Notes from a Workshop - Carol McKay (Notes from a talk given at the one-day seminar event 'Interacting With the Archive: Creative Approaches', University of Sunderland, 22/03/2007(1)).
Archival Practices 1. Accumulation: irresistible impulse to gather together and keep the ephemera of lived experience, effective in both the public and private realms. 2. Protection: desire to prevent the destruction of history by preserving it as record. 3. Storage: provision of adequately safe-guarded spaces, physical and virtual. 4. Classification: provision of filters through which the material fragments of time are systematised. 5. Transmission: technologies enabling access and distribution. 6. Rediscovery: inspiration for new histories, new art works, new curatorial interpretations. Presented as a descriptive list, archival practices can seem banal, unthreatening, even dull. Yet, in presenting their various interactions with archives, the five speakers at this one-day workshop collectively disturbed such an impression. None of the speakers are archivists, but all are engaged in on-going creative dialogue with archives. Archives at different moments and in various ways have enabled - and frustrated -- their own diverse activities as curators, artists, historians, editors.
Practices Enabling New Practices Fragmentary histories of photography exist across different archives and institutions: high street studio archives; business archives; family archives; mining archives; police and medical archives as well as photo-agencies, to name but a section of the archive typology discussed on the day. The joy of archival (re)discovery is the driving force of different practices. Happening across unexpected images in little known archives, or locating classics in national collections: both aspects of curatorial experience were described by Val Williams in her paper. Focussing on her role as co-curator of Tate Britain's ambitious new photography exhibition 'How We Are: Photographing Britain' (22nd May - 2nd September 2007), Williams discussed some of the practical as well as ideological tensions the curators experienced when negotiating their exhibition (perhaps to the surprise of some of the delegates, Tate Britain has no formal photography collection and little photography expertise). Images for the exhibition were sourced from a fabulous variety of archives across Britain, many of them much-neglected or overlooked. Some, such as the Archive of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, exist outside of the recognised structures of photographic practice. For Williams this archival research and rediscovery is a central aspect of her critical curatorial practice, enabling different understandings of photography's complex past. Similar archival practices enable the work of picture-editor Sophie Spencer-Wood. Describing her work on Phaidon's narrative photo-books Ghandi (2001), Freedom (2002) and Family (2005) (2) Spencer-Wood explained her editorial practice of making informed selections from an almost unimaginable excess of photographic materials across a plethora of individual archives. Her account of the challenges posed by such archival abundance reminds me equally of the fascinating analysis by historian Carolyn Steedman. Archives, Steedman suggests, are simultaneously the condition of historical practice and the cause of research malaise. What keeps you awake at night, she warns other researchers, "is actually the archive, and the myriads of its dead, who all day long have pressed their concerns upon you. You think: these people have left me the lot: each washboard and doormat purchased; saucepans, soup tureens, mirrors, newspapers, ounces of cinnamon, and dozens of lemons; each ha'penny handed to a poor child... Everything. Not a purchase made, not a thing acquired that is not noted and recorded. You think: I could get to hate these people; and, I can never do these people justice; and, finally: I shall never get it done... Your anxiety is that you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed... (yet) you know perfectly well that despite the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, it is in fact, practically nothing at all. There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are working in." (3) The photographic historical record is similarly everything and nothing; potentially overwhelming for the researcher, and yet a mere fragment - the visual dust -- of lived historical experience. This sense of everything and nothing perhaps also explains the thoughtful way in which Spencer-Wood reflected on the detail of her archival experiences. Individual encounters really do still matter, she suggests. Despite the way in which new digital technologies are revolutionising how we access and use photographic archives - remotely, virtually -- it is still important at some point to 'be there', in the collection (with white gloves perhaps), looking at and feeling the material presence of the images. Benefiting also from the first-hand, intimate knowledge of the permanent archive personnel, whom, she suggests, no digital record can ever entirely replace. The everything and nothing of photographic archives is also played out in Marjolaine Ryley's artistic practice. Based on her own collection of some 2000 photographs made over a 12 year period, her work nudges archival boundaries, as the private becomes public, the family snap becomes photographic art work. Like much of her other work, Residence Astral builds an archive out of an existing archive. The founding space of this archive is domestic, her grandmother's apartment; stored and arranged here are the material memories of generations. The collection and its spaces, psychological as well as physical, in turn become subject-matter for Ryley's photographic exploration. Reflecting on the relationship between archival research and artistic practice, Ryley points to the various ways in which the two interact. Like many artists she is intrigued by the question of how archives come about. When do private possessions become cultural records? The V&A's collection of Victorian family albums is a good example. Each album is its own archive, now within another archive. Artistically, Ryley is intrigued by such little, domesticated archival practices. The grid structure of the historical family album, for instance, is both an organisational technique and a metaphor for memory, with all its fragments and lacunae. It is with text, of course, that we seek to fill the narrative gaps between images, whether the marginalia of domestic albums, or the formal records of the institutional archive. And Ryley is drawn to work with both grids and text as she explores the scrap-books of memory. As an artist-researcher, she also addresses issues of photographic storage and transmission. Shoe boxes, framed photographs and annotated photographic albums may not yet be obsolete, but are digital technologies really changing the ways in which we interact with and curate our family archives? And if so, what does this say about shifting attitudes towards personal memory and remembering? The writer Jens Schroeter points similarly to a seismic change in the way in which family snaps are archived. While there is little alteration, perhaps, in what is being photographed (family high-points, celebrations and holidays), the treatment of these images is changing, as more and more private images are made public via digital means: personal web pages, emails and blogs for instance (4).
Archival Anxieties But what if I change the title of my initial archival list? No longer merely Archival Practices but Archival Anxieties , for archival practices are two-faced: at once reassuring and alarming. The desire to enter or use the archive exists alongside an equally rapacious desire simply to HAVE it (5). Feverish accumulation yet threatens disintegration. Family albums in car boot sales, or now a bargain on Ebay, testify to the relentless passage of time. Precious personal belongings - material memories - set loose from their individual anchors, free floating until some other collector (artist/historian/writer/curator) provides a new berth, which might yet be equally fleeting. Indeed, more than one contributor suggested that anxiety and frustration constantly threaten in the archive. Marjoline Ryley evoked such anxieties in connection with family photography; here, the reassurance of the visual snap-shot exists in constant tension with its testimony to the fleetingness of time and the brokenness of memory. From a different starting point, artist Stuart Brisely spoke passionately of his exasperation with archives. As founder of the Artist Project Peterlee (1976-77) he actively resisted the deadly stillness -- the quietude -- of the 'archive'. The Peterlee project instead as initially conceived was a continuous learning process, unearthing the personal and the shared memories of the community. It was to be a living-memory project, a lived memory politics, dependent on dialogue, negotiation and conversation, by and for the people of the new town. A project which would also acknowledge instabilities and conflicts in historical memory. But - inexorably perhaps - it became archival, an accumulation of recorded oral testimonies and photographic records: temporarily, indeed, a dead accumulation, dusty, unused and forgotten (6). As he demonstrated in his workshop contributions, Brisely's suspicions of archives continues, despite the reactivation of the Peterlee Project in a new guise.Cultural and social historians - unsurprisingly perhaps - tend to be less suspicious of archives and archival effects. North-East mining historian Stuart Howard has loudly defended the archival achievements of the Peterlee Project: as a superb visual and oral history resource it deserves to be celebrated for capturing the voices of people who were among the first to live and work in that part of the coalfield at the turn of the 20 th century. "If it hadn't been done then a part of the cultural and psychological being of future generations would have been missing....materials for the constructions of different interpretations of the region's history would have been missing...so every attempt aimed at rescuing historical and cultural evidence is very important (7). In his workshop presentation, though, Howard spoke - with more than a hint of ironic humour-- of the struggle to establish the North East Mining Archive Research Centre (NEMARC) from the collections of three different mining-related institutions, all with differing agendas and expectations (8). This story of an archive-in-process is one of dogged commitment to an idea of the archive as precondition for historical understanding. But disputes over archival responsibilities and funding shortfalls are just some of the anxieties which haunt many such projects. Equally a source of anxiety are those questions surrounding archival authority: who controls archives? How are decisions made as to what should be collected and preserved (and what should be excluded)? How do such decisions in turn impinge on the histories archives potentially reveal (or conceal)? What processes ensure equal and fair access and what practices prevent it? These were among the questions debated in the final workshop session, with some heated contributions from delegates on all sides. From the outside, this research workshop was an odd event, its archival remit broad enough to include papers from artists, photographers, editors, curators and historians. The delegates were equally diverse, from a range of research backgrounds and practices. A shared commitment to archives - or at least, to a questioning of archive functions - is what made the day a success. More than a commitment to archives per se, though, the event also demonstrated a remarkable cross-disciplinary willingness to examine the cultural preconditions for memory and remembering.
(1) This workshop was one in a series of five training events , Performing the Archive, funded by the AHRC. These offered post-graduate students in Art and Design the opportunity to engage with a broad range of archival practices, resources and theories. A collaboration between INTERFACE, University of Ulster and The School of Art, Design, Media and Culture, University of Sunderland, in association with Locus+. (2) Sophie Spencer-Wood ed., et al., Family: photographers photograph their families , Phaidon, 2005 Manning Marable, ed., et al., Freedom: a monumental visual record of African American history since the 19th-century , Phaidon, 2002 Peter Ruhe, Ghandi: a Photo-biography, Phaidon, 2001(3) Carolyn Steedman, "Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust," The American Historical Review October 2001 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.4/ah0401001159.html> (9 Jul. 2007). (4) He suggests that the 'transition to digital/ized archives can be regarded as a reordering of the reconfiguration of archive and transmission'. In "Archive - Post/photographic", Media Art Net, www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes (10 Jul. 2007) (5) Carolyn Steedman, op. cit., <www.historycooperative.org/journals> (9 Jul. 2007). See also Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression , University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996 (6) For more on the history of the Peterlee Project and its reworking, see www.peterlee-project.com (9 Jul. 2007) (7) www.peterlee-project.com (9 Jul. 2007) (8) An amalgamation of 3 separate mining resources, NEMARC has recently been awarded a substantial Heritage National Lottery Fund award. www.bbc.co.uk/wear (9 Jul. 2007)
|