Jasminka Babić
The Afterlife of Archives

Day to day we witness the rising interest of contemporary art in the themes of history, memory, and archive. The analysis of the relationship of the aforementioned, related, but not identical terms will be left for some other discourse, but, given the title of the exhibition which is the subject of this text, it is necessary to glance at the notion of archive in contemporary art. The reasons for the archive fever1 can be found in the evident endangerment of personal and social memory. New media technologies have brought organic memory to retardation, and, as a result of forcing the dominant narratives, social memory is being fully politicized.2 It is in the area of endangered narratives, fragmented history, and unfinished projects, where the archival impulse emerges in contemporary art practice, and which is articulated by the American historian and theorist Hal Foster in the text of the same title.3 Artists physically give shape to historical information through the found images, objects, or texts. By using fragments of archives, but also by creating new ones, they open up new spaces for reactualization and revaluation of historical segments.

Although in terms of content the archival impulse is clearly expressed only in recent works of Viktor Popović, interesting in this sense is the text by Klaudio Štefančić titled “Retorika modernizma” (“The Rhetoric of Modernism”)4 in which he interprets Popović’s strategy of the appropriation of the language of the art of high modernism through the process of archiving, that is, deconstruction of the same tradition. Referring to Miško Šuvaković, he calls him “an archivist in ‘disorderly and ‘chaotic’ archives […] in which art (painting, sculpture, etc.) is not seen as continuous development (progress, improvement through self-criticism […], but as a multitude of discontinuities.”5 However, even if we move away from the reference field of art history, in the works of Viktor Popović we can find examples of the use of archival material. Let us recall the works dating from 2004, in which the artist introduces photography, i.e., his personal photographic archive created during his stay in New York City. The works reveal a specific impression of the city filtered through the lens of an analog camera. If we extract only a photographic image from the final artwork appearance, it becomes clear that this personal archive has emerged as a result of informed and very specific artistic sensibility rather than as a need for a simple record of personal travel experience. But, as Popović’s ultimate aim is not to produce art photography, he uses it as a basis for the construction of completely new content. Photographic images by the complex technique of underpainting with acrylic paint and by transferring to a lead base through the screen printing technique acquire a completely different context. Painting of the axonometric representation of geometric bodies can be read as the appropriation of the elements of the abstract painting tradition, that is, the reinterpretation of the historical and artistic archive. The final result is the work whose equivocal quality is manifested in the dichotomous relations of the figurative-abstract, pictorial-photographic, mechanical-manual, language of high modernity-postmodernist speech, and it is precisely such strategy of dynamic relations and inverted meanings that is intrinsic to Popović’s entire oeuvre.

The works exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and at the gallery of the Multimedia Cultural Center in Split follow the same development trajectory and confirm Popović’s extraordinary skill in governing the aforementioned relations, but also his confidence in the transformation of the gallery space through the media of spatial installation. The artist intervenes on large format digital prints of archival photographs, taken in 1965 at the former Military Hospital in Split, with recognizable neon tubes and industrial filters for color correction. A dynamic play between the representation of hospital interiors from the 1960s and the cold geometric lines of neon gives the documentary photography a strong auratic character of the work of art. The memory of the represented space is further enhanced by the introduction of old bactericidal lamps and scrapped beds taken from the same hospital. With the form of a large installation structure made of iron beds, Popović cites modernist elements of the architecture of the hospital’s main building. The objects of utility themselves—as carriers of memory—are almost completely anonymized through the geometry of the verticals and horizontals of the newly created architecture. However, Popović is fully aware of the extraordinary strength of the memory code of the material he uses, and precisely through this tense relationship between content and form he makes the observer actively perceive the presented ensemble.

After almost two decades of artistic work, in 2015, Popović added to his programmatic (un)naming of the works the segment Archive ST3. A seemingly small change is, in reality, a sign of a greater shift. The fact is that a whole series of works—united under the titles of Untitled (Archive ST3) and Untitled (Archive ST3: Military Hospital)—are based on his research of institutional archives.6 However, it is not just about that. Popović has already used materials that we can consider archival,7 but now, unlike before, when the objects became part of the work by temporary appropriation, changing depending on the context of their exhibiting, for the first time, the artist takes the role of the archivist, the Derridian archon who has the competence and power to determine what enters into the archive and how that archive is interpreted.

To understand Popović’s decision to make such a turn in his artistic strategy it is necessary to look at the broader historical and social context that is at the very source of his new works. All the material gathered by Popović consists of digitized archive photographs related to architectural and urban planning projects in the period of high modernism in Split. This was a time of the most intense development of the city that followed after the first post-war industrialization. The large inflow of new population demanded urgent addressing of the issue of appropriate accommodation in Split so that the period of the 1950s and 1960s saw records in the intensity of residential construction in Yugoslavia.8 The major project of the modernization of the city involved the development of significant public facilities – administrative and business buildings, schools, and, of course, hospitals.9 In the late 1960s, a large urban planning project was carried out that regulated the expansion of the city of that time to its eastern suburbs, known today as Split 3.10 It is an example of an exceptionally well-considered urbanism that solved the issue of a rapidly growing population, while at the time preserving the Mediterranean identity and way of life through pedestrian streets and public spaces. Although it involved the mass construction of residential architecture, the project successfully avoided the complete alienation of the residents and the reduction of the new suburbs to the dormitory function, thus becoming a paradigmatic example of an exceptional urban planning and architectural practice.11

The reasons for Popović’s interest in the aforementioned period of the formation of Split can be understood through several parameters. On the one hand, Split 3 is the space where he grew up, and, in that case, the memory of space has a very personal character. On the other hand, the architecture of high modernism is fully consistent with the reference field of Popović’s interest in the field of art history. But while the development of artistic strategy in the autoreferential space of art can be seen as the defining of a very personal artistic identity, research of the living urban space inevitably acquires a broader social context. In Popović’s case, the decision to use archival and not recent photographs—as was the case with the photographs of New York City—speaks of a critical detachment from the current state of urban planning chaos and of recollecting the values according to which these spaces were originally conceived. The need for the accumulation of one’s archive and its reinterpretation is the consequence of the position taken by the institutional archives in relation to the socialist period of modernism in Croatia. The change of the social system and transitional chaos have destroyed the successor institutions of the aforementioned projects – the archives of either the former Urban Planning Institute of Dalmatia or Lavčević Construction Company are incomplete and partially lost. For example, the architectural model of the preliminary design of Split 3 itself was destroyed, and Popović was able to find its high-quality photograph only in Mušič’s Archive at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana. The situation is even more serious with regard to the Military Hospital because, at the time of taking control of the institutions of the former Yugoslav Army in 1991, the found archives were almost completely destroyed.12 The found photographs are part of Lavčević’s book of clients, which by sheer luck came to the Photographic Collection of the City Museum of Split.

The problems with systematic institutional work on the collecting and processing of archival material from the period of socialism are an indicator of a distinct politicization of memory. The process in which our not-so-distant history becomes a forgotten narrative has opened up a large field of artistic practices that problematize precisely the socialist legacy. In the public discourse, such practices are all too easily labeled as sentiment toward the undesirable past, but the described context of the creation of Popović’s recent works clearly shows that the artistic archival impulse is essential in a situation where we are physically losing the records that are the basis for all future interpretations of our history.