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: The 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.” In the words of Peter Osborne, “Benjamin’s prose breeds commentary like vaccine in a lab,” Radical Philosophy, no. 88 (1998), →.
Mark Godfrey’s much-discussed essay “The Artist as Historian,” published in October 120 (2007), has become a local landmark of sorts. In it Godfrey states that “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 what has been termed an archival form of research” (142–143). He then goes on to focus on the work of one artist-as-historian in particular, Matthew Buckingham, forgoing the opportunity to offer the reader an explanation, no matter how speculative or tentative, as to why historical research and representation in general have become so central to contemporary art (again). Furthermore, as the work of a historian does not necessarily coincide with that of a historiographer, the job description that I would suggest is more accurate with regard to contemporary art practice: the act of “writing” (or, more broadly, narrating) adds a key distinction here.
This analogy prompts the memory of a similar televisual metaphor: when asked about the socio-political import of hip-hop, Public Enemy’s charismatic frontman Chuck D famously called the genre “the CNN of Black America,” in that it also provides its (supposedly 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 a process of ideological homogenization. Likewise, it has sometimes been said that many of the last decade’s most important mega-exhibitions (biennials, documentas, Manifestas—not art fairs) at times came to resemble documentary film festivals where the likes of Discovery Channel, the History Channel and the National Geographic Channel come to exchange their wares, making the art world look like something akin to a BBC World program of politically disenchanted aesthetes and TV-hating intellectuals.
The historiographic turn in “post-socialist” European art specifically is the subject, among other things, of Charity Scribner’s aptly titled Requiem for Communism, published by MIT in 2003. An exhaustive list of practitioners from post-socialist “Eastern” Europe who self-reflexively mine this particular field would be hard to compile; however, such a list would definitely have to include the names of Chto Delat, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Marysa Lewandowska & Chris Cummings, Goshka Macuga, David Maljković, Deimantas Narkevicius, Paulina Olowska, and to a certain extent also Anri Sala and Nedko Solakov. Artists from the “West” who have consistently devoted their attention to the intricate meshwork of some of these histories include Gerard Byrne, Tacita Dean, Laura Horelli, Joachim Koester, Susanne Kriemann, Sophie Nys, Hito Steyerl, Luc Tuymans, and many more.
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.” We could easily replace Dürer’s idealized, quasi-divine Nature in this last quote with Culture, History, or Time in order to paint a fairly accurate picture of the thinking that goes on behind (or, better still, underneath) much historiographic-art production today: this strand of contemporary art is as much a business of extraction as it is one of excavation.
A great many artists have been “mining the museum” in recent years, and their interest in museological displays and genealogical frameworks certainly belongs to the broader thrust of the historiographic turn in contemporary art: Fred Wilson coined the geological formula, Louise Lawler and Mark Dion did some exploratory groundwork (quite literally, in the latter’s case), while Carol Bove, Goshka Macuga, Josephine Meckseper, Jean-Luc Moulène and Christopher Williams rank among the micro-genre’s better-known contemporary practitioners. Many of the artists working in this field of a critical museology have a complicated relationship with the habitus of institutional critique, to which it is obviously indebted; they certainly “long for” the museum much more strongly and directly than the first generation of institutional critics would ever allow themselves to. In the speleological imaginary of “mining the museum”—note the sexual undertones of this metaphor—the museum has become an object of desire as much as an object of critique, a cavity as much as an excavation site.