Authorship and Authority Part 2, Archives And Documents

Spring 2009 Bergen Academy of Art

Who speaks, reveals, frames, records and organizes; and, finally, who remembers and defines? These are essential questions of authorship and authority which are of concern to both makers and viewers. Comprised of a series of public lectures and a private reading seminar running the duration of the semester, this thematic project explores and moreover problematizes, the implicit, explicit or neutral position of the author/maker.

Part 2 Archives and Documents will focus on the nature and meaning of the archive. How does a society or culture create, store, and disseminate information, and how does this define the paradigms and discursive fields possible within a culture. This series of lectures, readings and screenings will examine the archive as conceptual and physical space and explore how history, memory, and meaning is created and perpetuated within the archival and its documentational, structures, manifestations, and determinates.

The lectures and readings will weave into each other and pull from a variety of sources ranging from theorists such as Roland Barthes, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida. Includes artists and practitioners Thomas Hirschhorn, Ant Farm, Jorgen Leth. Renee Green, Tacita Dean, etc.

*Note: While the lectures are open to everyone, the reading seminars are limited to a maximum of 15 people. These sessions build upon each other and require a consistent group of people to explore specific texts/works in depth. Participants in Thursday Seminars will be expected to be prepared for for discussion. Texts will be made available for participants in advance.

Week 9

Lecture : Tues. Feb. 24th 10:00-12:00
Manifestations and Neutralities of the Archive: From Hal Foster to Thomas Hirshhorn on the impulse and manifestations of the Archive.

How has the impulse to the archive informed the art-production and institutional responses to this production in contemporary art, Looking closely at Hal Foster's concept of the "Archival impulse" this lecture will explore the concept of the archive and how this has informed contemporary thought and art within the last five years.

Seminar: Thurs. Feb. 26th 13:00-15:00
Is there a inclination and predisposition for the organizational and the archive? And how does this construct, elaborate, and confine meanings? This Seminar will explore this impulse to the supra-level of organization through the reading of Hal Fosters work on the archive and how it has informed contemporary art and the curatorial. Reading will be Fosters "An Archival Impulse" October 2004, and his "Archives of Modern Art" October 2002.

Week 11

Lecture: Tues. March 10th 10:00-12:00

Witnesses, Liars And the Fabrication of the Document,

In Archive Fever, Derrida noted that the archive takes place at the structural breakdown of memory. Where recollection collapses we are compelled to document, catalogue, re-enact and repeat what we have witnessed or experienced. Referencing texts by Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, this lecture will look at the fundamental desire to archive and explore different artists' approaches to the document. Looking at works by Jorgen Leth, Ant Farm and others, this lecture will examine not only how artists have worked with the document, but how they have stretched and tested the borders of the genre by moulding it into a space for fiction, play, re-invention and pure fabrication.

Seminar: Thurs. March 12th 13:00-15:00

For this seminar we will be reading two seminal reflections on the archive. First we will look at a selection from Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Archive and Testimony and discussing the limits of bearing witness. Second, we will be reading a selection from Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever and thinking though the drive to archive from a psychoanalytical perspective. The latter half of the seminar will be dedicated to screening works referenced in Tuesday's lecture. They are filmic projects which take a more lateral and inventive approach to the document.

Week 12th

Lecture: Tues. March 17th 10:00-12:00
The Order of Determinations: The Layers of Meaning in the Construction of Language and the Archive.

The interconnections within a language (both words and grammars) are also determined in the relations, proximities, and structuring of meaning fulfilled in the supra structure of the archive and the histories and implications the archive entails. This lecture will explore Foucault's explorations of meaning construction and the containment of paradigms by the mechanisms of the Archive and how this relates to the history and identities of the cultural and the subjective individual who negotiates the social.

Seminar: Thurs. March 19th 13:00-15:00
How does the relation of works and meanings, defined within the archival, play out and determine the surface of individual identity and the circulations of power in a society. Additionally how does the accumulation and elaboration of memories and histories within the archive define and detail the individual and the social? This reading seminar will explore the concept of Archive in the Writings of Foucault and how this concept and its intersections in the power of the social and the creation of the individual subject has come to have such a strong influence on early 21st Century art and curatorial concerns. Reading will include Foucault's "The Order of Things" (Selections), and "History of Sexuality" (Selections).

Week 4; Tues. Feb. 20th 10:00-12:00

The Apparatus of Ideology and Implementation of the Self: Three Marxian theories.

There are two concurrent but intertwined directions which Marxian theory elaborates. On the one hand there is his theory of history which is commonly referred to as Historical Materialism. Secondly there is his theory of the Social which is referred to as Dialectical Materialism. These aspects of Marxian thought have had a vast and significant impact on not only political theory, in general, but on the social theory of art and the development and current of conceptual and political art of the contemporary age. This Lecture will explore the basic theory of Marxism and how it has metamorphosed in relation to the Theory of the Sign, Semiotics, and Structuralism. Thinkers and essays looked at will be:

Karl Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.", "Capital":

Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Jean Baudrillard, "For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign"

To Be Screened:

Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Richard Serra: Television Delivers People

And others.