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Image of the Past in the Archival art : With Walter Benjamins Concept of “Trümmmer(Wreck)” und “Scherbe(Debris)”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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This paper aims to explore the practical significance of the archive art via the two concepts of Walter Benjamin “wreck” and “debris”. Archive art explores the possibilities of summoning the image of the past to the present by placing documents, objects etc. associated with a particular person or event in the past with the aim to critically intervene on official historiography. But the images of the past, presented by archival art, are kind of fragments and discontinuous features. How these fragmented and discontinuous image of the past can have a critical and political potential and why? Walter Benjamin's concept ‘Debris’ has a significance of understanding the history of mankind as a process of violence and barbarism by the ruler. So the wreck are remainings of this destruction and violence. While history is not a continuous and piecemeal process, it has to be constructed from the wreck that is intertwined different periods at the same time. Furthermore the concept of wreck implies that discovering the wreckage of the past and working with it departs from the current context and needs. But with the concept wreck alone it is difficult to understand the messianic resurrection of the past that can be treated as the essence of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. In this regard, this paper presents the other concept ‘debris’ as a tool to think the image of the past. The concept Debris has, unlike the wreckage, the premise that you can restore the previous state of the unbroken by combining the collected pieces. In his philosophy of language Benjamin postulate ‘pure language(reine Sprache)’ as the origin state of language, from which each different language is understood as the debris of it. Applied to the image of the past, the concept of ‘debris’ can be helpful to think the practical meaning of the archival art. Each image of the past presented by the archival art can be thought as ‘wreck’ as well as ‘debris’ of the past. Whenever we recall each image of the past, we intend ‘the very past’ in mind. At the moment we discover ourselves in that image of the past, so Benjamin, it could become the dialectical image where the past meet the present. The images, used in archive arts, should be conceptualized as the wreck of the past while at the same time as debris. Only when we do that we are able to capture the critical potential of this practices with images.
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