Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

David Houston Jones is Associate Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, UK

• Introduction 1. The Beckett Effect: the Intermedial Archive 2. The Archival Testimonial: Mirosław Bałka’s How It Is 3. The Relational Archive: Silvia Kolbowski and Eija-Liisa Ahtila 4. The Personal Archive: from Christian Boltanski to Lifelogging 5. The Archive and the Informational Sublime: Arnold Dreyblatt. Conclusion.

This is a deeply compelling book. David Jones takes us into the quick of archive fever, exploring a range of artworks which exist in or refer to real archives, and allow reflection on our compulsion to archive and the rethinking of memory that theories of the archive allow. In a turn to Pierre Nora this book moves particularly to consider artists' interest in remnants, in material traces and the culture of remains. The illuminating series of chapters, beautifully titled - 'Intermedial', 'Testimonial', 'Relational', 'Personal', 'Sublime' - offers a taxonomy of archivalist practice. The interpretations yielded, of major artworks by Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Mirosław Bałka, Atom Egoyan and others, are gripping, deft, melancholy and disarming. In fine theoretical readings and measured discussions of the individual projects David Jones shows here, so brilliantly, how archive art engages major current questions of human memory and ethics.- Emma Wilson, Cambridge University, UK