Ernst van Alphen

Productive Archiving discusses a variety of problems archival organizations. It mainly focuses on the following three issues with archival organizations that are usually overlooked: first, the question of inclusion in or exclusion from the archive; second, the loss of individuality and specificity in the archive, the danger of homogenization; and third, that archiving may become a form of pigeonholing, boxing specific identities into a confined space. Avoiding the archive because of these problems is not an option, because archival organization is a basic symbolic mode on the basis of which we organize our lives, the past, the present and the future. What this book suggests is that it is best to explore constructive and creative solutions for these problems. Especially artistic archives seem to be able to develop these possible solutions, because they offer speculative, unexpected ways to order, select, and narrate specific information, and bring about new connections and archival organizations.… (plus d'informations)

Van Alphen, director of communication and education at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, takes three artists: Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando, and uses their works to describe the nature of artistic production after Auschwitz. He sees tragedies of narrative technique and historic imagination as cultural artifacts in dealing with human catastrophe and representation, mimesis, and reenactment as three significant methods of describing the indescribable. Salomon is carefully described as an artist of resistance, while French artist Boltanski is presented as an exemplar of archival art. The Dutch writer Armando uses the war as a metaphoric statement, as an index to reality. The last chapter is van Alphen's experience, both uncanny and sublime, of living in the house of a Holocaust victim.… (plus d'informations)