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The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive´s content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the "living" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways - from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp´s "anemic archive" of readymades and El Lissitzky´s Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive - as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art - and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.

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"The Big Archive is a wonderfully erudite study of the avant-garde´s anti-archival strategies that aim to subvert the structure and function of its nineteenth-century "hybrid institution." Spieker´s arguments are often beguilingly clever, at times devilishly so." - Craig Leonard, Prefix Photo

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Sven Spieker teaches in the Comparative Literature Program and the Department of Germanic and SlavicStudies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a founding editor of ARTMargins, and ArtMargins Online.

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