Archivomania burst back into thematic life in the 1970s in the artistic program of Russian Soc-artists. Sensing that the Soviet epoch was on the wane, Soc-artists set about defamiliarizing their everyday surroundings. Based on the traditions of both the Russian avant-garde and Pop-Art, Ilya Kabakov obsessively deconstructs the Soviet everyday by simply making it visible. Kabakov’s installations bring all manner of things together and to life: social realist imagery, bureaucratic forms, slogans, posters, Soviet school primers, consumer products, and not least, the language of Soviet clichés. Kabakov’s projects are tragic archives of the “rubbish” that the Soviet epoch, embodied by a loyal representative — the anonymous Soviet citizen — left behind.
After the symbolic Dadaist gesture of Duchamp’s (in)famous Fountain and the epoch of the avant-garde, the Pop Art movement, marked by the iconic figure of Andy Warhol and his famous Campbell’s Soup cans, continued to breathe life into and develop the archival line. Contemporary art practice today is largely based on the idea and practice of the archive; moreover, the archivization of the work in progress is frequently transformed into the work of art itself.
One of the most important figures in contemporary art, Christian Boltanski, was back in the news last year when, in a bizarre artistic gesture, the sixty-five-year-old sold his life to the Australian millionaire and art collector, David Walsh. For eight years, commencing January 1, 2010, four cameras will film (that is, archive) the artist in his studio day and night, projecting this unusual one-man-big-brother-show in a cave in Tasmania. If Boltanski lives for the next eight years, he will receive the full asking price for his life. If he dies within the eight years, he gets nothing. In doing what he is doing, Christian Boltanski is putting into practice the human archivization on which his own art centers, an art exemplified by his ongoing collection of anonymous human heartbeats. The artist has finally put his head on the block of the archive and symbolically returned the whole endeavor of art to its beginnings — to a cave. (Weren’t cave drawings the first archival exhibits?!)
As a longtime archivist of anonymous human destinies, Boltanski has now put himself in the position of the archived object, an act completely in accord with our time, one in which we all, as if in a kind of pact with the devil, are simultaneously archivist and the archived.
Archive Fever
I first showed symptoms of archive fever in 1989, although at the time I didn’t pick them up. All of sudden I was overcome by a feeling that the world I knew was under threat from a terrible amnesiac tsunami. A rescue project to save symbols of Yugoslav everyday life and popular culture — an idea that was to become the Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology—was sketched in a document of not more than two or three pages and briefly kept alfoat by the enthusiasm of three people. The common Yugoslav home fell apart barely two years later. When a house is collapsing, normal people look to save life and limb, and rescuing their favorite books is the furthest thing from their minds. But actually, I’m not so sure about that. Warned to take only their most essential belongings, when the air raid signals blared people took the most bizarre things down into the shelters. During the first alarm in Zagreb an old lady admitted to me that during the Second World War she found herself in the basement with an alarm clock in her hand. Why an alarm clock, of all things, was so essential she wasn’t able to explain.
Going abroad was like finding oneself an air raid shelter — one only takes the essentials. Most of all I missed my books, my Zagreb home library. The truth is that new books stuck to me like magnets, as if trying to compensate for the loss. I don’t exclude the possibility that I made Amsterdam my home just so I could give a home to my books, to both the new and the old, which lay in boxes, lonely and neglected in a friend’s Zagreb basement. It was a number of years before I felt able to confront the boxes. During a visit to Zagreb I spent a few days going through them, sorting out the books that I’d one day take to Amsterdam with me. A couple of years later my Zagreb friend offered to pack the books I’d set aside in a combi-van and taxi them to Amsterdam. I planned a welcome reception for their arrival, cleaning up my Amsterdam cellar and having special shelves built. At first I’ll put all the boxes in the cellar I thought, and then slowly, one by one, I’ll take them up to the apartment. I gave up after unpacking the first few boxes. Holding them in my hands again, the books no longer meant what I thought they would mean to me. Their order had been lost forever; their arrangement in my old Zagreb library impossible to reconstruct; their significance lost along with the codes of memory, as if they were written in a dead, undecipherable language. Ten unopened boxes still languish in my Amsterdam cellar.
In the meantime the Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology has been published as a book and is apparently even in its third edition. A handful of enterprising people copied the online corpus I had begun collecting with my Amsterdam students and gave it a hardcover. These memory fragments of the former Yugoslav everyday assembled by a group of anonymous young contributors don’t set my heart aflutter. The authenticity of the impulse has petered out. Because things that I was sure would disappear forever (the Internet was not yet in widespread use), today, twenty years later, pop up like jack-in-the-boxes. Everything the ordinary Yugonostalgic heart could ever desire is on YouTube. There are Internet sites loaded with old Yugoslav films and TV series, sites with ethnic jokes from the Yugoslav-era, virtual collections of objects from the Yugoslav everyday, the packaging of pioneering Yugoslav products, exemplars of socialist design. There are new “Yugonostalgic” souvenirs: men’s socks with Tito on them, bottles of wine with Tito’s signature, cookbooks with Tito’s favorite recipes. Memory of the Yugoslav everyday, which just fifteen years ago was an act of political and cultural subversion, is today just a bit of fun; things once considered irreplaceable relics are today cheap souvenirs. An authentic need to reestablish a brutally broken cultural continuity has been transformed into political kitsch and the cultural program of a well-funded NGO.
Serious and historically relevant analyses of the Yugoslav system have yet to appear. Equally lacking are reliable analyses of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. The diligent historians are for the time being maintaining their silence. Tito’s monuments have been destroyed, but a cookbook with his favorite dishes is, it seems, a bestseller. The virtual and physically-existing souvenir industry is broadcasting false signals, offering symbolic and high-speed acknowledgement of an unacknowledged history.
I am from the generation born after the Second World War, experience of which I gleaned directly from my parents and Yugoslav post-war culture, one that in spite of its proclaimed future orientation was actually deeply immersed in the wartime past. I am a witness to the recent “Yugoslav” disintegration and war (the war officially ended fifteen years ago), the change of ideological and political systems, and the collapse of a cultural system. I am a witness to multiple strategies conceived to organize the erasure of the past: the burning of books; the deletion of biographies; the rewriting of school textbooks and official truths; the change of languages, flags, and ideological options; the excavation and burial of bones; the fabrication of history; and the renovation and renaming of an entire landscape. I am also a witness to the overnight disappearance of an untold number of people.
In my life experience I also know something of the rapid replacement of technology (and it seems that technology shapes our consciousness far more than ideology). With enviable elasticity I replaced the ink pot and quill with a typewriter, and a typewriter with a computer. I also possess intergalactic experience — from the Gutenberg galaxy I’ve moved, like or it not, into a digital one. Since achieving mass penetration (and this happened barely fifteen years ago!), the Internet has turned everything we knew on its head. And here an important question arises, one that I suspect has no quick answer. Would Marcel Proust have written In Search of Lost Time if he had had a Madeleine cookie on the computer screen in front of him?