Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Horwatt, Eli

Titel

On The Clock and Christian Marclay's Instrumental Logic of Appropriation

Ist Teil von

• Framework, 2013-09, Vol.54 (2), p.208

Ort / Verlag

Detroit: Wayne State University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• On May 16th, 1972, Marcel Broodthaers completed his four-year "museum fiction" known as the Department of Eagles, with its Figures Section at the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf.8 Comprising paintings, photographic reproductions of art works, antiquities, ornaments, furniture, national symbols, patches, flags, natural and scientific objects, as well as slide-projected images from comic strips, advertising, logos, currency, book covers, and other mass media, it was hung parlor-style, in vitrines, and using other formal exhibition props. .13 In the wake of systems analysis by think tanks like the RAND Corporation, used to determine the fate of thousands in South East Asia, or in the emerging use of psychology in public relations and marketing firms, it is clear why the 1960s set the stage for archival projects where data, artifacts, and cultural detritus are assembled in architectures that mock official culture and the administrated, top-down collection. According to Wees, these images are "presented as straight fact: this is what the explosion looked like, these are signifiers of an event solidly grounded in reality and contextualized by other real, historical events such as the beginning of the Cold War. Implicit in Marclay's iconographic serial works is the assumption that through a mode of iconographic classification and the interplay of difference and repetition, a curator or collagist might collate knowledge and facilitate hermeneutic possibilities.34 Rembert Hüser has perceptively observed a connection nection between encyclopedic tendencies in found footage works and the image comparisons produced in art-historical slideshow lectures.35 The genesis of these lectures and the dominant methodologies for image comparison emerge in the art historian Aby Warburg's scholarly circle, when his apprentice Fritz Saxl devised dual image projection in the early 1900s.36 Farocki's interest in the evolution of images and the gestural iterations of workers situates him in intellectual dialogue with Warburg, who rejected the dominant art historical models (in which works are examined in relation to periods, styles or formal techniques), through examinations of the shifting meanings of an image's past and its living significations.37 This provisional but altogether novel approach to the study of culture is outlined by Giorgio Agamben: For Warburg, the significance of images . . . lay in the fact that, being strictly speaking, neither conscious nor unconscious, they constituted the ideal terrain for a unitary approach to culture, one capable of overcoming the opposition between history, as the study of "conscious expressions," and anthropology, as the study of "unconscious conditions," which Lévi-Strauss identified twenty years later as the central problem in the relations between these two disciplines.38 At the root of this project was the horizon of an alarming reality wherein the gestures of the past would become the subject of a "memory crisis.