Review: The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy by Sven Spieker

Abstract

The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy by Sven Spieker. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 219 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-19670-6. Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy is less about archival repositories than it is an art history book about archives as an inspiration for a motley crew of twentieth-century artists and commentators. The latter are strange bedfellows, but united by a particular interest in the very notion of the archive and its assumptions about the ability to organize the past into linear coherency for the present and future. Spieker argues that, contrary to the belief that archives capture history in a well-ordered manner, they are rather sites of chaos and contingency, with the presupposition of the rationality of linear history haunted by the specter of entropy and disorder. The archivist’s worst nightmare: the accumulation of bureaucratic detritus that resists archival ordering, with chaos ensuing. Despite the archivist’s most earnest efforts to sort and file the records, the sheer volume of records, by default and left unto themselves, will just become piles of paper. The archivist’s strategy: the Sanctity of Original Order and the Principle of Provenance (PP), keystone concepts in archival theory that can be traced to the Privy State Archive in Berlin. Spieker takes these concepts as his point of entry for the simple reason that they exemplify the logic of archives: preservation of the order of records and their chains of custody. The Big Archive works well as a companion piece to The Archive, a collection of pivotal essays that draw the relationship between the concept of the archive and commentary provided by modern art (Merewether, 2006). 1 Those familiar with the history of archival theory will recognize the names that Spieker references: American archivist T. R. Schellenberg and the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin. Departing from this starting point, Spieker then invites some unlikely characters into the discussion. The first is Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Freud and the archive have met before, in Jacques Derrida’s (1996) reading of Freud and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Spieker asserts that while Freud invoked archaeology as a metaphor for the task of the psychoanalyst, the metaphor of the archive is more apt. He shows that the administrative archives and the “psychic archive”—the latter comprised of inscriptions on the conscious and the unconscious—converge on two fronts. First is the materiality of the trace: memory relies on the “breaking of a pathway” that leaves a trace in the unconscious, similar to archival records existing as traces of historical past. Second, both are spaces of consignment, whereby the storage location of traces is topologically distinct from other spaces (i.e., the archival repository is distinct from other spaces, and the unconscious is a space distinct from the space of the conscious).