This piece addresses the creative canon, of practitioners who are noticed and validated by the dominant discourses of the performing arts and their histories. In these discussions, the canon is enacted through the archive by means of practices such as collecting and documentation. Whose archives are taken into the collection and whose are excluded? Once in the archive, whose names — and therefore activities and legacy — are documented as part of the cataloguing process, and whose remain invisible because they are undocumented by selective cataloguing practices and systems? By what institutional, professional or individual inequalities might some be privileged over others? If these are the risks of the archive, then a countering view, seen in this article, is that the archive is a source of data that can be used, through digital humanities work, to challenge and expand the canon.
The article also touches on exhibition making as another manifestation and perpetrator of the canon. In a museum context, the exhibition is a product of an institution and of individuals, who may have their own ‘master narrative’ and blindness. What is the museum’s position in relation to the diversity of its collecting or exhibition functions? How does a particular exhibition relate to a wider museum programme? Who curated it and with what agenda? In the cases of both the archive and the museum, the relationships between the institution, the collection, and practitioners of all kinds may be a mechanism of the canon.
For the author, critical archive studies — specifically the work of Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor — has offered a means to expand their own thinking about the archive, connecting different disciplinary perspectives. In my own experience, the visual arts archive has been a site of particularly productive interdisciplinary engagement, and my perspective has expanded significantly through collaborative engagement with these communities. Through an unusual process of review and response, this special issue has offered an additional layer of engagement between author and reviewer. Critical archive studies has contributed significantly to credible and rigorous exchange with other disciplines and in this spirit I have valued the conversation of this issue’s process. My response to the article in fact became part of the published abstract, because the author felt my words might represent it from a greater knowledge of the journal’s audience.
For me, digital humanities work is most exciting when it takes account of archival literature, to enrich understandings of the sources of digital datasets. Apparently comprehensive aggregated resources may exclude layers of the contextual value cherished by archivists, which has its own role to play in enabling nuanced understandings and multiple narratives. As such, my interest in the article centred on how archives, as much as the data they contain, can be mobilized, decentred or redirected to challenge, expand or undermine the canon. The project presented in the article aims not just to represent more groups and communities (by collecting dance as well as theatre, or by representing practitioners from a wider range of heritages) but also through the kinds of material they contain (attending to ‘devalued source materials’).
I was struck by the author’s references to ‘visual, textual and physically materialised manifestations of the canon creating a thick web preventing new and different histories’ — might this be about their materiality, their physical presence, in a way that the digital and a focus on data circumvent? It was an interesting idea. But we were in agreement that, while digital approaches can make visible data from the archive in new configurations, this is not a simple digital/analogue divide. As the author writes, ‘both analogue and digital, institutional and private, archives can have the power to instigate change, and contribute to the formation of more just histories.’
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Sue Breakell
Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, UK. As a visual arts archivist, she formerly worked in UK national museums, most recently as head of Tate Archive, London. Her research bridges critical archive studies, twentieth century art and design history and material culture. She co-leads the ‘Museums, Archives, Exhibitions’ strand of the University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History. https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/sue-breakell