Urban Archaeologies: Embodied Viewership in Recent Media Art

Abstract

This article examines self‐reflexive strategies by which contemporary media artists exploit the specific capabilities of photography, film, and interactive video to investigate the roles of memory and personal agency in urban experience. Works by Isaac Julien (British, b. 1960), Matthew Buckingham (American, b. 1963), and Matthew Ritchie (British, b. 1964) utilize a range of aesthetic and technological approaches to mine imagery of real and imagined cities, in ways that foreground the subjectivity of the viewer.

Keywords:

• Archival Impulse
• Embodied Viewership
• Media Art
• Urban Archaeology
• Baltimore, Maryland
• St. Louis, Missouri
• London, England
• New York, New York
• Buckingham, Matthew (b. 1963)
• Julien, Isaac (b. 1960)
• Ritchie, Matthew (b. 1964)

Notes

1 These projects are each well documented by accompanying catalogs. See Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter, eds., Megastructure Reloaded: Visionary Architecture and Urban Design of the Sixties Reflected by Contemporary Artists (Berlin: European Art Projects, 2008); Ralph Rugoff, Psychobuildings: Artists Take on Architecture (London: Hayward Gallery, 2009); and Robin Clark and Giuliana Bruno, Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009).

2 On the relationship of architecture and language in his work, Noble comments, “I wanted to make a big, Gaddis‐like novel—the irony of this is that the Nobson drawings are, essentially, one word poems.” E‐mail correspondence with the author, 21 February 2009. William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1955), is the 956‐page story of a minister’s son who makes a living by forging paintings.

3 See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. While the list of artists that Foster cites in his essay (Thomas Hirschorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean figure most prominently) does not include Isaac Julien, Matthew Buckingham, or Matthew Ritchie, the “impulse” he describes applies to them equally: “the work in question is archival since it not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private” (p. 5).

4 Urban experience is a recurring theme in the oeuvres of both Matthew Buckingham and Matthew Richie; Buckingham tends to identify a narrow slice of archival information regarding a place and to investigate it rigorously, offering new knowledge and posing new questions about a city. Richie’s approach is cumulative, combining elements of many places during many moments to produce ever‐expanding content. In contrast, urban experience is not a major theme in Julien’s overall oeuvre. Julien is best known for investigating issues of race and gender. The multiple iterations of Baltimore are unique in his oeuvre for playing out questions of race and gender through actual and imagined moments in the past, present, and future of the city of Baltimore.

5 The stunning image quality of Baltimore results from Julien’s technical skill and his method of shooting on 16 mm film, which is transferred to DVD for museum exhibition.

6 “Interview with Matthew Buckingham and Robin Clark,” in the exhibition brochure, Currents 94: Matthew Buckingham (St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum, 2005), n.p.

7 Matthew Ritchie, “Into the Bleed: Einstein and 21st‐Century Art,” in Peter L. Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S. Schweber, eds., Einstein for the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150.