Between artwork and document. Paths from the museum to the archive and from the archive to the museum

Abstract

Introducing the exhibition catalogue on Lucio Fontana’s drawings (Milan Castello Sforzesco 1977), Mercedes Garberi wrote that the museum is at the same time ‘archive’ and a repertory of the possible, a tool to work on the present and future. As demonstrated by many scholars on Institutional Critique, the archival obsession started exactly during that decade, and the archive has been assumed as a metaphor to react to the museum crisis by artists and curators. Starting from case studies analysis and a proposal of a temporary map through which the two different institutions, the museum and the archive, interacted through the collecting and the narrative and the display, we will analyze the contemporary debate and curatorial practices. The case studies analyzed will highlight three trajectories: the dialectic between archival and museological disciplines; the different spatial dimension; the public role. The questions are: is it possible, starting from an analysis on the archive, assumed as a metaphor by historians and philosopher, starting form Foucault, to define historiographical method, to define curatorial and exhibit projects with which reflect on the archive’s perception as a dusty, forgotten and inaccessible place, unlike the museum; on the opposition between documentation and artworks, consequently on the different policies of storage and display; on the interactions between the idea of ‘archive in motion’ (Ernst) and the acknowledgement that today the museum is a stage of events (Groys).