On March 9, 2019, I partnered with the Metropolitan New York Library Council and the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York to host a half-day symposium on arts in the libraries. [Photos by Aidan Grant + Neta Bomani]:
What role do the arts and design play in todayâs libraries? Our major public institutions frequently commission high-profile public art, some libraries feature dedicated exhibition space, and artists and designers have long drawn inspiration from archival and library collections. Yet today, as we access and create knowledge through an expanding array of designed platforms and interfaces, infrastructures and algorithms, aesthetic operations are integral to the core services that libraries provide. We see a growing number of library- and archive-based artistsâ residencies and exhibitions, and expanding interest in more sustained collaborations across the library and art worlds. In this symposium we gather librarians, artists, designers, and representatives from allied fields to examine recent examples of library-centered creative practice, discuss the mutual benefits of such collaborations, and propose new models for growing and sustaining these partnerships.
Maps reveal, delineate, verify, orient, navigate, anticipate, historicize, conceal, persuade, and, on occasion, even lie. From the earliest maps in cave paintings and on clay tablets, to the predictive climate visualizations and crime maps and mobile cartographic apps of today and tomorrow, maps have offered far more than an objective representation of a stable reality. In this hybrid theory-practice studio weâll examine the past, present, and future â across myriad geographic and cultural contexts â of our techniques and technologies for mapping space and time. In the process, weâll address various critical frameworks for analyzing the rhetorics, poetics, politics, and epistemologies of spatial and temporal maps. Throughout the semester weâll also experiment with a variety of critical mapping tools and methods, from techniques of critical cartography to sensory mapping to time-lining, using both analog and digital approaches. Course requirements include: individual map critiques; lab exercises; and individual research-based, critical-creative âatlasesâ composed of at least five maps in a variety of formats.
I was invited to talk about this class in Jer Thorpâs âData Artâ class at NYUâs ITP, and as part of the âMap as Metaphorâ series at the Center for Book Arts; you can find my talk and slides here.
I collaborated with colleagues from NYU and SUNY Stony Brook to organize a one-day symposium and three-day screening series (hosted at Anthology Film Archives) that bring together artists and scholars to examine the mediated and aesthetic dimensions of extraction and infrastructure. In the last decade, we have seen an explosion of artistic and scholarly interest in resource extraction, its cultural geographies, and the infrastructures that support it. We convene this event to interrogate the relationships between the representations of such dynamics and the larger forces that they condense: globalization, transmission, digitization, territorialization, labor migration, displacement, sustainability, security.
I was delighted and honored to take part last week in the Princeton-Weimar Summer School on “Archive Futures” at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. The week featured lots of stimulating guest presentations by visiting faculty and some tremendously exciting doctoral student work. I gave a talk, on our penultimate day, on “Archival Aesthetics.” The first half focused on the aesthetics of the archive: its boxes, shelves, architectural spaces, and digital interfaces; and the second half focused on archival art: art that draws inspiration from the archive (…and that, in the process, represents some degree of diversity in gender, race, and class).
I’ll post my text and slides below.
I was the last faculty presenter of the week, so I wanted to make sure to tie together various threads of our ongoing discussion, and to make mention of the students’ projects when appropriate, to reaffirm for them that their work is part of this big, interdisciplinary, long-term dialogue. For those reasons, I decided to write out my comments, rather than allowing myself to extemporize — but still, I refrained from presenting an “argument” that the participants would merely respond to, and chose instead to offer up an assemblage of examples (in keeping with David Joselit’s notion of aesthetic “aggregation”) — some of which were intentionally problematic or provocative, and some of which even I was annoyed by (<cough> Thomas Hirschhorn <cough>). I was hoping that these various projects — even the problematic ones — could generate a discussion about what an archive is and does and can’t do, and who it’s for and not for, and what it feels like.
We had a long, heated, fruitful discussion — one that took turns I certainly hadn’t anticipated. At the bottom of this post, I offer some reflections on that conversation. For now, I’ll simply say that it’s left me wondering about the relationship between taste and “rigor.”
[Note that the emboldened “codes” below — e.g., S2 — refer to slide numbers: S2 is Slide 2, S22 is Slide 22. You can figure out the rest.]
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By now, youâve probably noticed that itâs necessary to begin with a disclaimer. I wonât disappoint. Since Iâm the last in a long day â a long week â of cogent, coherent, compelling arguments by a coterie of esteemed scholars, and since Iâm sure your cranial archives are filling up and the bodies they inhabit are wearing down, Iâm going to take a few cues from Foster and Joselit, whose texts I encouraged you to read for today, and offer some fragmentary, indeterminate thoughts. Rather than taxing your brains by asking you to stick with me through a linear line of argument, Iâll instead aggregate some aesthetic examples that will, at the very least, I hope, give us some concrete âthings to think withâ â will allow us to reconsider some of the themes that have echoed through your projects and throughout our conversations over the past few days.
Itâs probably safe to say that a rather small proportion of the population at large has been in an archive â a physical, place-based archive. Fewer still have ventured beyond the reading rooms â those realms of white gloves and ink embargos â and into the vaults. Given the general lack of popular empirical evidence of archives, itâs rather remarkable that their commonplace conception is so evocative, if also clichĂŠ. Rarely does one encounter a sentence in the popular press in which âarchivesâ are not paired with âdusty boxes.â [S2] Dust: those same teeny-tiny particulates that have the power to defile and disable an entire microchip manufacturing operation, are, in the archives, an integral part of the operative logic and prevailing affect â at least in the âimagined archive.â
[S3] Lots of folks â John Ruskin, Burton Russell, Hannah Holmes, Steve Connor, Carolyn Steedman, and my colleague Eugene Thacker â have contemplated the ontological mysteries of dust, its temporal complexities, its poetic and epistemological powers: both blurring boundaries and revealing contours. And of course on Tuesday Daniel addressed the similar complexities of smoke. Dust, like smoke, is also multisensory: itâs something we see and smell and move through and inhale into our bodies, as Steedman reminds us. Those dusty boxes â timeworn though the image might be â also remind us that the archives (much like religious spaces, as Amanda knows) are spaces of embodied encounters.
[S4] This bears reminding, since thereâs been relatively little consideration of what itâs like â empirically, aesthetically â to do archival work, either as an archivist or a researcher. That, I think, is why Fargeâs highly tactile The Allure of the Archives received such a warm reception when it was translated into English in 2013, 24 years after its original publication. Farge offered an archival addendum to the already voluminous accounts of libraries as âalluringâ aesthetic and affective environments. Itâs really quite surprising how often, in our grand, capital âTâ Theories of âknowledge infrastructures,â we tend to balkanize intellectual labor and aesthetic experience.
Iâll share one short personal story: [S5] about a decade ago I was working on an essay about the 2006 renovation â a controversial retrofitting â of Alvar Aaltoâs Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvardâs Lamont Library. [Warning: lots of incoming air quotes.] The room was founded with a gift from Harry Harkness Flager, real estate investor and Standard Oil heir, in honor of his friend and former Columbia professor George E. Woodberry, who aimed to afford undergraduates an opportunity to experience the âdelight and entertainmentâ of poetry outside the âchore of the curriculum,â where, under the influence of new approaches to criticism (particularly New Criticism), poetry was increasingly analyzed with a ârigorous empiricismâ and mined for âfacts.â [S6] My study examined how Aaltoâs forward-thinking and fluid design â a warm, humanistic variation of Modernism â accommodated and symbolized the myriad material forms of poetry represented in the collection: manuscripts, little magazines, records, printed books, even poetry-inspired artwork. One of the reviewers of my article, however, claimed that my focus on âdelightâ and âentertainmentâ precluded poetryâs âsignificanceâ; to highlight aesthetic experience, my critic said, was to suggest that poetry is devoid of âintellectual or political engagement,â and to fail to acknowledge that âpoets even think rationally.â
These were my pre-tenure years: I needed that peer-reviewed publication, and I had already waited well over a year for this irascible review. So, in my revision I took great pains to demonstrate that feeling â even, heaven forbid, pleasure and delight â is not inimical to rational thought. [S7] I also had to spend some time explaining, contra many preservationistsâ claims, why, in the Poetry Room, computers werenât âperipheralâ technologies that marred the integrity of the design, and that they couldnât simply be moved off-site so as to preserve the roomâs classic aesthetic. At just over 1000 square feet the Poetry Room was one of the smaller media spaces Iâve focused on in my research, and its specific focus on poetry made its mission and audience particularly delimited. But even this small case study illustrates what Iâve tried to do with all of my research on media architectures (research very much inspired and informed by Lynnâs work): that is, to demonstrate how entwined infrastructures â architectural, technological, intellectual, social, etc. â embody certain politics and epistemologies. And this embodiment happens in large part through their aesthetics.
[S8:B] By aesthetics I donât mean only beauty or sublimity, or a taste-based assessment of âlook and feel.â Iâm also referring to sensory contemplation, which is not separate from or opposed to the realm of the intellectual. Rather, aesthetics are an integral part of the research and teaching and scholarly fraternizing â as well as the processing and preservation, cataloguing and curating â that take place in archives and libraries. We need to acknowledge these aesthetics of experience, for both patrons and staff, as well as both on-site and online communities, both the local and the distributed.
Letâs take a look at a few examples in which the aesthetics of archival infrastructures inform archival practice â and shape the operative logics and politics of the institution or collection.
[S9] Iâll start with an easy and obvious example: the archival object itself. One of archival preservationâs central concerns is determining whether something has âintrinsic valueâ based on its âuniquenessâŚof informational content, age, physical format, artistic or aesthetic qualities, and scarcityâ â and if so, then safeguarding the original item.[i] We saw yesterday at the Goethe-Schiller Archive the layers of meaning revealed by attending to the aesthetics of the document: its paper stock and format, the style of writing and the writing implement, the palimpsestic layering of drafts, etc. We saw on Monday the significance of a photobookâs distinctive material properties: its dimensions and layout, the tactility of its cover and haptics of its image reproductions. Tomâs voice mail collection also reminds me of the archival significance of the cassette tape. Thereâs been a resurgence of interest in tapes, and their potential researchers are interested just as much in the tapesâ distinctive hiss, the physics and gestures of their operation, the J-Card âcover artâ and inserts, as they are in their recorded messages.[ii]
[S10] In an archive, those tapes would be stored in a box â but that box isnât merely a holder-of-content. The box, too, shapes our archival experience. [S11] Consider Thomas Demandâs 1995 photograph, Archive (again, perhaps a too-obvious example), which highlights the standard modular unit of its namesake. The archival boxâs monotonous gray (or grey-blue-green) is the defining âanti-aestheticâ of the stacks, informing our conception of the archiveâs epistemological object. Yesterday, at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, we investigated the contents of mute gray-green folders inside a manila box, which was in turn enclosed in a surprisingly cheery blue tie-close box. I invite you to consider the affective and epistemological significance of all the untying and unboxing required to access the prized contents.
Demand, as you might know, uses âfoundâ photographs of historically or culturally significant spaces â photographs, we might say, that are plucked from the collective-cultural image archive â to construct life-size models out of paper and cardboard. He then photographs those models before destroying them, thereby precluding the modelsâ preservation as aesthetic objects. And when we, Demandâs audience, look at the resulting photographs, what initially appears to be a banal setting soon turns uncanny. Itâs too matte (or un-shiny), too sterile, too un-peopled, and, as we notice upon even closer inspection, devoid of details like door handles and electrical outlets. These spaces are too blankly generic to be real. The photographs document a fiction.
Demandâs process, it should be painfully obvious to everyone here, highlights the âconstructednessâ of the document.[iii] While Demandâs creative process obviously offers commentary on archival and historiographic process, here, of course, the creative content is archival, too. This particular photo, with all its unlabeled boxes, happens to depict a model of a photograph of the archive of Leni Reifenstahl. A headache-inducing hermeneutic tangle.
As a teacher, I often think about the pedagogical potential of the box en masse, too: when I take my students into archivesâ back rooms and conservation labs, they start to grasp the scope of an institutionâs collection and the breadth of formats it contains. As they scan the shelves and acclimate to the climate-controlled chill, they also begin to appreciate how value is attached to those materials â and just how much of it lives only in material form, and will likely not be digitized any time soon. [S12] I recently completed an article on library logistics, for which I examined the off-site shared print repository for the NYPL and Princeton and Columbia universities, which includes, among its 12.5 million items, some archival material. The facilityâs carefully engineered un-design is striking. As Michael pointed out on Tuesday, the aesthetics of storage facilities, with their boxes en masse, embody a host of often competing epistemologies and politics of information. Here, the box is both a unit of knowledge and a trackable object on a shelf; the collection represents both a potential intellectual commons of tremendous scope and value, and a product subject to inventory management.
Such storage spaces are typically accessible only by staff â but letâs think also about the design of public, or researcher-accessible, archival facilities. [S13] Consider Neutelings Reidijk Architectsâ 2006 Institute for Sound and Vision, a Dutch audio-visual archive in Hilversum, with its façade of televisions images molded, in relief, into multicolored glass panels â a pastiche of glitch aesthetics, TV imagery, and stained glass â and its ziggurat-like interior with âinfernalâ subterranean archives.[iv][S14] Contrast this with Arlette Fargeâs Bibliothèque de lâArsenal. [S15] And with Mass Designâs proposal for the Kigali Genocide Memorial archives, (a rather unattractive building, I must say,) where a âforestâ of pillars will afford individuals private space in which to offer testimonials, recordings of which will then be preserved in the archives, along with documents and audio-visual materials from the Gacaca (gachacha) [genocide] Courts.[v] Cultivating the appropriate affective ambience is critical for a space like this, which aims to make the public an integral collaborator in building and activating the archives.
[S16:B] Digitization efforts also, ostensibly, bring larger and more diverse publics to the archive. Yet a large portion of archival patrons interact with collections without ever setting foot in the archival space. They âvisitâ solely through the archiveâs website. Yet, surprisingly, only recently have archivists begun to pay attention to the usability and aesthetics of their web interfaces. Usability and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive concerns. Aesthetic choices in interface design inform workflow and intellectual labor, as Fabian has noted in his study of office forms. And as archivists Shaun Ellis and Maureen Callahan acknowledge, âour websites are actually a reflection of a whole ecosystem of tools, practices and attitudes within the library.â[vi]
[S17] Until recently, an âonline finding aidâ meant little more than a pdf of an archiveâs original type- or hand-written guides, or a manuscript-length, item-by-item html-based outline of a collectionâs contents. [S18] In 2013 a team from Princeton, including Ellis and Callahan, won the C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists for their design of an online finding aid that is, in the juryâs words, âelegant in its outward simplicity and robust in its search capabilities.â The archivists explained that their work began by âimagining an archives access system more in concert with what patrons have come to expect from the webâ â hence, the single Google-esque search bar.[vii] The redesigned site allows users to directly access digital content through the catalog, [S19] to sort inventories and dig into deeper levels of metadata if they so choose, and to offer comments at every descriptive level â from the file to the series to the collection.[viii] And every level of the collection has its own unique URL.
[S20] NYPL Labs â the New York Public Libraryâs in-house tech development team â is testing other means of accessing the libraryâs archival and manuscript collections. Their Terms Explorer allows users to search across archival collections and map out relationships between people, places, and subjects. Their Detailed Description Mini Map helps you to drill down into a finding aid at a granular level, while still orienting yourself within the larger collection. [S21] You can also transform a finding aid list into a network diagram, or visualize âdistant readingâ across all the collections. What do you think are the larger implications of these new interface designs? How does it shape how we navigate the archive and understand its contents?
[S22] Yet thereâs another way to think about archival aesthetics: in terms of archival art. As Hal Foster[ix] notes in his widely cited article on âthe archival impulse,â which Iâve asked you to read, there are lots of artists who take inspiration from archival or library material, or from the archive- or library-as-institution. In addition to the individual artists that Foster mentioned, we have entire exhibitions and collections devoted to archival art: [S23] Haus der Kunst in Munich hosted Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, Archiving in Art in 1997, Okwui Enwezor curated Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art for the International Center of Photography in New York in 2008, and Sven Spiekerâs The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy was published that same year.
In the time that remains Iâll âaggregateâ a few concrete examples that grapple with some of the themes that animate your work, and that take up issues we havenât had time to address. Perhaps Foster and Joselit, both prominent art historians, will offer us some conceptual tools to use â but I should note that I donât expect us to adopt their models wholesale, or to worry over whether or not a particular work meets all the criteria of a Fosterian âarchival platformâ or a Joselittian âaggregate.â As I hinted at in a few of my comments earlier this week, Iâm not one to deify the capital-T Theorist.[x] I think we can draw from their methods or concepts without necessarily buying into their whole program.
Last year I was invited to give one of the plenary addresses at the Library of Congressâs Digital Preservation conference, where we had representatives from the National Archives, the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio, universities and museums, alongside data scientists from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the NSA: a reminder of the incredibly wide variety of archival forms and ideologies. I focused my comments on the aesthetics of preservation; I started by talking about the history of âdestruction art,â then looked at a variety of artists who take up issues particularly pertinent to the âfuture archiveâ and its âtime objectsâ and aggregated media forms. These artists often bring into stark relief the conventions of archiving and preservation practice, and propose new directions for that practice, by pushing protocols to their extreme, highlighting âsnafus,â and creating âlimit cases.â [S24] We have artistic examples of the self-erasing disk, the self-destructing file, the self-deteriorating page â for example, William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaughâs Agrippa (this work of course takes up themes that are central to Yasminâs and Johanâs and Ellaâs work). [S25] We also have digital artists who highlight the volatility of data models, net architecture and storage media by building intentionally irreverent, idiosyncratic, unstable archives, or by constructing hypertext narratives meant to disintegrate with advancing link rot.[xi][S26] We have artists aestheticizing the hard drive and other storage technology, reminding us of the materiality of the digital object and of memory.[xii] [S27] We have artists highlighting the questionable veracity of emulation â a strategy used commonly in preserving âvariableâ media like video games and interactive art. We have artists transforming the processes of digital preservation and emulation into performances â archival âhappeningsâ â and framing the documentation of those processes as aesthetic objects.[xiii][S28] In aestheticizing the applications, affordances, failures and limitations of digital tools and techniques, these artists help to make manifest, perceptible â aesthetically experiential â the underlying values, tacit politics, and invisible âstructuring structuresâ of our digital archives.
[S29:B] Yet even artists who arenât working exclusively â or at all â in the digital realm, still pose questions that are pertinent to the future archive. One thing we havenât discussed much this week, at least by name, is âcommunity archiving,â which, according to archivist Terry Cook, reflects a move toward more âdemocratic, inclusive, holistic archives,â âlistening much more to citizens than the state,â and ârespecting indigenous ways of knowing.â[xiv] There are a number of artists working in the realm of âsocial practiceâ and ârelational aestheticsâ who engage with community archiving â not without much debate over both the aesthetic quality of the work and the integrity of their politics.
[S30] Take Theaster Gates, whose Dorchester Projects, a group of reclaimed buildings in Chicago that have been refashioned into a local arts-and-culture center that includes a slide lantern library acquired from the University of Chicago; book and LP collections acquired from the now-defunct Prairie Avenue Bookshop and Dr. Wax Records; and the library of John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines. [S31] The assemblage of media and architecture inspires its immediate South Side Chicago community, and the global audience that studies Gatesâs work, to consider the significance of preserving othersâ cast-off media, and of integrating these collections into a vibrant, multi-purpose community space. It also prompts us to consider the roles those specific materials (architecture books, âethnicâ publications) played in constructing Chicagoâs â particularly Black Chicagoâs â history, a history that other institutions had to âdeaccessionâ in order for Gates to step in as its conservator.[xv]
[S32] Working with similarly disenfranchised populations is Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, whom Foster wrote about in his October article. In the late summer of 2013 a group of students and I trekked up to the Bronx â to the Forest Houses public housing complex â to see Hirschhornâs Gramsci Monument, a compound, much like a low-lying adult tree-house, composed of plywood, plexiglass, and packing tape, and offered in homage to the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Throughout the summer the project, funded by the Dia Foundation and built by Hirschhorn and residents of the Forest Houses (who were paid $12/hour), had served as home to heady lectures, concerts, and art programs. As the New York Timesâ Randy Kennedy put it, itâs an âinner-city intellectual Woodstockâ composed of the âtotems of a postapocalyptic garbage cult.â
[S33] The compoundâs various platforms feature an arts workshop; a stage for presentations and performances; [S34] a restaurant with two-dollar burgers and one-dollar hot dogs and over-ripe bananas; [S35] a computer lab full of kids playing video games; [S36] an exhibition space featuring objects on loan from the Casa Museo di Antonio Gramsci in Sardinia and the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome; a radio station; a newspaper office where residents put out a daily photocopied edition; various seating areas; [S37] and an archive and library housing roughly 500 books on loan from CUNYâs Calandra Italian American Institute.
[S38] Hirschhorn supposedly met with folks at nearly 50 housing projects before he found a champion in Erik Farmer, president of Forest Housesâ Residents Association. Farmer appreciated not only the offer of temporary employment for his fellow residents, but also the potential to inject something new into the neighborhood: âThereâs nothing cultural here at all,â he said to the Times reporter. âItâs like weâre in a box here, in this neighborhood. We need to get out and find out some things about the world. This is kind of like the world coming to us for a little while.â Meanwhile, Hirschhorn mustâve felt he had found an ideal host in Farmer, who âwas the only one who asked me to give him a book of Gramsci to read.â[xvi]
I must admit: the three of us felt rather sheepish about our intellectual-cultural tourism to the South Bronx, an area of the city each of us had visited only a handful of times in our many years in New York. Iâm slightly embarrassed to admit that it was the archival impulse that drew us uptown. Hereâs how Foster explains the draw of the archive: âarchival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.â[xvii] They âelaborate on the found image, object, and text, and favor the installation formatâ and its ânonhierarchical spatiality.â They gravitate toward readymades, composed of objects âdrawn from the archives of mass culture, to ensure a legibility that can then be disturbed or detourned, but they can also be obscure.â Much of this work is ârelationalâ in nature, and thus adopts expression that is âfar more tactile and face-to-faceâ than the uber-archive of the Web. These archives are ârecalcitrantly material.â Work inspired by the archival impulse ânot only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and⌠in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.â [S39] And finally, it âarranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects (âŚplatforms, stations, kiosksâŚ).â
The Gramsci Monument â with its nonhierarchical circulation, its reclaimed materials, its bulbous nodes of packing tape and springy plywood platforms, its smells of grilled hot dogs wafting across the courtyard, its white plastic chairs arranged in clusters to foster conversation, its library shelves offering a mix of heady intellectual books and Ebony magazines â certainly bears out Fosterâs description. Foster further proposes that Hirschhornâs work is a response to, a âgrotesquerie of,â our âimmersive commodity-media-entertainment environment.â[xviii] [S40] These platforms offer the âintimation of utopian possibility, or at least a desire for systematic transformationâ â new development atop the landfill borne from what Hirschhorn calls the collective âcapitalist garbage bucket.â (Weâd have to consider the specific ways in which that âgarbage bucketâ has spilled into the South Bronx.)
Weâre not simply remixing and repurposing found texts and images and constructing readymades; nor are we simply rearranging archival materials. [S41] Weâre also generating new materials, new knowledge, as is evidenced in the daily newspaper and ongoing radio broadcasts. [S42] While I was there, a group comprised of at least one Forest Houses resident, a former police officer, and an official Gramsci Monument worker (possibly a Forest Houses resident, too) spoke on-air about police brutality and stop and frisk, while periodically evoking Gramsci.
The Gramsci Monument is the fourth and final of Hirschhornâs monuments; others for Spinoza, Bataille, and Deleuze appeared, for the most part, in the philosophersâ home countries, but apart from âofficial sites.â Gramsci gets stuck in the U.S., but he, too, is removed from its cultural capitals and finds himself situated in the Bronx. As Foster explains, âthe radical status of the guest philosopher is matched by the minor status of the host community, and the encounter suggests a temporary refunctioning of the monument from a univocal structure that obscures antagonisms (philosophical and political, social and economic) to a counter hegemonic archive that might be used to articulate such differences.â[xix][S43] More broadly, Hirschhorn âwants to expose different audiences to alternative archives of public culture, and to charge this relationship with affectâ â with a mix of âloveâ and âpolitics,â as proclaimed on the basketball hoops we see here.[xx] âHirschhorn applies these mixed means to incite his audience to (re)invest in radical practices of art, literature and philosophy â to produce a cultural cathexis based not on official taste, vanguard literacy, or critical correctness, but on political use-value driven by artistic love-value.â[xxi]
As much as I admire the mission, I just canât help but read condescension in the rhetoric. I canât get over that reference to the local populationâs âminor status.â I canât help but wonder if the Timesâs Ken Johnson is right: if the Gramsci Monument is just âanother monument to [Hirschhornâs] monumental ego.â Yet in reading through the Monumentâs extraordinarily text-heavy poster-size program, I found that Hirschhorn explains his relationship to the community in terms that are a bit less patronizing and actually rather redeeming:
I never use the term âparticipatory artâ in referring to my work, because someone looking at an Ingres painting, for instance, is participating, even without anyone noticing. I never use the terms âeducational artâ or âcommunity art,â and my work has never had anything to do with ârelational aesthetics.â The Other has no specific ties with aesthetics. To address a ânon-exclusiveâ audience means to face reality, failure, unsuccessfulnesss, the cruelty of disinterest, and the incommensurability of a complex situation. Participation cannot be a goal, participation cannot be an aim, participation can only be a lucky outcome.
Participation here comes in many forms. As Hirschhorn admits, âI do not distinguish between a person who could be a âreceptive participantâ and the person âhanging around.’â Theyâre all participating, and those myriad forms of participation are validated. Art blog Art F City featured an illuminating post that drove this point home. They write:
[S44] The purpose of combining a computer room, art studio, radio station, newspaper room, philosophy library, kiddie pool, snack bar, and an open mic stage, is to validate any group cultural experience. Copies of People magazine sit across from a bookshelf of Marxist literature. A photo wall titled âEvery book is importantâ shows kids holding up their favorite books, from textbooks to chick lit. Itâs a living embodiment of Gramsciâs desire for proletariat liberation from cultural hegemony, and his credo: âEvery human being is an intellectual.â
That liberation comes in many forms. The aforementioned blog post featured several interviews with local residents. Dannion Jordan, who was on the paid construction team, said, âYou work on something like this, and after a while itâs not like a jobâŚ. You start thinking itâs your thing, too. I mean, Iâm no artist, but Iâm making a work of art here.â Forest Housesâ Erik Farmer explained to Kennedy that, while for Hirschhorn the project is a work of art, â[f]or me, itâs a man-made community center. And if it changes something here, even slightly, well, you know, thatâs going in the right direction.â Local resident Cash explained, âThe way I see it is they provided fifty jobs to the community, for one. For two, everybody looks forward to coming here. If it were up to me, I would have this every year.â Another resident said, âIt kept people busy, people out of trouble. And focused on something positive instead of negative. You could tell there was a change.â And yet another experienced an aesthetic liberation: âAnd this is art. I never realized that artâŚit really changed my idea of what art could be. Art could be anything.â So can an intellectual. And maybe an archive, too.[xxii]
[S45] Artist Ann Hamilton likewise expands our notion of what constitutes, and doesnât constitute, an archive. For her, the historical document is fully embodied and vital and social; in this way, her work parallels that of Diana Taylor, who draws a distinction between the text-based âarchiveâ and the performance-based ârepertoire.â Much of Hamiltonâs work engages with the materiality and sociality of communication and historical artifacts, and how that materiality determines what constitutes a cultureâs âarchive.â [S46] Through the material abundance of her work, and through its lack of familiarity to what Foster calls typical âarchival architectures,â Hamiltonâs work allows its inhabitants to create new, unfamiliar, affective connections to history. It calls attention to the limitations of the official historical record and suggests means of refreshing the archiveâs architectures and materials with alternative sources that donât always readily lend themselves to classification or preservation.
âIâm very interested in the hierarchies of our habits of perception,â Hamilton says, noting in particular âourâ prioritization of âthe discursive structure of wordsâ over other âways of knowing.â[xxiii] Her work frequently questions the authority of the verbal and textual record. [S47]Aleph, for instance, includes a video close-up of Hamiltonâs mouth, full of marbles, rendering her mute. [S48] For myein, she recited Lincolnâs second inaugural address in phonetic code and covered the inside walls of the Venice Biennaleâs American Pavilion with a Braille translation of Charles Reznikoffâs Testimony: The United States (1885-1915). Both pieces questioned the universality of language and called attention to the archiveâs â and, in the latter case, American historyâs â unheard voices. [S49] Meanwhile, indigo blue and tropos involved the âunmakingâ of a book through erasure, or by burning away the text, line by line. Rather than an act of destruction, however, this unmaking represented a means of âclearing the field,â making room for another âmaterial kind of telling.â[xxiv]
Hamilton seeks to evoke historyâs âuntold storiesâŚthrough a material presence.â[xxv][S50] In mattering, for instance, a person sitting in a perch draws up from the floor a long line of typewriter tape and âweavesâ it around his hands. The gesture links mechanical production to handicraft, and, considered in light of the installationâs title, âmattering,â represents the transformation of materiality, and the human labor that produces it, into something that matters. Embodiment is entwined with epistemology ([S51] even her experiments with mouth-held pinhole cameras argue for an embodied record-making). Hamiltonâs work addresses, in her words, âthe way the body through physical labor leaves a transparent presence in material and how labor is a way of knowing.â[xxvi]
Hamilton uses quotidian materials â from bread to blue jeans to pink Pearl erasers â and a variety of media formats, to form inhabitable, multisensory âarchivalâ landscapes. [S52] At her 2012 the event of a thread at the Park Avenue Armory, we find newspaper, 8 x 11â lined paper covered with handwriting, scrolls covered with typewritten text, pigeons (which once, like the horse, served as a vital means of transmission), vinyl-record-engravers, erasers, bells, bellows, [S53] radios, the voice. In these installations, which commonly engage the histories of their sites, she creates palimpsestic landscapes by layering sight, sound, smell, taste, and texture, then activating the scene with simple, repeated movements, or what Clark Lunberry calls âaccretions of gesture.â[19] [S54] indigo blue and tropos, as I noted earlier, involved someone sitting at a table, [S55] âunmakingâ a book through erasure, by burning away the text, line by line. [S56] I took my graduate Archives + Libraries class to see the event of a thread, where several students commented on the various kinds of labor, or performance, represented in the installation. We had âofficialâ participants, [S57] including the artist herself, reading and writing and erasing and singing and recording. And we, the visitors, gleefully labored on our swings to move a giant curtain strung across the center of the Armory. Again, our bodies, through their physical labor, marked their presence in the material and contributed to a larger epistemological project.
[S58] How do we preserve these transparent presences? How do we ensure those quotidian gestures, that invisible labor, those unheard voices are registered in the historical record? What defies recording and preservation? These are among the questions Hamiltonâs work raises for me. She proposes that a history rooted not only in extraordinary events, but also in the everyday â its artifacts, sensations, labor, simple gestures â requires an archive that is embodied, material, and living.
[S59] Then again, what if there are aspects of the everyday that we simply donât want to be recordable and preservable? Voices that don’tâ want to be heard, gestures that donât want to be captured? Are you familiar with the Invisible Australians project? It cross-references documents generated through the Australian Immigration Restriction Act to piece together the identities â and posthumously grant subjectivity â to non-white residents who werenât recognized as Australians. The ethics of this project â and of the clearly unethical government policies it aims to redress â are worth debating.
[S60] Iâll end with an example thatâs quite the antithesis of invisibility and silence.
Camille Henrotâs 2013 video Grosse Fatigue is the exhaustive aggregative archive â a world tour and grand history of archaeology and epistemology. Joselit describes the aggregate as a platform that âstages cofrontationsâ between disparate, semi-autonomous items; it brings âunlike thingsâ into a âcommon spaceâ in order to âhave their conceptual unevenness heightened.â The video, based on her 2013 artistâs residency at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., exploits the aesthetic of the interface to contrast different materialities and aesthetics of preservation: [S61] a fish in a preservative bath, tagged bird carcasses in a drawer, proliferating browser windows and books and magazines and hard drives stuffed with gifs â and even technicians working in a natural history museumâs preservation lab. [S62] Art historian Pamela Lee suggests that the âwindows within windows within windowsâ layering of these analog and digital preservation systems â which we might say echoes of the boxes within boxes of the Goethe Archive â shows the âdigital windows and screensâ to be âjust as flattened out and drained of life as all those sorry animals carcasses accumulating in cold storage.â [xxvii] Weâre missing that accretion of material presence. The screen, she seems to be saying, despite its riotous chromaticism and propulsive rhythm, fails to provide a âcleared fieldâ for us where we can submerge our hands in boxes, take pleasure in the intellectual labor of mind and body, inhabit the dust, and breathe.
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[i] See Kimberly J. Barata, âQuestioning Aesthetics: Are Archivists Qualified To Make Appraisal or Reappraisal Decisions Based on Aesthetic Judgments?â Provenance, Journal Of The Society Of Georgia Archivists 12:1/2 (1994).
[ix] Hal Foster, âAn Archival Impulseâ October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.
[x] I donât particularly care, in most cases, if Iâm honoring the integrity of the Academic Sageâs gospel. Even our brilliant Theory Gods are still fallible humans â often driven by hubris, often prone to branded neologisms, often plagued with purple prose or a predilection for obfuscatory rambling â who have nevertheless done us a great service by bracketing and naming particular cultural phenomena, and offering us some potentially useful methods and concepts.
As I said above, we had a long, heated, fruitful discussion, with lots of unancipated twists and turns. It’s typically a delight to find a conversation generating new frameworks and concepts, and unfolding in unpredictable directions — but parts of our conversation took on a register that made me a bit uncomfortable (maybe productively so?). I’m partly to blame for this: I made a poor choice in preparing my presentation: I spent waaaay too long writing the talk, then spent waaaay too long preparing my slides, then spent way too little time thinking about my coda: a video clip. I wanted to show a few segments from a glossy, impulsive video installation, but the only high-res versions of the video available online were integrated into a seven-minute documentary featuring an interview with the artist. And in that interview our artist said some not-jaw-droppingly-stupid-but-not-exactly-brilliant things about cultural production and ethnology and disciplinarity and epistemology. I, perhaps not-exactly-brilliantly, figured people would listen past her not-always-compelling commentary and instead watch the super-flashy footage of the video installation itself; as I said, by way of preface, that’s what I wanted to highlight: the flow of images in the video. And if members of the group did want to take issue with her commentary in our conversation, all the better! We could disagree with her! Her work, by offending our own sensibilities, could challenge us to articulate those sensibilities. I happen to believe that we don’t have to “like” or agree with work to learn from it. Besides, this particular artist is widely shown, the winner of numerous awards — so why not grapple with her work?
Surprisingly (to me), we spent a really long time talking about intellect and taste: the artist’s intellect and my taste. Why would I not have chosen a piece that was more “rigorous,” more “sophisticated”? There were plenty of more “avant-garde” examples that would’ve been much more intellectually potent (Farocki, of course, as well as other vanguard gentlemen). I suggested that the very fact that this “flawed” work generated such a vigorous discussion indicated that it was, in some sense, successful — in inciting viewers’ critical thought, in pushing us to fill in the gaps that the artist left behind. But, apparently, my standards weren’t high enough; I was letting the artist off the hook — by merely giving her some play, it seems.
I left feeling defeated and a bit stunned. Yes, I made a bad choice in showing a video that interrupted the artwork itself with jejune commentary, which then kinda derailed our discussion. But still, I wonder: can we not seriously examine less-than-“rigorous” art (flawed according to whom, by the way — and, besides, what art isn’t in some regard imperfect?), to see what we might have to learn from it? Does all art have to come with a built-in, air-tight theoretical treatise? Do we expect all of our artists to be verbally articulate critical theorists? Can we, the “viewing public,” not add that layer of intellectual rigor through our conversations about art? Can artists not embed critique into their work though parody or provocation? And what roles does taste play in academics’ critical-judgments-that-aren’t-ostensibly-about-aesthetics?
I was delighted and honored to serve as an invited faculty member in the Princeton-Weimar Summer School on âArchive Futuresâ at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, in June 2015. The week featured lots of stimulating guest presentations by visiting faculty and some tremendously exciting doctoral student work. Iâd be curious to see how all of these studentsâ dissertations take shape: thereâs so much promise! I gave a talk, on our penultimate day, on âArchival Aesthetics.â The first half focused on the aesthetics of the archive: its boxes, shelves, architectural spaces, and digital interfaces; and the second half focused on archival art: art that draws inspiration from the archive (âŚand that, in the process, represents some degree of diversity in gender, race, and class). You can find my talk and slides here.
I was honored to join Matthew Kirschenbaum, Cole Crawford, George Oates, and Dragan Espenschied as one of the plenary speakers at the Library of Congress/NDIIPP âDigital Preservation 2014â conference in Washington D.C. Only July 23, I presented âPreservation Aestheticsâ; you can find my slides and talk here, and watch a video of my talk here (I strongly advise against it).
I was honored to serve as one of the closing keynotes at the Rare Book and Manuscript Librariansâ pre-conference at the 2014. American Library Association conference. I spoke about design and aesthetic experience in archives and special collections. You can find my talk and slides here.