[-empyre-] Legacies, and heritage

[Emily V Duke]

I will say something totally outrageous here: the archive is merely the hoard of the very orderly hoarder.  Let it rot!  All that matters are relationships, and those we keep alive through action.  We have them with the dead (as here, this week), with the distant, and they are facilitated through archived materials, but it is an operation with diminishing return.  So let it rot.  But slowly.


Emily Vey Duke
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Associate Professor | Department of Transmedia | Syracuse University
________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Patrick Lichty <Patrick.Lichty at zu.ac.ae>
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 1:48:22 AM
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] Legacies, and heritage

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
My difficulties with being part of this discussion is that Except for having minor ties to Carolee and having chatted online a little with Barbara, I'm not so connected to our artists.

Biographies.
I wonder what public documentation becomes shared memory. In some ways, I feel that as a mid-career artist, even being part of this conversation mitigates thoughts of my own death, which I hope are in the 40+year range. In context with one's great works, most of mine which were not even done under my own name, it seems that the construction of a biography is an indenx to those things we wish to be known/remembered for. There is ready evidence for the Yes Men work in the movies, but much less so for the RTMark work before it. A PhD student was shocked to know that RTmark was 3-5 people at Any one time, but generally with Igor Vamos and Jacques Servin (with Natalie Bookchin for a bit, then to the group you see in the Yes Men movie). Second Front is pretty clear, and you can find most of my curatorial writing in the 90's -2000's in various catalogues.

That is the historiography of the record, but I wonder about the human record that remains.  Was Vito Acconci remembered as a good person? It's obvious that Barbara, Carolee, etc were. And why is that important? Is it ok to be a terrible person but a successful artist?  Dali was by no means a nice person later in life but he had undeniable power.   Balzac is known as much as a speed freak (50 cups of coffee a day) as his work.  In many ways I feel there is a dialectic formed, like Elvis, between their bright youth and how they handled their later life. In Elvis' case, he should have been in the 27 Club. Cory Arcangel is weathering better, as are Whid and River. Being that I started as a contemporary artist at 30, joining that club would not have worked for me, but I realize that my output from Arabia has been slim and needs to be heard more, as there is great power here.

On the other hand, what of the archive?  Fluxus artist Larry Miller has a massive archive of media interviews, and the Bob Watts Archive, all of which are rotting in their place, What happens to the Cornell Archive after Tim leaves it?  Much like MFAs for the shrinking pool of jobs to take them in the USA, we have far too many records to take care of; too many beautiful legacies to care for.  Sometimes I feel that this is just the legacy pyramid, as Greek dramatists have stated there were thousands of plays, but 23 survive. Greek statuary is the same. But is it reasonable at all to take a Mac Classic and place it in a sealed titanium sarcophagus? Hardly, as even preserved perfectly the technology might last a couple hundred years, and the magnetic media will go to powder on first play.

In this elegiac conversation, I think there might be a tiered approach to legacy - that there is one for the living (-50 years), one for the institutions (-250 years), and one for posterity (250+ years).  Each of these is harder to maintain, or even justify. The living wish to preserve their traditions and remember their masters. The institutions wish to define history and maintain their sense of value, posterity need records that can be discovered after the institutions crumble.  The short answers for me to posterity are archival media and acid-free books, although I am curious how long totally solid state works with OLED screens may last. I know adhesives, etc may fail.  For me it's an experiment that's inevitable, and worth exploring, perhaps through examination of Machiko Kusahara's work in Device Art of the early 2000's, or Carolyn Frischling's work in digital marble.

Of course, Kandinsky said that art is a child of its time, but is there an awareness we can bring to the formal nature of this that understands that openculture's archives will disappear once the servers are shut down in the next fifty years? The idea that digital culture somehow is more efficient that atomic is a red herring - it takes more energy to maintain a digital movie in the cloud than a film archive, and systems migration means it is even less stable, as less viewed films are deleted.

And what of VR art?

In some ways, I feel I got in the wrong field to be remembered, but that's ok, as one's passions often do not follow their practicality.

.



Patrick Lichtyباتريك  ليشتي
Assistant Professorأستاذ مساعد
College of Arts and Creative Enterprisesكلية الفنون و الصناعات الإبداعية

P.O. Box 19282 Dubai, U.A.E | T:+971 2 599 3491 | M:
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