Július Koller a umelecký archív

This paper deals with the topic of artist’s archive with an emphasis on Julius Koller’s archive. It concerns with the broader discursive frames of archives understanding and its specific framework within the art production. It reveals Koller’s archive practices as a whole with his conceptual work included, as well as they are put in the context of selfhistoricizing practices, that are typical for the former Eastern Bloc situation. It illustrates similar strategies in the work of the IRWIN group, Museum of American Art in Berlin, Lia Perjovschi, J. H. Kocman, KwieKulik, Artpool Art Research Center, Tamás St. Auby and Ilja Kabakov. Their artistic practice constists of selfdocumentation and self-administration that serves to draft some kind of the para-institution due to lack of independent platforms for presenting visual art not necessarily bound to official doctrine of social realism. This activity turns out to possess substantial power to become effective subversive tacticts within the existing system. In the last part, the anthropological matter of the archive as a mind-map is discussed in a new relation to memory, from the photomontage, through The Mnemosyne Atlas and an imaginary museum of Aby Warburg to the Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. It provides another possibility how to grasp the phenomenom of art archive in the framework of visuality of modernity.