Reframing Július Koller : the artist archive as formative of collective discourse

This thesis examines the archive of a Slovak conceptual artist Július Koller (1939-2007) as an integral component of his artistic practice rather than as a repository assembled after its creation. Beginning with Koller’s Antihappening project and the accompanying manifesto System of Subjective Objectivity (1965), the central claim is that Koller’s artistic program relocated the site of artistic production from the autonomous object to the continuous cultural demarcation of everyday reality. Koller is situated within recent historiographic revisions of Central-East European art history and the growing scholarly interest in artist archives as active sites of both historical and artistic production. Rather than treating the archive simply as documentation through which the artist’s biography may be reconstructed, this paper approaches Koller’s self-constructed archive as a parallel institution to the state that organised and then continually reformulated the collective experience of communist Czechoslovakia from the artist’s point of view. In doing so the thesis serves as a contribution to the scholarship by shifting the focus from ‘archive as a site of preservation’ towards understanding it as having a capacity to remain socially operative through subsequent acts of its reactivation. This study compares the methods of Koller’s archival system and investigates its schematics alongside Jacques Derrida's conception of the archive to differentiate the imperatives between institutional and artist archives. Then, through Michel Foucault, Koller’s artist-archive and his internal self-referential system are discerned as formative of discourses due to its continued relevance with the world. In the final chapter, I employ Jacques Ranciére's 'communities of sense' to help me articulate why careful reactivations of the archive are needed to not deaden the objects in the archive, but let them breathe and reacquire meanings like they were intended to. Contemporary acts of archival reframing are never neutral. They have the agendas of the institutions presenting them that shape their reception with the world. I gauge that the effectiveness of these reframings depends on whether the institutions let the works keep their communicative potential, and that the archives these objects come from, that are active cultural structures capable of generating collective understanding, are considered with the agency they have been imbued with in mind.