Document as an idea
Proposal for a research project
Sophie Berrebi

Lisa Oppenheim's Damaged: Photographs from the Chicago Daily News is a series of reprints of faulty negatives of press photographs from the 1910s and 1920s, excavated by the artist from the archives of a local newspaper from Chicago (fig. 1). The works show elaborate captions that sit underneath rectangular frames partly filled with a mottled pattern criss-crossed by a network of white veins in places where the emulsion cracked and peeled off the glass plate of the negative. Although there is no image corresponding to the description below, the caption nevertheless encourages the viewer to search for a likeness in the picture, as if it were a Rorschach test. The words work to force an image to emerge in a place where there no longer is one. From recording specific moments in time, these press photographs have become the record of their own decay over time. Displaced from their archival context and reprinted on newspaper print, they document their own disappearance over time.
In this series of images, Oppenheim has performed and commented upon several shifts of context, purpose and form of these images. Singling out these now useless negatives from their archival context, she points out the indiscriminate logic of accumulation of the archive. Turning destroyed negatives into pictures to be exhibited in a gallery, she subverts the use-value of the press-photo and replaces it with an exhibition value. Yet the attraction of this body of work derives, not only from the result, but also from the obtuse meaning of their captions and their becoming works of art without completely abandoning their status of anonymous documents.
This work, made in 2003, reflects an interest on the part of artists in the document, often reworked in the wider context of practices involving documentary forms and archival compilations. A number of recent exhibitions, ranging from Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2002) to the recent The Need to Document (Lüneburg and Basel, 2004) presented, in an urge to show 'things as they are' documents as indexes of the real. The White Station, for instance, a short film by the Iranian filmmaker Seifollah Samadian presented at Documenta 11, said little else. Showing a woman waiting for the bus under the snow in Teheran, it recorded the duration of this moment of daily life, providing, through the camera, a proof of the very existence of that moment. Throughout these shows, the documentary genre has come to represent the strongest vehicle in art, to reflect upon the realities of the world.
A similar move has taken place in relation to the archive. Works of art such as, for example, Fischli & Weiss' Sichtbare Welt (1986-2000), which was presented in the group exhibition Voilà (Paris, 2000) - consisting in an extensive collections of contact sheets - turns artists into what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls 'archivists of collective life' making inventories of the world around us as many proofs or documents of its existence.1 In these contexts, the document is invested with qualities of certainty, transparency, and truthfulness. But such qualities, I would argue, form only a small part of the interest generated by the question of the document in the art context. While strictly, a document refers to an image, a text, or an object, either found or constructed, that is used for purposes of identification, education, evidence, or archival record, the document recurs in art in multiple ways and contexts, and with different finalities. It may, amidst other possibilities, be an object defined as a work of art strictly by its legal properties, as in the readymade; as a stand-in for a missing work, for example in performance art; or it may be the intimate and subjective account of a process, recorded daily through objects of daily life and notes, as in the artist Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document from 1973.
In examples such as these, the document is far from the 'positivist definition of fact' that defined it in the nineteenth century as the historians Philippe Roussin and Jean-François Chevrier have noted, in one of the rare attempts at defining the document.2 Instead of this, the appropriation of the document by artists opens up a range of paradoxes, including that of neutrality and subjectivity, transparence and opacity, and, art and non-art. The diversity of uses of the document in artistic practice begs the question of whether it would be possible to define a general idea or concept of the document that would characterize the multiple aspects and discourses attached, or, more specifically, the actions it signifies. The recurrence of documents throughout the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suggests that it may be a deep-seated issue, one that permeates the idea of what constitutes a work of art in modernism. In the space of this paper, I wish to explore this possibility, and through discussing the ubiquity of the document in art outline some directions for a more complete investigation of place and role of the document in, or as, art.

Surrealist documents
From the inscription on the door of the photographer Eugene Atget that, from 1890, advertised his trade as 'documents pour artistes', to the painter Robert Motherwell launching, in the 1940s, a collection of artist's writings under the title 'Documents of Modern Art', the term document repeatedly surfaces often signifying or anticipating a displacement from art to document and back.3 In the context of photography, Walker Evans was able to find a formula that could flawlessly, bring together document and art, when he coined the notion of a 'documentary style' in 1935, a combination of terms that evoked the principle of objectivity of the document along with an artistic interest.4 In other terms, and to quote the photographer August Sander writing at about the same period: 'a good photograph is always more than a document'.5 In the field of art, however, the slippages between art and document are usually more conflict ridden. Posthumous reevaluations of Atget's views of Parisian streets and shop fronts leading to their being considered more as art than mere document - with effect on their market value- has been a subject of controversy.6
A similar subject of debate has concerned surrealist photographs, such as those that graced the pages of Documents, the journal created in 1929 by the French writer Georges Bataille. Contrary to other surrealist periodicals like Minotaure, devoted to art and literature, Documents, which ran from 1929 to 1931, fore grounded an anthropological approach through which mundane objects and avant-garde art were studied side by side. An article on the painting of André Masson by the critic Carl Einstein was hence subtitled an 'étude ethnologique', rather than a 'critique', following a posture that literary historian Denis Hollier has described, in his presentation of the re-edition of Documents, as deliberately 'anti-aesthetic'.7 This anti-aesthetic position also governed the numerous commissioned photographs illustrating articles of the magazines. Jacques-André Boiffard's now iconic series of pictures Gros Orteil, illustrating an article by Bataille entitled 'Le Gros Orteil', and published in issue 6 (1929), or his photographs of the hands of Igor Stravinsky illustrating an article on the 'Cappriccio d'Igor Stravinsky', by André Schaeffner in issue 7 (1929), followed the traditional conventions of documentary photography: frontal view, clarity and presence of details allow the image to function as visual evidence in relation to text.
Yet this anti-aesthetic stance was fraught with ambiguity. Set against an impenetrable and abstracting background, Boiffard's images of single big toes exude an eeriness that is emphasized by the fact that the images are reproduced full page in the journal. This displaces the picture from a purely informative status (that would presumably only require a small image) to an artistic one: it is reproduced full-page the way works of art are in other pages of the journal. The picture, in which the hands of Stravinsky have been cut out from any background, is laid out above the text, seemingly floating on the white page. The absence of scale and background, lends it monstrous strangeness. These images lift the document from the realm of straight record into that of fantasy. They remain indeterminate as regards their purpose and status.8

Conceptual Documents
Whereas the history of art progressively integrated the surrealist documents into its narratives, removing them from their marginal position as printed material to study and present them as works of art, the displacement from document to artwork, and the anti-aesthetic claims surrounding this displacement, became thirty or so years later, integral to conceptual art. In a variety of ways, the written and photographic documents of conceptual art helped to redefine the nature of art. Legal documents, archival records and magazine articles were used by artists as art forms, inventing what the art historian Benjamin Buchloh has defined as an 'aesthetics of administration'.9
Robert Smithson experimented with the idea of photographic document in the mock-documentary article he wrote and published in the art magazine Artforum in December 1967 entitled a 'Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey'. This piece, written in a concise, journalistic style, explored the suburban wasteland of Passaic, describing abandoned construction materials and industrial waste as monuments of the past industrial era. Together with its photo illustrations, the text plays out a subtle indeterminacy between factual observation and fantasy-like interpretation. The implicit critique of the pseudo-objective nature of the documentary format and of the document as a faithful recording of fact brings these contradictory aspects together. Showing the discrepancy between text and image, and their basic inability to convey experience in a truthful way, was tackled in a somewhat sterner way by Martha Rosler, in her text and picture piece The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974). The work juxtaposes black and white documentary photographs of the Bowery with cards of the same format bearing words evoking the experience of area photographed. The extent to which these documents of a moment and place could come together and create a representation - a work of art- is measured by the alleged inadequacy of both image and text to convey a description. Questioning documentary practice through the relation between text and image envisaged as modes of transmitting the real, Smithson and Rosler simultaneously, although in different ways, interrogate the nature of documentary, as it slides between (photographic) document and work of art.
Douglas Huebler's variation pieces and duration pieces made from the late 1960s on explore an elementary quality assigned to the document, namely, its ability to record and present facts. Each of his works consists in photographs and typed and signed letters, describing an action defined by its change or duration and in which the photo camera serves as a proof-making, with the written document legalizing the process. Huebler's works rely upon an acknowledgement of the conventions of the document: signed letters and photographic proofs and recordings suggest a belief in the authenticating nature of the photograph. But this belief concerns events and actions that cannot be objectively assessed or documented. The rigor of the form and of the tasks set in each piece contrasts with the subjectivity or impossibility of their undertaking. In Variable Piece No. 70 (1971), Huebler for example assigns himself the impossible task of documenting through photography 'the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in this manner'.10
This purely conventional nature of the document exposed by Huebler becomes even clearer when detached from the moment of the performance. This is the case of the Vito Acconci's Following Piece from 1969, which began as a poet's way of alleviating writer's block by 'breaking out of the house and leaving the paper behind' (fig. 2).11 Acconci decided to follow randomly chosen individuals in the streets of Manhattan until they entered a private building. It is only after the actual event took place, that Acconci had the photographs that show him in the posture of an urban stalker made, for the purpose of a gallery exhibition.12 If, as in Douglas Huebler and other process and performance-based works, the photograph is the only materialization of the work, does it make a difference that the photographs were made, right at the time of the process or later? While the result is admittedly the same - seeing is still very much believing - the difference occurs in the way in which the document becomes emptied of any notion of a relation to the real, and instead becomes pure convention, pure form, pure construction. The differences between the document as truth and the artwork as construction are dimmed.
The photographs reproduced in Documents, like the magazine articles of Smithson, the amateur snapshot, and signed declarations of Huebler, all challenge, albeit in different ways and contexts, the idea of the work of art as an autonomous, stable entity. Instead of this, surrealist photography, like conceptual art, uses documents to create objects whose status shifts between art and document. Rather than a difficulty, I would argue that these ambiguities and contradictions between art and document is what enables the document to become an aesthetic tool. As it becomes an artistic tool, its contradictions are less paradoxes than they are dialectical qualities.

The dialectics of the document
In one of the rare articles written on the subject, the French art historian Regis Durand sets out to define the process by which the document becomes a work of art only to rapidly dismiss it, arguing that while the passage from document to work of art poses 'interesting historical issues' it is, 'too close to an investor's history of art' that 'expects the creation of value as a result of the simple passage of time'.13 While Durand interestingly introduces the question of time in the passage from document to work of art, and while the process he describes fits the critical fortune of figures such as Atget or Boiffard, in saying that the document becomes art simply through the passing of time, and in suggesting that only interesting historical questions can be raised, Durand misses out on the diversity of the forms taken by interchange between document and artwork. He notably ignores the dialectical process by which the document can in turn both exceed the work of art and yield to it.
The literary critic Walter Benjamin, in one of the fragments that compose One Way Street, a book of "aphorisms, jokes and dreams" as he once described it, published in 1928, discussed this dialectical relationship between artwork and document in '13 Theses Against Snobs'. The text opposes the work of art to the document, testing their differences in the course of thirteen theses (fig. 3). The theses are prefaced by a short statement that sets the scene: 'Snob in the private office of art criticism. On the left a child's drawing, on the right a fetish. Snob: "Doesn't this make Picasso seem such a waste of time?".' Following this introduction, two columns divide the page, each one claiming the respective qualities of the work of art and of the document and bringing them in comparison with one another. The third thesis, for example, asserts: 'The art-work is a masterpiece', while the corresponding line on the other column claims: 'The document serves to instruct'. In thesis 9, the idea according to which 'in the art-work the formal law is central', is compared to the document in which 'forms are merely dispersed'. Thesis 10 reads: 'The artwork is synthetic: an energy-centre', contrasting with 'the fertility of the document demands: analysis'. Pointing out the naiveté of the snob who is touched by the spontaneity and directness of the child's drawing, Benjamin seems at first to aim at putting things into place. Hence he stresses the 'one dimensionality', the poverty of the document when compared to the work of art, which he praises for its quality of synthesis. Whereas, as he states in thesis 6, echoing thesis 9, that the work of art brings content and form into one to produce meaning, the document's strength comes only through a 'wholly dominant' subject matter.
In this perspective, the work of art is granted qualities of synthesis, of uniqueness remoteness, and durability that the document clearly cannot match. The snob who prefers the fetish to the Picasso is in a sense not so far from the investor in Durand's essay who waits for the fetish to become, over time and change of context, an object of aesthetic contemplation. However, Benjamin's condemnation of the document should not be taken entirely at face value. The solemnity of his tone is enough to suggest that some irony is lurking behind, and certain theses seem more ambivalent than the sententious style they are written in would let appear. Thesis 11, for instance, states: 'The virility of works lies in assault, whereas the document's innocence gives it cover'. This may suggest that whereas the work of art declares itself as such, the 'innocence' of the document enables it to strike. Read in relation to Smithson's Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, for instance, Benjamin's remark may help to understand that Smithson's turning of industrial waste into monument is stronger as an idea concealed under the innocent form of a magazine article than if it were to be articulated into the form of a sculpture or a painting. In other terms, while it appears to be lesser, the document may in fact have a greater ability to persuade than the traditional work of art.14
To interpret Benjamin's theses in this way, it is necessary to remember that around the time that he wrote and published One-Way Street, he displayed a strong interest in avant-garde art, photography, dada and surrealism. The original cover of One-Way Street testifies to this interest, featuring a montage of visual and written documents by photographer Sasha Stone, who was also a friend of Benjamin's. In his article on surrealism, 'Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of European Intelligentsia', published two years later, Benjamin in fact described the productions of surrealists as, among other things, documents rather than works of art.15 And in his 1931 essay on the 'crisis of the novel', he likened the practice of the novelist Alfred Döblin in Berlin-Alexanderplatz to montage and compares it to Dadaism: 'Authentic montage is based on the document. In its fanatical struggle with the work of art, Dadaism used montage to turn daily life into its ally. It was the first to proclaim, somewhat uncertainly, the autocracy of the authentic.'16 Thus the document, while it cannot measure up to the great classical works of art, may nonetheless, notably in a practice of montage, display a greater power of subversion.
Durand defined the relation between document and work of art in terms of a unidirectional temporality. Montage, however presupposes a different idea of time, made of collisions and shortcuts, a perception of time that the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has elaborated in his discussion of anachronism, in his book Devant le Temps.17 Although usually considered a pitfall of history, anachronism, he argues, enables us to account more powerfully for the richness of images that combine different temporalities - the moment of their making and all the layers of images through which they reach us when we look at them. In every historical object, writes Didi-Huberman - after Walter Benjamin - 'all times meet'.18 The image is at the heart of this idea of anachronism. And when Benjamin speaks of dialectical images, he means, according to Didi-Huberman, that the double-sided temporality of the image enables it to escape from being either a simple 'document of history' or a 'work of art idealized as a monument of the absolute'. In this context, montage is what enables those qualities of the image to emerge fully.19

Document-as-Art
The dialectical nature of the document, its instable identity as both document and work of art, and its anachronistic qualities, suggest that the range of identities assumed by the document in art goes far beyond its status as evidence that is commonly fore grounded in contemporary documentary practices. While the success of documentary practices and of works using the form of the archive would suggest that they represent the legacy of the 'dialectical documents' of surrealism and conceptual art, other artists seem to have more successfully integrated the dialectical nature of the document as artwork. The challenge may not be the same as for surrealism and conceptual art. As Jacques Rancière has convincingly argued, art today no longer exists in the regime of representation in which works of art could be defined as such in relation to stable criteria. In our current 'aesthetic regime of art' art does not have a specific place and role in society. Furthermore, it is no longer defined according to disciplines, thus, art in the singular replaces the pluralized form of the (fine) arts, argues Jacques Rancière. Stripped from these categorizations, what defines the work of art in the aesthetic regime is its belonging to what Rancière calls a specific 'sensorium' - something like a way of being - in which it will be perceived as art. A paradox arises here, because this specific sensorium exists in a context in which art has not been attributed a specific place: the aesthetic regime rejects the distribution of the sensible. As a result, in the aesthetic regime art is constantly caught in a tension between being specifically art and merging with other forms of activity and being.20 Given this context, there is no longer a modern, stable notion of the autonomous work of art that the document-as-art could challenge. Nevertheless, the document-as-art can still confront the rather naïve perceptions of document as stable truth, and reveal instead the construction of meanings and layers of temporality that preside over artworks resorting to documents. The French artist Jean-Luc Moulène and the American artist Christopher Williams, for instance, elaborate bodies of work that continuously question the image under the angle of the document.
This is also the case of Lisa Oppenheim, and - to conclude this essay with the work by another young artist who explores the multifold quality of the document-as-art - of the Slovakian artist Roman Ondàk. In his photo-piece Bad News in a Thing of the Past Now, made in 2003, Ondàk presents two photographs of the same size, showing a similar image of a man sitting on a bench in a park and reading the newspaper (fig. 4). A quick glance suggests that it may be the same person, who may have slightly changed position to be more comfortable. Looking at the images more closely however shows that the images represent two people dressed identically and who seem to read the same paper in exactly the same place in the park. Those elements give some clues as to the time that may have elapsed between the two images, a few minutes perhaps or a few hours. The reference to time is in fact present in the title of the work: Bad News is a Thing of the Past Now. The past and the now can be read in reference to the age of the characters, a younger one on the left, an older one on the right, as if the older figure was pushed back and the younger one had come to take his place to read the newspaper, in which perhaps the bad news was once displayed.
This bad news, we gather from extra information on the work, is in fact the announcement of the beginning of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army, that was reported in newspaper editions of August 22nd 1968, an issue that Roman Ondàk assumes his father, read on that day.21 In these photographs, Ondàk re-stages, thanks to a facsimile of the newspaper, his father in the act of reading that newspaper issue, on a park bench, some thirty years after he maybe did it the first time. On the photograph that is on the left, we see his son, the artist, who now has the age that his father had thirty years ago, reading the same newspaper. This poetic 'back to the future' shrinks, with the help of photography and newsprint, time and space and lends the photograph awkwardness, as if it could, today, recapture the past. Metaphorically, then, the past appears into the present and projects the present back into the past. The work hence functions as a dialectical document, in which montage plays with the possibilities and limits of photography to present a slice of time. Montage, but also here, the mise-en-abyme created by the inclusion of the facsimile into the images suggests the past brought into the present and simultaneously thrown back into the past through being photographed. Ondàk here weaves together archive, document and anachronism, in a work that rejects the supposed transparence and truthfulness of the documentary in favor of the multi-layered, dialectical document-as-art.