POTENTIAL:
ongoing archive
by
Anna Harding
Justin Hoffman warned, referring us back to the philosophy of the Auto-destructive
Art movement in the late 60s, that “If we do not know how to destroy
superfluous commodities, forces, and information, we will destroy ourselves” . Today we have become used to over-ordering in a
buy one, get one free culture. Getting our snapshots processed, it is
too easy to end up with not one set of prints, but a second set for
free, plus a reference sheet of mini-prints. We end up with 100 prints
when actually there are only a handful of images worth keeping. Brewster
Kahle, currently archiving the entire internet states: “We recently
just went over 100 Terabytes for the web collection alone. Quantity-wise
that’s larger than the library of congress”. The internet is now the primary information resource
to millions who, like Kahle, feel that “The net’s graduated from being
exciting to being an appendage to my brain”. Are there implications
regarding brain function and data processing if we become so reliant
on excesses of external data? What does it mean that this appendage
to the brain is now archived only by his commercial company, Alexa?
The human genome project offers the patent for the genetic make-up of
the human being. Tim Hubbard of the Sanger Centre, founded to further
the knowledge of genomes, recently stated that while the total genetic
data for the human being is now mapped in the human genome, they
haven’t a clue how to build the first cell of a new human being. The
database is a repository, a bank for sequences and maps and potential
structures for engineering new forms of life. Holding the patent is
not currently about expression in human form, but about usefulness,
about potential.
An archive is a repository for the future, a starting
point, not an end point. While the collector perhaps discriminates
between objects, the archivist accumulates with no declaration of
what specific value that material may hold for future users.
Derrida suggested that we should “restructure from
head to bottom our inherited concept of the archive”. Rather than making the usual association between
archives and the past, it is the future that is at issue. Referring
to Freud’s intention to analyze across the apparent absence of memory
and of archive, the symptoms, signs and metaphors that attest to archival
documentation where an ‘ordinary historian’ finds none, he highlights
the differing approaches to the past held by a psychoanalyst and a
historian. Derrida proposes that archives offer the opportunity for
a new persona: the “historian of promise…(who)would work at the vertiginous
moment of suspense at which the future is unknown and unknowable”. Perhaps this is where the project POTENTIAL: ongoing
archive is located: being open towards the future as well as in anticipation
of hope for the future , offering models as well as critique.
Archival work is largely invisible, mute, stumm, according to some a withdrawal,
and in Baudrillard’s opinion it lacks communicability. Perhaps because
of this (until the arrival of the internet) archives have been perceived
as inaccessible, only open to ‘experts’. This inaccessibility has
been made worse by the fact that increasingly archives and image banks
are considered by institutions as commodities who increasingly impose
charges for making a search, let alone using the material in any published
form.
In POTENTIAL: ongoing archive, processes of sorting and
organising information are foregrounded and opened to scrutiny by artists.
Some propose autonomous organising systems, some highlight hidden values
which structure our knowledge. They encourage us each to customise our
own sorting and collecting lenses.
The Greek root of the word archive
arkheion, means house, residence of the
superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded or were considered
to possess the right to make the law. It was at their home that official
documents were filed. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in
effect spoke the law, on the basis of the substrate which legitimises
it, shelters and in effect conceals it . The archive is also a consignation, a gathering
together of signs in an ideal configuration, in a consignment. The principles
upon which institutional archives are founded are brought into question
by a number of artists’ practices. Other artists have conveyed uncertainty
about consigning their personal work to public archives, perhaps uncertain
that they will remain visible and accessible and that the artist’s intention
can be maintained. Alternative projects have arisen which take the form
of autonomous archive, set up by individual artists or curators as a
resource for their working practice. But the downside of autonomy is
perhaps the danger of being forgotten and overlooked, so the implications
of non-cooperation have to be considered. These are some of the dilemmas
that POTENTIAL: ongoing archive will consider.
The dangers of the imperative to rationalise and streamline information
are commented on by Susan Buck-Morss. She highlighted the potential
loss in the transfer of archival data from one format to another which
she witnessed during her research on Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk
at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In tracing Benjamin’s working
methods she detects a color-crayon coding system on his notes: drawings
of squares, x’s, circles and crosses. By decoding this system, scholars
identified Benjamin’s planned book on Baudelaire. Buck-Morss describes
going into the library with her set of coloured wax crayons in order
to copy the marks before they were ‘deleted’ from the visible archive.
The marks were about to be expunged by archivists transferring papers
to microfiche, the detail from margins or verso being forsaken in the
name of efficiency of access.
In 1999 the performance group desperate optimists decided
to stop making live theatre productions and to make a CD-ROM version
of their previous 6 years of performance work, calling the CD Stalking Memory. This might seem a healthy way to conclude a period
of activity, consolidating it in a format that can be conveniently carried
on one disc. But what Stalking
Memory interestingly addresses, is how our memory of these projects
can be affected by what we have or haven’t seen of the original work.
The highly edited video clips and selected choice of stills on the CD-ROM,
which are known to be lacking and incomplete, are accompanied by texts
which deliberately highlight this problem.
Data is next to useless without interpretation. The laboratory in Leverkusen
where the German photographers such as Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth
have their large format photographic prints made, holds an archive not
only of each artist’s digital files, but a named member of staff as
interpreter of each artist’s personal instructions. The renown of this
lab rests in the quality of interpretation of archival data to each
artist’s recorded preferences to produce identical editioned prints.
An ability to produce identical, consistent results through personal
interpretation of archived data is their expertise.
Archives always have potential for misuse. The Guardian newspaper recently
made an apology concerning the contextual use of two photographs they
had published. Both were photographs of children, used out of context
to illustrate articles about racial tension in the North of England.
By way of apology to the children and their parents for the misleading
use of these images, the second picture was deleted from the newspaper’s
archive, as if its removal absolved the newspaper of their guilt and
the possibility of such ‘mistakes’ being endlessly repeated. But as
Derrida remarked in Archive Fever
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if
not of memory”.
Artists regularly use archival material as inspiration and reference
in their work. J.G.Ballard writing on Tacita Dean’s film Lost
at Sea, based on the story of the round-the-world yachtsman Donald
Crowhurst who disappeared at sea in 1969, describes it as a “tour de
force of melancholy reporting”. In another of Dean’s works, Girl Stowaway,
1994-6, the installation includes a small newspaper clipping which provides
a key point of clarity and moment of inspiration for the work and our
reading of it. A flash of imagination offered by a small chance detail
like this news clipping, offers an example of what excites the researcher
or artist in the archive. This might be what another writer
on Tacita Dean refers to as a ‘radium glow’, the ‘green flash’ occasionally
seen the moment after the sun disappears into the sea at sunset, when
a green iridescent flash fans out over the horizon . The flash is a fragile moment both of transfixion,
and also of disappearance.
With live, ephemeral and participatory art practices, the imperative
to make and distribute documentation is inestimable, but how is our
memory of an artwork affected by the documentation? Occasionally such
importance is attached to documentation that the archive, the future
viewer, may be privileged over the live audience . Ever-expanding capacities for digital
storage and retrieval reduce the need to decide what to throw away and
hence decisions as to what is important can be deferred. We reach the
danger point of information overload. To avoid obsolescence,
archival data must regularly migrate onto the latest format – from floppy
disc to CD-ROM (zip and jazz discs being long defunct) to DVD and so
on. This is time-consuming, requires vigilance and accuracy, is costly
and as with all archival work, is completely unglamorous.
Under the creeping domination of art institutions by capitalist imperatives , some individual artists and interested parties may
feel that the onus rests on them to maintain their own archives as some
kind of alternative, perhaps at the same time dispensing with some of
the expectations, such as permanence and inflexible order, which institutions
impose. Scott Lash points out that “Organisations and their accompanying
power, and indeed individualization as we know it, are decaying social
forms” . In our age of collapsing boundaries, of flows, perhaps
we are no longer bound by conventional organising systems (the props,
the struts, the joists that sustained ideology) and can propose smarter
alternatives. Scott Lash suggests we get ‘disorganisations’, which have
no interest in the procedure and protocol of the old organisations,
which are reflexive about values, which are always on the move, which
are not super-structural, where personal aesthetic and ethical frameworks
are valued, which can be reflexive, critically engaged and flexible,
which have the potential to be open and ongoing. The current attitudes
among artists to archive as a basic organising system, are perhaps what
we might take from POTENTIAL. The artists contributed with the following
works:
Revisits by Christian
Dorley-Brown one of a number of his projects that reinterpret
and re-read personal picture archives.
In 1986-7 Dorley-Brown photographed all the tower blocks
in the London Borough of Hackney, suspecting that they would not be
around for much longer and that an undervalued aspect of local history
and geography was about to be lost. He offered this original set of
prints to the Hackney Archive as some sort of civic duty (this archive
was closed in 2002 due to extensive cuts by Hackney council). Revisiting
the same locations in 2001-2, re-shooting each image from an identical
viewpoint, he has made Revisits 1987-2001 which consists of over 100 pairs, reflecting the
results of changing housing and planning policies on the urban environment.
A complete set of prints, plus a CD version, all realigned digitally
in 2002, is destined for the Museum of London photo archive and he is
experimenting with new archival pigments and ink jet processes which
promise that the prints remain stable for 100 years, which contributes
a functional aesthetic to the project.
Ironically 15 years later, after extensive demolition,
tower blocks are being rebuilt in Hackney, this time by private developers
for young professionals who enjoy the fine views (was this not Corbusier’s
intention for the blocks in the first place?). Unsurprisingly the local
planners and architects have no interest in this photographic document
of changing attitudes and aspirations. A similar lack of interest in
his archival endeavours was recently shown by the National Portrait
Gallery, who last year exhibited his portrait of a town: haverhill2000.com
- a composite morph portrait built up from 2000 individual portraits.
Despite extensive debate about this portrait of Britain in the year
2000, in the national press and on the internet, the National Portrait Gallery felt unable to accept
it for their collection as it is ‘anonymous’ and not of one famous individual.
The work of Ella Gibbs might raise some similar
questions. Her works seem designed to evade conventional art categories.
For example, belt, an ongoing project of hers since
1996, she describes as belt a
space in between, an experimental live meeting place / project space
/ laboratory of ideas. Her most visible project to date (part of the
exhibitionTemporary Accommodation,
Whitechapel Art Gallery, Jan. 2001), was simply entitled Programme, and to many gallery visitors appeared irritatingly ephemeral
and completely ungraspable. The aesthetic which Gibbs works with relies
often on chance and momentary connections between individuals and a
sense of intimacy of the moment which she creates. The activities which
constituted Programme consisted
of a series Planned Projects* ( performances, preachers,
language classes run by artists, cake-baking and a tea party) as well
as Incidental Events*, such
as the introduction of a sofa, red shoes day, a mending event and numerous
other acts offered by members of the public as part of her project.
The whole Programme was backed up obsessively with
thorough documentation of all the events that took place over the 53-day
period.
During Programme, emphasis was primarily on the event
taking place and on the flexibility of the space which changed everyday.
Documentation was used in thephotocopied weekly newsletters,
providing visitors with information and news of what had already happened
and a schedule of forthcoming events. It was produced and distributed
in the gallery, in local cafes, bars and mailed out. It was free to
take away and back issues were always available. Posters advertised
every event, were updated constantly and displayed on gallery notice
boards. Until a calendar was made in the gallery, the ‘activity’ of documenting was probably more evident than the documentation
itself.
A significant development in the 53-day ongoing event
was the production of Calendar,
a wall-size graphic response to Programme
taking the form of a day-by-day calendar format of photos, lists and
other ephemera, produced by artist and close friend Tomoko Takahashi
(archivist anonymous), from the materials collected by Ella and participants
in her ongoing archive. Calendar
involved sorting, classifying and displaying material from the extensive
archive which Ella had accumulated. It was made in the gallery during
opening hours and was only finished hours before the exhibition ended.
Calendar was then beautifully documented on 5 x 4 photographic transparencies
to retain the maximum detail possible in reprographic form. The detailed
archiving of Programme, as
well as Tomoko's contribution of Calendar, insist on a desire not to be misunderstood (hence the extensive
list of credits below). They perhaps also provide a prototype for the
future, a blueprint conveying the layout and content of such a project.
A parallel archive is provided as a web project (www.whitechapel.org/programme)*
made in the months after Programme took place. This parallel documentation
to Takahashi's Calendar avoids
over-determination by offering an excess of detail and the opportunity
to inspect any detail which catches your curiosity. This delicate balance
between closure and leaving open to the future, offers the possibility
of an ongoing event, retaining something of the specificity and intimacy
of the live moments which Ella is able to create.
Jakob Jakobsen’s psychogeography workshops, in an
abstract way, touched problematics very relevant to a discourse of
the archive, especially regarding representation and production of
ideology. He deals with not an archive with documents, but a living
city (a living archive). The objective of his workshops is to make
a new emotional map of the city in question and by that challenging
the common technical and instrumental construction and representation
of the city.
Helmut Kandl’s two videos, A Doctor from Vienna and Portraits
Austria 1942-1944 were both made from the photo archive of an unknown
photographer, born around 1910, probably a pharmacist or doctor, an
eye specialist. The archive, consisting of 14,000 numbered negatives,
was found when a flat was cleared. The numbering provides a chronology
for the two sequences of images. The first set, including some colour,
are seemingly the private life of the photographer spanning a generation.
Family events (marriage, child, nude shots of his wife, skiing trips)
merge with historical events (invasion of Hitler’s army, Nazi rallies,
destroyed cities). We witness the rawness of an archive in unedited
form. With no information beyond dates spanning war years and the location
of Vienna, we are left to imagine the rest. The formal portraits are
presented on a monitor turned upright to portrait format adding a sense
of purposeful and unrelenting inspection, like a medical light box inspection,
with the monitor bearing the volume of the head and shoulders, like
the carved head of Karl Marx emerging from the vertical stone block
on his tomb at Highgate Cemetery.
Kelly Oliver in her book Witnessing
refers to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of recognition: reviewing,
acknowledging, admitting or confessing, the mental process of identifying
what has been known before. She emphasises how this visual process of knowing,
grasping objects at a distance, creates an illusion of mastery, born
out of suspicion and accusation. In Kandl’s two Portraits
series, the faces portrayed raise questions of complicity and witnessing,
perhaps questioning the relation of a single individual to politics.
They evoke Christian Boltanski’s archive projects, for example Le Lycée Chases, in which ordinary school class photos are reproduced
and enlarged beyond the capacity of the originals, yet fail to generate
further information through closer inspection, yielding only further
ambiguity and anonymity in the pattern of dots making up the photographic
print. Kandl highlights the ambiguity of loss, as well as an implied
arbitrariness and perhaps violence of the system whereby these individuals
have been collected together. He also brings us head on with the fact
that we wish of the artist and of viewers to add their own shifting
subjectivity, to somehow complete the picture and make it comfortable.
For instance in my case, recently seeing Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film
The Night Porter (a plot centred
on the masking of war crimes in Vienna), has coloured my own viewing
of Kandl’s found portraits.
The use of family narrative and autobiography
has featured strongly in Rita Keegan’s work. Although she was
born in New York City her parents were Canadian. Her mother Olive, was
born in Montreal then raised in Dominica. She moved back as a young
woman where she met Rita’s father, Aubrey. They married in 1939. When
war came her father enlisted and her mother went to live with his family
in Collingwood. Her father's people came to Ontario early in the 19th
century and settled there, where his great grandfather Pleasant Duval
opened a barbershop and soda fountain. After the war her father and
mother moved to the States where she and her brother Lorne were born.
Each summer they would return to Collingwood.
In Apron Strings
Keegan looks at the domestic space, where the traditional focus
for most women and children was the kitchen, the heart of the home. The kitchen has always been a room with many other functions than
the preparation and the eating of food. It is the room where everything
happens. In the small apartment she grew up in, the kitchen table was
the most used piece of furniture in the house. The aprons were from
her grandmother’s house in Canada. They are an important part of the
domestic ritual representing a social history and decades of styles.
Nils Norman’s Adventure
Playgrounds follow on from his book The Contemporary Picturesque,
adding another category of urban furniture to be collected and displayed.
The addition of graphics and literature from the Adventure Playgrounds
Association adds through association a faded idealism from the 60s and
the play movement from which these structures emerge. Like the Arts
and Crafts idealism of the early London County Council housing (Boundary
Estate in Shoreditch) or the garden suburb movement (Turnham Green in
West London) the idealism behind the provision of children’s play equipment
has long been neglected and taken for granted. Nils’ recuperation of
past ideals carries irony and nostalgia beyond a purely forensic cataloguing
of the under-funding and poverty of long-term thinking in much of our
inner city urban planning today. A terrible sense of loss and neglect
is conveyed by archiving attempts at creative play, a powerful attestation
to our loss of aspiration for social space, space as a place for adventure
and exercise.
When Ruth Maclennan took up the position of Artist-in-Residence
at the London School of Economics, she began by making a series of video
interviews with archivists to show how the archivists reflect, self-consciously
or otherwise, certain received views, that are quite fashionable today
(access, heritage etc.) and to show their own personalities, outside
interests, foibles, ways of moving in the space and responding to the
camera and questions. The archivists not only make but in a sense are
the system of retrieval for the archive, as you have to go through them
to find anything. She also shows through the use of overt editing, the
artificiality of the set-up, the staginess of the interview, the way
each in a sense gets a chance to 'do a turn'.She also made
a poster charting different terms used for plotting and mapping systems
and has searched out mapping systems and diagrams which are housed in
the archives, to consider how people in different contexts have come
up with graphic systems to make sense of information. These projects
examine the subjective and historically contextualised moment of things
which are communicated as if they were objective and true, if not timeless.
She explores an aesthetics and ethics of truth which belongs to a particular
moment and situation.
Naomi Salaman’s Changed Press Marks of the Private
Case is about the history of sexuality and the history of Information
Management, storage and classification. It is made on microfilm - a
35mm black and white film which is the International Archive Standard
material used for documentation. It is intended to be seen on a microfilm
reader in a library or archive. It documents the paper records of over
800 books which have changed category, or 'press mark' from Private
Case books to a less restrictive classification within the library scheme.
Changed Press Marks of the Private Case is a work about documentation
as well as a source of information for researchers, and forms part of
Salaman's work on 19th century collections of erotica in public libraries
and museums. It was funded by the London Arts Board and is being distributed
to forty libraries in the UK and abroad.
Barbara Steveni’s performance ‘I am an Archive’
was a recent departure within Barbara’s practice, which she has adopted
as one means of representing a body of scarcely known (in effect suppressed)
archival material, the history of APG, the Artist Placement Group. It
coincided with a three year process of negotiation for purchase of the
APG archive, between the UK artists of APG and the national contemporary
gallery of Britain, the Tate Gallery Archives Department, a negotiation
which included pushing the Tate’s desire to ‘acquire’ the archive to
one of ‘purchase’. It also coincided
with the current growing interest both in APG’s ideas and application
of its practice (as O + I) in today’s society.
The title and idea ‘I am an Archive’ is an extension
of what Barbara had for many years seen her work with APG as being –
a continuous performance – stemming originally from our conversations
over these last three years during the Tate negotiations and their preparation
for its ‘purchase’ and with Barney Drabble. It also stemmed from her
view that ‘creativity’ is never a finished thing. If you preempt it
and control it, you will limit what can emerge.
Barbara’s position within the body of this ongoing work,
APG now O + I, was further
endorsed recently when asked to make an oral history recording for the
National Sound Archives series Artist
Lives, she realised “I am the archive”. Her specific area of ‘research’
is essentially pragmatic: lobbying for and implementing a new role and
function for art and artist within societies, non-art institutions,
its government, commercial and educational organisations, could now
be viewed as in the past rather than as an ongoing exemplary practice
.
A move into a contextual ‘art’ performance was recently
made by Barbara,.Her recent transition from illustrated talk to performance
(Jan – Feb 2002), is something I have perhaps felt uncomfortable about,
but which Barbara is keen to develop.
Recently in response to growing interest in this, she developed
a performance called I am an archive, in which she presents on stage a beautifully made
crate which was delivered to her after the Out of Actions show in Barcelona,
which she uses as a prop for presenting her Russian banner and a box
of archival material from which she reads, then as a seat while she
shows slides, pointing out the cracked slides to us. Consequently
“Context is Half the Work” coined by John Latham continues today as
a proven and fundamental lynch pin in this in this arena of art action,
through O + I and Barbara both in her work with the Group and in her
working methods as an individual. Her ongoing concerns when addressing
today’s issues and positioning, or ‘placing’ herself in today’s contexts,
revolve around: “How do we negotiate as artists an effective role and
function for art and artists in today’s greed economy dominated as it
is by ‘money- worship’?. Whose Culture is it anyway, for whom and for
what purpose? (a reference to cultural politicians and art managers;
in this case the UK’s ex minister for Culture Chris Smith and his proclamation,
“I want to see Culture at the heart of Government”.Her stage
presentation, installation, lecture, slide-show, presents the potential
of a past history for today’s contexts.
V-files by
Nasrin Tabatabai, as the title simply suggests, is a computer
file of video clips, a selection of short video fragments abstracted
from her own video rushes as well as those of other people who contributed
their home videos or travelogues. The clips span many disparate locations,
transcending geography and place. This is a selection of tiny fragments,
perhaps a minute from a two-hour tape, or an idle moment when the camera
points at the floor, footage that occurs by chance which offers potential,
maybe as a trigger for future projects or to provoke a memory.
V-files is a search for intangible narratives,
selected intuitively. As with a jump of memory, the images change, mix,
connect and disconnect on the surface of the screen, avoiding giving
any direction to the perception of the viewer. The topography of cities,
travelogues, meetings in unexpected moments, daily life are all in one
screen, ready to jump, mix, or simply not fit.File
titles provide prompts, aide-memoirs adopted for the home computer.
Recurring interests in memory, aspiration, and location or lack of,
seem to feature in all of Tabatabai’s recent projects. Not specific
locatable memories, but memories which can be recycled, telling details
in which we can one day find everything and another day nothing.
V-files has
a parallel in the collecting and assembling of personal sound archives
via peer to peer file sharing networks such as Napster or LimeWire (or
what inevitably followed shortly in their footsteps, the subscription
services), which enable individuals to search and compile esoteric sound
collections on their computer. V-files
highlights the highly personal readings that can be made in every archive.
Introductory text by Anna Harding from the book Potential:
ongoing archive which she edited, published by Artimo Amsterdam 2002
ISBN 90-75380-48-8www.lostart.nl and coincided with the exhibition Potential,
an ongoing archive curated by Anna Harding, in John Hansard Gallery,
Southampton, 2002.
copyright Anna Harding 2002
.“ Referring to the murder
of Moses, embedded in Jewish memory (and in the memory of humanity),
Derrida views this itself as a virtual archive, implying that the texts
of this archive are not readable according to the paths of “ordinary
history”. The unconscious does not know the difference between the virtual
and the actual, the intention and the action, hence, pursuing a psychoanalytic
logic, Derrida asks, “what difference is there between murder and an
intention to murder…?.” The will to kill, the acting out and the attempt
to murder are all literally inscribed in the archive. Derrida op. cit.
pp. 64-67.
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