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.