Book Club 6: The Big Archive by Sven Spieker

Words by Jennie Freeburg
Illustration by Paul Windle

Something is missing in The Big Archive. “To the bureaucrat” the jacket copy reads, “archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the ‘living’ past.” Author Sven Spieker explores bureaucracy, history, and art through a lens of “archive”—archive as all of these things. One thing “the big archive” is not, however, is an archives, as Michelle Caswell succinctly put it in a recent article addressing the problem with scholarship such as this, which uses “archive” as a metaphor without acknowledging or engaging with archivists or archival studies.

In short, what’s missing in The Big Archive is archivists.

For Spieker, archivists do not create archives, the nineteenth century creates archives, bureaucracy creates archives, the psyche creates an archive for Freud to mine, as abstractions upon abstractions pile up: the psyche as literature as archive as anthropological site. Spieker’s oversight (or, to put it another way, erasure) is a shame for both archivists and scholars who would turn to this book, as often enough Spieker’s posited theoretical frameworks could and should be grounded in archival practice, but aren’t. Instead, the only way archival theory is acknowledged is through a bizarre and ahistorical emphasis on the principle of provenance (PP as it comes to be abbreviated, so oft is it invoked) as a singular and static doctrine of “the archive.” He cements provenance to a place and time, 1881 Berlin, but also continues to use an 1881 archival concept as a straw man for artists to interrogate and disrupt from Duchamp through Andrea Fraser, because archivists, much like Spieker’s conception of typists and telegraph operators “[do] not search for the meaning of written symbols, but listens to the pattern inherent in a series of meaningless signals structured by gaps.” Thankfully then, there is Duchamp and the surrealists to mimic the work of feminine labor in order to reveal its meaninglessness.

It is perhaps fitting and unsurprising that a book on archives without archivists is centered around a similarly disembodied artistic movement. Nothing summed up these parallels for me so much as a passage on the practice of automatic writing “developed” by Breton and Soupault and its links to spiritualists and secretaries (“who types away as fast as she can with her thoughts elsewhere, oblivious to the meaning of the words”) punctuated by a photograph of a woman at a typewriter surrounded by men, captioned “taking automatic dictation from Desnos at the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes.”

In this and other instances, The Big Archive contains its own critique. A discussion of Walid Raad’s work, The Atlas Group Archive, is particularly disappointing for how much his work does engage with contemporary archival practice and theory, but rather than exploring those connections, Spieker collapses Raad’s specific archival engagement into Duchamp’s abstracted one. The difference between Raad’s Notebook Volume 38 containing “cut-out photographs of cars which correspond to the models, makes, and colors of cars used in specific explosions in Beirut during the civil wars” and Duchamp’s mass-produced Fountain which now exists as 17 replicas of the lost original, is, as Spieker has it, “a play of signifiers without a recognizable signified.” Spieker writes on how Raad’s work addresses the trauma of removing an object from its context. The Big Archive would do well to return “the archive” to the context of archives.

The LAAC Book Club brings together LA-area archivists and friends to read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives.