Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Miroslaw Balka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for 'archival' media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.

David Houston Jones is Associate Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, UK