[-empyre-] Preservation: personal and institutional

["Clare Stewart" <cstewart@acmi.net.au>]

In response to Damien's and Tom's posts and relating back to my opening reference to the work of Ken Jacobs, I am very interested in the work of filmmakers who make use of found footage... a process that is, in a way, a kind of preservation of the everyday. It is a film art form that has its origins in the cinematic work of Joseph Cornell and there are some very fine examples on show in the ACMI Screen Lounge programs 'Celluloid Memories' and 'Screen Echoes'. Contemporary Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Gustav Deutsch's ongoing Film Ist project is exemplary in this field...recycling everything from footage purchased in a flea market (old Mexican soap-opera colour tests used by a cleaning lady to scrub floors and consequently chemically damaged in the most visually exquisite ways) through to the 35mm stock used to mechanically run an early German computer... Deutsch's project, arranged in a series of chapters on the properties of cinema (eg. movement and time, light and darkness, a mirror, a blink of an eye etc) archives forms of moving image that fall outside institutional archival parameters. In recontextualising damaged stock, he also poses questions about how we value things. In the case of the Mexican soap-opera colour tests, what is considered throw-away develops even greater integrity (visually) for having been thrown-away and misused and then recovered. In a kind of layer-upon-layer effect, it is Deutsch's labourious recontextualising of this work that will now be institutionally preserved and therefore ensure the preservation of something that would otherwise have been discarded. 

Deutsch's art practice, and that of many others, relies on extensive personal archiving of the kind that Damien's Object Not Found project involves. Institutional archives, as Paul's detailed posts have shown, deeply consider organisational principles and collection development policies etc. I am interested in the kinds of organisational principles that individuals develop for their personal archives (which may lead to more public projects). It strikes me that what is being preserved is not the object as such, but the meaning that individual ascribes to the object (something Damien also suggests in his work). Here I am reminded of a CD Rom project by Agnes Hegedus that I saw in at ZKM in 'Surrogate' back in 1998 (I think it ended up in Artintact too). It is an archive of personal objects belonging to the artist. These could be ordered in various categories that riffed on the kinds of categories we might expect to encounter in a public institution. However each object had a textual and spoken narrative attached to it, and could also be order associatively, through the memories and stories attached to its acquisition/gifting/reception etc. As part of the exhibit, the public was requested to bring in an object, which was then treated as a museum piece (eg. carefully cleaned and photographed) and then you were recorded telling your own story about the object. The object became important because of the story, not for its objectness.

When I worked at the Australian Film Institute's valuable Research Collection (now located at RMIT), I filed a perfume sample from Dior's Dolce Vita in the film title file for Fredrico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita. I was convinced that this would be useful to some future researcher. I am only sorry I did not create a cross-reference record along the lines of "Cinema and its Olfactory Resonances", as someone approaching the topic of odour and film may not think to look in the La Dolce Vita title file! I like to think that institutional archives are also peppered with idiosyncratic, personal values or moments that sneak in around the objective objectives of collection policy.


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