“[…] Vilém Flusser […] His second book A História do Diabo (History of the Devil), published in Brasil in 1965, approached history and the creation of linear time as the work of the devil.  […] the book combines philosophy and humor […] By philosophizing in translation and without foundations, Flusser bridged languages, disciplines and cultures.”

“[…] He has been both celebrated and criticized for his philosophical speculations and style of jumping across disciplines while ignoring, […]”

“If we abandon the idea of possessing some identifiable hard core, and if we assume we are imbedded within a relational network, then the classical distinction between “objective knowledge” and “subjective experience” will become meaningless.” If intersubjectivity becomes the fundamental category of thinking and action, then science will be seen as a kind of art (as an intersubjective fiction), and art will be seen as a kind of science (as an intersubjective source of knowledge).”

Vilém Flusser “On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise)” Leonardo vol.23, no.4,(1990):399.

from Introduction

(…) Bruscky and Kac have forged  through their practices the very space in which their work occurs. Unlike contemporaries who have relied on established media (…), Bruscky and Kac have often worked with new technologies and remote communication, short-circuiting the effects of institutional and market validation (..). This critique, which is often implicit in the material manifestation of their work, at timed becomes explicit, as in the case of Bruscky’s exhibition of his archive and Kac’s books-both of which have I sought to highlight here. (…)

If there is a common agreement in current discussions of art criticism, it is the recognition of a general crisis (…). Other critics have also called attention to the apparent paradox between vibrant expansion of the global art market and the simultaneous demise of criticism in recent decades, pointing to the increased inability of contemporary critics to make value judgments, as art criticism becomes ever more informative and promotional than critical.

from A Topological Approach to Art in the Crisis of Criticism

“Besides Derrida’s[…] The first is Ann Reynolds’s original approach to Robert Smithson’s archive, which used a morphological methodology not very common among historians, but employed by Smithson himself as his working method. These morphological connections of eclectic material, such as images and written texts, diverse authors, disciplines, and concepts from popular and erudite culture, are “categories of thought and images that remain invisible to established hierarchies of interpretation.” The second book, written from the point of view of performance studies and focusing on inter-American cultural relations, is Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, in which Taylor examines the hegemonic power of text-based archival sources over performative, oral, and other ephemeral forms of knowledge.”

The experimental, concept-based, and often ephemeral aspects of contemporary art, which have only increased since the 1960s, producing fluid lines between work and documentation, certainly benefit from the issues raised by all three books, which pose relevant methodological challenges to more positivist approaches to documentation in art history and criticism. Bruscky’s and Kac’s works, writings, and archives put into play logical topologies that often escape the chronological and medium-based analytical methods of art history and criticism.”

from Archive of Artworks to Archive as Artwork

When artists perform the archive, and artists’s archives are exhibited as art installations; when the mass media is used as a medium for art making and exhibitions re-enact historical events by seamlessly combining documentary and fiction; when the past refuses tosettle and nature’s entropic processes are countered by a generative technology designed to upgrade and perpetuate itself-is history permanently undead?

from When documentation and Memory Refuse to Settle is the Archive Alive?

As the boundaries between art’s inside and outside become less clear, meaning and authorship become more collective and distributed. In a participatory paradigm, for instance, completeness is no longer possible, desirable, or taken for granted. The artist’s role as theoretician and archivist further disrupts boundaries between art production and its documentation, and therefore does the same to the traditional hierarchies between artists, critics, and art historians.

from Elsewhere in Contemporary Art: Topologies of Artist’s Works, Writings, and Archives

In the effort to represent and stabilize past events, which ghosts does the archive have to avoid and evade, preserve or defend against? Beyond humidity, mold and insects, what other entropic forces oppose the process of archivization? What cannot be documented? Which memories can be materialized in form and space? Whose memories get to be preserved in archives? What kind of documental collection is formed when the artist is the archivist?

from Conclusion