Curating an Archive

Examples

A list of concepts and proposals which approach the archive process in an interesting way:

• Donald Judd's Archive - Ordered by Birth Year
  • It is said that Judd's personal archives of books and catalogues about contemporary art were organised by the order of the birth year of the artist or writer
  • Donald Judd, 1983: "To begin at the beginning in a proper philosophical manner, one person is a unity, and somehow, after the long complex process, a work of art is a similar unity. But the person is fairly unintelligible and the art is intelligible. Primarily what is intelligible is the nature of the artists, either of the past or now. The interests, thoughts and quality of the artists make the final total quality of the work."
  • (Aside) Met someone who played a game in which he memorised the birth dates of a wide range of people and from time to time would try to make lists of people who lived at the same time at a single one year...

• Tate + Pompidou's Link
  • Conversation series at Pompidou in which artists from different generations (30-40s meets 50-60s) with what the curators have perceived as similarities in their practices are asked to have a dialogue together about the similarities and dissimilarities in their work. Done to unintentionally hilarious effect when artists are 'conceptual' and suddenly unwilling to articulate their readings or views on the work as a form of performance of the work itself.

• Seoul Museum of Art's Hidden Track
  • Show in which mid-career artists (50s-60s) were asked to consider produce works different to their current 'oeuvre'.
  • From the AAA website: "As the exhibition's title "Hidden Track" indicates, the show has been offered to the participating artists as a forum for experiment and amusement where they can try completely new styles of work, deviating from their signature idioms. Revealing each artist's hidden desire for creation, works on display will provide viewers with new aesthetics and unique spectacles through a synergy derived from the unexpected collisions of exhibited pieces"

• Barbican's Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
  • From Barbican Website: "Anthropologists from outer space set out on a mission to understand life on earth. Imagine that they begin their mission by examining the curious phenomenon that human beings call ‘contemporary art’. What does Art tell them about human life and culture? Believing these objects to have a real or functional use, the Museum’s curators deploy an eccentric classification system. They treat artworks as artifacts. The Martian perspective opens up contemporary art to fresh interpretations as well as humorous misunderstandings. In presuming to understand an unfamiliar culture, the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art parodies the way that Western anthropologists historically viewed non-Western cultures through alien eyes.
  • Curator's note: "The project is in part inspired by the first chapter of Kant after Duchamp by Belgian art historian Thierry de Duve, in which an imaginary anthropologist from outer space sets out to inventory ‘all that is called art by humans’. Since Martians do not have art as a defined category in their culture, they classify and interpret their chosen objects without the ‘knowledge’ we know as art history. Instead, they treat works of art as artefacts: objects which serve a function, whether real or symbolic.

• Tim Etchell's Broadcast and other works at Mirrorcity, and his works in Forced Entertainment
  • From [http://mirrorcity.southbankcentre.co.uk/tim-etchells-broadcast-looping-pieces Mirrorcity website}: Over many years Tim Etchells has accumulated fragments of text, ideas, overheard conversations and cut-and-paste excerpts from newspapers and web pages in a ‘notebook’ – in fact a single sprawling word document. In this performance Etchells weaves together passages from his textual scrapbook to create unexpected dialogues, juxtapositions and ambiguous collisions. A Broadcast / Looping Pieces provides a window into Etchells’ creative process and his approach to text, as well as what he terms the ‘transformative power of performance’.
  • Polemic posters which reflect excerpts from reality, as if automatically mixed up by a markov generator in a computer, but actually painstakingly rewritten to sound at the midway point between naive and cruelly trolling the uninformed or uneducated. (I am reminded of Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook!)
  • See also: Certain Fragments

• Exhibitions to show changes in time and space and understanding - about our perspective of objects changing over time:
  • Natural History Museum's Reconstructing the Dodo - there is a section about scientific reconstructions but focusing on debates on why and how people had wrongly reconstructed the dodo bird over time.

• Exhibitions with pedagogic aims - about expanding people's understanding of objects and material history
  • Manchester Museum (Uni of Manchester)'s artefacts interspersed with video screens with interviews with children and non-specialists talking about what they thought the object was, followed by what they thought about later when they were told what the object was, and how they appreciated or liked it more (or hated it) after knowing what the object was used for in the past. This 'personal opinion' was followed by a professional or expert weighing in on the importance of the object after that.

• Unfurling
  • Unfurling: “Never The Same has commissioned five artists and scholars to produce work that activates archival materials related to Chicago’s rich history of politically- and socially-engaged art.
  • One of the artists is Dan S. Wang who will produce a suite of new letterpress posters announcing imaginary future events that speak to the current and past worlds of Chicago critical art. See http://www.prop-press.net/01c1.htm

• Factory Records' Numbering System
  • Most of the things assigned in their record numbering system were records, but FAC191 was a cat which once lived in their basement.

Thoughts

direction?

• the goal should be to produce an archive exhibition which produces opportunities for new connections and collaborations
• historical VS pedagogic / past+present direction vs FUTURE directions (orthogonal, ideally)
• real vs reproductions / reimaginings

material/merch wishlist?

• To produce a small 3d printed model of The Substation (exterior)
• To produce a small 3d printed stackable / architectural model / interior of The Substation
• To take a photograph of all the material stacked up in a pile in the Theatre, against the black box wall, spotlight on it from the top