Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers. |
into the art historical archive—as early as 1946, Clement Greenberg declared Evans' work to be « modern art photography at its best.» [28] By Levine's decoupling of the image from the author's name—or better: her shifting the author's name into the title of the image—sorting according to author name, which is constitutive for the museal formatting of the archive (compared with, for instance, ordering according to so-called epochs), is destabilized. For a brief moment the art historical positioning in the archive sedimented into the image is rescinded. Yet in the meantime, the archive of art history has neutralized this deviation: the image now summons up not only the name ‹Walker Evans,› but also ‹Sherrie Levine.› The artistic desedimentations of the archive perhaps now discover their limit at the archive of art. The shifting of this archive will then more likely be triggered off by radical techno-discursive changes— such as the transition to so-called post-photography, which I will explain below.
The archive and its inscribed order of rule become even more problematic when it does not deal with
things, but with people. In the course of colonialism, the nineteenth century collected an enormous image reservoir of portraits of those who did not fall under the heading of the white, Western, civil subject. [29] However, not only members of foreign ethnic groups were subject to archival classification, but also social others. The bureaucracies of surveillance and control discovered the potentials of photographic recording early on. The idea of the passport photo emerged soon after the invention of photography; portraits were taken of imprisoned persons and collected in so-called criminal albums for the identification of repeat offenders. [30] In his fundamental and influential essay «The Body and the Archive,» Allan Sekula, theorist and conceptual photographic artist, supports the thesis that the institution of the photographic archive as such found one of its earliest forms in the close connection between professionalized police work and the social sciences, which were in the process of emerging. [31] However, the sheer volume of the images stood in the way of the archival promise associated with the systematic photographic recording of persons deemed criminal, namely to be able to