Katy Suggitt - Archives

7/27/2019 Katy Suggitt - Archives

1/15

Katy Suggitt; MA Media Arts 2009/10 Media Methodologies 1

How do artists use, create and respond to archives?

By Katy SuggittMA Media ArtsManchester Metropolitan University2010


2/15


The intention of this essay is to discuss the variety of ways that artists have contributed to and explored thenature of archives as part of their methodology and as a subject of their work. In 1964 Andy Warhol startedto create and keep what became known as his Time Capsules consisting of the ephemera arising on adaily basis from the machinery of his artistic activity. There was no process of organising or selecting thecontent, no sentiment attached to the idea of collecting it was a non-hierarchical, utilitarian process. The

title of this work suggests a relationship with a future audience; the emphasis is on looking forward ratherthan historical. As was often the case with Warhols work, he pre-empted what has become a long andcomplex range of artistic activities relating to archives.

The Archives Study Center at The Andy Warhol Museum

http://www.warhol.org/collections/archives.html

What is an archive?

An archive is defined as collections of documents generated by a particular person, family, or organisationin the course of their activities, and which have been chosen to be kept permanently. Archives may includepapers, books, photographs, audio-visual recordings, or other kinds of material

1

To archive something is to place or store something in a place or collection whether physically or digitally.

Although, according to Derrida (1994) archive is only a notion an impression associated with a word andfor which, together with Freud, we have no concept.

2Different types of archive include: personal archives

of family histories and vernacular photographies, artists archives of research material and institutionalarchives.

1University Archives Hub

2Derrida; Archive Fever


3/15


Deconstructing the archive.

Access to the content of archives has been made easier by digitisation and growth in funding for artisticprojects has been encouraged by government initiatives in developing deeper media literacy as discussedby David Puttnam (2006)

The Creative Archive License Group exists to ensure public access to publicarchives is optimised in the digital age. Its quite simple, we all pay for theupkeep of the material in these archives we should all be able to accessthem. If we are unable to access most, if not all, of the riches locked up inthese treasure troves, then it quite naturally begs the question, why are wepaying for them to be preserved in the first place?

3

When considering the reading of a photographic archive and what its content can tell us Bate (2007)4

suggests we consider:

Who owns / keeps it?How did it come about?The conditions of its existence.

the unconscious of the archive, its partiality, its inconsistency, its exclusions

He makes the comparison between the linguistic distinction between grammar and speech (structure andcontent) and goes on to compare archaeological versus historical approaches to our understanding.

The historical approach tends to focus on:GeniusInfluenceThe extraordinary(subject matter is subservient to these categories).

The archaeological approach tends to lean more towards:The issue of where and why it emerged as it did, what the photography was used for and what regular

objects appear across the surfaces of all these photographs.Alternatively, Campany (2003) suggests Art could be a space to examine the meanings and implicationsof the archival, rather than simply turning its images into artworks.

5

He identifies three categories of the way archives can be used:1. Researching, collating, representing of images2. Recreation of archival images in ways that allude to the construction of official knowledge.3. The exploration of the interrelations of collective history and private memory

Researching, collating, representing of images.

The body of work created by photographers like August Sander (1876 1964) whose work is systematic

documentary record on a particular theme, in his case People of the Twentieth Century, A PhotographicPortrait of Germany exists as an important source of reference in its own right. The titles of the work,describing occupation or status, create a sociological reading of the portraits. Sander has used theclassification system of the archive as a working structure for his project and as a means of presentation. It

3In a speech delivered to members of the CALG in September 2006, David, now Lord Puttnam identified the Creative Archive asbeing at the forefront of movements to help the public develop deeper media literacy.

4The Archaeology of Photography: Rereading Michel Foucault and The Archaeology of Knowledge by David Bate)


4/15


has been noticed that the images are not necessarily representative of the demographic at that time certain types, such as farmers, recur more frequently than others.

August Sander 1922, BohemianGerman, Cologne,Gelatin silver print8 5/8 x 6 11/16 in.

84.XM.126.131

J. Paul Getty Trust

August Sander Circus Usherettes with ProgramsGerman, about 1930 - 1932

Gelatin silver print9 5/16 x 6 15/16 in.

84.XM.498.14

J. Paul Getty Trust

Francis Bacon (UK; 1909 1992) built up a collection of ephemera that as a visual reference bank for hispainting. Bacon said that he looked at photographs for inspiration in the way that one looks up meanings ina dictionary.

To this end he collected a broad range of mass produced imagery including reproductions of fine artpaintings, illustrations of crime scenes, skin diseases, film stars, athletes, books and magazines onsubjects including art, sport, crime, history, photography, cinema, bullfighting, wildlife and the supernatural.

Reproduction of Velazquezs Portrait of Pope Innocent XAs it was found in Bacone studio.

Francis Bacon Study after Vlzquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953oil on canvas, 153 x 118 cmDes Moines Art Center, Nathan Emory Coffin collection,Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust


5/15


Gerhard Richter (Germany b. 1932;) collects and uses mass produced imagery and found photographs inan image bank in a similar way to Bacon and with a range of subject matter that is equally diverse in itscontent. He employs a systematic approach to organising his resource materials known as The AtlasProject and this time consuming method seems to translate to the paintings by which time the application ofthe medium seems to have become almost detached from the content of the image.

In 1964, Richter described the function of vernacular photography in his working process: Not having toinvent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by paintingcolor, composition, spaceand allthe things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art."

Gerhard Richter Atlas Sheet 14

1964

66.7cmx51.7cm


6/15


Julian Germain; Consett 1888 - 1990 Don McCullins press photographs ofConsett.

Photograph for the Consett Guardian, Chronicleby Tommy Harris, 1949 - 70

Family snapshot, Consett

Julian Germain is a photographer whose work has involved combining his own work and other

photographers images as a way of exploring multiple perspectives.

His Steelworks (1990) project provides an example of this method juxtaposing his own images with thoseof Don McCullin, local press photographer Tommy Harris; and the People of Consett to create a portrait ofa community affected by de-industrialisation. He combined vernacular photographs and the pressphotographs not only removed from the newspaper context but also revealing the artifice often used inpress photography.

In 2005 he undertook a fellowship at The National Media Museum in Bradford.


7/15


Joachim Schmid has been collecting and curating found images in projects dating back to 1982 in keepingwith his maxim: no new photographs until the old ones are used up

6(In opposition to what could be seen

as this somewhat altruistic statement, Derrida points out that Archivization produces as much as it recordsthe event

7.)

Schmids project is of a curatorial nature, appropriating images found and collected in the public realm markets, the internet, the street. He looks for what he calls patterns or recurring themes in the leastremarkable of vernacular photography. Sometimes he makes humorous connections, - the ridiculouspoodles on their brightly coloured commercial portraitists backdrop. Sometimes the grouped imagesbecome a poignant observation of our shared collective experience.

Archiv#122,1991

6Opening text from his exhibition at The Photographers Gallery Selected Work 1982 2007

7Jacques Derrida; Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression


8/15


Archiv #28, 1988

^ Archiv #253, 1992


9/15


2. Alluding to the construction of knowledge.

Heidegger ascertained that that which is (present) is privileged over that which is absent. This condition isillustrated in our reading of an archive for historical representation this leads us to artists whose workalludes to the nature of the archive as a construct.

Antoni MuntadasThe File RoomA temporary physical installation and a permanent, expandable database in the virtual, interactive andmultimedia space of the internet and the world wide web, all of it referring to censorship and to those of

an artistic or cultural order specifically , on a world scale and ranging from historic cases to those that aremore incandescently current. In its materialization as a multimedia and three-dimensional sculpturalinstallation the bureaucratic atmosphere of an archive is recreated, with the walls full of file cabinet drawers

that increase the darkness of the enclosure, which is lit nonetheless by the terminals and monitors thatallow the consultation in situ of the compiled computer archives. Archives are accessible moreover throughthe internet.

8

(source: Muntadas: Media Architecture Installations, anarachive number 1, Centre Georges Pompidou,

1999.)

To the visiting artist, access to the archive is to be put in a position of privilege, the novelty of discoveringobjects, documents, recordings, beautiful for their aged appearance and emotional connection with thepast, authoritarian in their existence as historical documents, hidden in their files and boxes behind closeddoors under lock and key, guarded by sentinels, testament to the unstoppable tide of time, organised intheir strict systems of classification A-Z, subject keywords, challenging our perception of distance andproximity, effortless reconfigurations occur in the unlikely relationship between categories.

Creative imaginations dont have to work very hard to see the humour and the poignancy the material heldhere.

Is it the physicality that holds the key to the power of the archives ability to communicate?

8http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/the-file-room/


10/15


Collective History and Private Memory

Christian Boltanski (France; b. 1944)

Personnes (People / Nobody) at Monumenta Parisby Christian Boltanski

The sound of hundreds of heartbeats; an unheated space in winter; a crane that grabs and drops a heap ofclothes;

The artist has 40,000 heart beats in an archive at home. In July 2010 he will open a library of heartbeats.Since 2005 Christian Boltanski has collected heartbeat recordings around the world. TheseArchives duCoeurwill be kept sheltered from the effects of time on the Japanese island of Teshima, in the Inland SetoSea.

Boltanski work explores ideas of death and remembrance. His works act like memorials with visual andphysical references to archives: stacked, labelled boxes, and appropriated photographs. Boltanskisrecreation of the physical components of the archive are there to remind us of the individuals whocollectively make up a community. At once referencing their significance and insignificance as individuals.He combines the use of objects and sounds to convey the tangible and intangible nature of consciousness.The concept of collecting heartbeats stretches our imagination beyond the physical towards a morephilosophical consideration of the temporal.

The nature of the physical archive and the digital archive illustrate our changing position after technology.

If it is the case that it is the physical nature of the archive that creates its appeal to our senses and sostimulates our intellect, does this mean that the digitisation of archives and information in general will have

the effect of lessening our dulling our engagement with the past (if indeed that is what it is to engage withan archive)


11/15


12/15


She lost him two and a half years ago through cancer. Now she lets his digital remains take over hercomputer: the way his desktop looked when he last used it; how he named his files; the web sites he

visited. Yesterday the system showed her a photo of a holiday they were on ten years ago to the day.Occasionally she goes to their favourite cafe and lets his digital remains take over her MP3 player. Theysend her his music.

Digital Remains is about a world in which our data is stored on the network leading to digital archives ofgenerations of people. We remotely log in to them throughWe remotely log in to them through our devices.

Digital Remains is about the very personal nature of our data, how it talks about us and how it reveals our

behaviours through meta data.

Digital Remains is also about changing rituals in an increasingly complex, mobile, networked and pluralisticworld where traditional grieving rituals are not always appropriate.

11

Gaulers work could be read as a response to the anxiety created by the loss of memory associated the de-materialisation of possessions.

Photographs, songs, memorabilia, keepsakes, things once owned and handled by another person are nowmore likely to be kept out of sight in places that might become unknown or inaccessible to us in theirabsence.

11Michele Gauler; http://www.michelegauler.net/projects/digitalremains


13/15


Derrida (1994) suggests that ..the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic.It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation. 12

Michael Landys Art Bin and his earlier work Break Down (1997) that Landy described as an examinationof societies romance with consumerism are a response to the individual and the artists capacity toaccumulate material objects and emotional baggage. His work is the antidote to our need to collect andhold on to the past as well as exploring the importance of destruction in relation to creation.

12Derrida; (1994) Archive Fever at Memory the Question of Archives international colloquium


14/15


Bibliography David Campany; 2003; Art and Photography (Themes & Movements) Phaidon Press;

The John Hopkins University Press; Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz;Archive Fever, A Freudian ImpressionSource: Diacritics Volume 25, No. 2 (Summer 1995) pp 9-63From JSTOR (digital archive)

Archives Fever; Maureen Flynn-Burhoe. [online] (Updated 2000)Available at http://http-server.carleton.ca/~mflynnbu/archives/index.html [accessed March 2010].

Afterimage; The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; (35.3) The Archaeology of Photography:Rereading Michel Foucault and The Archaeology of Knowledge by David Bate

Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [online] (Updated 2010)Available at http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/ [accessed March 2010]

Archives Hub [online] (updated 2010)Available at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/ [accessed February 2010]

The Getty [online] (Updated 2010)Available at http://www.getty.edu/ [accessed March 2010]

Francis Bacon; Available at: http://www.francis-bacon.com/ [accessed March 2010]

Losing The Past; Radio 4 By Richard Hollingham

Broadcast date:Wednesday 6 Oct 2009 9-9.30pmWednesday 13 Oct 2009 9-9.30pm

Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/losing_the_past.shtml

BBC Creative Archives [online] Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/creativearchive/ [accessed March 2010]

The National Archives; Available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/[accessed March 2010]

The Archives Study Center at The Andy Warhol Museum2007 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Available at http://www.warhol.org/collections/archives.html [accessed March 2010]

Gerhard Richterhttp://www.gerhard-richter.com/ [accessed March 2010]

Julian Germain http://www.juliangermain.com/[accessed March 2010]

Media Art Net; Available at: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/the-file-room/ [accessed March 2010]

Michele Gauler; Available at http://www.michelegauler.net/projects [accessed March 2010]

Michael Landy; Tate Shots http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnTCZFyzkvY [accessed March 2010]


15/15


Michael Landy; Perfecting The Art of Destruction http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8486011.stm [accessed March2010]

Creative Commons

We work to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in the commons the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc

Documents

Katy Suggitt - Archives