Archiving to Oblivion

At some point the archive became a concern of art theory. Not archiving in its verbal form, but "the archive". For some the archive was an artistic genre, for others it was a medium, or a theme, or a precondition of any artwork. Some talked about artists who found their primary materials in existing archives, or about those who built their own idiosyncratic archives, or those who simply collected stuff together or had a penchant for old bits of paper and faded photographs, but also about those who sought out and made visible documents neglected by history and hence not previously archived…