Re: [-empyre-] Current preservation discussions and resources.
On Feb 3, 2005, at 8:42 PM, noah wardrip-fruin wrote:
>It's probably also worth mentioning the Electronic Literature
Organization's project in "Preservation,
>Archiving, and Dissemination" (PAD):
>http://www.eliterature.org/pad/
crossing paths w/various projects, here is sum nfo on another PAD that
became PAD/D:
"What started as a straightforward call to establish an archive of
politically committed art wound up instigating an ambitious new
artist's collective. A decade before the emergence of the world wide
web and prior to the introduction of the personal computer, one
organization of artists and activists sought to produce a networked,
parallel arena in which to nurture, theorize, display and distribute
creative practices opposed to, or simply desperate to be something
other than, capitalist culture. [the degradations of capitalism]. It
began with a meeting called together February 24th, 1980 by the art
critic Lucy R. Lippard. The call itself had been printed on the flip
side of an invitation for an exhibition she organized at Artists Space
featuring the "many good, socially active artists no one heard of." By
using the mailed invite as an organizing tool, Lippard had also
transgressed her own, presumed curatorial disengagement, a point I
return to below. Nevertheless, on this winter's evening, a group of
fifty or so artists, writers and veteran political activists eagerly
answered her call. Lippard's planned agenda was to explore ways of
archiving her swelling collection of documents about art with political
intent. The meeting took place at Printed Matter Book Store that was
then located on Lispenard Street in Downtown Manhattan. Lippard's plea
to not found another organization was quickly disregarded and the rest
of the story forms a chapter [is part of] in the unknown history of
collective, activist art gradually being excavated by a new generation
of historians."
<---CUT-PASTE--->
Within a year of its founding PAD/D was [indeed] making art as well as
archiving. It was also programming public events, networking with other
organizations, and publishing its own newsletter named simply 1st
Issue. (And soon renamed Upfront after it became apparent that a many
issues of 1st Issue would be extremely confounding.) Along with
Upfront, the group also published a one-page calendar of progressive,
cultural events in the NYC area called Red Letter Days. In sum, it
would not be unfair to describe the driving force behind this frenetic,
multileveled activity as a desire to unilaterally reconstruct the
entire, corrupted world of bourgeois art from the bottom up. As the
group stated in its first newsletter:
"PAD [/D] can not serve as a means of advancement within the art world
structure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop new
forms of distribution economy as well as art... "
(Ibid.)
To achieve this objective, the group began developing plans for an
organization of even larger size and complexity: a national or perhaps
even international network of like-minded activist artists working in
consort with non-art, progressive activists. If PAD/D's immediate goal
was to organize a highly fractured, post-68 counter-culture, the
group's larger vision sought to bring into being a bona-fide
counter-hegemonic or oppositional public sphere. Woven from equal parts
recovered genealogies (from the PAD/D archival materials) and
politically sympathetic exhibition outlets (university galleries, labor
unions, community centers, even church halls), this [hoped] longed-for,
counter-hegemony was, more than anything else, the feature that set
PAD/D apart from other, self-organized, art collectives then or since."
<---CUT-N-PASTE--->
"All this time however, the PAD/D Archive Committee intrepidly
continued working on the extensive repository of political art.
Consisting primarily of Barbara Moore and Mimi Smith, they catalogued
and cross-referenced hundreds of entries by hand on standard index
cards. In 1989, The PAD/D Archive originally conceived as a form of
counter-cultural activism in which models of politically engaged art
-making would be circulated like a tactical toolbox finally found its
lasting institutional home in the Museum of Modern Art Library. One of
Clive Philpot's last acts before resigning from MoMA, the irony was not
lost on former PAD/D members. In 1988 Deborah Wye, the Museum's Curator
of Prints, organized an impressive survey of "political art" entitled
Committed To Print in which the PAD/D Archives played a key research
role. Nevertheless, the vast majority of work documented in the PAD/D
Archives remains invisible today and forms the cultural equivalent of
cosmic Dark Matter: that unknown, unseen material that constitutes the
majority of actual universe. And this obscurity remains so, despite the
contemporary art world's paying of lip service to "political
correctness." With almost two thousand entries spanning the years 1979
to 1988 and including performance art, guerrilla actions, street
posters, gallery based political art, as well as plans for an
international art strike in 1969, the PAD/D Archive is a significant
resource for a new generation currently rediscovering artistic
collectivism. And if PAD/D was the focal point of the 1980's New York
activist art scene that included such organizations as Group Material,
Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Art Against Apartheid, Carnival
Knowledge and Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America,
it also led to the formation of REPOhistory. In fact, not only was
REPOhistory co-founded by several former PAD/D members, including Janet
Koenig, the late Ed Eisenberg, Lucy R. Lippard, and myself, and thus
benefited from PAD/D's organizational and networking know-how, but
REPOhistory also inherited PAD/D’s Lafayette Street office space.
But as an activist organization can we say that PAD/D was a failure?
Certainly as a means of repelling gentrification or of establishing an
alternative realm of artistic practice it did not succeed. Yet the
emergence of tactical media and new forms of collectivism over the past
ten years suggest the possibility of establishing a counter-hegemonic,
cultural sphere is not a linear process, just as the historical
re-construction of groups such as PAD/D is part of a re-mapping that
ultimately leads to questions about the nature of creative, political
resistance itself.
Meanwhile, aspects of the political imagination of PAD/D remains
visible today in such projects as Groups and Spaces and Nettime, as
well as similar on and off-line networks dedicated to linking
disassociated pockets of creative experimentation and resistance. As
cultural producers are increasingly forced to choose between affirming
the power of global capitalism or exploring new as well as old
alternatives to it, PAD/D's legacy may become one history lesson
necessary for survival."
data.src:
title: A Collectography of PAD/D, Political Art Documentation and
Distribution: a 1980's Activist Art and Networking Collective
dvr: Gregory G. Sholette
as published in:
title: GROUPS and SPACES E-ZINE
edition: #0004 (Networking Part 2)
dvr: Brett Bloom
date: 2003
format: txt
uri: http://slash.interactivist.net/analysis/03/04/01/1532234.shtml
i thought -empyre- might be interested in this interconnection in
relation to naming, archiving, organizational models, hystories, etc...
the full txt by Greg Sholette provides much more detail on the
formation, organization + activities of PAD/D as well as providing
links such as:
http://www.moma.org/research/library/library_faq.html#padd
to nfo about the PAD/D archive as hosted by the Museum Library @ the
The Museum of Modern Art in NYC NY .US. this [connection/overlap] also
raises interesting + suggestive ideas about operations between
institutional agencies + [organizations/projects] that function as
oppositional, hystorical reconstructions, self-organization +
documentation...
// jonCates
edu: http://www.artic.edu/~jcates
collab: http://www.criticalartware.net
projs: http://www.systemsapproach.net/
new: http://netbehaviouralist.blogspot.com/
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