[-empyre-] Legacies, and heritage: Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art

Mon Apr 29 13:25:29 AEST 2019

Hi Patrick,

Many congratulations on your recent news!

Well, when are close friend, Grace Quintanilla, died at 52 within the same two weeks at Barbara, Carolee, and Agnès, Renate and I thought it would be important to spend a month on -empyre- reflecting on the feminist legacy in video and new media art.  Our thought wasn't that we would celebrate "good people," although we're happy that so many empyreans have shared their heartwarming memories of these artists, but to reflect on the incredible impact on art by these groundbreaking women artists.  Although such discussions may well touch on issues of preservation, etc., we hadn't anticipated that the discussion would flow in this direction.

Now that it has, I appreciate your mention of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Ar http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu), which I have curated in the Cornell Library since I founded it in 2002 -- I guess the Goldsen Archive now has somewhat of a short legacy of its own now that its well through its 17th year..  Regarding its preservation, I was happy when we negotiated its location in the Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) -- otherwise known generally as "rare books."  Goldsen's initial success then catalyzed other Cornell Library curators to work on other media archives, with the result that RMC also houses America's largest Hip Hop Archive.  The advantage is that all materials that fall within RMC will be maintained and, ideally, preserved by the Cornell Library -- in contrast to materials that end up in the general stacks which are more vulnerable to deaccession over the long haul.  My main goal as curator has not been to select special artists for the preservation of their work, but to gather together very broad archives across video and new media so that future artists and researchers might find these collections inspirational for the creation of new work and scholarship.  As a result we have broad holdings across the media and institutions, including large holdings in video art,  CD-Rom and net.art,  the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships in New Media competition, which ran from 2003-2008 with dossiers of roughly 300 leading American new media artists; the Experimental Television Center Archives (including 3,000 titles of video art and documentation);  the Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art (360 hours of digitized documentary footage of Chinese contemporary art from 1986-2002, including documentation of early works by artists such as Xu Bing, Song Dong, and the female performance artists who helped catalyze the Tiananmen episode, etc.; the paper archives of the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA); and tapes from the 1970s Ithaca Video Festival which was founded and curated by the incomparable artist, Philip Mallory Jones, etc.  It is true that Goldsen maintains a large collection of individual artist portfolios donated by participating artists whose contributions have helped grow Goldsen since its founding, but my emphasis has not been on the handpicking of individual artists.  The result of this curatorial strategy also has helped us bring in grants from American and Asian sources for broad research in preservation, such as three grants with Turbulence.org from National Endowment for the Arts for the preservation of net.art, a very large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research preservation and access of interaction art on CD-Rom, and a very recent grant from NYSCA to better organize public access to its "memory" archives held in Goldsen.  

Of course, Goldsen also serves as the Cornell home for -empyre- (although we currently need to respond better to Renate's pleas to bring the homepage up to date!!!), and we aim to preserve the archive of all -empyre- postings since its founding by Melinda Rackham in 2002 (the same year as Goldsen began).

Regarding this month's celebration of such incredible pioneering feminist figures in media art, I can say that this strategy of making accessible broad swatches of artistic production has enabled us to bring together exciting sets of dossiers representing the incredible contributions made to our art forms by experimental feminist art workers and innumerable artists of color working across the genres  and the globe.  This commitment to celebrating the diversity of media arts has been key to the growth of Goldsen. Two years ago, I curated with Mickey Casad (now at Vanderbilt University)  a large exhibition of Goldsen holdings, whose online catalogue provides an extensive overview of our philosophy and holdings: Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive (http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/), which featured works by Barbara Hammer and Grace Quintanilla.   I was so pleased that Grace came from Mexico's Center for Digital Culture for the opening to join with other crucial figures represented in the show, such as Ralph and Sherry Hocking Miller of Experimental Television Center, Anne-Marie Duguet of Anarchives (Paris), and Karen Helmerson of NYSCA

Our hope is that more artists and researchers, such as Jessica Posner, will benefit from the wealth of material available in Goldsen.  Indeed, it would be very cool to work with Jessica in hopes of including a dossier of the Feminist Art and Video Festival, which she put together last year in Syracuse.

Thanks for mention, Patrick, and hope that this email also clarifies the drive behind this month's discussion on -empyre-.

Cheers,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

On 4/27/19, 8:33 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Patrick Lichty" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Patrick.Lichty at zu.ac.ae> wrote:

    ----------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:
    w w w . z u . a c . a e

    Disclaimer:This e-mail and the files(s) attached to it are confidential and belong to the intended receiver (unit) only.In case you are not the intended receiver of this letter, or if you have received it by mistake, please advise the sender and delete it along with its attached file(s) from your system immediately. You do not have the right to copy, print or distribute this e-mail or any part thereof, or to release its contents to any other party whatsoever, except with prior approval from the sender.If you violate the above, you will be legally accountable.

    _______________________________________________
    empyre forum
    empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
    http://empyre.library.cornell.edu