Archaeology in the Expanded Field

This project is at a very preliminary stage and will by necessity only grow slowly and organically as I read and encounter new works in my spare time. Here is a short essay I wrote explaining the framework and applying it to some of the artworks I encountered during my postdoc in Istanbul.

Scope of the Project

“One of the defining ironies of our time is that so much of the vanguard art production—the art that is most closely aligned with the boundary-pushing, experiment-prone, horizon-expanding tradition of progressive culture, and with the avant-garde’s traditional claims to “newness” in particular—should be so preoccupied, both in its choice of subject matter and in its choice of techniques, in both form and content, with the old, the outdated, the outmoded—with the past.” (Roelstraete, Way of the Shovel, 15)

Art and archaeology may at first seem like strange bedfellows. There are, however, good reasons for the two disciplines to be interested in each other. Both artists and archaeologists have deep investments in visual culture and in the meaning and value of objects. Both ground their work in representational and imaginative practices that seek to engage, understand, interpret, and communicate about humanity’s past, present, and future. Both are closely associated with museums and “high” culture, which have given artworks and artifacts a similar a kind of aura and mystique, whether granted by the genius of the artist or the mystery of time. Colin Renfrew puts it as succinctly as anyone yet has, drawing attention to display and process as key overlapping preoccupations:

“Archaeology began in the Renaissance with collecting and display. From the gallery and the museum and the cabinet of curiosities came the first motivation for the ‘backward-looking curiosity’ that we have come to term archaeology. And archaeology was then transformed into a systematic, and in a sense, scientific, discipline, rather than the somewhat random amassing of ‘curiosities’ as a by-product of the Grand Tour. That transformation came about through the systematic process of excavation which was refined into a well-controlled and well-recorded stratigraphic exercise directed toward the recovery of context. So the undertaking of display, and then the notion of process, were and are integral to the very inception and development of archaeology, just as display and process are today central to the new self-awareness in the visual arts.” (Figuring it Out, 83)

Aside from these sorts of commonalities, the fields have interacted directly and indirectly with each other in a variety of ways. There are four main ways that art and archaeology overlap as forms of visual culture, research (scientific or otherwise), and genres of communication. These include the following categories of practices and media:

Archaeology, not art: includes technical illustrations, diagrams, photography, video, and other media which use techniques familiar to artists, but squarely within the scientific idiom.

Art, not archaeology: includes the “Historiographic Turn,” mock-science and pseudo-practice of archaeology, art practices which concern archaeological themes or repurpose the visual culture of archaeology, artworks focused on monuments, memory, fragments, remembering, forgetting, and so on (e.g., Mark Dion, “Tate Thames Dig”).

Both art and archaeology: a collaborative mode that includes archaeological researchers using artistic techniques in their fieldwork and/or publication strategies, as well as artworks produced by artists together with archaeologists, whether on-site or otherwise, as well as the work of “artists-in-residence” on archaeological excavations (e.g., Simon Callery, “Trench 10”).

Neither art nor archaeology: an integrative mode that is at times difficult to distinguish from both art and archaeology, but which is distinctive in its hybrid research-based practices that both blur the lines between the two fields and speak directly to both audiences (e.g., Gala Porras-Kim, “The Ethics of Dust”).

Bibliography In Progress


Articles and Chapters

Edited Volumes

Podcasts

Monographs

Artworks/Exhibits

Exhibit Reviews

Exhibit Catalogs

  • Branzi, Andrea and Kenya Hara. 2016. Neo-Prehistory — 100 Verbs. Lars Müller Publishers.

  • Mahlouji, Vali. 2019. Baalbek, Archives of an Eternity.

  • Okwui, Enwezor. 2008. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. International Center of Photography.

  • Onar, Felekşan. 2022. After Utopia: The Birds. Sadberk Hanım Müzesi.

  • Razian, Nora. 2023. Monumental Shadows: On Museums, Memory and the Making of History. Beirut: Kaph Books.

  • Roelstraete, Dieter. 2013. The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art.