Art + Archive: Rethinking Art's Histories

'Archive' has been one of the most persistent buzzwords in the international artworld since the turn of the twenty-first century. Art + Archive examines the meaning and function of the notion of the archive in art writing and practices from 1995 to 2015, making a valuable contribution to an under-analysed topic in the field.

The first part of the book outlines key texts about archive art, the interdisciplinary theories these build on and the specific meaning the archive comes to have when brought into the artworld. It shows how writing about archives by Michel Foucault and others lines up with the institutional theory of art established in the 1960s: both highlight the importance of institutional structures and point to a complex set of relations between history and critique. The second part of the book examines how the archive is used to make sense of different conditions and concerns relating to materiality, research, critique, curating and temporality.

Instead of approaching the archive as an already defined conceptual tool for analysing art, Art + Archive rethinks the so-called archival turn, showing how it is deeply embedded in issues relating to social, technological, philosophical and historical contexts.