Doppelganger
Magazine >> Issue Three | January 2006
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ARCHIVE
THIS
CLASSIFIED MATERIALS: ARCHIVES, ACCUMULATION, ARTISTS AARON PECK
The person best suited to approach an archive is Joseph K—or, at
least, like Orpheus, anyone compelled to descend into hell. Classified
Materials: Archives, Accumulation, Artists, the current exhibition on
the second and third floors of the VAG, even fails to take us to the gates.
The problem with Classified Materials is not the work. There is some great
work in the exhibition (along with some that is not so great). Neither
is it, in a sense, the curation. The problem with the exhibition is that
it takes on an extremely complex and urgent topic and then fails to engage
with that topic or make any trenchant statement on it. The result is,
at best, a diffuse exhibition.
The introductory text of Classified Materials declares that the exhibition
“does not attempt to define archiving or accumulation. Rather, taking
cues from a broad selection of works produced over the past thirty years,
this exhibition sets out to consider a variety of ways in which artists
have approached archiving and accumulating within contemporary culture
and the ways that they transform the meaning of these words in the process.”
One floor, we are told, is dedicated to art that uses “archives”;
the other is more specifically about “accumulation.” How these
terms are used, let alone the way their meanings are being “transformed,”
remains unanswered.
Among the usual suspects to comprise the exhibition, the VAG, however,
did one thing that involved a playful curatorial risk—it asked Geoffrey
Farmer to arrange items from its catacombs. The Hunchback Kit
(2000-05) appears throughout both floors of the exhibition. The main staircase,
for instance, is overwhelmed with banker’s boxes. The rotunda on
the third floor contains a series of vitrines containing old typewriters,
fake trees, and rope. Between two chairs appears an old fax machine (a
note on it declares it still works). A broken lamp, with the lit bulb
still in, sits in the middle of another room. In one corner, a series
of old cabinets are lit in blue light, with the nighttime soundtrack of
crickets. Farmer’s archival interventions give Classified Materials
both a boldness and a character the exhibition would have otherwise entirely
lacked.
So, to be sure, there is some work in this show that should be praised,
but the organization and topic that subsumes it is questionable.
In The Décor Project (2000-05), for example, Hadley +
Maxwell, randomly placed on the “accumulation” floor, collaborate
with a curator, collector, or editor by redecorating the home of said
collaborator. The work of Hadley + Maxwell offers an extended meditation
on subjectivity. The work asks: what happens when two interested subjects
collaborate? In the case of The Décor Project, the following objects
are produced: a binder with a completed questionnaire, a letter from the
artists to the participant, and a series of photographs of the rearranged
dwellings.
The collaboration between an artist and a cultural producer in The
Décor Project does an unexpectedly poignant thing. It marks
how fragile human relationships can be. The documents track people’s
lives, the way they change over time, who moves out, who loves the way
their kitchen looks in different light, who breaks whose heart, who couldn’t
stand living in a specific place to begin with. There is a remarkable
consistency to Hadley + Maxwell’s work, dating back to an early
show at Artspeak in 1999, Negotiating Desire. I look forward
to seeing more of The Décor Project, but in terms of the
exhibition, I find the relationship to “accumulation” tenuous.
There was also some great photography in the exhibition as well. It seems
almost trite to praise Ed Ruscha’s gorgeous aerial photographs of
parking lots (1967-99), but these, along with Ruscha’s Sunset
Strip (1966) accordion-photograph, were among the highlights. As
was Roy Arden’s Rupture (1985), a series of archival photos
framed below blue monochromes. The images are placed in a row, and they
have a haunting effect, definitely another highlight of the exhibition.
But I’d like to return to my main criticism. If it seems pedantic
to complain that the VAG lacks a definitive position on its topic, the
sinister applications of an archive are being ignored. However warm and
nostalgic Heather Passmore’s Bikini Projection (2003) may
be, for example, any connection that work has to Stephen Shearer’s
Metal Archive maquette (2000) is beside the point. Both use found
images, yes, and both accumulate images—but they’re
presented as archives. (Discussing how these two artists obsess
over gender would be far more interesting.) Shearer’s use of the
term “archive,” in fact, is a bit of a misnomer.
An archive, in a strict sense, refers to a process of categorization—most
commonly by an interested group—a government, a corporation, a community,
or a family. Archives are potentially sinister things. They’re also
potentially compelling, too, a mixture of care, surveillance, nostalgia,
skepticism and veracity. But to neglect the sinister aspect of archives
misses the complexity, and danger, inherent in any system of classification.
I don’t mean to slag Shearer’s virtuosic drawings, for example,
but in terms of the exhibition, something is lacking. The Long March
Project (2004) and Jayce Salloum’s (kan ya ma kan)
There was and there was not (1988-98) consider the more sinister
aspects of archives. But little else on either floor considers does, and
“accumulation” alone is vague.
The exhibition reminds me of Rebecca Comay’s statement in the introduction
of Lost in the Archives: “What isn’t an archive these
days?” Classified Materials does not interrogate what an archive
is or could be. Instead the exhibition rests on general assumptions. It
blankly states that contemporary culture “archives” and “accumulates”
things without offering any statement on what an archive or an accumulation
may do.
As I’ve said, the problem with Classified Materials isn’t
the work. The exhibition falls short of making a statement about its topic,
and the failure of making a statement on its topic is the exhibition’s
greatest flaw.
We are in need of statements—vulnerable, overconfident, provincial,
incoherent, didactic, brilliant, whatever. Any kind will do.