( 10 ) Ernst, “Archival Times”, 10. Indeed, they are perhaps better characterised as capturing the ‘anarchival’ rather than the ‘archival’ impulse which is discussed by Foster, amongst others. As Foster explains, ‘[i]n this regard archival art is as much reproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps ‘anarchival impulse’ is the more appropriate phase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” (Hal Foster, “An Anarchival Impulse”, in The Archive (Documents of Contemporary Art), ed. Charles Merewether (London, Cambridge Massachusetts: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), 144).
( 11 ) Foster, “An Anarchival Impulse”, 144.
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public (in terms of both access to and contributions from), which is interchangeable with the notion of a library, or an idiosyncratic collection of things, which accommodates our ever-increasing range of options for storage, and which has even been described as the internet itself. At the heart of such descriptions as “the megarchive of the Internet”, ( 1 1 ) is the malleable quality of available content. The information that the internet contains can be added, altered or erased at any given moment. Rachel de Joode’s Hanging Marble, 2014, mimics this condition. While the image which her digital vinyl print depicts is a close-up piece of marble – a material which is assumed to be aged and rigid – it is presented by being draped over a frame, so that the image appears bent and distorted. It takes on a new, objectbased form. Hanging Marble mirrors the internet’s sublime-like façade, where older information can be altered and shaped