Amy Howden- Chapman

On Archiving Fever

They copy papers haphazardly, everything they find, tobacco pouches, newspapers, posters, torn books, etc. (real items and their imaginations. Typical of each category)… - Onward! Enough speculation! Keep on copying! The page must be filled. Everything is equal, the good and the evil. The farcical and the sublime - the beautiful and the ugly - the insignificant and the typical, they all become an exaltation of the statistical. There are noting but facts - and Phenomena. Final bliss. 

This passage from Flaubert’s farcical novel Bouvard and Pécuhet captures something in the mania of archiving. - the collecting, then characterising, the scrabble to make sense of everything in life from the scraps to the treasures. The works in Archiving Fever collectively map this territory between compulsion and care. Each work reveals something about the systems we construct in order to comprehend the objects, ideas, and images around us. Archiving Fever questions how we seek to preserve our past and negotiate the present, while revealing how making art is simply an extension of every human’s desire to, retain and reorganise both the physical environment, and the terrain of memory.

There are many similarities between the archivist and the artist. They both seek to mould meaning, to sort the world into understandable portions, to present to a reader or viewer a frame or system through which to understand information, be it historical documents or sweeps of colour. Many artists celebrate the process by which their work is constructed, whereas archivists are often working within long established institutional structures that tend to naturalise the categories into which information is placed. The works in Archiving Fever are constructed from an intersection of these two activities. The process of archiving is laid out for artistic analysis, yet we also see the ways in which artists have joined in the simple delights of archiving, labelling and preserving - making something that was previously nothing, precious.

Dane Mitchell’s work Dust Archive (2001-ongoing) begins with what a normal archive would disregard, or even attempt to remove. Dust can be seen as a physical sign of disintegration, the residue that settles on forgotten objects. Dust is an umbrella term for all types of matter, flicks of skin and threads of fabrics, but instead of attempting to sweep the archive clean of such matter Mitchell’s project collects, and analyses what is inside and invisible within these minute bundles. By making ‘cultures’ from the dust particles, Mitchell is archiving traces of the microbes that can cause amongst other things -urinary tract infections, E. coli, and the common cold. Images of the culture dishes show shimmering splurges of growth, with each sample producing a distinctive scene of bacterial blossoming.

While Mitchell’s work concentrates on matter that would usually come in under the radar of the normal archive, Patrick Pound’s works contain object that seem so slight, that they cause us to turn to question the structures and underlying narratives that  create the categories in which they are presented. In Seven Day’s February (2006) a series of photos of screwed up pieces of paper only gains significance once we know that the objects are the end result of a daily task the artist has set himself, and assiduously completed. The balls of paper are an archive of Pound’s activities, while also being bundles of potential, for if unwrapped they might show us a small story of a stranger’s shopping expedition, or more. We are reminded that an archive can be both infinitely large, and infinitely detailed.

Simon Denny’s work grapples with the infinite in a spatial sense, illustrating how the process of archiving is as much physical as it is mental, with objects gaining new meaning every time they are repositioned. For Archiving Fever Denny has re-contextualised a previous project. The base materials, wood, paper, plastic and found objects that were originally laid out with some semblance of order - within the space of the Adam Art Gallery, are dispersed with some materials scattered, some piled, some swept together, with whole containers smothered in the embrace of meters of cling wrap, while monumentally sized roughly sawn planks bulge out of the architecture. In this work Denny also comments on the ways in which institutions such as art galleries attempt to archive such ephemeral and site specific installations, by plastering across the walls and floor, the catalogue picturing the installation in its previous incarnation. Alongside this printed matter of his own practice Denny has placed piles of the Dominion Post from the day the work was installed, yet their haphazard placement suggests that he is happy to forget their content. Their casually archived state suggests endless possibilities, which is the starting point for the immense life-long project of Frederick Butler, as represented in Ann Shelton’s work, A Library to Scale.

Butler’s categories make plain the subjectivity that exists in all archives, that a narrative, be it of a national history, or the life of an eccentric collector, is what constructs meaning.  In this way, we see the analogy between archivist and artist can be extended to encompass archive and art gallery, or archive and museum. In the words of Douglas Crimp, “The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe… Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but “brick-a-brack,” a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects.” 

Butler observed his community and charted its fads and preoccupations using idiosyncratic categories to order and annotate and dated newspaper clippings. The vast information within the books is mirrored in the numerous patterns of the wall-papered spines, retro woodcuts sitting alongside soft-petalled watercolours. Because this subject is so visually rich, Shelton takes a documentary-like approach, photographing the groups of books as a whole. The second component of the work is stop-frame animation-digital images, allowing us fleeting access inside the works. The frames change too rapidly to read the articles,  but we can see the categories, at times bizarre, a realisations that we are flicking through a series of article that share a common theme of ‘nudity’ or ‘railway station.’

The outcome of Butler’s obsession, if it had been conducted in our contemporary internet age, is almost unimaginable. With the internet, the desire to search, record, map and archive has taken on mammoth proportions, including the opportunity to individualise information, to collect and display data about ones-self.  Sites like flicker.com encourage people to archive the contents of their handbags, “What's in your bag today? Empty the content of it and take a pic! Add notes and post it to the group.”   The internet has enabled the most private and the most public of information to be categorised. An yet the internet has also provided a zone in which marginalised information, or information that in another era would have been suppressed, can be easily circulated. Gaston Ramirez Feltrin’s video work Gotcha (2004) is made up of American surveillance footage taken in Iraq in 2003. Yet such digital data, once in the public realm is no longer a stable entity, and here has been added to by the artist.  By setting the shootings in the context of a Playstation like game, our attention is drawn to the voices of the American soldiers eagerly encouraging each other to get their targets.  As viewers we become implicated in the callous and brutal action as we look through the sights of a gun at men scurrying, almost bouncing across a field, until in an instant the men are blown to pieces. Without the surrounding narrative, these events, that may have been explicable, or possibly justifiable seem plainly like an execution without trial.

In previous work, the artist Johanna and Helmut Kandl’s created fake histories in Soviet propagandist style. Here they take the images of history and let the audience reconstruct the context and the narratives that hold such things together. The photos in Herr Doktor aus Wien (A Doctor from Vienna) are found images. The work points out what we take for granted in an archive, the source of the material is missing, as the photos were found in an abandoned house.  This is research backwards, one usually starts with universal categories, age, occupation, nationality; here we start from the end, the feelings of this person, their erotic desires, their joyous family moments and yet the most basic overarching narrative is missing.  For all the richness of social and historical information, this personal archive remains floating.  Touching down to the Nazi rallies and the bombed cities we realise this is a particularly ominous time and place. It is the memory that imbues images with meaning as much as the visual information evident. As theorised by Siegfried Kracauer  “The old photograph has been emptied of the life whose physical presence overlay its merely spatial configurations…The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that history has discharged.”  The photograph, like the archive, has to be activated by a human presence; the system that binds objects and images together has to be an understandable cultural narrative. Without such a system, the elements of the archive, like the visual information in a photograph become merely a collection of useless pieces, nothing more than a “general inventory of a nature that cannot be further reduced.”

Popular Production’s work grand canyon suite 1 or wonder whats wrong (1990)  is a coy, but carefree, example of the way the archive can be re-activated. The film is constructed from fused archival film footage. The images flicker with age but are  combined with a symphonic soundtrack, it feels as if the artist has gone frolicking in the archive and managed to find a festivity of sound and colour.

Curation is itself a process similar to archiving, the unveiling of a category under which a group of works can be linked together. In Archiving Fever the category is the obsessive flush that at times overtakes artistic and archiving activities. What is memorable about the show, is that through the flush we come to see shades of fever in our present society, from the fads of the daily paper to the way we increasingly demand that any category we invent, any search we undertake, can be instantly fulfilled.