The Spectre of Documentation
Published on March 13th, 2024
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Documentation has become ubiquitous, moving from a way to reflect a past life of an artwork or event, as a copy, a repetition or a derivative, into a practice capable of changing the status of the artwork. In this sense documentation not only future-proofs but also relentlessly (re-)invents and (re-)becomes the artwork.
11 January 2023 / 13 March 2024
Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna
The documentation of a work is able to position itself almost autonomously alongside the work itself, sometimes as the only source, historical artifact, granulate, independent work of art and can take on diverse, variable forms such as photography, interview transcript, installation manual, index card, software code, etc.. Documentation can only formulate the claim of an objective truth, but can never completely do justice to it. Supposedly obvious and elementary in the preservation of cultural assets, “recording” thus opens up new, variable perspectives. It is precisely within this multi-perspective framework that we consider and discuss the inter-dependencies of documentation, truth, significance, copy, author and art. The authors (artists, recipients, technicians, archivists) determine the focus and relevance.
short blurb:
Documentation has become ubiquitous, moving from a way to reflect a past life of an artwork or event, as a copy, a repetition or a derivative, into a practice capable of changing the status of the artwork. In this sense documentation not only future-proofs but also relentlessly (re-)invents and (re-)becomes the artwork.
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