VISUAL ARCHIVES AS PREPOSTEROUS HISTORY

Three examples of artistic archiving – Christian Boltanski's archival installations, Ydessa Hendeles's installation Partners: The Teddy Bear Project and Peter Forgacs' film Maelstrom, which is based on archival home footage – are situated in relation to the privileged and respected position of the archival medium in Holocaust studies. This reading of three contemporary works of art takes its cue from Mieke Bal's notion of preposterous history, elaborated in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999), where she demonstrates the idea that art's engagement with what came before it involves an active reworking of the predecessor. In light of Bal's argument, archival practices by Boltanski, Hendeles and Forgacs are perceived as preposterous in relation to the archival genre they adopt. They do not comply to the genre and to the qualities assigned to it through the course of history, but in their practices they foreground, each in their own way, aspects and qualities of the archival mode so far unacknowledged or repressed.