In this essay I discuss two central themes of my scholarly research: the use of documents and the place of the image in contemporary artistic practices. These issues form the basis of the integrated project “Precarious lives: art, memory, and history”. Although rejected by minimalists and conceptualists, the image was the fundamental operator in the documentary paradigm in the arts of the 60s and 70s. We consider here the critical image as the one that seeks a contact with the real. Although it fails to capture the entirety of its referent, the critical image works that loss and shows that failure.
Keywords: art and document; art and precarity; documentary art; critical image.
