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Week 2 Taxonomies, Categorization
- Day 1 [Tues Jan 25]:
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin
(download pdf)
"The Art of Archiving" by Geoffrey Battchen
handout, see lecture notes
- Day 2 [Thurs Jan 27]:
Taxonomies
see lecture notes
Carl Linnaeus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolus_Linnaeus
Schedule of Presentations
- February 3 Franky Brian Guttman
- February 10 Eric Patrick Basil
- February 17 Patrick Michael Kewley
- February 24 Mark Vernik
- March 3 Frank Nicholas Napolski
- March 8 Ryan John Kader
- March 24 Todd Patrick Lacey
- March 31 Christina Yuka Ikeda
- April 7 Thomas Zarcone
- April 21 Alice Young Jeon
see lecture notes
References/ Recommended Reading
-Lecture Notes: Taxonomy
Taxonomy (from Greek -- taxis = order and nomos = law)
- hierarchical classification of things, or the principles underlying the classification.
Almost anything, animate objects, inanimate objects, places, and events, may be classified according to some taxonomic scheme.
Mathematically, a taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. At the top of this structure is a single classification, the root node, that applies to all objects. Nodes below this root are more specific classifications that apply to subsets of the total set of classified objects. So for instance in Carolus Linnaeus's Scientific classification of organisms, the root is the Organism (as this applies to all living things, it is implied rather than stated explicitly). Below this are the Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, with various other ranks sometimes inserted.
Some have argued that the human mind naturally organizes its knowledge of the world into such systems.
Anthropologists have observed that taxonomies are generally embedded in local cultural and social systems, and serve various social functions.
Such taxonomies as those analyzed by Durkheim and Levi-Strauss are sometimes called folk taxonomies to distinguish them from scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus objective and universal.
The most well-known and widely used scientific taxonomy is Linnaean taxonomy which classifies living things and originated with Carolus Linnaeus.
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-Lecture Notes: The Art of Archiving" by Geoffrey Battchen,
in "Deep Storage" (see bibliography)
Obsessive Acts of Storage:
Hitler ordered photographs of all historically important paintings
in Germany in case of allied bombing. / Linz art collection
Vera Frenkel "Body Missing" as part of "Deep Storage"
http://www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing/barspace/site_map.html
New art of archiving- online
Some of the images in the archive have never been recovered.
Frenkel invites artists to submit their photos to fill in the blanks, to
speculate about what might have been there.
"Stories are always partial."
Shift from storage of objects to the flow of data
Corbis Corporation: Image Library
http://pro.corbis.com/
700.000 images so far probably the world largest image library
Ambition according to Corbis manager:
"...capture the entire human experience throughout history."
Assumption: electronic reproduction is the only aspect of an image
worth owning
Politics/ ideology/ consequences of such centralized digitalized archiving:
Walter Benjamin 1936 essay on effects of mechanical reproduction-
Shift from production to reproduction as basic condition, as central to technically
induced commodification of capitalism
He predicted this turn as reason for its predicted downfall of the system.
on one hand utopian dream of an open access democratic archive and on the other--
the fear of possible trivialization of knowledge
In addition-- problem of one person, -the wealthiest capitalist Bill Gates,
being in charge of reproduction.
Simulated glitter of reproducibility as danger to loss aura
Battchen: danger of alienation from people's own culture
Gates: reproductions will encourage people to seek out the originals in galleries etc.
Classification as central aspect of archiving
Battchen questions folk classifications mourning the authority of science models
German art historian Aby Warburg:
"Mnemosyne Atlas" 1928/29
Maps of collective memory
- Calls into question hierarchical structures, organizational principles in art history (at his time: based on formal analyses)
- He systematically created panels, in which combined antique reliefs, frescos, popular fliers, and drawings.
-- a mix between high and low culture
---parallels to montage
- Russian constructivist Rodchenko called the archive "photo file"
Compulsive repetition in post-war art:
Battchen asserts a failure to mourn
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Gerhard Richter's "Atlas"
http://www.diaart.org/exhibs/richter/atlas/photo1.html
August Sander
http://www.moma.org/collection/depts/photography/blowups/photo_009.html
No references for this section.
