A couple quotations and some commentary.
These come from Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. MIT Press, 2008.
“Archives do not record experience as much as its absence; they mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place, and what is returned to us in an archive may well be something we never possessed in the first place” (3).
I have been peddling something about our already having come up with a “phenomenology” of the Biblioteca Nacional Tristán de Leonís fragments without knowing it by failing to move beyond descriptions of the fragments. I do not think I am correct in this at all, but have gone to the extreme in order to press the question: What else would the result of a phenomenological approach look like on paper? One of my central questions is how to incorporate these fragments into debate (and in which debate?)
These come from Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. MIT Press, 2008.
“Archives do not record experience as much as its absence; they mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place, and what is returned to us in an archive may well be something we never possessed in the first place” (3).
I have been peddling something about our already having come up with a “phenomenology” of the Biblioteca Nacional Tristán de Leonís fragments without knowing it by failing to move beyond descriptions of the fragments. I do not think I am correct in this at all, but have gone to the extreme in order to press the question: What else would the result of a phenomenological approach look like on paper? One of my central questions is how to incorporate these fragments into debate (and in which debate?)
If a fragment is the partial presence of an absence, as I have said, drawing mainly on Hans Belting, Spieker’s idea on the experiences left unrecorded in the archive draw attention to the accidental nature of these manuscript fragments; that is to say, these pieces were not only never intended to be fragments, they probably weren’t supposed to survive. They are fragments according to those who use them now, for us, and our encounter with them something that shows incongruence with the history that they seemed to be making. Further, are the fragments, then, really that sad? Or do they communicate some sort of fraudulent melancholy like the fake Romantic fragments, which for some, cause so much disgust?
In speaking of Kurt Schwitters' The Cherry Picture [Merzbild 32A. Das Kirschbild] (1921). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Spieker writes:
...”although we can read the fragments of text that dot many of Schwitters’ works, such a reading never manages to fully integrate the text with its image. Where linear reading presupposes concentration and the ability to 'hold the line,' the broken surfaces of Dadaist montage, much like montage film, encourage a receptive mode characterized by distraction, a lack of linear direction, and repeated fading in and out” (11).
In speaking of Kurt Schwitters' The Cherry Picture [Merzbild 32A. Das Kirschbild] (1921). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Spieker writes:
...”although we can read the fragments of text that dot many of Schwitters’ works, such a reading never manages to fully integrate the text with its image. Where linear reading presupposes concentration and the ability to 'hold the line,' the broken surfaces of Dadaist montage, much like montage film, encourage a receptive mode characterized by distraction, a lack of linear direction, and repeated fading in and out” (11).
I have been reading and writing about each of the Amadís fragments in conjunction with Montalvo’s text. I am not sure what I hope to achieve as a result of these comparative studies, but this passage, for an entirely different context and object, raises many applicable questions in “hold the line.” I must remember that any observations and theories regarding differences between these two texts (if we consider the text on the MS. a viable text) I construct will always be those made pretending that the text of the Amadís manuscript could indeed permit a reader to “hold the line,” those made as though the face of the manuscript were not really broken. It is useful to note that the first thing I did, although I had criticized a similar inertia for some 15 pages before, was transcribe the fragments. I initially placed the images of the manuscript next to the transcription. I realized, however, that the images were making the file too difficult to navigate, and I removed them for the time being. Immediately I began to ignore the missing text, forgetting its absence and piece together lines that were never once continuous. Without returning to the images, I then wrote 5 pages of commentary based on my fake fragment text. It is becoming increasingly hard to discern what, exactly, is given, and what I am making up.
