthusiasm for citation and
postmodernism’s cannibalistic appropriation of historical
imagery 5 —that is alluded to in naming both this phenomenon
and the present exhibition project The Way of the Shovel.6

Video (color and black-and-white, sound).

Production photo, Sandquarry, 2005.

Courtesy of the artist.

RAPHAËL GRISEY

6 minutes.

Art-historical quotation, the referencing or incorporating of

the work of one’s forerunners in one’s own work, is a practice
as old as art itself—although one could venture that this practice
has never been quite as big a business as it is now, in our present,
art-history-obsessed moment. But I very much doubt whether
the same can be said, with comparable conviction, about much of
contemporary art’s pervasive preoccupation with history, or
the historical, in general. In this respect, historical consciousness
in the art world appears to have reached a critical level, to
have become something qualitatively new—and it is this shift that
is the subject, among other things, of the current reflection.

ROELSTRAETE 19
7 “History is one way in which a society
recognizes and develops a mass of documenta-
tion with which it is inextricably linked.”
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage
Books, 2010), 7.
8 Who are the artists we are talking
about here? Most of those whose work is
included in the exhibition The Way of the Shovel
evidently belong to this category—one that
is by definition very porous, highly elastic,
and keenly aware of the resistance to categori-
zation implicit in all acts of art making.
But many more whose work, partly for reasons
of curatorial economy, is not included in
the exhibition likewise share the archival and/or
historiographic impulse to a greater or
lesser extent, such as Kasper Akhøj, Markus
Amm, Leonor Antunes, Sven Augustijnen,
Ursula Biemann, Ulla von Brandenburg,
Matthew Buckingham, Tobias Büche, Andreas
Bunte, Gerard Byrne, Duncan Campbell,
James Coleman, Jeremy Deller, Sam Durant,
Slawomir Elsner, Annika Eriksson, Cerith Wyn
Evans, Omer Fast, Luke Fowler, Simon Fujiwara,
Mario Garcia Torres, Felix Gmelin, Rodney
Graham, Tamar Guimarães, João Maria Gusmão
and Pedro Paiva, Hadley+Maxwell, Laura Horelli,
Pierre Huyghe, Luis Jacob, Jan Kempenaers,
Tim Lee, Zoe Leonard, David Maljkovic,
Lucy McKenzie, Steve McQueen, Jonathan
Monk, Rosalind Nashashibi, Henrik Olesen,
Paulina Olowska, Susan Philipsz, Mathias
Poledna, Florian Pumhösl, Pia Rönicke, Dierk
Schmidt, Paul Sietsema, Sean Snyder, Michael
Stevenson, Catherine Sullivan, Javier Téllez,
Luc Tuymans, Gitte Villesen, Danh Vo,
Jeff Wall, Emily Wardill, Christopher Williams,
and many more—clearly a predominantly,
if not overwhelmingly, European affair.
(To readapt a phrase taken from Friedrich
Nietzsche’s caustic pamphlet Vom Nutzen und
Nachteil der Historie für das Leben [On the uses
and disadvantages of history for life] from 1874:
our valuation of the historical may be only a
European prejudice. That the passion for
historical research in art should have such
strong institutional roots in the European art
scene in particular is hardly surprising of
course—it is the one continent whose towns
20
and cities are so often referred to as open-air
museums, and the one continent in which
the work of remembrance has been elevated to
the status of an infallible political sacrament.)
Whether among them we will find the leading
artists of their day is a very polemical claim
of course, but more than just a few of the
names listed have certainly dominated the
critical landscape of the art of the last two
decades—an environment defined not so much
by sales figures as it is by high levels of
visibility in such landmark global art events
as Documenta and the Venice Biennale,
the intellectual milieus in which (along with
major museums) art-historical doxa is most
regularly produced.
9 Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,”
October, no. 120 (Spring 2007): 142.
Godfrey primarily focuses on the work of one
artist-as-historian in particular, the aforemen-
tioned Matthew Buckingham. My preference for
naming the artist a historiographer rather
than a historian is related to the centrality of
writing (or, more broadly, narrating) in the art
practices under discussion here; one could also
think of these practices’ relationship to the
act of chronicling—the production of texts as
much as images, or the production of imagery
conceived as text. This leads us back to my
earlier remarks concerning the daily pressures
of academization and increased levels
of discursive literacy found among the artist
class in general.
10 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,”
October, no. 110 (Fall 2004): 3. In this essay,
Foster focuses on the work of Tacita Dean,
Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn, mention-
ing the names of Gerard Byrne, Stan Douglas,
Mark Dion, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon,
Renée Green, Pierre Huyghe, and Philippe
Parreno in passing. Foster continues: “In the
first instance archival artists seek to make
historical information, often lost or displaced,
physically present.” On occasion, this archival
impulse has indeed acquired a quasi-pathologi-
cal tinge, culminating in a veritable “archive
fever” as a result. Mal d’Archive: Une Impression
Freudienne [Archive fever] is the title, of course,
of a slim treatise by Jacques Derrida from
FIELD NOTES
 What has caused historical consciousness in the art world,
i.e., among artists, to reach such new heights of informed sophistica-
tion? One key factor has doubtless been the academization of art
education and the increasing demands for both art-historical
and broadly theoretical literacy made upon artists these days.
This trend is closely related in turn to the inexorable rise of the
information and/or knowledge economy, and art’s gradual annex-
ation by it—the economic background against which the recent
reconfiguration of art as a type of research, and of the artist as a
producer of knowledge or knowledge worker, must be in part under-
stood. Where once art was made primarily inside painters’
studios, photographers’ darkrooms, or sculptors’ workshops, it is
now increasingly being produced on laptops, in libraries, and
of course above all in archives—sites for the preservation and
dissemination of knowledge. As such, “the way of the shovel” and
the expanded historical awareness it represents are part of a larger
process of epistemological reorientation underway in society as a
whole; the historiographic impulse in art is, inevitably, a function of
the hypertrophy of “information”—of the deluge of so many “facts”
that invite cultural processing and taxonomic ordering.7 (What
are often being dug for in these various archives are indeed mere
facts, snippets of non-knowledge unearthed from the recent past.)
A foundational irony, then: The retrospective, historiographic
mode—a teeming, unruly methodological complex that includes
archival research, the document, the act of excavating and unearth-
ing (literally so in faux-archaeological digs), the historical account,
the memorial, reconstructions and reenactments, the testimony—
as a critical badge of true contemporaneity, a sign of firmly
standing in one’s time. And sure enough, this looking back isn’t just
popular with many artists—a mere matter of quantity. It is the
preferred method of many leading artists, too: those practitioners
and producers whose work we will in turn look back upon as
emblematic of its era—a matter of quality.8 In the words of Mark
Godfrey, the author of one of a handful of landmark texts to have
signaled the emergence and traced the contours of this phenome-
non: “Historical research and representation appear central to
contemporary art. There are an increasing number of artists whose
practice starts with research in archives, and others who deploy

ROELSTRAETE 21
 1995—in many ways a companion piece to his
groundbreaking Specters of Marx from 1993, the
book in which, partly as a response to
the hysterical triumphalism of the so-called
“End of History,” he coined the notion of
“hauntology” (a very useful term in describing
our current topic—as a conflation of the
apparent opposites of haunting and ontology, it
could be characterized as a science of vanishing
traces and of persistent absences, and much
of the art discussed in these pages occasionally
relies on such “hauntological” schemes).
More importantly, the title of Derrida’s book
was appropriated by Okwui Enwezor for an
exhibition organized at the International Center
of Photography in New York in 2008, the
subtitle of which was Uses of the Document in
Contemporary Art—an issue close to our
present concerns. The artists included in that
exhibition were Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean,
Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică,
Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Félix
González-Torres, Craigie Horsfield, Lamia
Joreige, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Ilán
Lieberman, Glenn Ligon, Robert Morris, Walid
Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh,
Lorna Simpson, Eyal Sivan, Vivan Sundaram,
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, and Andy
Warhol. Yet another variation on the compul-
sive condition of “archive fever” resounds in
the title of an essay by Brazilian psychoanalyst
and renegade cultural theorist Suely Rolnik,
published in 2011 as a preface to Documenta 13,
namely “Archive Mania.” Rolnik’s essay opens as
follows: “The globalized art world has been
overtaken in recent decades by a true compul-
sion to archive—a compulsion that includes
anything from academic research into pre-
existing archives or those still to be con-
structed, through exhibitions fully or partly
based on them, to frantic competition among
private collectors and museums in the
acquisition of these new objects of desire.”
Suely Rolnik, Archive Mania (Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz, 2011), 4. We shall be returning to
the related issue of institutional desire toward
the end of this essay.
22
11 “The Artist as Ethnographer” once again
leads us back to the work of Hal Foster; it is
the title of one of the essays compiled in The
Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996). “The Artist as Anthropologist” is the title
of an essay by Joseph Kosuth from 1975. “The
Artist as Archaeologist”—the prime example
of the artist as researcher for whom the
preferred method of compiling source material
is digging—and “The Artist as Archivist” are two
essays that, remarkably, remain to be written.
12 Here, we return to the Benjaminian
rhetoric of fragmentation discussed in note 1:
the greater the scatter, the smaller the
pieces, and the more enigmatic the shard, the
greater the artistic interest—clearly,
in concordance with the persisting spirit of
postmodern suspicion of totalities and
totalizations, wholeness continues to be
something of a taboo in progressive culture.
This is not to say, however, that the fragment’s
power of enchantment does not have a
hallowed history of its own; writing about a
fifteenth-century altarpiece from Colmar,
Joseph Leo Koerner has noted how “the
pleasures of the fragment, and of painterly
awkwardness bared by museological display,
belong to a yearning of objects of belief.”
See Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the
Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 61.
Indeed, one way in which the fragment appears
in the allegorical scheme of the archaeological
optic is as fetish or relic—very much things
that belong to the world of belief circum-
scribed in Koerner’s book. Now with regard to
the discussion of exoticism and related
orientalisms of the mind, the figure of the
archaeologist is of course especially suscepti-
ble to such romancing. Neil Asher Silberman
has referred to this complex as “the fable
of the Archaeologist as Hero”—one of the basic
narrative forms through which archaeological
finds are brought to the public, in varying
degrees of elaboration and detail. As an
adventure story with a moral, it legitimizes the
exploration of hidden places and sanctions
the removal of long-hidden antiquities.
As a genre of travel writing, it often emphasizes
the local population’s ignorance or hostility
to the archaeologist’s endeavor and places
FIELD NOTES
 what has been termed an archival form of research.” 9 Or, in the
words of another authoritative voice, that of Hal Foster: “An archival
impulse with a distinctive character of its own is pervasive—enough
so to be considered a tendency in its own right.” 10
Indeed, a steadily growing number of contemporary art
practices engage not just in storytelling—although this enthusiasm
for narration is in itself a telling enough symptom, oral culture
being the oldest form of memory retrieval—but more specifically in
history-telling. (More than a few exhibitions have exploited the
fortuitous phonetic proximity of “history” to “story,” not to mention
the deconstruction of history as his story. His-story, in fact, is
the title of an early film by Deimantas Narkevičius, one of the artists
featured in The Way of the Shovel.) The artists in question delve
into archives and historical collections of all stripes, proverbial
shovel in hand—this, in part, is where the magical formula of
“artistic research” comes into play, and the artist as anthropologist,
archaeologist, archivist, or ethnographer puts in his or her first
appearance11—and enthusiastically plumb the abysmal depths of
history’s most remote corners (the rule regularly being that, regard-
less of what is dug up, the more obscure it is, the better —which is
inevitably where a certain romantic fantasy of the exotic, the
fetishization of art-historical minutiae, and the cult of antiquarian
anecdote enter the picture12).

and-white, sound). Part 2: 16 mm film in

DEIMANTAS NARKEVIČIUS His-story, 1998.

screening. Part 1: 35 mm film (black-

30 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

35 mm film and 16 mm film, double

loop (black-and-white, silent).

ROELSTRAETE 23
 the scholar’s persistence in a heroic light. From
often humble beginnings, and often with a
childhood fascination for antiquity, the
archaeologist leaves familiar surroundings to
undergo exacting professional training under
a series of mentors and when armed, at last,
with the intellectual weapons of the profession,
sets off for unfamiliar or exotic realms, braving
opposition and danger to solve an ancient
mystery. The lives of such real-life archaeolo-
gists as Austen Henry Layard, Heinrich
Schliemann, Arthur Evans, and Howard Carter
have lent themselves to this style of retelling,
as have such fictional heroes as John Cullinane
and Indiana Jones.” See Neil Asher Silberman,
“The Politics and Poetics of Archaeological
Narrative,” in Nationalism, Politics, and the
Practice of Archaeology, ed. Philip L. Kohl and
Clare Fawcett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 251. Clearly,
the archaeologist-as-hero is the product of
the same culture and era that gave us the
heroic myth of the artist’s lone genius, and
in the golden era of archaeological expeditions
in particular, archaeology and artistry
frequently intertwined. Both the artist and
the archaeologist appear as quintessential
incarnations of the mythical figure of the
seeker, the man with a mission—here, it is worth
pointing out the contours of the long shadow
cast by Robert Smithson on subsequent
generations of artists (Smithson as a heroic
searcher is palpably present in The Way of
the Shovel; in two distinct artworks, one by
Tacita Dean and another by Zin Taylor, he
himself has effectively become the object of a
Smithson-like search). The resulting magic
of the “find” is a factor that we will be returning
to in due time.
13 Many other quasi-artisanal modes of
production owe their survival in the artistic
sphere to this emotional charge, but analog
film and photography have an especially
powerful hold over the cultural imagination
because of the peculiar physicality of their
media, the essential transience of which adds
extra drama to the dialectic of absence and
presence—what is filmed or photographed, is
always, by the time-based medium’s very
definition, already gone—in which they are
24
grounded. If analog film is a particularly popular
medium among the artists discussed in this
essay, it is precisely because of the poignancy
with which it reenacts the drama of capture and
erasure. Analogue, finally, is the well-chosen
title given by Zoe Leonard to a large-scale
photographic project in which the artist sought
to document and inventory “some of what we
are losing,” namely “a kind of urban texture that
is fast disappearing beneath the tide of
multinational homogeneity.” See the website
of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus,
Ohio, where Analogue was first shown in 2007:
http://wexarts.org/ex/?eventid=1948.
14 The ubiquity of this prefix in contem-
porary cultural discourse is obviously related,
once again, to the persistence of certain
postmodern tropes in the dominant culture. In
a cultural climate in which the ideas of newness
and originality are almost by their very
definition considered ideologically suspect or a
plain theoretical impossibility (“myths,” in
Rosalind Krauss’s celebrated words), the next
best thing theory can proclaim when scouring
the cultural landscape are “returns” rather than
novelties (let alone revolutions): a return of
the real, a return of the repressed, the “return
of the human figure in semiocapitalism,” the
return of religion, literally countless returns of
painting, etc. This obsession with remakes,
reruns, and returns itself reveals the depth of
our era’s addiction to history; Sven Lütticken,
who in 2005 curated the exhibition Life,
Once More: Forms of Reenactment in
Contemporary Art, has described this condition
in an essay titled “Planet of the Remakes”
(New Left Review, no. 25 [January/February
2004]: 103–19). Art’s role in it could in fact be
called “the return function”—the title of
an essay I dedicated to the work of Deimantas
Narkevičius, one of the artists participating
in the current exhibition, some years ago
(see Deimantas Narkevičius: The Unanimous
Life [Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofia, 2008]).
15 Here, too, the historiographic impulse
in art has undeniable Luddite overtones, as
the twinned curse of total transparency and
constant, immediate accessibility that some of
FIELD NOTES
 Crucially, the point is not necessarily, or not always, recovery of
some long-forgotten artifact; much of the work in this vein is in fact
often preoccupied with disappearance, with the trauma of irrevers-
ible loss, of dispersal and dissolution—hence the pervasive
atmospheric presence of a certain melancholy mellowness through-
out this field (the whirring of 16 mm film projectors and other
trademark sounds of obsolete technologies obviously help quite a bit
to establish such an ambience13). For what cannot be recovered
can at least be remembered—or, more ambitiously as well as more
ambiguously, reconstructed, reenacted, repeated. (The prefix
“re” is very much the operative term here.14) Indeed, if the past truly
is a foreign country, as British novelist L. P. Hartley famously
put it, it is certainly one many artists feel called upon to rediscover
from afar—the only terra incognita left to map, perhaps, in a
world of total transparency in which everything is always
immediately “known” (again, the emphasis here is very much on
whatever is incognito).15

with text. 136 x 99 in. (345.4 x 251.5 cm).

Edition of 5, aside from 2 artist’s proofs.
2005. 16 mm film (black-and-white, silent)
3 minutes, 24 seconds. 2 ink-jet posters
JOACHIM KOESTER Message from Andrée,

Collection of Baltimore Museum of Art.

ROELSTRAETE 25
the art under discussion here seeks to critically
distance itself from (for example, by way of
privileging outmoded, dysfunctional, or arcane
reproductive technologies) is a defining
technological feature of our contemporary
digicracy, our present-day “Cyberia.” Indeed,
these artists’ singular enthusiasm for the
forgotten, the opaque, the unknown, and the
untraceable—consider, for instance, the
cult following inspired by the Dutch conceptu-
alist Bas Jan Ader in recent years, an artist
now above all remembered for his mysterious
disappearance at sea in 1975—must partly
be viewed in relation to our culture’s profound
dependency on the Google/Wikipedia model
of knowing and learning, the shimmering
symbol of a factoid-saturated world in which
everything can always be known and can always
be known immediately (see note 20, on these
technologies’ cultic celebration of speed).
16 This analogy prompts the memory of
a comparable televisual metaphor: when
asked about the sociopolitical import of
hip-hop, Public Enemy’s charismatic front man
Chuck D famously called the genre “the CNN
of Black America,” in that it also provided
its marginalized constituency with informal,
unofficial history lessons and alternative views
of mainstream “news”—or any fact of world
history that may have fallen by the wayside in
the dominant culture’s relentless process
of ideological homogenization. Likewise, it has
sometimes been said, not wholly approvingly,
that many of the last decade’s most important
mega-exhibitions (biennials, Documentas,
Manifestas) at times resembled documentary
film or photography festivals where “other”
Discovery Channels, History Channels, and
National Geographic Channels come to
exchange their wares, making the art world on
occasion look like something akin to a BBC
World program for politically disenchanted
aesthetes and TV-hating intellectuals.
The notion of the global art world as an “other”
History Channel is one of the motivations for
the inclusion of Siebren Versteeg’s sculpture
History (2003) in the present exhibition,
where it operates as a marquee sign announcing
an “other” film program, screened inside
the exhibition space.
26
17 “Countermemory was for the most
part an oral memory transmitted between
close friends and family members and spread
to the wider society through unofficial
networks. The alternative vision of the past,
present, and future was rarely discussed
explicitly; rather it was communicated through
half words, jokes, and doublespeak. . . .
Often countermemory resided in finding
blemishes in the official narrative of history or
even in one’s own life. . . . Countermemory
was not merely a collection of alternative facts
and texts but also an alternative way of
reading by using ambiguity, irony, doublespeak
and private intonation that challenged the
official and bureaucratic discourse.” Svetlana
Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic
Books, 2001), 69–70. Boym’s emphasis on late
Soviet underground culture as a primarily oral
affair helps explain the central role of story-
telling in quotidian cultural practice as a feature
of much post-Soviet art production—a fact
easily grasped by any casual observer of the
work of, say, Ilya Kabakov. Quite a few artists
whose work has become strongly associated
with the archival impulse and/or historio-
graphic turn grew up in the Soviet Union or
Soviet-dominated Central and Eastern Europe,
and the tradition of countermemory appears
to have been a formative influence in the
development of their practice. The historio-
graphic turn in “postsocialist” European art
and the artistic response to the end of actually
existing socialism are the subject, among
other things, of Charity Scribner’s aptly titled
Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003). An exhaustive list of practi-
tioners from postsocialist Eastern Europe who
self-reflexively mine this particular field
would be hard to compile; however, alongside
some of the names mentioned earlier, it should
probably also include the likes of Sergey
Bratkov, Olga Chernysheva, Chto delat?, Aneta
Grzeszykowska, Marysia Lewandowska
and Neil Cummings, among others. Continuing
Western interest in these practices certainly
helps to underscore the point of art’s critical
role as a site for the ritual remembrance
of those political histories that mainstream
culture, for obvious reasons of economic
expediency, is so anxious to help us forget.
FIELD NOTES
In fact, already here we must qualify our grand sweeping statement
with regard to these artists’ interrogation of history as a monolithic
whole (or one unmapped continent), for more often than not
what they are interested in are, above all, those facts and fictions
of the past that have mostly been glossed over in the more official
channels of historiography, such as, indeed, the so-called History
Channel itself.16 The primary interest here is in an “other” history,
or a multitude of other histories, and in this sense the global
art world could be viewed either as an alternative History Channel
or as an alternative to established History Channels—not so much
a site for mere memory as the home-away-from-home of what
Svetlana Boym, in her discussion of samizdat intellectual life in
Soviet Russia, has called a countermemory.17

44 × 44 × 8 in. (111.8 × 11.8 × 20.3 cm).

Silicon, bronze, velvet, and wood.
Installation view, History, 2003.

Courtesy of the artist and

Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
SIEBREN VERSTEEG

ROELSTRAETE 27
 18 Looking at the Overlooked is the title of
a book by art historian Norman Bryson devoted
to a critical revaluation of still life. In it, Bryson
posits the distinction between “megalography”
and “rhopography” along the following lines:
“Megalography is the depiction of those things
in the world that are great—the legends of
the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of
history. Rhopography (from rhopos, trivial
objects, small wares, trifles) is the depiction of
those things that lack importance, the
unassuming material base of life that ‘impor-
tance’ constantly overlooks. The categories of
megalography and rhopography are intertwined.
The concept of importance can arise only
by separating itself from what it declares to be
trivial and insignificant; ‘importance’ generates
‘waste,’ what is sometimes called the preterite,
that which is excluded or passed over. Still
life takes on the exploration of what ‘impor-
tance’ tramples underfoot. It attends to
the world ignored by the human impulse to
create greatness.” Looking at the Overlooked:
Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London:
Reaktion Books, 2004), 61. Clearly, most of the
artists under consideration in the present
essay (only a few of whom practice still life in
the traditional sense, although stillness
certainly is a recurring quality in much of the
work discussed here) more or less tend toward
the rhopographic tradition in art.

NOR M A N BRYSON Looking at the Overlooked:

Four Essays on Still Life Painting.
(London: Reaktion Books, 1990).

28 FIELD NOTES
The artists active in this field preferably side with the castaways
and the downtrodden, the abandoned and the deserted, those
forgotten or otherwise left behind by mainstream history; they look
at the overlooked and conjure the voices of the stifled and the
unheard.18 They reveal traces long feared gone, revive technologies
long thought (or actually rendered) obsolete, bring the unjustly
killed back to (some form of) life, and generally seek to restore
justice to anyone or anything that has fallen prey to the blinding
forward march of History with a capital, Hegelian-inflected H. And
so much of the resultant work appears concerned with the business
of remembering or at least of turning back the tide of forgetfulness;
indeed, remembering and forgetting as such are often the true
subjects of these various artists’ meta-historical musings—consider
the example, for instance, of Anri Sala’s Intervista (1998),

International, Paris; Marian Goodman Gallery,

New York; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and
A NRI SA L A Video still, Intervista, 1998.

Courtesy of the artist; Ideal Audience

Video (color, sound). 26 minutes.

Johnen Galerie, Berlin.

in which the artist’s mother is shown looking at a soundless film

fragment of herself at sixteen speaking at the Albanian Communist
Party congress and trying to remember what she had said.
Here, finally, is where we encounter the critical impetus of much
of the work produced in this spirit—the primary basis of its claim
to a historical connection to vanguard traditions of resistance
and contestation, for what many of these works either want or try

ROELSTRAETE 29
 19 Things, relics, products, objects, items,
fetishes, evidence, commodities—the
recent vogue for such historiographic practices
is directly related, clearly, to the establisment
of the relatively young field of material
culture studies and the adjoining province of
“thing theory,” one of the leading proponents
of which, Bill Brown, is a contributor to
the present publication. Contemporary art’s
enthusiasm for the archaeological optic may be
partly rooted in a generalized resurgence
of critical interest in thingness and materiality;
see the following note for more on this subject.

BILL BROW N Things.

(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004).

30 FIELD NOTES
to remember is often that which mainstream historiography either
asks or compels us to forget. And the more forceful the demands
made upon us to forget or otherwise outsource our memory (and not
just to ever-expanding external memory drives), the greater art’s
passion for remembering, for digging up a past everyone
else seems in a suspicious rush to leave behind.

♠
Indeed, in answering the question as to why (or more importantly
still, why now) a growing number of artists unearth, look back,
and dust off, we must consider the current crisis of history, both as
an intellectual discipline and a fundament of contemporary
culture more generally. Such a diagnosis may at first strike the
informed reader as unnecessarily alarmist and overblown: indeed,
even the most cursory glance at the groaning bookshelves in
the history section of one’s local culture mall—or its counterpart on
Amazon.com—seems to suggest that the opposite is true. True,
there is plenty of historiography out there, but much of it is of a
myopic kind that seems to deepen the cultural pathology of forget-
ting and the scattering of attention rather than fight or at least,
like some of the art gathered in The Way of the Shovel, challenge it.
It is a type of writing that prefers to hone in on objects (again,
the smaller, the more mundane, and the less significant the better)
rather than people, the grand societal structures that harness
them or the events that befall them and/or help bring those struc-
tures into being. Virtually every little thing—see my remarks on
the “rhopographic” in note 18—has become the subject of its
own (always strictly cultural) history of late, from the pencil, the
porcelain toilet bowl, or the bowler hat to the zipper, the stiletto,
or the potato.19
It does not require too great an effort of the imagination to
grasp the dispiriting political implications of this obsession with detail,
novelty, and the quaint exoticism of the everyday (best summed up
by the dubious dictum that the “small is beautiful” or the equally
often misused quip that “God is in the details”). Indeed, it seems
sufficiently clear that the relative (commercial) success of this
brand of micro-historiography, with its programmatic suspicion of

ROELSTRAETE 31
20 The critique of contemporary society’s in the art gathered under the rubric of
infatuation with speed—one major side effect The Way of the Shovel is its continued allegiance
of which has been the erosion of memory— to this exact avant-garde tradition of critique
has been a key feature of a number of and/or criticality.
significant developments in art over the last
two decades, most notably in the slow-motion
aesthetic pioneered by film and video artists
such as David Claerbout, Douglas Gordon,
Sharon Lockhart, and Bill Viola, or filmmakers
such as Alexander Sokurov and Béla Tarr.
Art’s turning back of the two-faced clock of
planned obsolescence and accelerated oblivion,
however, is at work in a much broader range
of artistic practices, and it could be considered
the driving force behind the ongoing love affair
with the auratic notion of anachronism. It is
against the backdrop of this particular condi-
tion that the all-consuming passion for, say, the
Kodak Carousel slide projector, Super 8 mm
film, or the aesthetic of the Polaroid must
be read, as well as the renewed interest in
artisanal modes of production and traditions
of craftsmanship such as ceramics, lithography, TACITA DEA N FILM, 2011.
weaving, and woodcarving (the names of 35 mm film (silent).
11 minutes. Projected dimensions
too many artists to be enumerated here come
variable.Installation view,
to mind). This trend toward a reappraisal of The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean:
manual labor—obviously not always performed FILM, Tate Modern, 2011.
by the artist’s own hand—is also reflected
in art’s conception of archaeology as a science,
not just of material facts (see the previous
note) but of material facts dug up with one’s
own bare hands. This double turn toward
handiwork and materiality is clearly related to
a general ambience of digital fatigue that has
settled in certain key corners of progressive
culture in the last decade or so: the greater the
part of our lives spent online or in front
of computers, the greater the temptation to
escape this regime of relentless dematerializa-
tion, and here, too, art appears to offer
either an antidote or a way out of our pres-
ent-day Cyberia (see also note 15). In this sense,
one could argue that recent developments
in art have given the digital back its original
meaning—not a game of zeroes and ones but
that which relates to the fingers (digitus is
Latin for finger). Yet another instance, in short,
of art reverting to its historical promise of
criticality by opting for what may at first glance
resemble a regressive stance. Indeed, through-
out this project, one of our foremost interests

32 FIELD NOTES
all forms of grand historicization—itself a consequence of the cen-
trifugal dynamic of academic specialization that has taken hold of
intellectual life as a whole—is related both to today’s general state
of post-ideological fatigue and to the political evacuation (or plain
depoliticization) of academia, of which the “crisis of history” is but
one portentous symptom. That said, the crisis of history also
makes itself felt in the plainer terms of everyday life, where it is
directly related to the increasing tendency to outsource the labor of
remembrance to ever-growing memory banks (i.e., computers, online
encyclopedias, search engines, and the like; see note 15).
If “progress” in contemporary culture is predicated in part on accel-
erated oblivion, it is typically art’s role to go against the grain of
such dominant, homogenizing trends and slow down the spiral of
forgetfulness, and even to occasionally turn back the clock.20

PHIL COLLINS Video still, marxism today

(prologue), 2010. High-definition video.

Productions and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,

35 minutes. Courtesy of Shady Lane

New York.

A second part of our tentative answer to the question as to why

a growing number of artists look or turn back, unearth,
and dust off is more directly related to the straightforward matter
of chronology: what are some of the key dates in the development of
this so-called historiographic impulse in art? Where does it
start? Why now, or why then? The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,
the collapse of various communist regimes in Central and Eastern
Europe, and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, mark
the first clear milestones in this process, and afterthoughts of the

ROELSTRAETE 33
 21 Recall remarks made in note 10 on
the subject of Derridean “hauntology”—a term
we owe to Derrida’s critical response
to mid-nineties neoliberal doxa according to
which the end of the Cold War was nothing less
than the end of history itself. Indeed, for
Derrida, the end of the Cold War signaled a
return of (or to) history, and it is partly in the
context of this assertion that our current
chronology singles out the 1989–91 period as a
formative moment in the development of art’s
renewed and massively expanded historical
consciousness. When Derrida contends
that “haunting belongs to the structure of DEIM A NTAS NA R KEVIČIUS Film still,
every hegemony,” one can well imagine that The Head, 2007. 35 mm film transferred to
DVD (color and black-and-white, sound),
much of this haunting, in contemporary
12 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
society, is performed, first and foremost, by art:
that which reminds us, and thus keeps 22 Indeed, one could conjecture that
intact the promise of a possible return (it is in some of the art produced under said conditions
this context of a possible return that I propose enacts a half-ironic nostalgia for absurdity,
we read the opening quote by Nietzsche). and it is doubtlessly this nostalgia for the
In this sense, one could speculate that much absurd that instills a welcome dose of humor
of the art under discussion here only dwells in much post-Soviet art—the product of a
upon the past so as to better keep the memory culture in which the joke was very often the
of the future alive (note the paradoxical only dependable avenue for the formulation
formulation). As the late French maître penseur of critique as such.
puts it, “a specter is always a revenant,” and
“at bottom, the specter is the future, it is always
to come, it presents itself only as that which
could come or come back.” Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London:
Routledge, 1994), 11, 48. Marx himself, of
course, is one of the more prominent specters
to appear conjured in some of the work
gathered in The Way of the Shovel, most notably
that of Phil Collins and Deimantas Narkevičius.
(A tempestuous student of Marxism, Vladimir
Lenin is the unflinching protagonist in works
by Raphaël Grisey and Sophie Nys, while Stalin,
of all people, makes an incongruous appear-
ance in Lene Berg’s Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of
a Woman with Moustache [2008].)

34 FIELD NOTES
Cold War can be seen to haunt much of the work under discussion
in this publication.21 The post-Soviet condition is the primary
subject of work by a sizable number of artists who came of age in
Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s/early 2000s—in other
words, artists who belong to the last generation of direct witnesses
to the Eastern Bloc’s “other” way of life—and much of the historio-
graphic (“archaeological”) work produced under this particular
heading often concerns the commemoration of certain aspects of
daily life in that “other” world now irretrievably lost to memory.
(It is precisely in this mnemonic effort that an all too easily misread
measure of nostalgia can be seen creeping into the artistic culture
of memorial politics—a charge that sometimes seems hard to
dispel even in the work that appears preoccupied with highlighting
the cruel absurdities of this lost world’s political culture.22)

Video still, Lénine en pensant, 2005.

Distributed by Filmform, Stockhom.

Video (black-and-white, sound).
6 minutes, 36 seconds.
SOPHIE N YS

ROELSTRAETE 35
 23 It is worth pointing out an interesting and refine crucial parts of my argument. Hidden
paradox here: if nostalgia literally means in Remembrance is the Silent Memory of Our
“a painful longing for home” (nostos means Future featured the work of Lene Berg among
homecoming, algos pain), then a nostalgic others, and included the work of many of the
yearning for utopia—a place that never was— artists referred to in previous footnotes. The
is clearly an impossibility. But then again, title of Gregos’s essay was taken, in turn, from
it is precisely this illogic that constitutes the the the first line of L. P. Hartley’s novel, The
elusive essence of art’s own thought. Art’s Go-Between, as mentioned earlier in the text.
attachment to the phantasmagoria of utopia
is associated, of course, with its historical
claims to otherness proper—to belonging to,
or even being, that which stands on the other
side of, and just as often even opposite, the
logic of identificatory thinking; to siding with
“difference” and committing to making that
difference (see also the previous note on the
appeal of the absurd as a particular type of
illogic). The nostalgic obsession with modernist
form in particular (think of the work of
Leonor Antunes, Eva Berendes, Carol Bove,
Martin Boyce, Thea Djordjadze, Camilla Løew,
Michaela Meise, Eva Rothschild, Bojan Šarčević,
Katja Strunz, and many others of a certain
generation who operate in the revived field of
sculpture specifically), i.e., the yearning for
“modernity, our antiquity”—to name one of the FR EDRIC JA MESON
three leitmotifs associated with Documenta 12 Archaeologies of the Future:
The Desire Called Utopia and Other
(2007), the mega-exhibition that in many ways
Science Fictions.
signaled the culmination of this retro-modern- (New York: Verso, 2005).
ist fantasy—may have something to do with a
longing for the bygone age of dialectical
clarities, both of the ideological and the
aesthetic kind. (On the entanglement of utopia,
difference, and the dialectic, see Fredric
Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
[London: Verso, 2005], xii: “the fundamental
dynamic of any Utopian politics will . . . always
lie in the dialectic of Identity and Difference.”)

24 A comparable chronology is proposed

by critic and curator Katerina Gregos in her
essay ”Is the Past Another Country?” partly
written as an accompaniment to her exhibition
Hidden in Remembrance is the Silent Memory of
Our Future, organized in the Belgian city
of Mechelen in 2009. In this essay, Gregos took
issue with some of the polemical claims first
articulated in the original “Way of the Shovel”
essay published that same year, and I want to
acknowledge her for encouraging me to review

36 FIELD NOTES
 Artistic interest in this other world does not, of course, neces-
sarily equal interest in its politics or even in politics proper; the
real attraction, in my estimation, rather concerns its otherness pure
and simple—hence also its ambiguous relationship to the long
history, now seemingly wound down, of utopian thought and prac-
tice, the thought and practice of that which literally is not there or
is no longer there. Tellingly, the demise of utopia in the wake of the
collapse of socialism and the Left is a recurring subject of the more
melancholy work discussed in this essay; once again, it is what
lends the art in question a nostalgic charge.23 A second key date is
that of September 11, 2001—the one event that did more than any
other to signal the end, symbolically at least, of the age of neoliberal
complacency ushered in by the publication, in 1989, of Francis
Fukuyama’s landmark essay “The End of History?” (see note 10).24

Collection of Marilyn and Larry Fields.

Pigment ink and acrylic on canvas.
34 x 30 1⁄4 in. (86.4 x 76.8 cm).
Stream in the Grid, 2011.
GA BRIEL OROZCO

ROELSTRAETE 37
25 The term history painting is used as a
synecdoche here, but it is no coincidence
that arguably the two most influential painters
of their generation, Gerhard Richter and
Luc Tuymans, have each made art “about” 9/11
and/or its immediate fallout (a subject taken up,
needless to add, by countless other, lesser
gods). A painting by Gabriel Orozco at the
entrance to The Way of the Shovel likewise
points to the symbolic significance of that date
as a milestone in the development of our
subject. The most ambitious survey to date of
contemporary artists’ responses to the
epochal events of September 11, 2001, was
organized by Peter Eleey at MoMA PS1 in 2011;
this exhibition was simply titled September 11.
In 2012, an exhibition organized by Michael
Darling and Joanna Szupinska at the MCA,
titled Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against
Gravity, was similarly haunted by the specter
of the fallen towers, captured in the work
of Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jonathan Horowitz,
Robert Moskowitz, Thomas Ruff, and others.
civilizations”? A revitalized interest in the
politics of authenticity—see, among others,
earlier remarks regarding the revival of
craft and the renewed enthusiasm for tradi-
tional modes of production—is another
hallmark of this post-ironic cultural climate,
and it is clear that the artistic passion for
historical research feeds off of these senti-
ments, one more reason why the new
historicism is quite distinct from the trademark
postmodern treatment of history as a
board game or smorgasbord of iconographic
motifs and floating signifiers. Indeed, irony
is not exactly a dominant mode in much
of the work produced within the confines of
our research subject (see also note 5).

GER H A R D RICHTER
September, 2005.
Oil on canvas. 20 1⁄2 × 28 3⁄8 in.
(52 × 72 cm).

26 The Bush era has also been associated

with the end of irony, an intellectual
luxury connected to the relative carelessness
of the Clinton years. A spirit of renewed
earnestness and sincerity certainly pervaded
the upper echelons of the global cultural arena
in the opening decade of the twenty-first
century, i.e., following the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001—indeed, what else
could possibly explain the very belief in such
chimerical absolutes as a “clash of

38 FIELD NOTES
If anything, the two-pronged terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the
subsequent War on Terror and other variations upon the “clash of
civilizations” announced the dramatic return of History (with a
capital H), resulting, in part, in renewed calls upon art to (counter-)
document, represent, and witness—that is to say, resulting in
a revival (of sorts) of history painting.25 More important, however, is
the oppressive tenor of the political climate these events helped
inaugurate, and in many ways one could view the historiographic
impulse in art (i.e., the massive turning away from the present, back
to a more alluring or inspiring past) as the quintessential artistic
paradigm of the Bush II years, which constituted a present so bleak
and grim that no one could be faulted for choosing to
live in the past instead.26

Courtesy of Aurel Scheibler, Berlin.

23 1⁄2 x 28 1⁄2 in. (59.7 x 72.4 cm).
AIC C 224 4, 2013.
DAVID SCHUTTER

Oil on linen.

The historiographic turn in contemporary art, then, was also a

turning away from a present that art, as a whole, felt utterly power-
less to change—or, more prosaically, a present that art was utterly
uninterested in being a part of. Here, the aforementioned crisis
of history folded effectively into a global crisis of the countercultural
political imagination, turning both history and the archive into a
prime destination, a refuge even, for anyone still interested in

ROELSTRAETE 39
 27 Psychoanalysis’s self-image as an more trustworthy arbiter of quality than mere
archaeology of the mind—made manifest most taste or success. Perhaps many artists use the
emblematically in Sigmund Freud’s own tried-and-tested methods of history as science
passion for collecting Egyptian, Greek, and in the hope that some of the discipline’s
Roman antiquities—has been the subject of aristocratic sheen will rub off on their own
numerous books, conferences, essays, exhibi- products or projects or otherwise inscribe
tions, and the like. One of the key references them and their work in the annals of history.
in this sprawling terrain remains Donald Better to be a footnote in the ever-expanding
Kuspit’s text “A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy library of, say, Smithson commentary than
of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis,” first to evaporate in the thin air of this year’s ten-to-
published in a catalogue accompanying an watch.) See Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells,
exhibition of selected items from Freud’s ed., Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal
personal collection of antiquities. In it, Kuspit Collection of Antiquities (New York: State
speculates about Freud’s attraction to University of New York and London: Freud
archaeology, a discipline that was experiencing Museum, 1989), 133–34. The notion of
a golden age of sorts in the closing years of the psychoanalyst’s couch as an excavation
the nineteenth century (a moment in time even site, the treasure of which is trauma, is
more morbidly obsessed with the past than rendered present in the exhibition by the work
our own, as Friedrich Nietzsche noted in of Rebecca Keller, Jason Lazarus, and
his Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Shellburne Thurber.
Leben; see note 8), in the following terms:
“The analogy associated an unpopular, suspect
enterprise with a popular, respectable one,
for Schliemann’s discovery of Troy—his
demonstration of the reality of its heroes,
the facts that informed the legend—gave
archaeology a special celebrity, an honoured
social place: it was an adventure that produced
concrete results, a means of showing the
truthfulness of literary fantasy.” And
so it is that “Freud’s appeal to archaeology can
be regarded as an effort to ingratiate psycho-
analysis with society—to win its approval
and trust, to gain an influential place in it— JASON L AZA RUS
and even to have some of the heroic quality Above Sigmund Freud’s couch, 2008.
Archival pigment print. 40 × 50 in.
associated with archaeology rub off on
(101.6 × 127 cm).
psychoanalysis.” (Recall the allusion to the Courtesy of the artist and
heroic complex subtending archaeology’s Andrew Rafacz Gallery.
self-image in note 12. And while on the subject
of the magical contamination sought by
Freud, the salutary “rubbing off” referred to
by Kuspit: clearly, in their cultivation of the
retrospective and/or historiographic mode,
many contemporary art practices inevitably
also seek to secure the blessing of history—
in an art world that often seems wholly
dominated by the inflationary valuations of
the market and its corollary, the fashion
industry (“here today, gone tomorrow”), time,
literally rendered as the subject of the art in
question, is evidently presumed to be a much

40 FIELD NOTES
upholding art’s historical promesse de dissidence, in safeguarding
the creaking, corroded pedigree of criticality.

♠
Toward a conclusion—where should we turn (back) to but the
oldest of all origins, namely the earth itself? Indeed, one of
the most compelling ways in which this historiographic turn has
manifested itself in the art of the past decade has been through
an often quite literal amateur archaeology of the recent past,
or (a crucial qualification) a performance of archaeology, by way
of the scientific theater of excavations and extractions, through
digging and unearthing. Without a doubt, archaeology’s
own way of the shovel has long acted as a powerful metaphor
for a variety of endeavors that spring from the depths of the
human mind; perhaps the most famous example of this allegorical
impulse concerns psychoanalysis, in which the object of
archaeological scrutiny is the depth of the human mind.27

deep red velvet chair, 2000. Chromogenic print.

20 x 20 in. (50.8 x 50.8 cm). Edition of 25.
Buenos Aires: Analyst’s desk with

Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.

Courtesy of the artist and
SHELLBU R NE THU R BER

ROELSTRAETE 41
28 That the fragment, the shard, or the
trace is closer to the truth than the whole from
which it is derived was a contradiction sensed
most poignantly by Theodor Adorno, the
high priest of critical theory, when he posited
that “the whole is the false,” his celebrated
inversion of the well-known Hegelian assertion
that “the whole is the true.” (Hegel’s
epochal statement appears in the preface to
his Phenomenology of Spirit from 1807.) See
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen
aus dem beschädigten Leben [Minima moralia:
reflections from damaged life], trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978). Adorno’s
last great work, Ästhetische Theorie [Aesthetic
theory], published posthumously in 1970,
was entirely dedicated to theorizing these
various contradictions, the expression of which,
according to Adorno, found a privileged
platform in (modern) art. In the context of our
current reflection, one could recast this
Adornian-Hegelian bon mot in the following
terms: “the now is the false.”
29 The reference here is to Honoré de
Balzac’s well-known short story “Le Chef-
d’œuvre inconnu” [The unknown masterpiece]
from 1831, a classic parable of the tragic
contingency of artistic invention. The story’s
punctum, so to speak, is a precise rendering
of a woman’s lonely foot in what, from Balzac’s
description, sounds like the world’s first
abstract painting, symbolizing the protagonist’s
inability to translate the beauty of his
female model to the canvas’s two dimensions.
In many ways, this enigmatic foot acts like
a fragment or shard, the painting’s proverbial
Achilles’s heel, even, belonging to a whole that
the viewer can only unearth in his or her
imagination. Picasso, whom we already quoted
here, was sufficiently obsessed with
Balzac’s story to move into the house in the
Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris where the
creative action in “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”
was said to have taken place; it is here,
ironically, that Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica
was conceived and executed.
30 The connection between the discourse
of truth and the microscopic (or “rhopo-
graphic”; see note 18) scale on which this
42
discourse operates is the subject, among many
other things, of Michel Foucault’s aptly
titled The Archaeology of Knowledge, in which
archaeology’s forensic gaze is pitted against
the grandiose, ideologically tainted claims
of the history of ideas. It is precisely within this
framework of archaeology-as-critique that
much of the art discussed in these pages must
be viewed. “In archaeological analysis compari-
son is always limited and regional. Far from
wishing to reveal general forms, archaeology
tries to outline particular configurations.
Archaeological comparison does not have a
unifying, but a diversifying, effect.” Foucault,
157–60. The medical overtones of the
archaeological optic, incidentally, are alluded
to with startling dramatic effect in Ana Torfs’s
Anatomy from 2006, in which the archaeologi-
cal search for evidence (in this particular
instance in a court case meant to identify the
murderers of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg) is set inside a late eighteenth-
century anatomical theater in Berlin.
A NA TORFS
Anatomy (detail), 2006. Black-and-white
slide projections,
34 minutes. Video on two monitors,
90 minutes. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-
Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Erworben durch die Gesellschaft der
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2010.
FIELD NOTES
As is (or was) the case with psychoanalysis, the reasons for art’s
more recent attraction to the archaeological paradigm may
well be related to the discipline’s peculiar truth claims—the rhetori-
cal assumption that depth delivers (artistic, psychological) truth,
that the ground cannot lie. A great many artists refer to their
work as a labor of meticulous uncoverings, unearthing buried trea-
sures and revealing the ravages of time’s passage in the process;
works of art are construed as shards, fragments of an unknown,
irretrievable whole (once again, acting as the Benjaminian ciphers
of a revelatory truth), as traces preserved in sediments of fossilized
meaning no longer legible to the present. In a great many of
these cases, that which is dug up appears more “real” and therefore
also more “true” than all that has come after, accruing to form
the fallacious delusion that is the now.28 The current project’s titular
shovel, in other words, provides privileged access to historical
truth—one that is entangled in the messy business of matter,
of stuff, the ever returning “real.” Furthermore, if archaeology is
an art of finding rather than searching, it inevitably invokes Picasso’s
celebrated quip that the protean artist does not seek, he finds:
the archaeological find functions as a mirror image of the trouvaille
(“Eureka!”) that so often defines an artistic project, and the
entire archaeological enterprise as a particularly material-centered
form of (re)search can easily be reconfigured as an elaborate
allegory of the artist’s quest for the unknown, and ultimately
unknowable, masterpiece.29
Indeed, the scrupulous archaeological ethic of unending
patience and monastic devotion to material detail—seamlessly mir-
rored in its preferred optic, that of the clinical close-up 30 —appears
to approximate the obsessive “science” of a type of art making that
repeatedly requires plodding through hours, days, and weeks of
archival rubble-shoveling before something that may (or may not)
resemble a work of art emerges.

ROELSTRAETE 43
31 Michelangelo’s statement with regard
to the slave figures, that he was “liberating
them from imprisonment in the marble,”
also recalls the famous motto that guided his
near-contemporary Albrecht Dürer: “Truly
art is firmly fixed in Nature. He who can extract
her thence, he alone has her.” See Albrecht
Dürer, Vier Bücher von Menschlicher
Proportionen [Four books on human propor-
tions] (Nuremberg: Agnes Dürer, 1528). We
could easily replace Dürer’s idealized, quasi-
divine Nature in this last quote with the
Trinitarian figure of Culture, History, and
Time so as to paint a fairly accurate picture of
the thinking that goes on behind (or, better still,
underneath) much historiographic art produc-
tion today—a strand of art that is as much
concerned with the geological work of
extraction as it is with the archaeological work
of excavation.

MICHEL A NGELO BUONA R ROTI

Young Slave, c. 1516–30
Collection of dell’Accademia, Florence

44 FIELD NOTES
 (Speaking of rubble: Michelangelo’s sculptures of dying slaves wrest-
ing themselves free from the marble in which the artist “found”
them captive continue to provide what is perhaps the archaeological
paradigm’s most gripping image.31) The way of the shovel, in
other words, is an exemplarily attentive and caring one, the path
of well-tempered hand-eye coordination—a matter, once again,
of “looking at the overlooked” and lovingly restoring it to sight, if
possible, by the artist’s own hand.
Now that we find ourselves touching upon the all-important
topic of gazing, peering, screening, and ultimately showing,
it is worth noting that archaeology implies display, and the archaeo-
logical optic is without a doubt one of the founding principles,
if only aesthetically, of modern museum culture, which has in turn
become the object of investigation (and, tellingly, unadulterated
desire) of an ever-increasing number of artists: the museum, once
quite simply the mere final destination of that which was excavated
somewhere else, has itself become something resembling an
overcrowded excavation site, something that requires and invites
“mining” as much as the sand-covered gold troves of extinct
overseas civilizations. And whereas “mining the museum,” in the
early days of the “movement” called institutional critique—
I am borrowing the phrase from Fred Wilson’s well-known master
class in the genre in question, originally organized at the Maryland
Historical Society, Baltimore, in 1993—was primarily concerned
with digging in (and up) the dirt, today’s interrogation of museum
culture and of the history of museological spectacle appears
positively benign, enchanted. In the work of artists for whom the
museum has become a second home, sometimes even a second
studio space, here, too, a more straightforward critical mode has
made way for nostalgia. Not surprisingly, the artists involved
in this type of quarrying want the museum to retain the original
“museum look” of the institution’s golden years (code, in effect,
for a distinct type of technophobia). To the aforementioned infatua-
tion with antiquated and obsolete technologies of image (re)
production must now be added the infatuation with antiquated and
obsolete technologies of display, such as the Victorian glass
cabinets traditionally associated with natural history museums,
dioramas, catalogues, and journals modeled after the example of

ROELSTRAETE 45
32 Here, we find ourselves returned to
one of those foundational ironies touched upon
in my opening remarks: once upon a time,
dematerialization was the hallmark of real
vanguardism—Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking
chronicle of the emergence and enshrinement
of conceptual art, titled Six Years: The
Dematerialization of the Object from 1966 to 1972
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),
singled out the resistance to commodification,
the becoming-material of art, as the critical crux
of the conceptual art movement. Toward the
end of the period referred to in the title,
however, the global financial economy had
caught up with the New York avant-garde and
appropriated dematerialization for its own
purposes in that it had become one of the
guiding principles of deregulation (embodied, in
the political climate of the time, by Nixon’s
decision to disconnect the dollar from the gold
standard). Forty years on, dematerialization has
become one of the bedrocks of the global
economy, and art’s calls for the rematerialization
of its object stands out as the contemporary
counterpart to conceptual art’s originary
dissensus. On the connection between this
tactic of rematerialization and the emerging
field of thing theory and material culture
studies, see notes 19 and 20.

LUCY LIPPA R D Six Years:

The Dematerialization of the
Art Object from 1966 to 1972.
(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).

46 FIELD NOTES
a late nineteenth-century issue of National Geographic magazine and
the like. What is a museum, after all, but an elaborate machine built
for time traveling—to the future and back?
Finally, and most importantly perhaps, art and archaeology
also share a profound understanding of the primacy of the material
in all culture, the overwhelming importance of mere “matter”
and “stuff ” in any attempt to intuitively grasp and read the cluttered
fabric of the world, the cuneiform of things. Art and archaeology
alike remind us of both the irreducible materiality of the world
in the age of its purported dematerialization32 and the nonnegotiable
historicity of all life in the age of forgetting. It is in this tangle
of tropes—the “haptic” method of close-up viewing; the researcher’s
laborious, time-consuming scrutiny; and a base materialist take on
the facts of historical life—that art and archaeology meet to produce
one of the defining metaphors of our time: the way of the shovel.

ROELSTRAETE 47