Hot Lunch Leftovers, ed. Jane Wallace, 2022
The Desiring Archive
"In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension..."
(Neuromancer, Gibson W.)
Central Ōtautahi was the site of two not-quite-concurrent archiving projects I undertook in 2015- ish, at which time, with the immediate emergency earthquake response having concluded, the city was perhaps closer to its future than its past. The first, and most consuming, of these projects, was to construct an archive. This archive, I decided, could exist within its own axiom so long as it was exhaustive. I archived demolished modernist buildings my grandfather had designed by collecting detritus from the sites and building this into clay vessels. I archived the home he designed for his family by filming the space from four angles, room by room, on found 16mm film. I photographed each piece of pottery he had made in the summerhouse shed, that hadn’t smashed in the earthquakes. All of these constructions could form archives because they were exhaustive—all the buildings, all the pottery. I thought that constructing an archive from embodied interactions with its subjects—making the archive—evaded any necessary archival legitimacy; a family archive, a personal archive, an archive of feelings.
The second of these archives was ‘Community Service: A Reading Room,’ which invited contributing members of historic Ōtautahi artist-run spaces to contribute any kind of written ephemera that was representative of the time and social space their projects occupied. The contributions were exhibited at North Projects, an artist-run I was involved in that operated for two years out of the back half of an uninsurable villa on the Bealey/Manchester corner. In a trail of emails with Simon Palenski, who we invited to write an accompanying text for the project, I was adamant that Community Service was neither an archive nor a history. Simon echoed this in the resulting text, that rather than an archive, ‘the objects reflect on the space that North Projects inhabits. They [the ephemera contributions] dissimulate a community and a series of social relationships and experiences that exist in that space.’ I’m retroactively surprised by my own anti archival admissions. Maybe this sort of labelling held too much responsibility. Responsibility for what? Exhaustively and objectively compiling the social space of every Ōtautahi artist-run ever?
Whether either of these projects constitute an archive is arguable, though perhaps a question of labelling more so than an interrogation of their content. In conversation with Ann Cvetkovich discussing their bodies of work mutually titled an Archive of Feelings, Tammy Rae Carland clarifies that, ‘the archive is about the original, the thing itself, and you get to work directly from a poignant moment, or object, or letter, or experience that you can consider to be both authentic and
subjective.’ As an artist appropriating objects—often the personal belongings of others—to create archives, their definition certainly serves their own purpose, but it serves my own too.
Cvetkovich further defines the archive as a ‘mutually constructed’ interplay between lived experience and context. I take the idea of mutual construction to contain not just the interpersonal or social spaces that surround the formation of the original object, but also the social spaces inhabited by whoever and wherever the object is revisited from, that is, constructed in the present. In these social spaces where perception is directed by ones various orientations towards the object, and where authenticity and subjectivity can be synchronous, the original object becomes, or just is, little more than a point of orientation from which to construct imagined histories and futures.
The archive spills over.
The things itself spills over, outward from its present orientation and into the imaginary. It is a vehicle for affect, a ‘non-conscious experience of intensity… a moment of unformed and unstructured potential.’ It’s this space the archive occupies that provides a platform for subversion and inclusion—a subjective, affective, authentic, imagined space, where borrowing the language of the institutional archive might serve to transgress dominant narratives.
In Lawrence Welschner’s biography of The Museum of Jurassic Technology, he describes the museum as borrowing languages of authenticity—in this case the display cabinets of ‘artfacts,’ dark corridors, earnestly informative collection descriptions—to critique the very institution this language is derived from. An anonymous shopfront in Culver City, L.A., my memory of the museum is a barely lit warren of tall glass cabinets containing dioramas and artefacts: a five inch hairy horn that grew from the nape of a woman’s neck, Disney characters that had been constructed by hand to sit in the eye of a needle and viewed through a magnifying glass. And then I’m perched on the sidewalk outside, eating a samosa from the next door convenience store, attempting to untangle what I had just seen, what of it was ‘real.’
Welschner’s book, ‘Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,’ about the museum and its founder, David Wilson, rather than untangle the authentic from the constructed, gave me permission to not know, to enjoy it even, that undefined space. Welschner is firm in his perspective that the museum is not a parody. Wilson is not trying to fool anyone by smattering ‘authentic’ artefacts amongst ‘constructed’ ones, ‘he actually believes in this stuff.’ I wonder if by ‘this stuff,’ Welschner is referring not to the ‘facts’ of the natural histories, but in the potential for objects, artefacts, to precipitate affect, a non conscious experience of intensity that productively messes with established narratives of history and reality and the institutions who decide which is which.
This pivot from authority to affect is manoeuvred by way of labelling. Local Contexts co-founder Jane Anderson, who has been part of developing a traditional knowledge labelling system, calls the archive’s ability to serve indigenous communities a ‘radical failure.’ The continuous removal of cultural, historic and familial objects and documents, from indigenous communities has found these objects absorbed into institutional archives and become largely invisible and inaccessible. In legal terms, ‘things’ exist within a value system that only recognises property—the thing belongs to someone. As knowledge that is accumulated over time, traditional knowledge is not subject to intellectual property legislation.
Local Contexts’ TK (Traditional Knowledge) Labels is a global indigenous archiving system that can be used by institutions holding indigenous archives to label provenance and use of objects uplifted from their communities. As a response to this fraught and complex issue of indigenous knowledge and ownership, a system of labels on digital archives seems mild, but, vitally, the institution holding the archived material must consult with the indigenous community who designate the labels themselves. The instigation of this communication has the potential not only for indigenous communities to regain some control over provenance and appropriate use of archives, but provides a digital infrastructure to hold this knowledge on the terms of those who the knowledge belongs to. At the time of writing this, the application of TK Labels for mātauranga Māori is being developed by Local Contexts founder Maui Hudson (Te Kotahi Research Institute at the University of Waikato), to develop TK licences in intellectual property law.
Here, labelling activates the archive. The object is manoeuvred out of institutional ownership, out of ‘objecthood,’ by allowing it to hold knowledge, or recognising the knowledge it already holds. This recognises, too, that we are not necessarily completely agential in our relationships to objects. The object, the original thing, orients us in a two-way conversation. In disrupting the authority of institutional archives by redistributing ownership, we so too disrupt dominant historical narratives and chronologies and begin to dismantle the passive exclusion that institutional systems perpetuate.
In ‘New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption,’ archivist Jamie A. Lee positions the act of critical archiving as a direct interrogation of dominant narratives and a tool for radical social justice through storytelling. Using queer theory to ‘investigate the power that archival standards and practices have exerted over non-dominant and marginalised peoples, communities, and histories,’ Lee centres community participation in the generation and organisation of oral history archives. ‘From the storytelling that takes place in dialogue, to the archival contexts in which the story made accessible through digital and physical discursive entry points, the oral history record has the power to affect the narrator, the interviewer as interlocutor, the archivist, as well as present and future visitor to the archives.’
I’m particularly interested in queering archives as a practice not dissimilar to TK labelling, in that the archive is not fixed but revisable, re-writable, and responsive. It can be formed or reformed to reflect the needs and values of its present community and the futures they imagine.
Writing on Gregory Sholette’s ongoing project The Imaginary Archive, Tim Corbalis describes the cultural economy of art as being, ‘dependent upon a sphere of hidden social production involving cooperative networks and collaborative production— systems of gift exchange, unremunerated group labour, collective forms of practice.’ Sholette’s public art project that explores collaborative and collectivist cultural practices, writes Corbalis, explores the, ‘splintering of cultural memory into a series of alternative historical possibilities and desires… How are socially-based cultural practices perceived, shaped, limited, or liberated by their relation to historical memory?’
In large part to the spread of digital networks, Corbalis exclaims (in 2011) that, ‘The once hidden archive has split open, its ragged contents are spilling out into view.’ I’m reading this on the Enjoy gallery online archive, a resource I use often and think is an exceptional archive of Aotearoa artist run practice and discourse, but wondering what these ragged contents are, and where they are? How might hidden social production be archived? My instinct is that it can’t, at least not exhaustively in the way my own criteria-for-archiving aspired to. But just as adopting the language of the archival institution might subvert the very authority this language represents, so too does the artist-run borrow language to subvert authority. The press releases (sometimes), the opening parties (always), the hidden social networks, the durational rotation of exhibitions or projects. These are the languages of the cultural economy of art that the artist-run seeks to dismantle, if not actively, then inherently.
Of all the artist-runs that existed, sort of, together for those three weeks in spring 2015 at North Projects, I mythologised CASKO the most. Perhaps it had the most space left around what archives existed from the project, being essentially nothing but Merrisa Clair’s text ‘Cultivating the Hinge: CASKO and the Revision of Space,’ held in The Physics Room’s online archive. The text describes an industrial chiller somewhere on or off High Street that hosted eight site specific projects over the same number of weeks. Written in 1998, only the year after CASKO operated, points of reference in the text could be inferred to reflect the frames of reference that surrounded CASKO-the-social space. Clair prefaces the logistical details of the space by framing a, ‘poetic dis-ruption of officially sanctioned languages of bodies in space by gestures that push, stretch, transgress, deconstruct, re map and ultimately transform power-structures.’ Although unreferenced, I can’t help but read Lefebvre’s The Production of Space into the activation of resistance via social spaces. Perhaps not very incidentally, Louise Palmer’s contribution to Community Service included a 1991 first translated edition of this book, with Paul Klee’s ‘Uncomposed in Space’ on the cover.
Clair’s text, then, might be an archive in and of itself, in that it surrounds facts of CASKO’s existence with cultural and social references that reflect the spaces it occupied, physical and otherwise. The existence of this text wills CASKO into being, but an existence that exists always in relation to the reader. Just as the objects in North Projects generate relational space in an artist-run cannon, so too do the points of reference in Clair’s text. Community Service was an archive, I guess, an archive that has since swallowed up North Projects with it, into the mythologised social landscapes of Ōtautahi artist-runs. What are these social landscapes, if not a vessel for our own mythologies? And what even is an archive, if not just whatever we need it to be, whatever else it’s wrapped up with, in whatever present moment it’s seen, spoken to, from?
My first archive, the personal one collecting the affect of post-quake Christchurch, the pots my grandad made, the social and cultural relationships of my mid-20s,—it wasn’t exhaustive. I’ve since found many more of his pots that missed out on the photo shoots, and calculated that some of the buildings I documented were designed by his firm after he’d retired. Also since I made this archive, he died, and his ashes were buried in one of the pots I documented, a small unglazed one with an angular lid.
