What does contemporary art have in common with archaeology? Quite a bit, it turns out, as is revealed in “The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, which looks at a trend among contemporary artists of using archaeological methods in their work.
The exhibition grew out of an essay written by the MCA’s senior curator Dieter Roelstraete for the E-flux journal in 2009, when he was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. “It is actually the single most widely read or quoted article I have ever published. Clearly I touched a nerve there,” Roelstraete says. In the essay, Roelstraete pointed out a growing tendency in contemporary art of looking backwards. “There is a very strong retrospective thrust,” Roelstraete says, which he points out stands in “stark contrast with [the idea of] art as this avant-garde enterprise that looks to the future”.
Two groups
The works on show by around 30 artists fall into two general groups: those that use archaeology directly as a subject and those that use it indirectly as a metaphor for historical research. For example, works by Michael Rakowitz and Jean-Luc Moulène are inspired by the archaeological collections in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad and the Louvre, respectively. “Those two are quite emblematic because they see archaeology as a minefield of conflicting political interest and historical forces,” Roelstraete says.
Oblique
Other artists take a more oblique approach, such as the Canadian artist Derek Brunen, who created a six-hour-long film in which he digs his own grave, or Stan Douglas’s 1986 film “Overture”, which uses black and white archival footage of a train ride through the Rocky Mountains and sound excerpts from Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. “The real heart of the show is artists facing history,” Roelstraete says, and how they narrate, digest or reconstruct the past through their work.
And no show combining contemporary art and archaeology would be complete without a piece by Mark Dion, the “prime excavator” as Roelstraete describes him. He has created a new piece for the show that resembles an archaeologist’s workstation with all the tools of the trade. The artist, billed as a “krypto-zoologist”, will also be in town for a talk with Lisa Graziose Corrin, the director of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University on Saturday, 2 November, at the Chicago History Museum, with tickets available at chicagohumanities.org.
• The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 9 November-9 March 2014.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘Back to the future'