Review:

Since starting work as the archivist for the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in 2000, I have been fascinated by how the idea of archives has worked itself into contemporary art discourse and art practice among artists, curators and cultural theorists and how these individuals interpret and define the concept of archives as place and process.1 This interest in the archival and subsequently in the investigation of the manner in which societies construct and order memory, stem, in part, from the popularity of texts by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in the contemporary art zeitgeist. In particular, Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and Derrida’s Archive Fever have proved influential in their analysis and deconstruction of the way knowledge is constructed and the impulse to preserve evidence of oneself and one’s cultural milieu (Derrida linked the urge to archive to the death drive in Archive Fever, for example). The show at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists provides a recent example of this movement in contemporary art.

The artists represented in Classified Materials prove an exemplary case study to illustrate the search for meaning within the artistic milieu. According to the press release, Classified Materials explores a world of information overload, and how the process of organizing, assembling and ordering materials plays an increasingly vital role in all aspects of society. It further states that the exhibition explores how artists find creative ways to produce meaning through the process of collecting and classification. To achieve this goal, forty-four internationally renowned contemporary artists from Canada, the United States, Asia, Europe and the Middle East are presented to the public. Questions posed in the press release include: "How do artists classify materials that resist classification?" and "How do they determine what is significant or relevant?" One way in which these questions are answered by the curators and the artists is to use archives as both a metaphor and a literal example of the manner in which meaning is created and assigned through artistic production. The question remains, however, if this simile has any relevance for the archival community and whether these artistic interpretations of archivists, archival work and archives are based on a clear understanding of what these terms mean.

After repeated visits to the VAG to review and reflect on the work I was left with one overwhelming observation: this show fundamentally misunderstands what an archives is and what archivists do. To be fair, in the introductory panel to the exhibit the curators have stated that Classified Materials "does not attempt to define archiving and accumulation." If this is the case, then what relevance does the question posed above have for the archival community? If the curators decline to define what an archives is, then how can we quibble with the interpretation they provide by their choice of artists and works in the show? Interestingly, however, the introductory text goes on to say that the "exhibition sets out to consider and expand notions of archiving and accumulation within contemporary culture." This contradictory intention seems counter intuitive as, arguably, the viewer would be better able to appreciate the concepts that the artists are exploring in their work if they understood the starting point from which it is based. This, however, assumes that the artists themselves know what an archives is. Classified Materials proves that neither the curators nor the artists have a firm understanding of the traditional definitions assigned to the ideas they claim to be exploring. Indeed, this misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the archives is evident throughout the exhibition and likely stem from a reading of texts by Derrida, Foucault and other postmodern philosophers by cultural theorists, art historians, and by extension the artists who investigate memory and meaning.

Particularly influential has been Derrida’s book Archive Fever, which explores the urge to archive in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and how memory and consciousness are proscribed and institutionalized as a way to express unconscious forces of power and knowledge.2 Foucault, on the other hand, explores the conditions under which meaning is assigned and how meaning is produced to allow for claims of truth based on data produced at the time of creation and interpretation, particularly in terms of written and oral evidence. The common theme that emerges from these texts is the link between memory, the assignment of meaning within societies and the institution that maintain that evidence, namely the archives. Indeed, if one looks only at postmodern writers who explore how societies construct (or deconstruct) knowledge then the interpretation of the archives offered in Classified Materials makes sense. The archives becomes a metaphor to express memory and meaning and the artists sorting and classifying of information and ephemera becomes a logical extension of this one dimensional, curatorial view of the archives.3

The works shown in Classified Materials thus provide examples of a definition of archives based on a reading of postmodern philosophical texts. The curators include works in which artists select, classify and consolidate ephemera to stand in for cultural memory (to be either filled in by the viewer, or mediated through the artist’s interpretation) and offer these art practices as representative of archival work. Steven Shearer’s scrapbook like collages of found images illustrate this trend. In Metal Archive, Shearer has created grids of photographs depicting heavy metal memorabilia that he has collated and presented as a cohesive unit. In essence, Shearer is acting as an indexer by accumulating like images, in this case related to Heavy Metal, and presenting them together in order to make statements about a particular sub-cultural trend and the culture that produced them. The work attempts to be both anthropological and documentary in its depiction of a sociological phenomenon. By imposing order on the disparate elements of heavy metal imagery in Metal Archive, and in his other collage works shown in Classified Materials, Shearer adds value and meaning to those images. This added value is a direct result of the selection, sorting and classification engaged in by Shearer and is represented as archival in nature. Indeed, Shearer himself refers to the work as an archives assuming that a collection of images (and the process of selection) can be correctly referred to as such.

In addition, other works in Classified Materials draw on the process of selection, classification and documentation. Bernd and Hilla Bechers photographs documenting industrial sites and Kate Craig’s video of her collection of leopard skin clothing, Skins: Lady Brute Models Her Leopard Skin Wardrobe, also show the artistic process of cataloguing evidence of social meaning. In the Bechers’ case the goal is to document evidence of industrialization and manufacturing in Europe, including steel plants and water towers, in an era when those sites are becoming abandoned as companies move to third world economic zones. Kate Craig, by contrast, brings the urge to collect and document to a more personal level, depicting herself changing in and out of a succession of leopard printed clothing. In her choice of wardrobe, and in the moments of nudity between costume changes, Craig confronts and challenges the viewer to think about ideas of femininity. The common denominator in these, and in other works in the exhibition, is the urge to preserve memory and to imply a larger cultural and social meaning in the manner in which material evidence of those cultures are sorted and presented to the viewer.

Other artists in Classified Materials attempt to draw attention to different aspects of the archives. Geoffrey Farmer’s series of installations, Hunchback Kit, depict a romanticized view of the archives as a place that is cramped, dusty and cluttered. The work consists of objects brought up from the basement of the Vancouver Art Gallery where, coincidentally, the archives are also stored, and recreated as installation works that exactly mimic the placement of the original objects in situ. There are dusty shelving units holding books and catalogues, file cabinets, cardboard storage boxes, miscellaneous furniture, and other debris. These works evoke a sensibility of an archives as a dusty and dirty place where objects and knowledge are stockpiled. In terms of exploiting a sense of place Farmer has succeeded in recreating an image that many people have of an archives as a location for chaos and disorder. This disorder depicted in Farmer’s Hunchback Kit, provides a needed counterpoint to the order, classification, and indexing of cultural memory found in the rest of the exhibition, and succeeds in depicting one interpretation of the archives as a physical space.

Finally, Roy Arden’s photographs should be mentioned for their misrepresentation of archival numbering and the implication that there is something sinister behind the fact that the numbers do not appear in sequential order. In the photo series Komagatu Maru, Arden uses archival photographs from the City of Vancouver Archives, depicting a 1914 incident involving the ship Komagatu Maru. The ship contained approximately 375 Indians wanting to immigrate to Canada and who were refused entry on the basis of Canada’s exclusionary immigration laws that had been created to halt the influx of non-white peoples into the country. The ship sat in Vancouver’s harbour for two months, and was eventually forced to return to India after allowing only a small handful of its passengers to leave the ship and enter the country. Arden’s version of the incident is depicted through a selection of archival photographs on which he has copied the archives accession numbers onto the surface of each image. According to the label text accompanying the photographs, "The gaps in the number sequence signal that the ‘truth’ of the archives is always incomplete, changing, provisional." Had the artist, or the curators, consulted with the City of Vancouver Archives, or a professional archivist, they would have realized that there are some very practical reasons why gaps in the sequence of numbers may exist, and that none of them refer to something that may be missing or the archives attempt to impose their own interpretations on historical events. Very simply, the photographs may have come from different accessions (hence a different number would be assigned), or processed at different times, or taken by different photographers, or any number of other innocent explanations as to why the numbers appear as they do. However, archivists are aware that no archives contains all the information possible about a particular event or period in history, or that there are no limits on the way the materials in their holdings may be interpreted by those accessing the materials. Perhaps this is the larger truth that Arden was attempting to evoke in his work.

As noted in the above examples, Classified Materials relies on a reading of archives and collections as metaphors for memory and meaning. This interpretation manifests itself in the selection of works by the curators and the manner in which the artists included in the exhibition have responded to the challenges of contemporary culture through an artistic production that incorporates ephemera, indexing, collecting, sorting, accumulating and providing contextual affiliations among cultural objects. As archivists, however, we know that an archives is one of three things: the place where records are kept, the records made or received in the process of carrying out an activity or the institution responsible for the records and all associated activities. Neither the professional definitions nor the curatorial interpretation of the archives need to dominate over the other when an institution creates an exhibition that purports to explore the nature of archives, but a multi-dimensional view of the archives incorporating both perspectives would have provided greater depth to the exhibition. Indeed, if the curators do not want to define what an archives is, as stated in their exhibit objectives, then why limit it to one definition, albeit one that manifests itself in multiple ways in the work of the artists included in Classified Materials?

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1. See my article “The Fonds and Creative Licence: The Morris/Trasov Archive” in the Spring 2001 issue of this newsletter for a discussion of how one archive, created by artists, has interpreted the idea of the archive and how their definition differs from the traditional one offered by the archival profession.  

2. For an in depth discussion of Archive Fever, see Susan van Zyl, “Psychoanalysis and the Archive: Derrida’s Archive Fever,” in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, et al. (The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp 39-59.

3. Hal Foster in “Archives of Modern Art,” Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002) p. 65, explains that he defines the term archives “as Michel Foucault used it, to stand for ‘the system that governs the appearance of statements,’ that structures the particular expressions of a particular period.” and that an archive simply “supplies the terms of discourse.” 

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© 2006 Archives Association of British Columbia