The Artist as Historian

In his essay “The Artist as Historian,” Mark Godfrey highlights recent art practices whose points of departure are not only researching past events but also “the way in which such events have formerly been narrated or indeed ignored in received historical writing.” Godfrey himself, if briefly, uses history, linking the formal strategies of these contemporary practices (for example those of Jermey Deller, Francis Alÿs, Tacita Dean and Anri Sala) to the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s and early 70s as well as to the Pictures artists of the 1980s. While noting that a new generation of artists are using similar media when compared to the canon of conceptual and appropriation art (e.g. text and the indexical image– photos, slides, film and video), Godfrey distinguishes the former from the latter two movements by observing that today’s artists are using these media to specifically critique modes of historical representation. He then focuses the remainder of his essay on analyzing the works of a current practitioner who exemplifies the “artist as historian”– Matthew Buckingham. Buckingham might seem a good choice to represent this movement in part because his interests span an eclectic range of American and European history and his work is produced in a wide range of media.