WHAT IS CONSISTENT, though not entirely indicative of any larger movement or thematic purpose, is a similar impulse that all of these artists — from Bourgeois to Judd to Wojnarowicz to Chicago — possess: the desire to chronicle, to document. The art can be the archive. Or the archive can be the art. Just in the way Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-Valise” (1935-41), a series of miniature reproductions of his own work, was a playful compendium rendered in small-scale, so Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” is itself an archive, one that suggests new hierarchies that foreground women. On a larger scale, the drive to chronicle is something that possesses all of us, not just artists; how that act is determined as art is also worth examining. The curator Massimiliano Gioni’s 2016 New Museum show “The Keeper” was an examination of the collections not just of artists but of ordinary people, from a farmer named Wilson Bentley, who insisted on documenting every snowflake that fell across his Vermont yard to the curator and artist Ydessa Hendeles, who has assembled the largest collection of historical portraits of people photographed with teddy bears — a toy whose birth and subsequent popularity overlapped with the rise of American imperialism and Nazi Germany. Among the thousands of such pictures are those of families proudly dressed in their Nazi uniforms. Hendeles has pointed out how difficult it was to find those particular images in her exhaustive search. But it’s not because so few of them existed. It’s because today there is a shame in acknowledging them.

All too often, the gaps in an artist’s life are just as startling to discover — the unspoken moments that inform the work, that speak to “its presence in time and space,” as Walter Benjamin put it, “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” The artist Ruth Asawa, who died in 2013, famously studied at the progressive Black Mountain College with Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers. Her hanging wire sculptures are beautiful and sensuous pieces; their woven forms appear to breathe like creatures if disturbed by a gust of air or the accidental touch of a viewer. Asawa was incarcerated with her family as a teenager during the 1940s at the Rohwer concentration camp in Arkansas. Had she not faced discrimination as a Japanese-American, it is possible she may never have found herself in the more radical and experimental mountains of North Carolina, where prejudices against her race were largely nonexistent. What was it like, then, to be a teenager in what was essentially a hastily erected, dusty prison, to have one’s existence henceforth marked as some kind of threat? Surely Asawa was creating her earliest work, learning to express the deepest parts of herself on paper or with craft. There are only two surviving watercolors by Asawa from her time in the camp with her family. One depicts a sumo wrestling match; the other, a landscape of the swamp surrounding the camp. There is one photo of Asawa with her English teacher and her fellow classmates on a field trip outside the camp, where it is possible she drew the landscape. In a 2002 interview, Asawa said she wasn’t interested in making art that confronted the experience. “Just surviving was much more intense,” she said of her regular life as part of an immigrant family in the United States. Perhaps she refused to allow the experience of incarceration to define her. Perhaps she wanted to discuss the experience on her terms. Or perhaps, when looking at all of these archives, as W.G. Sebald so beautifully understood, the indirect gaze can make for a more potent examination of the injustices of life, writing, as he did, not about the atrocities of the Holocaust but about the silkworm production of the Third Reich (1933-45): a historical detail seemingly accessed on a walk across the Suffolk countryside. We value archives because we value the life that preceded them. But artists are not perfectly self-aware, and they owe neither us, nor posterity, an explanation for what they value or what they choose to ignore. What always remains is the work, and then the archive. For those of us who are left, we can only attempt to read between the lines.