RE: [-empyre-] Preservation: personal and institutional (Tom Nicholson's reply -- forwarded)

["Michael Arnold-Mages" <magesm@mesanetworks.net>]

Return-Path: <tomjnicholson@hotmail.com>
From: "Tom Nicholson" <tomjnicholson@hotmail.com>
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] Preservation: personal and institutional
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 03:02:08 +1000

Clare's description of how an object can become important because of its
story, not for its objectness rings true.  It strikes me that this more
relational system of meaning is often generated by an archive itself. 
Archival systems (like ordering material alphabetically, or
chronologically) often generates curious juxtapositions which, like an
individual narrative, inflects the meaning of an object in an unexpected
way.


Whitechapel Art Gallery in London recently showed Gerhard Richter's Atlas,
the accumulation of over thirty years of collecting images (sometimes
found public images, sometimes his own photography, including photographs
of his own paintings).  It is was a stunning experience.  There is no text
to narratively inflect the meaning of the images.  But the sheer
aggregation of images, and their diversity, mean that each image was read
in relation to the mass of all the others.  So even fairly straightforward
personal photos of his baby son with food-smeared fat face and goggly eyes
were always encountered in relation to his collection of concentration
camp photos, or the eerie collections of photos of famous 20th century
men, or the detaiels of smears on his abstract paintings.  I suppose that
this logic of encountering each part of the arhive in relation the
aggregation of its entirelty is part of what is compelling about an
archive. 


An (anachronistic) archive by an individual which then becomes public can
be immensely powerful, and many examples in postwar art spring to mind,
like Bernd and Hilla Becker's serial photography (an archive characterised
by a peculiar muteness), or On Kawara's even more cryptic 'archive' of
date-based works.  A recent - and ongoing - body of work which I think is
remarkable is by the Atlas Group (aka Walid Ra'ad, a Lebanese artist now
partly based in the USA).  The work of the Atlas Group is a fictional
archive dealing with the Lebanese wars.  The material varies in form from
video to still images, and Ra'ad even delivers, with the clinical
precision of an archivist, 'lectures' listing the material from the
project.  Part of the power of these works is how they interogate the way
residues alternately disclose and withold histories: the material is most
often characterised by an opaque relation to the Wars in which the nature
of these histories is implicitly described rather than directly shown.  To
return to Clare's point, The Atlas Group very often employs a structure in
its video work where a very short (and highly compact) snippet of visual
material is preceded by a lengthy textual description of the origins and
nature of the material about to be shown.  In other words, this
intensifies a relational system of meaning which Clare described in her
email, as well as articulating the way that this relational system often
moves towards a blur between fiction and authenticity.