Photography is one of the mediums that I rarely connect to problematic situations. Whether it be interpretation, classification and in this case even less archival work. This is possibly explained by the assumption that photographs are so straight forward that what needs to be understood beyond their own existence? Unlike books, manuscripts, even paintings and other mediums photographs are considered a stolen moment encapsulated in a photograph to document.
I became aware of this dismissiveness while reading Elizabeth Edwards’ Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive. She states “An archive—of photographs—something separate from the dynamic of a discipline, something to be mined when useful, ignored at whim; a mere passive resource, tangential to the main business, a mere supporting role whose significance is defined not through its own identity but through asymmetrical relations with other objects which it serves to confirm in some way or other.”
A perfect example of this is the outstanding work Julia van Haaften did for the NYPL’s photograph collection, which had been neglected and forgotten until her personal interest sparked this great endeavor of classifying, organizing and eventually creating a collection out of the photographic material.
The retrieval and storage aspects of the archive are structural components that undoubtedly are of great importance for the conservation and organization of them. Nevertheless, as Jhon Tagg shares in “The Archiving Machine, or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet”, it is the relationship of classification and knowledge that make the archive a well of wisdom. The importance of classification is essentially making sure we have as less lost narratives as humanly possible and that through classification systems we can diligently and responsibly reflect truth, whichever that may be.
I found very interesting how photography, since its origins with the stereograph and other formats, had “the issue of the archive”. As already discussed in other classes, we often think that the problem of excess of data / documents / material is only a question of our time, however John Tagg’s text presents the fascinating discussion around the mass production of stereographs in 1859. Thus, classification and organization of photographs and stereographs were since the beginning an issue to be solved, and the handbook The Camera as Historian represents this issue very well. It does so, mainly because it shows how every choice of classification system reveals its power relations, social rules and, as Tagg says (inspired by Foucault) “the space of the file is the space of disciplinary machine”.
With this in mind, it was a great discovery for me to think about the idea of “counterarchives”. Though the commandment aspect is intrinsically part of any archive, the idea that “forgotten” or “lost” archives have the power to create a new narrative about society, especially the ones that suffered from a regime of terror, made me realize how important each archive is in relation to the discussion of truth. The fact that “Archives still retain, therefore, a particular and perhaps privileged relation to the field of truth…” is an engaging form to relate with archives, and it improves the discussion about History and narration. Yet, it was not very clear to me what the author meant with the statement that “archive cannot be taken over but has to be smashed.” I understand his concern about the danger of using archives in the study of history as an element of real truth, however the idea of “smashing” was not clear (maybe an English issue for me?)
Finally, I would like to add a comment about Douglas Crimp’s text concerning photography collection and the NYPL case. I found very interesting how, when Julia van Haaften started organizing the photography collection in 1977, photography “changed” its role, gaining autonomy from the document / archive / subject it was coming from, and embodying an aesthetic element. Thus, becoming art. When the author gives the example of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs that would not only represent the information in the photo, but also the expression of an artist, I ask to myself: if each photo has this “double” aspect (information and artistic intension or interpretation), how should we organize them? If until now photography has usually been classified through author’s name, date or subject, would it be possible to create a classification related to the aesthetic experience? If so, which “elements” of the artistic interpretation would be used? And then, after all, wouldn’t these topics of organization also reveal its apparatus?
Storage, storage storage. It seems we are always running out of space and in the midst of material chaos. Reading through Lischer-Katz article it felt like I have read all of this before. Actually my perception is that all I have read about archives lately talks about the same points. Firstly, the question of the immateriality of digital material. Second, the ecological impact of not only maintaining the new infrastructures to store and preserve digital media, but also the impact of our analog media material that needs to be discarded. And Finally, the worry that a significant amount of our analog collections and in the future even our digital collections will be lost.
A fascinating aspect of this moment in archival history is that I can’t stop but think about how the archives have always been overlooked and seen as transparent, even before the digitization era. Before digitization maybe because it was too big and in your face and now because through digitization everything gets sent away to the “Cloud”. With this transparency that follows archives a worry surfaces. What is the future of archives and how will archivists, scholars and the public’s relationships to it change? Will we loose the archives as we know it?
On the other hand, the ecological aspects are clearly not addressed as often making it more difficult to come to a well rounded solution for this reality. We talk about the problems that we know so well, but what are we going to do about it? It’s like we are in a constant loop of recycled conversation.
The Aesthetics of Erasure photograph (oil on linen), He Did Not See Any American blue, by Artist Rights Society member, Jenny Holzer (ARS), was a visual symbol of how most marginalized populations feel when sorting through the historical records seeking knowledge and the missing pieces of their blotted out past. I was constantly looking to see if could possible read through the blacked out words that would reveal their true context and also to solve the mystery of why those particular paragraphs were selected for erasure compared to those words still visible.
It lead me to the supplemental article by Ella Klik and Diane Kamin, Between Archived, Shredded, and Lost/Found: Erasure in the Digital and Artistic Contexts. In this essay both writers point out very interesting perspectives that I never thought of as an artist and writer. New attitudes, desires and connections on keeping or discarding artwork in the digital era, was that of “Beyond Additive Subtraction”. She examines scholars Matthew Kirschnman, Wendy Chun and Wolfgang Ernst works to describe the reoccurring act of erasure and how it is unavoidable. These scholars in their works believed that ‘overwriting’ and and erasing was necessary to make room for new data. The act of erasing and recreating in the same space is a “habitual condition of the digital.” The idea that the relationship between the surface and the the inscription is changing with electronic media, which means a radical change in how we store and keep archives digitally is now a new “dyna-archive” compared to the classical archive. Chun stresses the duality of the digital archive, citing that erasure is habitual and continuous.
Chun’s idea of digital media production being habitual and continuous made me think about my childhood toy the Etch and Sketch. One of my favorite creating toys that made me feel good about my artwork. It also had a dual system of creating and erasing in order to make room for something new. I always thought on the art that had to be erased. Yet, I just happily deleted it (shook it) and poof gone! I could always see the remnants and tiny traces of what I had just lost, yet I was more focused on the new creation that would overwrite it.
Connecting both of these concepts make the act of erasing the opposite of storing both frustrating and liberating. One goes with the other? Production and recycling all in one movement? What does that do for long-term archival practices? Can we deal the idea of creating something, not saving it and move on by making something to replace it? This is an interesting yet complicated practice, yet it may be the future of digital archiving.
For my presentation I chose to look at several artists that examine the ideas of the Anarchive, the archive and the library in their work and how that work has functioned in the discipline of art.
Zielinksi termed the AnArchive ‘the utopia, the non-place, which in an ongoing process reshapes and reinterprets the materials from which memories are made. Anarchives necessarily challenge, indeed provoke, the archive: otherwise, they would be devoid of meaning.’
The artist On Kawara’s explored this idea of the non-place that was able to then be reshaped through different contexts both during his lifetime, and after. Kawaras work was the deliberate and consistent chronicling of the daily processes that he found value in but was stripped of noted value other than that they existed to others by their time stamps, noted course on a map or with use of other basic technology at the time. These tracings bundled together and viewed in relationship to the fine-art industry, specifically contemporary art, they show analysis of intent.
Joselits proposes that art work must have a proposition. This proposition ‘functions like a score, which can generate a profusion of enunciations or remain without issue, as pure potential.’ This is the question that Kawara asks throughout his projects—the work itself behaving very much like a score, a basic tracking of his existence—what is an archive vs. AnArchive and letting the audience decide by how they engage with the work.
Registration of time throughout the work offers the audience an access point that is malleable. Collectors of his work pick paintings off significant dates in their lives, birthdays, anniversaries, a mnemonic tool that comes from a place of another person’s making. This ties the audience and artist together in a web that Candida Höfer investigates in her documentation of the collectors placement in his Today series date paintings.
Höfer, who looks at ideas of cultural identity and ownership through monuments in her work, travels to various collectors’ homes and looks at how these patrons put Kawara’s project into their space. As both a nod to the art, but also a critique of the ‘International style’ that Joselits discusses. Joselits looks at how the ‘elastic’ nature of international style is about ‘the enunciations made within this language in relation to particular places and times’. These ‘enunciations’ are the grooving of the work into collectors’ identities, the ownership now of a part of Kawara’s lifetime, a reification of time between Kawara and the owner of the work through their painting and its placement within their home, that hundreds of other people now also have in their homes.
The same addressing of ownership is seen in Höfer’s other projects of libraries, archives and museums, primarily in Western cultures. She examines the recognizability of the spaces and the monumentalism of the structures themselves. The scale of these spaces is overwhelming and vast, representations of the accumulation of information within the culture, but at the same time questioning what all the content is. The architecture is magnificent, but is also indicative to the elitism that comes with feeling both comfortable or uncomfortable being in the spaces that she shows.
Water Towers, Bernd and Hilla Becher
The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is where Höfer studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, well known for their work documenting the structures of industrialization in Germany in the 1950’s and ’60’s. Bernd has been quoted saying he photographed because he “was overcome with horror when I noticed that the world in which I was besotted was disappearing”. Their work was an investigation and fascination with the onset of new buildings that represent a different kind of visual world. Architecture represents to the person who doesn’t go in, or have access to the interior of a space or system is how most people interpret the content of interior material or action of a structure. This seems to be a large part of Höfers work, not just the architecture of the building, but also the architecture of the books themselves. Almost metaphorically, the books are the buildings and the structure of the building is the landscape that systemically allows for the books to be accessed, or not.
The idea of access to books being political is seen in the work of Marta Minujín in her project Parthenon of Books. The project, originally done in 1983 in her native Argentina, was a response to the collapse of the Argentinian military dictatorship. During the dictatorship there was a ban on books, primarily Marxist works and others that had references to political structures and philosophies. Once the dictatorship collapsed, Minujín gathered the banned books and placed them in a structure shaped as the Parthenon. The reference to the Parthenon, the Grecian temple dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and freedom, establishes a timeframe for the importance of the passing on of knowledge through literary channels. Three months after the project in Buenos Aires was built the structure was tipped and the public was given access to the books. Minujín recreated this project in the 2017 art fair Documenta where she requested banned books from around the world to be added to the structure, both speaking to the idea of global knowledge and the collective need for engagement in helping each other in different spaces to have access to knowledge and ideas, especially those that have been suppressed. After the show closed, these books were redistributed to the public.
All of these artists are playing with the ideas of either national, cultural or personal distribution of information. In doing so, they each look at how access to information is nested within the larger structures of access to libraries, archives, anarchives and technologies.
A few images come to mind when most people think of what an “archive” looks like. Books stacked upon miles of shelves in a library, some neatly stacked alphabetically and/or organized by decimal system, others piled on carts waiting to be wheeled back into circulation or scanned and re-cataloged into the institution’s database. Sometimes people think of old artifacts carefully preserved and encased behind glass at museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian. Occasionally they’ll probably think of digital databases from public libraries or universities that one would have to click through in order to find the most relevant literature to lend academic authority and background context for a research project.
People don’t always think of post-its on a wall that accumulated to reflect a city’s collective consciousness right after an election as a kind of archive in and of itself. They also don’t always wonder about the ways in which street art enthusiasts have taken care to photograph and document a finished piece (or even if it’s work-in-progress) so that they can publish it on their website. They don’t always ponder about how certain museum institutions have exhibits consisting of encased displayed items that were acquired and archived without the permission of certain cultures as a result of colonialism and imperialism. These items are often kept out of reach from the general public — and kept even further away from people who may not be able to afford the cost of an admission ticket — but they are nonetheless catalogued and told from an out of touch and outdated hegemonic viewpoint.
Foucault wrote about the archive as a “totality of the formulations of the conditions of our existence, as the ultimate happiness on earth, the archive serves to organize mental and enforced orders in the shape of appropriate structures and to preserve, with a tremendous amount of effort, the memory of past orders” (Zielinski). Based on the etymology of the word archive as derived from ancient Greek, it means both commencement and commandment. Linguistically and metaphorically, the word itself brought order to a world of chaos as humans throughout time have tried to organize the stimuli and phenomena around them in order to tell stories as a way of survival.
While going through week’s selection of readings, I kept thinking, “What about the anarchive? What is it?” Was it a kind of academic protest movement against the archive as an authority of knowledge? And, as Siegfried Zielinski asks, why do we need “anarchaeology for anarchives” especially for the arts? I stumbled through these terminologies, trying to figure out what they mean and why these words exist to describe two diametrically opposed concepts of what collected knowledge can look like. What is all this anarchyabout archives?
According to Zielinski, anarchives do not lay claim to any authoritative entity of leadership. Anarchives do not claim to know from where things originated, nor do they claim to predict or know the direction in which the discourse about any particular topic may be headed toward. Instead, anarchives arise and exist to challenge and provoke the archive. Anarchives are always in an active mode; once they go live, they become an ongoing project that may continue to grow in its significance and/or magnitude. Anarchives also tend to “celebrate the past as a regained present.” This creates a participatory atmosphere in which audiences can also partake in the rediscovery or the revisiting of previously collected items or epistemological works and view them through a different storytelling perspective or narration of history.
A few examples come to mind when I think of anarchives in more recent contexts—whether they’re conceptualized by artists, artist collectives, or individuals connecting across different social media platforms.
The first example is Subway Therapy by Brooklyn-based artist Matthew “Levee” Chavez. Although he isn’t a licensed therapist, Chavez wanted to create an experience and a space where people can sit with him and tell him what’s on their mind. He would have a table with two chairs laid out on a subway platform and invite commuters to sit down and chat with him, and he would also have Post-Its and markers on the table for anyone who preferred to express their thoughts in this method. Chavez started Subway Therapy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election season, and when the results came in on November 9th, he invited people to write or draw their thoughts and feelings on the post-its, which he then hung up on the wall of the 14th Street station. Chavez would collect each post it and store them in folders, though it’s not clear whether he organized them in any particular order or separated the negative messages from the uplifting, positive memos. Currently, the New York Historical Society is partnering with Chavez to digitally archive the post-its and preserve them as part of a museum collection for future generations to see.
Another example that reminded me of an anarchive is the artist coalition movement called Decolonize This Place, which strives to provide a more honest and accurate depiction of history than museum curators and historians would traditionally convey to the public. Decolonize This Place arose from the Occupy Wall Street movement and is comprised of artists and academics across different disciplines. On Columbus Day in 2016, the group had decided to “occupy” the American Museum of Natural History and demanded that the statue of Theodore Roosevelt be taken down because of his imperialist policies. They held free educational tours for the public to “challenge and provoke” the museum, making the case that most, if not all, of the artifacts in the museum’s vast collections were obtained from a hegemonic system of colonization and imperialism.
The attitudes and the language of this imperialist hegemony still permeate the ways in which the exhibits are displayed; the museum curators and historians responsible for collecting and cataloging the artifacts behind the glass cases used language that is considered today to be culturally ignorant and insensitive to human diversity. The layout of the museum itself, if one is to think of the institution itself as an archive, remains largely unchanged—the exhibit on the third floor featuring “Primates” for instance, is right across the hall from where the “Eastern Woodlands Indians,” the “Plains Indians,” and the “Hall of Pacific Peoples” are located.
As someone who identifies as a minority and ethnically identifies herself as Filipino, I felt that this was an offensive and frankly terrible way of organizing the logistics of a museum’s floors. I’m not even going to gripe about the fact that the artifacts from the Philippines should have been grouped with the Hall of Asian Peoples, even though the archipelago is located in the Pacific Ocean. By their logic, then, Japan should have been grouped with the Hall of Pacific Peoples. Alas, it’s not. It just felt odd that artifacts from my ethnic culture were on display, but the labels were written from the vantage point of people who are outsiders to my heritage. In light of these kinds of issues, Decolonize This Place continues to re-educate the public about the other side of history’s coin and remind them of the forgotten and sideswept cultures by staging these sit-ins and tours, thereby disrupting the hegemonic ordering of history and presenting itself as an artist coalition in support of anarchival efforts.
The last example I kept thinking about was the hashtag’s dynamic use in social media platforms, especially on Twitter, to sort, aggregate, and archive user’s posts and status updates. Hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #YesSheCan have been used for various social movements since the moment it was introduced to the public as a useful function in social media.
More recently the hashtag #MeToo on Twitter and across other platforms highlights the widespread occurrence of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape that happens each day not just to women, but also to men and to members of the trans community. These endeavors highlight the depth of complexity surrounding the prevalence of these problems in society. These social movement hashtags can be considered as on-going, live examples of the anarchive because they disrupt and challenge our conventional everyday discourse about patriarchal values and toxic masculinity in society.
Monday October 23, 6-7pm
GIDEST Room (Room 411), University Centre.
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Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
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Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, the Centre Pompidou and PS1 MOMA. Her work has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to TED and Wired. Heather has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is an affiliate of Data & Society.
Following up from this week’s wonderful discussions about artists and projects along the aesthetics of the “archival” (thanks to Loribeth, Maris, Ding and Julianne!), I wanted also to share with the class on a Singapore-based artist collective known as tsunamii.net (2001-2005). Given that there are some artists and people deeply involved/interested in art, and that there was a mention of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, I thought it would be nice to introduce an artist collective from (my) home that had been working on the geopolitics of the internet’s physical infrastructures, a decade before we’ve seen a proliferation of so-called “post-internet art” or the likes of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Tyler Coburn, and Nina Canell dealing with similar issues. In fact, Rhizome included an entry focusing on tsunamii.net’s project alpha 3.4 (2002) commissioned for Documenta XI: https://anthology.rhizome.org/alpha-3-4
Yet, the collective remains pretty much on the margins of net art’s history as “outsiders” (word is, they were unknowns at Documenta, invited in a last-minute attempt to have some representation from Southeast Asia); but also strangely un-discussed within Singapore’s own art history as well. That the artists came out of a formative performance art period in Singapore also meant that they favored an ephemerality to their alpha projects; hence not much documentation of their work remains today – further complicating their non-inclusion in the archives of art history.
Lastly, I guess I’m sharing this as I’m hoping to research further on tsunamii.net’s body of work for my final project.
What is recognized and represented as “knowledge” in the archive is inextricable from the institutions that authorize its contents into discursive existence (from Foucault’s Order of Things). But from a media studies perspective, any (re)production of knowledge will render multiple processes of reception, feedback loops, networks of information.
Hal Foster’s analysis of ‘archival artists’ and their practices provides a model for re-imagining archive “retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory” (4). Neither internet database art nor white-walled museum art, archival art re-positions the spectrum of archival material in a “matrix of citation and juxtaposition” (5) to allow different unfoldings of history and memory for the viewer.
Although embedded in the digital, this formulation reminded me of a panel I attended earlier in October, at NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where author Claudia Rankine launched The Racial Imaginary Institute, an archive of artists working through notions of race and power. Rankine described this project as a website of “deep memory,” that confronts the “unitedness of whiteness” and the “capacity to hold difference in the united states” with a commitment to the counter-narrative.
As Foster suggests, “archival art is rarely cynical” and “concerns love as much as knowledge” (6). If you are familiar with Rankine’s nonfiction (a must read – Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), there is a rather depressive but painfully real register to her writing as a black woman voicing ‘micro-aggressions’ in a racially-triggered world. In contrast, she expressed a serious optimism in this collaboration with artists making possible the ‘institutionalization’ of intertextual truths in the face of fake news (which is not new).
Alexandra Bell’s Counternarratives precisely challenges the institutionalization of information. Making editorial notes and black-out text on New York Times articles and making massive prints to wheat-paste on public walls of Brooklyn, Bell’s work thinks about “historical revisionism” as part of daily archival practice. In a world where people of color cultures have had their history written over for them, Bell recovers the agency for artists to rewrite their archives from the margins.
Because of the diversity of mediums represented in their website archive (journalism, sculpture, conceptual art, performance, visual arts and more) and allowing “asynchronous objects to occupy a common space” (Joselit 18), The Racial Imaginary Institute constitutes a kind of “aggregate” of awareness on race and its power networks. It is open to the public to submit material and thus activates the promise of the archival impulse.
RESEARCH GRANTS 2018-19: DEVIANT PRACTICE
In 2016 the Van Abbemuseum launched the research programme Deviant Practice. Following the conclusion of nine research projects over the past year, we are seeking new proposals from artists, curators and writers for 2018. Researchers will be awarded a grant of 2,000–10,000 EUR depending on the project for a mutually agreed period of work in and with the museum.
ABOUT THE RESEARCH PROGRAMME: DEVIANT PRACTICE
We understand deviance as veering off the entrenched path. For the modern art museum such as Van Abbemuseum these paths emerged from the west’s understanding of itself and by inference its relationship to others. Deviance therefore necessarily involves challenging long-held institutional, racial, geo- and bio-political assumptions. We understand the prefix “de” in deviance in relation to notions of demodernising, decolonising, deprivileging or decentralising—key strategies we hope to continue to explore. We also understand deviance as an opportunity to reflect on the manner in which we approach our own practices and protocols: questioning past suppositions, hierarchies and modes of working might be one way to institute deviance. At the same time, deviance should also concern itself with how we find paths through the present and towards the future.
TWO RESEARCH FRAMEWORKS: Archives & Constituencies
DEVIANT PRACTICE 2016–17
Descriptions of current research projects can be viewed here.
SUBMITTING PROPOSALS 2018–19
Proposals should be sent to opencall@vanabbe.nl by the November 17, 2017.
To read more about this research grant for artists, curators and writers, CLICK HERE
I am drawn to the aura of Tacita Dean’s work, specifically the process, particularly with Girl Stowaway. I am sure there exists, in a vacuous alternate dimension devoid of chaos and serendipity, a boring version of an archival art piece which resurrects a historical Jeinnie, projected in a wall-to-wall carpeted gallery cave where humans on awkward first dates sit squishily on that flat couch while looping fluorescent assaults of the ken burns effect gradually make them realize they learned everything they needed to know from reading the embossed didactic glued to the wall. Deep in the throes of trying to impress one another with pseudo-intellectual endurance for art gazing, each first-dater hopes the other will initiate the gesture to move on. In the real world (in this dimension, or as marvel nerds call it, earth 616), Dean’s work is catchy and vibrant. Why? I cite captured coincidence.
The extroverted making of art (and perhaps, due to its pensive and temporally absorbent nature, archival art) might be the best exercise we have for trapping exotic, wild coincidences for dissection under epistemological and existential microscopes, to be prodded and picked apart by whatever theory pierces the skin, hoping to bottle any organs of intellectual merit.
Unpacking my own experience of exposure to Dean’s work suggests Girl Stowaway as a piece takes many forms across its scope, including the form of journalistic reporting on what feels like lived performance art and true crime investigation and testimony. Where Stowaway ends or begins as art, whether it exists on visual media, or through story, or in interview about either (or all of the above), is not easy to pinpoint. In the middle of a course brimming with examples of well ordered orders and neatly cataloged catalogs, I find that difficulty to be refreshing.
While I understand the broad labeling of this sector of art as archival, I do not understand how fabricating your subject’s history (which she did, and which I am ALL FOR!) does not constitute a disqualification of sorts. We have explored how empirically flexible the archive can be compared to its dusty colloquial stereotype, but I still feel as though, for the sake of its own historicity, archival should be an adjective associated with minimal invention, fabrication, or fill-in-the-gaps creation. Foster describes archival art as art that “not only draws on informal archives, but produces them as well”, and I took informal to mean still possessing a reasonable degree of empirical integrity. I seem to still have this childishdefinition hammered into my head in verb form; to preserve a subject in its congenital truth, or to freeze from all subsequent biases. Susan Breakell explains that archive as a verb did not exist in her dictionary before 1988, and the use of it as such generates lexicological discomfort. That discomfort is the type of sensation, one of casual grieving for the loss of a reliable concept, that archiving should effectively preclude, no?
NO. Of course not.
The fabricated can simultaneously be the most integral part of archival art, and a vehicle for truths. Consider Cheryl Dunye and Zoe Leonard’s piece in which the fictional Fae Richards is invented and brought to life through the presentation of an archive of her life as a lesbian African American actress and singer in golden age hollywood, amalgamating the true experiences of many under one persona. It is a work of art that showcases the ability for its format to double as fiction and fact, discussing very resonant themes for black female artists of that (or perhaps any) era in a manner that may exceed the profundity of an alternative piece based on any single, historical individual.
Over the weekend I saw Bladerunner 2049 in theaters and the film gave new parameters to the definition of the “archive” while at the same time maintaining existing aesthetic ideologies. Encased in an Egyptian temple-like monolith, offline digital assets were stored on acrylic “drives” and in precious glass orbs handled with white gloves.
Archival assets, both analog and digital, have unique attributes when taking into account the struggle to store them in perpetuity: analog paper assets can be affected by flooding, humidity and climate control; digital assets are affected by increasing needs for physical geographical location.
The Internet Wayback Machine is an attempt to archive pieces of the internet that have been deemed valuable, but what of the future of the archive? As resources become sparse, what will we deem as valuable of saving?
For over a century artists have created artifacts meant to re-frame existing knowledge and perception, and create social commentary for the future of civilization. From Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, to Jan Hoek’s The “Real” Somali Pirates, 2017, artists have (sometimes literally) flipped reality on its head in order to engage the audience and invite them to look at things just a little differently.
The landscape for viewing these artifacts has also changed dramatically: where Duchamp’s work is in the pristine gallery, Hoek’s photographs are in a Brooklyn deli. In the same way that physical artifacts have moved from the Archive monolith into the public space, web-based digital interpretations of assets have become more and more prevalent. For the last four years, Rebecca Onion has been featuring her favorite “Digital Archives” on slate.com, and they range from Knitting Pattern Archives to the a timeline on the history of slang. Each year the interfaces for these online projects become more and more dynamic and engaging.
More important than the interface is the artifact itself. But how do we define the artifact? Typically the association one makes when thinking of the archival artifact, one thinks of a document, whether it contains information on births, deaths, landowning or laws. In Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, the author defines the “document” as “tertiary retention” where Primary Retention is the present, Secondary Retention is memory of the past and Tertiary Retention is the documentation of the memory of the past. And I agree with David Joselit’s assessment that by storing a temporal occurrence, “It is consequently perfectly possible that by this definition documents may be fictional…” (“On Aggregators,” pp 8).
This is exemplified in Hoek’s photographs which recreate images of Kenyan men posing as Somali pirates. In 2010, at the height of Somali attacks, Western journalists sought to find retired pirates, as it was much safe to travel than traveling to Somalia where they may have fallen victim themselves, in order to gain insight into the surge. These Kenyan men saw an opportunity to be paid for their stories by pretending to be pirates.
Similarly, in an interview of Mariam Ghani, the artist states that, while conducting research for her work, “Sometimes this research leads me to construct a fiction or reconstruct a speculative history around documents or fragments, physical traces, or a sense of place”(Bindu Bhadana, “Index of the Disappeared,”2016). Constructing truth or fiction through photography and film has been a long running debate among theorists since the mediums’ inception into the art world.
But some artists embrace the ethereal nature of the artifact more than others. In the 1963 interview of Nam June Paik by Gottfried Michael König, the Paik regaled musician John Cage:
“Why do all musicians and music publishers believe that everything must result in something of importance to the history of music? That’s crazy. I told Cage: Destroy your manuscripts and tapes when you die! He thought that was too dramatic. I think it’s a crime that Cage makes tapes at all.”
During his interview, Gottfried Michael König pursued the issue: “So your own works are only intended for the moment? They have no significance afterwards? Not even for you? […] Your work only exists as long as it is being performed?” Nam June Paik responded: “Yes, that is beautiful. When I die there’s nothing left. I am not producing a child” (quoted in König 1963: 32, 34).
So what is to become of the artifact? Should it be contained and preserved only to be found in the next millennia while digging through the mountainside? Or will it finally be returned to its rightful owner? Possession of an artifact not belonging to its country of origin can often be a double-edged sword: while the artifact might be better maintained, once the artifact can be returned, how will it get there? Remaining in the hands of the possessing society may also mean a false interpretation of an object, not unlike the scene in Disney’s The Little Mermaid and her seagull companion’s designation of a hair-combing “dinglehopper” to an obvious fork, the artifact may not be fully understood until returned to its rightful owner.
These questions may only be answered by future generations, who even now are re-framing their definitions of the artifact by recognizing it, as Joselit does, in having a “condition of plasticity or transitivity” (pp 8). Exercises conducted in the classroom ask students to think on the viewpoint of future populations and come up with their own artifacts in the same way that artists have for so long.
So whether fleeting and ethereal, analog or digital, vivid or crude, fact or fiction, the ideological landscape for the artifact and archive alike are ever-changing and their future has yet to be seen.
How are communities and activists in New York City using, misusing, and inventing technologies to confront social injustice and structural inequality? This event will bring together local organizers, technologists, and scholars working on mesh and alternative networking, cryptography, and practical privacy to discuss strategies, tactics, and shared challenges and opportunities in DIY and ground-up communication and organizing.
How are communities and activists in New York City using, misusing, and inventing technologies to confront social injustice and structural inequality? This event will bring together local organizers, technologists, and scholars working on mesh and alternative networking, cryptography, and practical privacy to discuss strategies, tactics, and shared challenges and opportunities in DIY and ground-up communication and organizing.
Dabriah Alston, Red Hook Wifi Finn Brunton, New York University Grey Cohen and Sam DiBella, CyPurr Collective James Grimmelmann, Cornell Tech; Cornell Law School Brian Hall, NYC Mesh David Huerta, Freedom of the Press Foundation Matthew Mitchell, CryptoParty Harlem Dhruv Mehrotra, Eyebeam; Courant Institute for Applied Mathematics Dan Phiffer, Artist
To Thomas A. Reppetto, an author and police historian, the very fact of the exhibit — “Unlikely Historians: Materials Collected by NYPD Surveillance Teams, 1960–1975” — is evidence of how much times have changed. Years ago, he said, a city agency would have been hard-pressed to stage an exhibition that resurrected the memory of provocative police practices.
“The police would not have wanted to do it,” Mr. Reppetto said. “The police would never have agreed to it, and if the police didn’t agree, it wouldn’t be done.”
Mr. Reppetto is no fan of the exhibit, suggesting that making intelligence material public can often reveal sensitive tactics. But curators say they received no objections from the Police Department or City Hall while they were putting the exhibit together. In fact, among the visitors to the exhibit has been Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill. (A police spokesman did not respond to a question seeking the commissioner’s thoughts on the images.)
The show, which opened last month, includes 30 photographs and seven film segments created while the police Photo Unit was working with investigative bureaus like the now-defunct Special Services Division, whose members monitored groups they deemed to be dangerous or subversive.
I believe classifications vary culturally. In ancient China, books were traditionally classified into four categories: Confucian classics(jing), historical works(shi), non-Confucian philosophical works(zi), and literary works(ji). Physics, geography, mathematics, etc all belonged to the “zi” category, which seems very unscientific nowadays although the subjects may have at once the perilous otherness and resemblances in Foucault’s preface. Speaking of food dropped on the floor, many people, especially nomads or some Japanese who often sleep on the floor, don’t necessarily regard the ground as very dirty. It’s not always the particular characteristics determine where something belongs to. Rather, it’s our cultures that arrange them.
Languages also play a fundamental role in classification. The example of certain aphasics sorting wool may indicate this point. There are a lot of rocks, birds, plants exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History. As we discussed last class, some ubiquitous objects may serve as a piece of archive. It seems that we divide objects into types as we speak and as if our ancestors had figured mysterious connections between the words and certain elements of the objects. No wonder several theorists found inspirations through the fictional writings that challenge the existing ideas using words. Scholars may create new terms as they recognize new types scientifically, and pop cultures also often times breed new phrases defining unclassified entertainment and phenomena. The Chinese customers who find the 6-inch Subway sandwiches not enough but footlong too much even have given that a term.
Order is suggested by Foucault to be related to a threshold, below which is same, and above which is other. The ordering process, in some ways, is an expression of our cultural tendency to distinguish between that binary we seem to create. An aphasiac’s inability to create order in objects they are given to arrange suggests a hardwired connection between the capacity for communication and the synthesis of distinguishing criterion between dynamic stimuli. Musings on the whimsical ordering logics of a Chinese encyclopedia, and the alphabetization of Eusthenes, fuel Foucault’s argument that theory is born somewhere between language and science. Science operates within the fundamental codes of language, and between the two is a middle ground upon which theory has taken root and grown into our modern systems of classification. Language is much more than reproducible alphanumeric vocal or textual patterns of meaning; semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, permeates and defines the identity of many objects that remain excluded from the traditional archive.
Foucault (KM McCready)
Before the modern age, establishing orders taxed language to its limit, and since language often represents the culture that has refined it, order could be thought of as an expression of culture, if not a key recursive factor in its genetics. We likely cannot conceive of a time when language had substantially more authority, while having less fixity. Both global literacy and the definitional fixity of language seem, by the reasoning of Foucault, to be negatively correlated to its subjective, authoritative potency. That bond has seen its inverse peaks creep closer to zero in the past two centuries. When Foucault suggests the actual Grotian birth of man occurred recently, with the retirement of classical thought, he seems to be referring to an idea that humanity finally stumbled upon a more objective means for authoring and managing whatever portion of its cumulative identity is epistemic in nature.
Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre Houël (1874)
As revolutionaries stood around piles of burning Bastille archives in 1789, I wonder if there was a palpable catharsis felt by individuals on behalf of the species; it would seem that on the archival scale of the item people were merely burning paper, but on the scale of the fonds, however,society was rejecting monarchy. This moment in human history sparked the development of what we know to be a hugely determinate epistemological protocol that, even after its own prime, continues to catalyze changes in what defines collections, knowledge, and collective knowledge. Born from the familiar conundrum of how best to conserve history selectively in the wake of regime change, Respect des Fonds created a relevance for the origin story of all subsequent archival data. Along the line of subsequent additions to archival guidelines, the Dutch Manual christened the concept of Original Order, the restoration of which allowed respect des fonds to govern records within (or below) the fondal unit.
Theories were not without critique; restoration of original order risked damaging the meaning a collection had accrued since creation. While adoption was, and has, been far from universal, the effort of a more detailed classification system has obviously enabled a growth in the efficiency of the knowledge pool. It took nearly two centuries for the Scott and Fenyo series system, which allowed for multiple interrelationships in ordering logic. As the successful deviations in practice across Europe over time suggest, respecting the Fonds wasn’t necessarily an attempt to cryogenically freeze the aura of a particular data with its origin, but rather an effort to tag it with a dart, paint a modest portrait of its genealogy, and re-release onto the shelves of the scholarly sea.
The prospect of finding a contemporary, tactile example of some of these principles is daunting. Meditating on my choices, I wander through my neighborhood, smartphone in hand, browsing through the mobile sites of countless libraries. As the unholy marriage of a search engine and my personal geolocation narrow down which locations lay within the reach of my metrocard, I pass beneath a window display of a local vintage clothing store. I stop dead in my tracks, and double back.
An uplit mannequin dons a shockingly period-accurate mid 50s outfit (jacket, shirt, pants, hat, shoes, briefcase – a complete temporal displacement via the subtle semiotics of textured fabric which reveals, conceals, or frames the hosting body). Here, the language of costume communicates to me a sense of suburban American coziness I have only seen depicted in visual storytelling; my grandfather’s generation and its picturesque postwar prosperity lives on in the soft cuts of its surviving period attire. The design conveys the economic confidence of a global superpower counting its profits after a lucrative world war, while simultaneously trying to swallow the the unsettling reality of the atomic age.
mid 1950s attire – illustrated ad – (why? magazine)
On the surface, the outfit before me, while impressive for seeming complete, was not epistemologically active beyond the meaning it evoked in me, nor was it a relevant example to the assignment at hand. What intrigued me, however, was the principled process through which the different elements of the outfit had been unified after having traveled through time and space among countless other garments of dissimilar style. This shop’s curator had assembled a functional semiotic archive by clustering unique garments together in restoration of a modular conceptual cultural artifact an observer could detect. Such a restoration was governed by a respect for the meaningful origins of that which only retains meaning if its origins are retained along with it. While “knowledge” can only be presented through garment with a high degree of abstraction, the aforementioned methodology of conceptual restoration is akin to an archive’s handling of physical volumes of text and visual media with great respect for the fonds. Both garment and book can be processed as artifact, I suppose.
Uffner’s office and records – from NYT
A New York Times article from this past August resurfaces in my memory, and I recall a description of a Sunday afternoon spent shopping with Helen Uffner, one of the most reliable sources of period clothing for the film industry. Like the curators of countless small vintage clothing depots, Uffner’s work is in some small way made possible by the tectonic shift in archival theory and methodology centuries prior concerning what was of value for knowledge based artifacts. She restores order between found items, turning them into wearable modular artifacts of fashion history.
Letty Lynton Dress (George Hurell)
The nuances of a garment’s life as it relates to its historical identity present many of the same issues which faced archives during the attempts to standardize Respect des Fonds. Uffner’s blog documents a style of dress worn by Joan Crawford in the role of Letty Lynton, who went on to define women’s fashion for a generation. The dress design was copied by department stores however (a frequent occurrence due to patent loopholes), so classifying a found dress presents obstacles for the goal of a linear identity as artifact; the item’s actual history (if a clone) represents an important era of American manufacturing, while its design represents a pivotal moment in pre-code Hollywood. Which origin is the determinate one? What is the setting on the foucaultian threshold machine? A responsible system of preservation would demand all potentially notable characteristics of the artifact be part of its classification. Uffner describes an interesting paradox for the vintage clothing collector: nearly every item was manufactured, making it ubiquitous in origin and creation, but the life it has lived has made it unique without severing its connection to the original, abstracted design. This might offer insight into the archive, where the soul of each weathered volume reminds us, in our pursuit of refurbished meaning, not to confuse guiding order with law.
The readings this week shed a heavy load on the harsh realities facing archivist; analysis, classification and distribution of knowledge and information. All the readings made their unique points yet one in particularly triggered memories of collecting, organizing, labeling my own historical records.
In “The Order of Things…”, Foucault, stresses some key reminders about the world of ordering, classifying and naming things. He speaks of “aphasiacs”, a person who has had a brain injury and as a result has impaired language and can not read or write nor recognize order of things. Foucault’s comparison on a culture who has lost it’s language can be tormented in the same fashion as brain injured (stroke) person who has lost all language, reading and writing abilities. He found it suspicious and comical that Borge’s idea of ordering things was not just “linking together things that are inappropriate” (preface xvii), but that there was “no
law or geometry, of the heteroclite” (common locus) when arranging or placing them into groupings. This practice by Borge was futile and pointless according to Foucault.
I could not help but to feel a sense of relief that someone put my frustrations into perfect metaphors. Language and origin has always been of great interest to my personal research. A lost language is a big puzzle when attempting to preserve or rediscover secret or destroyed knowledge. As Foucault states perfectly, I have experienced that feeling of a “loss of what is common to place and name.” (preface xix)
I was not surprised to discover just how brutal and difficult it was to practice and as a principle, in“Disrespect the Fonds, Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives,” by Jefferson Bailey.
Dechein termed the act of arranging materials as, “brutal manipulations”, I call it simply language and culture manipulation. As language and meaningful context disappeared, so did the origins of old records and their importance of being properly placed. For archivist with the daunting task and deep work of deciding what stays and what goes, I am wondering what is the hope for future generations who seek to reconnect with lost information–and build new connections to culture, language, objects, that have been misrepresented by racially biased library infrastructure? Can I be hopeful and optimistic about digital archiving and the new data being collected in today’s media practices?
I feel like an “aphasiac” sometimes too when it comes to connecting to the past. How can archivist ensure info takes it’s rightful place next to objects and things– “next to and also opposite of each other” ? (Foucault)
It seems the evolution of archiving during the early 19th and 20th centuries, inspired archivist and librarians to innovate clever ways of organizing. Frustratingly they would arrange, rearrange, and then adopt newer ordering and classifying systems to set in place– only to repeat and improve as new technology and massive data sets demands it.
Reading through Foucault’s Preface on “The Order of Things” and Perec’s piece “Think/Classify” led me to think about classification systems that we use in other disciplines to order information and understand complex environmental ecosystems, especially in the sciences. The readings also brought to mind the concept of the “rectification of names” in Confucianism—that if our language is not correct and accurate in the naming of an object or of an idea, then language would fail to reflect the accuracy of reality. So much of epistemology depends on the proper ordering, classifying, sectioning, defining, hierarchy, and enumeration of things that at times we may have to also alter and revise our man-made classification systems to accommodate new knowledge or to rectify previously known facts, truths, or observations. In doing so, we are not only reordering and renaming the logistics of our collections and archives of knowledge, but we are also rearranging the ways in which we think about the world and how we relate to it.
Foucault gives us an example of this: “What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of these categories to all the others.” He even goes on to state that “The central category of animals ‘included in the present classification’, with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all…”
Naming the five (or is it six?) kingdoms in elementary school is one thing, but having to delineate between phyla, families, species, etc. is another challenge that is never ending as we accumulate and accommodate new knowledge of every biological organism that exists in the various types of ecological systems that already exist in our world.
As we process the information that we already have about particular academic disciplines and topics, we simultaneously struggle with rearranging the logistics of how we want to order, classify, enumerate, define, and compartmentalize our knowledge so that we can easily access the information for later use… just in case we may need to go back, rethink, and reorder our lists again.
From our readings, it did seem as though Paul Otlet was a kind of a tragic hero who was well ahead of his time, but ultimately shunned by his own government. I wondered if this is an aspect that intrigued and inspired Google to take Otlet into the folds of their history: Google as this idea that was not just well ahead of its own time, but also one that shouldn’t be curtailed or limited by the presumably narrow visions of national governments.
That there was exactly one whole century between Otlet and La Fontaine’s dream in 1895 to index and classify the world’s information and Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s initiative to start Google in 1995 seems to have given Google significant leverage: a whole century worth of a great history of (transnational) informational management.
That Otlet predates Vannevar Bush also makes historical sense for Google to position itself in relation to Otlet rather than Bush. But I also can’t help but wonder if the fact that Otlet wasn’t American also helped Google project itself as an idea/machine/company whose vision and history goes beyond its American origins, thereby enabling Google to position itself as certainly a trans-American, if not altogether transnational, entity. A strategic coupling that would perhaps give Google better access and entry to not just cultural institutions in Europe, but potentially also to the rest of the world.
[Of course Vannevar Bush’s direct involvement in the building of the atomic bombs in World War II made his postwar essay on the need to consolidate all information for the purposes of a peaceful, programmable future all the more ironic. Incorporating Bush into Google’s history and lineage would have been a ticking time bomb.]
I was really impressed and inspired by Warburg’s library organization and thoughts, especially because every time I had to organize my books at my very small personal library, it was a challenge to figure out which way would be the best: by author’s name? Country? By subject? Or the order I wanted to read? After many thoughts and no decision, the books were somehow organized in an unorganized way between a rational and a subjective orderliness. Warburg’s organization was very well thought and structured one, but had a very subjective side related to our daily memory organization and connections. In relation to that, his library was circular and the circle is very symbolic for a never-ending form of knowledge. Thus, a circular library gave his method of organization another mnemosyne dimension, as “(…) his library was memory, but ‘memory as organized matter’.” (p.201).
Prelinger’s Library has also a “circular order” in is organization through the idea of serendipity, in which we have the opportunity to become flaneurs in our own discovery. It gives the feeling of an infinity of connections, just like the connections we make in our head. Besides, the complementary relation between digital access and analog browsing also made me think about this circular dimension, in which one aspect is connected to the other and vice-versa.
On that account, it was even more powerful to read about the BookOps and the ReCAP, and also to watch “Cold Storage” about the Harvard Depository. Being part of the library infrastructure and logistic, and with the necessity of efficient storage and retrieval, its organization has to be rational. Therefore, everything is more “square” than “circular” in its organization. I wonder if, with the increasing number of books that need to be storage, there’s a way to still create an efficient logistic that is less money-space-time focused, giving “off-site” storages a more circular aspect.
If books are and have to be “a thing on a shelf” in those places, is there a way to better connect them with “a topical and material unit of knowledge” that they are in the libraries? Is there a circular logistic able to keep receiving all the number of books and still maintain this landscape a real discovery experience for human knowledge?
Not directly related to this week discussion, but very close to that, Wisemen film “Ex Libris” about the New York Public Library is a great reflexion on what libraries are and mean nowadays, focusing on their role in the society and in how “far” this role is, as books are not the main element of them anymore. A must-see!
The readings this week shed a heavy load on the harsh realities facing archivist; analysis, classification and distribution of knowledge and information. All the readings made their unique points yet one in particularly triggered memories of collecting, organizing, labeling my own historical records.