Archives of Modern Art

Abstract

OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 81–95. © 2002 Hal Foster. The “archives” of my title are not the dusty rooms filled with dry documents of academic lore. I mean the term as Foucault used it, to stand for “the system that governs the appearance of statements,” that structures the particular expressions of a particular period.1 In this sense an archive is neither affirmative nor critical per se; it simply supplies the terms of discourse. But this “simply” is no small thing, for if an archive structures the terms of discourse, it also limits what can and cannot be articulated at a given time and place. Here I want to sketch a few significant shifts in the dominant archival relations that obtained among modern art practice, art museum, and art history in the West circa 1850 to 1950. More specifically, I want to consider the “memory-structure” that these three agencies coproduced over this period, and to describe a “dialectics of seeing” within this memory-structure (I trust these terms will become clearer as I go along).2 I will focus on three particular moments—perhaps more heuristic than historical—and I will concentrate each moment on a particular pairing of figures and texts. For better or worse, all my figures are men and all my texts are canonical, but the men do not look so triumphant in retrospect, and today the canon appears less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through. This condition (which need not be melancholic) distinguishes the present of art and criticism, politically and strategically, from the recent past (the past of the postmodernist critique of modernism), and part of my purpose is to point to this difference.