Introduction: a browser (a second visit to the archive) [i] [ii]by Andrew Renton and Kitty Scott Nothing is thus more troubled and more troubling today than the concept
archived in this word “archive.”
[iii]
It concerns a history of sitting and thinking. The walking that accompanies
most exhibitions will not be entirely ruled out. Requests will have
to be made repeatedly.
Perhaps it is tautological to think of this Browser as a remake of an earlier version. Archives are always remaking
themselves. They are constituted not only by the materials contained
within them, but by those who (re)turn to them. Nothing happens until
then.
Bankside Browser also anticipates
a place and an archive which has yet to accrue to it. This Browser projects forward to when there will always have been
a Bankside.
Archives (1) The permanently valuable noncurrent (inactive) records of the museum
preserved because of their continuing value. Archives assume many
forms, including machine-readable records and audiovisual materials. (2) The repository where archival records are housed.
[iv]
Beginning, then, with apparent closure, because it is no longer apparently
concerned with the visible. The implication, then, that it is no longer
engaged with an aesthetic, working only with an idea—and a buried
one at that. But there is always an aesthetic, it is never without
metaphor; nothing remains hidden forever.
Deliberately low-keyed art often resembles ruins, like neolithic rather
than classical monuments, amalgams of past and future, remains of
something "more," vestiges of some unknown venture. The
ghost of content continues to hover over the most obdurately abstract
art. The more open, or ambiguous, the experience offered, the more
the viewer is forced to depend upon his own perceptions.
[v]
(The lost object. The realised object. The object redeemed.)
There are, then, several stages to our object. We grieve almost before
we begin. We grieve for something which has been lost to us, almost
at the moment we realise that it is ours to lose. We lose it at that
moment when it becomes autonomous, free-standing. When it looks
like something.
Many of the finding aids, especially those to individual collections,
do not only direct the inquirer to the specific documents, but also
serve as an introduction to artists and subjects. A guide to the papers
of a person often begins with a sketch of his or her life, with a
portrait and a few photographs of the work added. This is followed
by a chronology of the life, of exhibitions and other important data,
and a bibliography of titles by and about the person. The preparation
of these sections requires, of course, some research by the archivist
which, in turn, provides a background for the production of the inventory,
the main body of the finding aid. Carefully prepared guides to the
individual collections become important information sources, far beyond
their immediate purpose. In the case of local, or less widely known
artists, they are often the only publication with some comprehensive
information.
[vi]
Every system fails. What was unaccounted for, left out, missed, mistaken,
misunderstood, misplaced, lost, incorrectly spelled?
A hiatus, when what has been collected would appear to change if not before
our eyes, at least whilst our eyes are averted.
The public archives tradition was affected by European archival developments
in the nineteenth century. A body of European theory and practices
for the administration of public archives was steadily drawn upon
in the United States by state archivists and various other exponents
of the European archival mode in the early twentieth century. Formation
of the National Archives of the United States in 1934 gave impetus
to the spread of these practices and the theory behind them.
[vii]
The archive and the database offer up the possibility of searching and re-searching from anywhere. What kind of archive is it, now, when it might be entered from afar? An unresolved tension emerges from that resource seeking a subject and the latent, distant material of the collection. The collection suggests a quiet patience, awaiting even the most casual browser.
What you
should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and
at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over
to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can’t and
you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about,
another load off you mind.
I started
off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I
went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything
into the same-size brown cardboard boxes...
[viii]
The sounds of the archive make themselves known. Nimble fingers
whisper over keyboard keys, oft repeated questions fly about the room,
archivists discretely go about their business assisting visitors,
papers are shuffled....
The earliest remnants of organized archival collections have survived,
in the form of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform characters, from
the Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian civilizations of Mesopotamia
(3rd millennium BC) and from other sites, especially in the Mediterranean
region and Central and South-east Asia. Such early collections also
served as libraries; depending on whether they were part of a palace,
temple, museum or school, they contained official state and business
records, religious texts or literary documents. In Egypt under the
rule of Ptolemies (3rd century BC) the literary manuscripts held by
the Museum of Alexandria (a combination of museum, library, archive
and centre of scholarship) were systematically copied and catalogued.
The lost works of some Greek artists, such as Apelles, are known only
through references in Alexandrian and Roman Manuscripts. Imperial
Rome paid much attention to the administration of public records,
as well as to the production and presentation of literary and scholarly
texts.
[ix]
What has happened in this space? Who was here before we were? From our first thoughts we had been discussing that high Modernist office aesthetic, where the building seemed to formalise the type of activity contained within it. There is a residual optimism to St Christopher’s House. It has produced a methodology of its own.
Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we
are faced with here. We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect
of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply with the sudden vicinity
of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration
that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own.
[x]
Genizah. The word is late
Hebrew and suggests something gathered and hidden away. The synagogue’s
genizah was often an annexed room where sacred texts, no longer fit
for public or ritual use were set aside. The status of these texts
is difficult to define. As sacred texts, their written manifestations
must be absolutely perfect. Should one letter of the text be damaged
it should be repaired; should the parchment prove irreparable it must
be set aside. The faulty text becomes an object which cannot be used,
but equally cannot be destroyed. It may only be set aside, or respectfully
buried. In 1896 Dr Solomon Schechter obtained permission to remove the contents
of the Ben Ezra synagogue genizah in Cairo. Over 140,000 fragments
were transported to Cambridge University for extensive study. A hundred
years after the discovery the collection, it is still not completely
classified. The scholarship derived from the collection has authenticated,
but corrected later, more established versions of certain texts. What was set aside has, paradoxically, become an ‘authentic’ resource.
...[H]ere, again, a new form of expression was involved. Instead of painting
something new, my aim was to reproduce the paintings and the objects
that I liked and collect them in a space as small as possible. I did
not know how to go about it. I first thought of a book, but I did
not like the idea. Then it occured to me it could be a box in which
all my works would be collected and mounted like in a small museum,
a portable museum so to speak.
[xi]
Appearance is confirmation of an object in its place. It looks like something;
it looks like itself. And confirmation only occurs with a representation
made in relation to some other object or objects in a similar state. This is to speak of
genre. The object confirms its look with
genre, and vice versa. It is never without genre.
The archive cannot be described in its totality; and its presence is unavoidable.
It emerges in fragments, regions, and levels, more fully, no doubt,
and with greater sharpness, the greater the time that separates us
from it: at most were it not for the rarity of the documents, the
greater chronological distance would be necessary to analyse it. And
yet could this description of the archive be justified, could it elucidate
that which makes it possible, map out the place where it speaks, control
its rights and duties, test and develop its concepts—at least at this
stage of the search, when it can define its possibilities only in
the moment of their realization—if it persisted in describing only
the most distant horizons?...
[xii]
There is something about the commitment to submission, which confers a
different shape and status upon the work. In taking it away from the
obligations of installation, there is still the question of what kind
of object(s) it is (they are), and what could such objects do?
It struck us that the process of submission was becoming a parallel process
of accommodation and installation. There is, in the end, no dislocation,
because there never was any location which might serve to focus the
attention of anything that fell within it.
The archive, in a certain sense, is meant to be considered a work of art,
or perhaps more accurately, as a vehicle for artistic research, as
a working model for research as art, art as research.
[xiii]
It is always moving.
The archive has always been a pledge,
and like every pledge [gage],
a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer
archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable
meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that
archives. It begins with the printer.
[xiv]
... And therefore it is always yielding. For we are working through a
time when the work cannot centre itself. It chooses to inhabit the
margins. Perhaps this is a measure of the way that we work with a
notion of meaning infinitely flowing. It is so self-evident that we
have become even mistrustful of closure.
Is then, any solution, even this one, an evasion of that understanding?
Is the browse a compromised temporary closure, or precisely its opposite,
an act of resistance?
The concept for his Time Capsules originated in the mid 1960s, but Warhol
started making them in earnest in the early 1970s. The resulting collection
of more than 600 boxes and file cabinets records every aspect of his
daily life. After the Time Capsules are fully catalogued, they will
stand as the most comprehensive record of Warhol the artist, filmmaker,
author, publisher, music producer, businessman, celebrity and collector.
They will also serve as an intriguing window on American culture and
society during those years.
[xv]
Because everything is equivalent, or at least should begin with such a
semblance, we have to learn how to behave within the archive. It is
not simply a question of decorum, it is knowing how to look. There is always a question of how things might be contained, preserved.
They might be stored away;
out of sight. This would aspire to an object’s
integrity and stability. But there must be handling.
And with handling comes change. For to observe a thing is to change
it.
(One might suspect that Derrida was right to place Freud somewhere near
the archive, since we may find that it engenders all manner of pathological
behaviour.)
We live in an information-oriented society in which everything must be
accounted for. Each individual is an "image bank," a terminal
constantly accumulating and processing a vast amount of information.
This cultural reality, as it operates on the individual and on collective
levels, is being understood and articulated by more and more artists
who function as curators of the imagination. These artists use the
media and other forms of interaction and exchange, developing an artists'
network that parallels conventional art systems. Each artist's concerns
are personal but open to cross-referencing with those of others who
are willing to share their research for the purpose of creating art.
[xvi]
There are no terms, at first, with which to speak of the new. So one inhabits
the archive, at first, without language, or with barely the makings
of one. We come to speak within the archive and it comes to speak
for itself.
Andrew Renton & Kitty Scott London & Vancouver & London October 1996 - February 1999
[ii] Bankside Browser emerges from the first Browser project held in Vancouver in 1997. The organisers are grateful to the board of Artropolis AT Eight Society for their extensive support and development of the project. [iii] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, (trans. Eric Prenowitz), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 90. [iv] William A. Deiss, Museum Archives: An Introduction, Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1984, p. 8. [v] Lucy Lippard, Six Years: the Dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 (reprint), p. 112. [vi] Antje B. Lemke, "Art Archives: A Common Concern of Archivists, Librarians, and Museum Professionals", Art Libraries Journal, Vol. 14, #2, 1989, p. 10. [vii] Richard C. Berner, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical Analysis, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983, p. 2. [viii] Andy Warhol, From A to B. [Reference to folow————] [ix] Antje B. Lemke, Deirdre C. Stam, "Archives", The Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner (ed.), Ohio: RR Donnelley & Sons Company, 1996, p. 364. [x] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1973, p. xvi. [xi] Marcel Duchamp, Interview with J.J. Sweeney, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz (ed.), London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, p. 513. [xii] Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith), New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 130. [xiii] Scott Watson, “Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies from the Morris/Trasov Archive", Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies from the Morris/Trasov Archive, Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1992, p. 5. [xiv] Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 18. [xv] Richard Hellinger, "The Archives of the Andy Warhol Museum", The Andy Warhol Museum, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1994, pp. 197-198. [xvi] Michael Morris, "The Artist as Curator of the Imagination”, Artscanada, April/May, 1978, p. 41. |