To Imagine and Document: Art’s Double Life

Abstract

In the age of modernity, imagining and documenting were two opposing activities. The present age unites them, and I want to explore what takes place when that union occurs, because I see it as the most critical feature in much contemporary production. If the nineteenth century debated realism, and if (generally speaking) the twentieth century dealt with the avant-garde, then the twenty-first century poses the question of the archive and the documentable, not merely a question about the past but also a concern for how practice relates to the present. The “archive” is a sort of fragmentary link to the past; it contests the idea of history and meaning (not discounting them altogether, but contesting them), for it presents not “an account,” but rather allows for different narratives. The word “archive” recurs in almost all social and humanistic disciplines and is a key element in the practice of art and literature. But at the same time, the archive can be conceived as an action imposed upon documentality. It is here that the imagination (in the sense of “creation”) enters, generating a dynamic that extracts art and literature from their isolation within institutions and re-orients them outward toward the artistic institution. I have selected certain works to explore the interplay between imagining and documenting; operating within an extremely wide panorama, they leave their mark and experiment with new possibilities. Specifically, I will focus on the works of Dani Zelko, Mariana Mariana López, Galo Ghigliotto, Vivi Tellas and Paz Encina. Art, literature, and activism can do nothing other than to continue to call attention to the world of violence and inequality, not in the sense of facts in themselves but rather the way in which our feelings toward those facts become naturalized. I think of this double life as the dual activities of imagining and documenting. But there is also the duality of “critical response,” the risk of encapsulating contemporary works within the space of their own field.