why read the archive?

When I agreed to do the exhibition, the curator Leslie Patterson mentioned that the Chicago Artists' Archive is housed in the Visual and Performing Arts Library, where my show is installed. I am a recent transplant to Chicago, and I live about a half hour outside the city, so reading the Archive allows me to learn Chicago art history during the day. I come up with many reasons not to drive down to openings (why on Friday nights? when traffic is the worst?). I wrote this post about the archive in June, which lays out a bit about the Archive and what I have been looking at.

The real reason to read this archive is its unique status as a regional open and free artist archive. While my research is far from complete, a few hours of Google searches has unearthed many archives, but none quite so beautifully simple in its conception or as extensive in its scope. If you make or made art in Chicago or the Chicago area, or were born here and went on to have an artistic career by any definition, your work belongs in the Chicago Artists' Archive. There is no curator making selections for the archive or editing it in any way. If you submit, you are included. One artist made the CAA into a public archive for his work, sending 'archival' CDs with his photographs, inventory lists, regularly updated resumes, and statements.

I have learned an enormous amount already about Chicago's art scene. Of note are the longevity and significance of artist-run spaces and galleries, as well as the tremendous influence of the School of the Art Institute.  And I am only in the middle of the H's, a third of the way through.

When I am full of the archive, I walk out to see the city's public art, visit the SAIC or Columbia College student galleries, the Pop-Up Art Loop galleries, the shows at the Art Institute, and then stop at the MCA on the way back to the Northwestern shuttle bus. Every day is full of art these two months, and that is the best reason to read the archive.

Artists and Archives

Hal Foster wrote a great essay in 2004 called An Archival Impulse. He includes a lot of interesting artists, including Pierre Huyghe, showing at the MCA, and Tacita Dean.

Im going to include a longish quote here:

This last point might imply that the ideal medium of archival art is the mega-archive of the Internet, and over the last decade terms that evoke the electronic network, such as "platforms" and "stations," have appeared in art parlance, as has the Internet rhetoric of "interactivity." But in most archival art the actual means applied to these "relational" ends are far more tactile and face-to-face than any Web interface. The archives at issue here are not databases in this sense; they are recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible, and as such they call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing. Although the contents of this art are hardly indiscriminant, they remain indeterminant like the contents of any archive, and often they are presented in this fashion-as so many promissory notes for further elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios. In this regard archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps "anarchival impulse" is the more appropriate phrase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects-in art and in history alike-that might offer points of departure again.

photo of file contents, Chicago Artists' Archive

I like that Foster discusses the physical tangibility of the archive, and the subjective, open eye with which the artist approaches it. They are these endless seas of material to reference and consider. I find myself drawn to stories about female artists with kids working from the suburbs, because that is me right now. I read it all, but I read those stories, the ones that reflect my experience, with a little more kinship.

I feel less inclined to make work about the artists in the archive and more inclined to build the archive. I've only been here for a year, but I can see gaps, for sure: artists or galleries who are not represented, or artists who are only represented by one show or one work. I want to go through newspaper archives, gallery files, all of it, to fill it out as a complete picture.

Installation

We installed the prints on September 5, a Sunday. Everyone got sick on the planned install day, so the whole family came as an installation team.

I saw the case before I made the work. As I got into reading the Archive, the work evolved as site specific drawings: about the Chicago Artists' Archive and in the Chicago Public Library. The 8th floor north case has rotating exhibits curated by the Visual Arts curator, Leslie Patterson. It is a large case with glass that reflects the many, many hanging fixtures in the hallway. 

The prints needed to be large and bold to compete with that reflection and draw viewers down the hallway. I even tried using photographs of the fixtures in the drawings. I am sure they influenced the content of the drawings: and I don't mind the way the two things interact in the final installation.

The pieces also picked up the palette of the library.

8th floor hallway with Jeanne Dunning print (north case at rear)

installing horizontal descent in north case

 Thanks to Roger, who curates and installs the exhibitions in the Performing Arts case at the opposite end of the hallway. He did the lighting and developed the hanging system for the case.

Metaphors for Archives

I have been working over the last few months with very fragile structures: stacks of ladders, parachutes and hot air balloons. They have come up as I work with the Chicago Artist Archive, and I am going to set out to describe why these images come up, and what they mean in relation to an archive.

hanging drawing, 2010

Building a stack of open ladders is the kind of fool's errand I might go on if left with them in a room. I am not much of a builder of things. I tend to make fragile structures and urge them together with string and tape. They list and collapse regularly, and I abandon them. This can feel like a metaphor for my artistic practice. At times my work feels strong, faithful, and forthright. At other times it feels thin, like a veneer, and I worry that it is too easy to make a beautiful thing that is not worked enough. The tower of ladders is also a metaphor for my professional practice: riddled with left turns and odd choices, the artistic ladder tower of success is being torn down and re-built in my head on a daily basis. It can collapse and require starting over, in a new direction, or perhaps the same direction all over again. Or I build my tower, brush my hands off, and then never see another opportunity like it again. 

sketch for artist's book, in process

In the context of the archive, each ladder could represent an artist's professional practice. The ladders stack together, building a larger structure of cultural contribution. Careers look the same: art schools, exhibitions, reviews, community engagement, an obituary, a loss of interest, a resurgence. They stack together gently, elbow to elbow. 

from Open Source Sculpture by Max Grueter

The parachutes represents the artists and their inclusion in the archive. Artists and their work are best described by reviews in local press. When reading one review after another, I see the artists drifting gently down into the perpetuity of the archive. Think of it: a review of a group show in 1970 now helps someone find you, forty years later. It holds your voice, what you were feeling and thinking all those years ago. 

dropping, 2010

I am also using the parachute in the only way I ever have: as an elementary school phenomena. The parachute is my favorite collaborative piece. The act of lifting the membrane into the air and pulling it down to make a shelter is powerful and ridden with symbolism. The parachute's shifting strength makes me think of local art worlds: held together by hands and air, filling and collapsing by the energy of the participants. 

by Scott Adams

Hot air balloons, from SketchUp 3d warehouse

The hot air balloons relate to the the act of making. The joy we feel when we make things lifts us up. It carries us onwards. We are fragile, gigantic egos, making dramatic gestures. The loose balloons are the ideas leaving our studio and moving out into the world. They are everything while we are in them, but then we make them, or sell them, and they disappear into the past.