[-empyre-] The archive

[Yann Le Guennec]

I think documenting a process is not the same thing than documenting a 
piece. In fact you can document everything, and mostly document the 
document. Some consider an art piece should be a document about society 
or contemporary times. I believe we should learn about processes out of 
the paradigm that consitutes the project approach where you have to plan 
a process, document the plan of the process, the realization of the 
process, and finally, its result.

If you consider that any art practice is a global process, you can see 
every piece as a document about this practice (think about Niele Toroni 
for example, where all installations are pointing to a single process). 
Why should you document the document? And what is the art piece, seen as 
a document, pointing to as a reference ? An originating point ? What is 
archiving what ?

I believe that there is no archive, but only things pointing to other 
things, lost in compressed and always reconsidered times. Archiving is 
an utopian capitalistic concept. Preservation does neither act on the 
past or on the future, it's a posture trying to understand the actual.


cheers,
yann


Le 03/10/2010 20:20, Melinda Rackham a écrit :
> Lynn
> Yes I agree- I've seriously tried to stop making art through injury or
> circumstance several times and I just keep being drawn back into some
> form of creative practice.
> Faking documentation is an art in itself - quiet acceptable when
> presented as practice, but it gets slippery when, for example, one is
> assessing a PhD, and the process documentation has obviously been
> constructed to prove a point after the fact.
> Yet we are not disturbed at all when books are written from screen plays
> after cinematic releases to capitalize/augment the experience.