PUBLIC LECTURE:

GORGING ON IMAGES: THE ARCHIVE IN 20^TH CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY By SVEN SPIEKER, author of the forthcoming book The Big Archive: The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of the Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008)

The lecture will take place on Monday, February ll, 2008 at 7:00 pm in Room 300, Silver Center, New York University, Department of Art History, 100 Washington Square East (entrance on Waverly Place). It is organized by Professors Ulrich Baer and Shelley Rice, in association with the Humanities Team-Teaching Initiative, as part of the seminar Archive, Image, Text: The Myth and Reality of What Archives Hold, sponsored by the Departments of Photography, German, Art History, English and Comparative Literature.

The archive in contemporary photography—from Gerhard Richter to Susan Hiller and Tacita Dean—oscillates between the pathos of total inclusiveness and the specter of radical dispersion and discontinuity. In this lecture Spieker will trace this double orientation: first to the 19^th-century (photo) archive with its rhetoric of preservation and identification, and second to what has been referred to as the early 20^th century’s turn towards archival forms of organization as a result of the waning of the aesthetic of shock during the 1920s (photomontage). Using two seminal essays in the history of photography— Alexander Rodchenko’s ““Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot” (1928) and Sigfried Kracauer’s “Photography” (1927)—he will demonstrate that this archival turn, whose impact on contemporary photographic practice is considerable, was not without its own internal fissures and contradictions. Whereas Rodchenko appeals to a monumental, totalizing archive of photographs with a transcendent referent (the founder of the Soviet Union, Lenin), Kracauer, who views photography as a form of counter-memory, proposes an archive of radical dispersion. By way of a conclusion he will highlight the different ways in which the fractured “archival turn” of the early 20^th century lingers in contemporary photographic practice.

Sven Spieker was born in Bonn, Germany, and has degrees (in Slavic and Eastern European Studies) from the University of London and Oxford. He is currently teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies and the Department of History of Art and Architecture. His research interests include Russian and East-Central European literatures, contemporary art, the theory and practice of the historical avant-garde (especially in Russia and East-Central Europe), and the interplay of media, art, and philosophy. He is the author of Figures of Memory and Forgetting in Andrej Bitov's Prose: Postmodernism and the Quest for History (1996) and G0G0L: Exploring Absence: Negativity in 19th-Century Russian Literature (1999). Spieker is also the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal for contemporary art and aesthetic theory in East-Central Europe.