All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist

INTRODUCTION:

SHAKING UP THE ARCHIVE

Clive Phillpot

The Art Libraries Society, otherwise known as ARLIS, was established in Britain in 1969 in response to the rapid development of art libraries in art schools, universities and museums. In the 1960s, partly due to a restructuring of art education and partly as the result of a publishing boom, art libraries were growing and consolidating and art librarians were emerging as a distinct branch of the wider profession. By the end of the decade, there was a band of mostly quite young professionals who had been appointed specifically as art librarians; natural networkers, they began to affiliate for reasons of self-help and in 1969 formalised their situation by founding ARLIS.

National groupings of art librarians had begun in France and Canada in 1967;but after the invention of the odd but memorable acronym ARLIS (chosen for obvious reasons over the more logical ARTLIS),the next such organisation to form, in the USA in 1972, simply introduced a suffix to denote North America, becoming ARLIS/NA. ARLIS was thus required to transform itself into ARLIS/UK (and later ARLIS/UK&Ireland). More groups were founded: in Australia and New Zealand in 1975 (ARLIS/ANZ), the Netherlands in 1982, Norway in 1983 (ARLIS/Norge), the five Nordic Countries in 1986 (ARLIS/Norden) and subsequently in Italy and Japan, among other nations.

In contrast to this international proliferation, the original ARLIS (and some of its siblings) developed to the point where it began to sub-divide into sub-specialisms such as cataloguing and classifying, slide curating and, eventually, archiving. Thus in 1995 an Art Archives Committee (known initially as the Visual Archives Committee) was established. The emergence of art archivists parallels the original emergence of art librarians as a specialist group within a larger field; and again, the reasons for this are to do with recent institutional growth in this area and the feeling that people with similar concerns needed an opportunity to talk to each other and shape a collective voice.

As the Art Archives Committee’s activities grew, so did its ambition. Thus in 2007, under the leadership of Judy Vaknin, it was decided to organise a substantial day conference under the title: ‘The Archival Impulse: Artists and Archives’. With the help of thethen Tate Archivist, Sue Breakell, Tate Britain was secured as the venue and funding was obtained not only from ARLIS/UK&I but also from the Arts Council of England. The conference took place on 16th November 2007.

The title of the conference was derived from that of an essay by Hal Foster in October magazine, ‘An Archival Impulse’. Here Foster says that the examples of Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant and Tacita Dean, among contemporary artists, point to an archival impulse at work internationally in contemporary art… an archival impulse with a distinctive character of its own, pervasive enough to be considered a tendency in its own right.¹

There are, however, several ways of regarding this phenomenon. Foster is mainly concerned with artists working in pre-existing archives, their involvement often leading to new hybrid art works. This kind of involvement with archives is, indeed, a hot potato in current art practice. But, to other artists as well as to archivists, equally deserving of attention is the proliferation of artists’ own archives, especially given the variety of media that now constitute contemporary archives. With regard to this latter territory, Sue Breakell, in her introduction to the conference, identified three aspects to archives: creation, curation and consumption, as well as three constituencies: archivist, artist and researcher.²

The underlying theme of ‘The Archival Impulse: Artists and Archives’ at Tate Britain was to explore artists’ use of archival themes, as well as the interpretation of archives in their work. In the event, the successful programme and particularly the audience’s response to this programme tended inevitably to fall into the two main areas of specialisation: artists and their concerns over their own practice or their own archives; and archivists and their concerns over the archives in their care. Since ‘The Archival Impulse’ was substantially over-subscribed, the Art Archives Committee, in appraising the success of the conference, quickly decided that the need for a follow-up day conference had been amply demonstrated. Consequently a sequel,‘Archiving the Artist’, was organised eighteen months later and held again at Tate Britain on 12th June 2009. On this occasion, the main emphasis of the conference was on artists’ own archives, but speakers were included from the three constituencies identified earlier — not only artists and archivists, but also researchers in artists’ archives.

Following the two conferences, Tate agreed to publish some of the papers on its website under the rubric Tate Papers. Since only a few papers given at the conferences were included in Tate Papers (though others were made available on the website as ‘Online Research Publications’), the Art Archives Committee began to examine the possibility of assembling a book on the subject of artists and archives which would include papers from the conferences supplemented by newly invited essays that would give the book more substance and balance. The book has been divided into three sections: Artists; Archivists; and Art Historians and Theorists.

The diligent and sensitive appreciation of the contents of the archive by the archivist is set out here in exemplary fashion in the chapter by Anna McNally. She reminds us that few researchers are aware of the archivist’s hand in the process of using an archive and, quoting Ernst van Alphen, that the act of archiving introduces meaning, order, boundaries, coherence and reason into what is disparate or confused. She also cautions us not to blur the documentation of the archive with the archive itself. When the researcher in the archive is similarly diligent and sensitive, as is Jane Stevenson, writing here about her work with archival material from the artist Edward Burra, one can expect many useful discoveries. For example, Stevenson’s alertness contributes directly to the redating of artworks but also to a much better understanding of her subject. She explains that what biographers want most is maximum preservation and minimum censorship especially since a subject’s sex life and income… explain so much about anyone’s life, famous or otherwise.

We are grateful to Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, who, with substantial experience of administering and supporting archives, has contributed an overview of artists’ archives drawing upon her experiences when Curator of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In her essay, which focuses on the imaginative use of a pre-existing archive by artists to foster the creation of new work, she remarks that traditionally the artist’s archive told the art historian more about the art, whereas now we see increasingly how an artist can use it to tell us more about the nature of the archive. Thus contemporary artists, in addition to being more conscious of their role in creating an archive of their own history, very often also make primary work out of an engagement with another archive. In the process they frequently shake up traditional notions of archival practice.

However, it is perhaps also possible to suggest that creative archiving as defined here by Athanasios Velios, when practised on the archive of a deceased artist, specifically the John Latham Archive, can shake up not only archival practice but also the received archive. Of course, this is only practical and morally acceptable when the archive is replicated digitally, thereby offering the possibility that its surrogate can be manipulated separately while leaving the original as received. The potential blending of minds of the artist and the archivist strays into the subjectivity highlighted by Foster when he says that archives call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing.³

Barry Flanagan laid down the future framework of his own archive while he was still alive. He decided that it would be independent of institutions but also would include exhibition display. As Jo Melvin says, his enlightened and professional intention was to develop a database and website that combines the exhibition of artworks as a catalogue raisonné with archive, giving a fluid interaction of components between archive catalogue and artwork catalogue thereby bringing the archive into the open… into the domain of an art exhibition. This way of proceeding could be a model for other artists.

Yet another variation on shaking up the archive occurs when artists are still around to shake up their own archive and here we have the example of Bruce McLean, who has engaged creatively with his own comprehensive archive and produced new work as a result of this. Although this revisiting and even reworking of older material is perhaps only a variation on what artists have always done with their previous work, whether they re-interpret earlier examples or simply utilise the agency of memory, it is a new twist in a climate where archiving has been given much greater prominence. Memory, of course, operates in every one of us as an organic filter, processor and synthesiser of the past.

But we can go further in shaking up the archive: what if the artist is the archive? Now in one sense every artist, indeed every individual, is the embodiment of their own archive. Memory again! But in the case of Barbara Steveni, the artist has embarked upon a series of what one might call documentary performances under the rubric I AM AN ARCHIVE. She often triggers these events by utilising archival documents relating to her own life and reengages with her past life by engineering re-encounters with people from those times in the very location where significant events happened. These re-visitings are in turn recorded, often in image and sound, thus laying down a compounded version of past and present. In a way, this is a kind of son et lumière oral history — with all the temporal distortions involved in a post-factual recording of the past.

It is not often that the negative side of archival accumulation is aired. In the case of one very archive-conscious artist, Gustav Metzger, it is clear that sometimes this accumulation becomes a burden. And while this is evident in the interview included here, in fact many artists express regrets about the quantity of stuff that they have accumulated and the inhibiting effect of a documented past. But overriding this personal burden there is also what Sas Mays calls archival antipathy, which he characterises as the issue of the non-archival, the anti-archival and the extra-archival. This might be thought to contradict the statement of Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever, quoted by Sue Breakell, that we have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, that we are in need of archives.⁴ These different positions draw attention to the contemporary richness of the topic of archives as a site of intellectual conflict.

It is only a few steps from this situation to a consideration of the 1965 multiple Total Art Match-Box by the sometime Fluxus artist, Ben Vautier, following in the footsteps of Marinetti and the Italian Futurists who railed against the instruments of the oppression of the past. Ben exhorts us to use these matches to destroy all art — museums – art libraries etc. I am sure that he would be open to the inclusion of art archives in this list.

Both Uriel Orlow and Ruth Maclennan cite the example of Breakdown by the artist Michael Landy in their correspondence. In 2001, Landy notoriously destroyed all his possessions, from his passport to his car; but Orlow points out that while engaged in destruction he diligently created an inventory of destruction. Thus his new beginning paradoxically included a record of what used to be. Ruth Maclennan observes further that artists have destroyed their work only to be reborn as a different kind of artist altogether. As it happens, the principal impulse of both Orlow and Maclennan is the preservation of histories that might be lost, were it not for archives.

The vulnerability of archives is brought out in a different way byVictoria Lane in her vivid description of the potential threat to the archive if an uncredited person were to be given access to its inner sanctum, the strong room. In the event, the actual granting of permission for a photographer to enter this space, and the resulting photographs, leads her to muse on the utopic nature of what the archivist does in establishing intellectual control over documents, through description and arrangement, in contrast to the physical, heterotopic space of the archive revealed by the photographs.

Finally, the essay by Neal White takes us to a new place, the shaking up of social and cultural hegemony by means of the autonomous archival practices of groups of artists and other individuals. While it is tempting to ally these practices with the aesthetics of resistance attributed by Hal Foster to archival artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, with his counter-hegemonic archive⁵ , Neal White actually declares a different stance. He suggests that it would be incorrect to characterise these highly articulated structures within the political economy as resistant through counter-institutional, marginal or avant-garde forms, for they are not necessarily even opposed to the institution, but instead represent emerging networks that are establishing a set of new practices and sharing resources.

The art archivists and art librarians who came together to offer the public thoughtful discussions of the interactions between artists and archives at Tate Britain in 2007 and 2009 hope that this collection of essays will not only bring some of the papers into print but assist in propelling these discussions further and contributing to the diversity of practice.

Footnotes

1  Foster, Hal, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, no.110, Fall 2004 (3)

2  Breakell, Sue, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’, Tate Papers, Spring 2008 (6), http:www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7288 (accessed 16/7/2012)

3  Foster, op. cit. (5)

4  Breakell, op. cit. (4)

5  Foster, op. cit. (10, 5, 9)

1

FROM OUT OF THE SHADOWS ¹

Penelope Curtis

The Archive inside the Archive

Artists may well keep their own stuff in the belief that, in due course, ideas expressed in different ways on bits of paper or in other media will once again become useful. This is perhaps not so very different to anyone’s reason for keeping notes from the past;but in the artist’s case there is the additional task of developing and then maintaining a reputation, so that, towards the end of a career, the retained stuff may acquire more value than it had at the beginning. Rather than being a question of financial gain (though that can be involved), this is about how much the work of a whole career can make the early stuff count.

Archives tend to be seen as two dimensional, which is a great problem for artists who try out their ideas in the round. Rather few places keep much in the way of three-dimensional artistic archive, though architectural archives are an obvious exception.² The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds³ can be seen as unusual in its collecting activity, which ranged across period and practice, as well as media, taking it well beyond the monographic archive where, as in the case of the Musée Rodin or of Moore himself,⁴ diversity of medium is offset by the purely monocular lens.

The recent display at Tate Britain, which revealed a good deal of Naum Gabo’s archive for the first time in public, also implicitly revealed why this material was in the archive and, indeed, why it had ever been archived at all: it was flat, or could be made flat. Gabo’s bank of ideas for sculpture was expressed in a form that lay exactly on the threshold between the two- and the three-dimensional. These proto-sculptures were expressed in ‘archival’ form from the very outset; the idea of the archive was, indeed, integral to their meaning. In this sense, they signal that which is particular to the archive and which I want to signal here: its often peculiar position between past and future tense.

The Henry Moore Institute not only housed the archives of sculptors but also asked artists to come and use thosethose archives. This meant, obviously enough, relating the archive of one artist to another. Sometimes this was straightforward and the artist acted primarily like an art historian, seeking to understand a given research area more thoroughly. On occasion we specifically invited one artist to work on the archive of another, but just as often artistswould find their way by instinct and empathy towards the archive which spoke to their work.⁵

Beside the Archive

This happened with projects which were primarily premised on the archives of individual artists. It happened with Jaki Irvine’s recuperation of Betty Rea and Neal White’s of Jacob Epstein. One was gracefully romantic, the other more confrontational, but both were nostalgic for what might have been. What links these projects, as different as they were, is the fact that their subjects had been side-lined by a dominant artistic establishment. A less personalised but nonetheless effective reanimation was in play with Mark Wilsher’s use of reproductions of 1960s sculpture, as with that of Falke Pisano’s collaged recreations. They use the archives of other artists; and whilst