The Death of Imagination and the Destruction of Inwardness

The essays in Contestations seem to speak to a movement away from treating the archive as a means to create a totality, a grand narrative, to a way of using the archive to reclaim, or at least re-construct new fictive histories or memories. As Hal Foster writes in his Archival Impulse essay “This move to turn “excavation sites into construction sites is welcome in another way too: it suggests a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic.”

The quote in the From Enthusiasm interview “We recognize that it’s no longer helpful to pretend that artists originate the products they make...Interpretation has superseded intention” does seem open for debate. A move from “struggling to originate” to a “struggle to choose” seems to speak to superficial view of the world that will only lead to superficial results.