“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.”