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Abstract
Over the past several decades the archival turn in contemporary art practice has produced a panoply of visual, performance and literary art works that activate the archives. Artists working within this turn often employ critical-aesthetic strategies to records in order to reconsider historical narratives, expose missing or silenced voices, interrogate modes of representation, or investigate relations between official and personal memory through art-making processes and works. Other artists combine these strategies with socially and community-engaged practices, as did poet Kaia Sand and interdisciplinary artist Garrick Imatani, who were artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center in Portland, Oregon from 2013 to 2015. This paper explores how Sand and Imatani affectively engaged history and memory with a collection of police surveillance records, transforming records of control into works of art that commemorate the lives and work of activists. Employing interdisciplinary thinking about the nature, use and movement of records through time, space and circumstances, this paper argues that records are affectively charged objects able to evoke sensations and feelings, orient thought, and stimulate ideas about ways in which they can be used, which in turn generate new connections, relations and possibilities between the past, present and future.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to Anne Gilliland, Jamie E. Lee, Michelle Caswell, and Diana Ascher for their thoughtful comments and suggestions during the writing of this article. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Victoria Hoyle and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their generous and insightful remarks.
Notes
1. Sand, “A Small Encyclopedia of Life,” 49.
2. Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 106.
3. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 33.
4. See: Simon, “Introduction” and Merewether, The Archive. Also see Foster, whose term “archival impulse” speaks to the same archival turn. Foster, “An Archival Impulse.”
5. See: Foster, “An Archival Impulse”; Borggreen and Gade, Performing Archives/Archives of Performance; Schaffner et al., Deep Storage; Enwezor and International Center of Photography, Archive Fever; Merewether, The Archive; Simon, “Introduction”; Comay, Lost in the Archives; Vaknin et al., All This Stuff; Vierke, “Archive, Art, and Anarchy”; Harding, Potential: Ongoing Archive; Spieker, The Big Archive; Bismarck, et al., Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites; Downey, Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Culture; and Osthoff, Performing the Archive.
6. For examples of artists and art works that investigate the archive as concept or theoretical construct, see Enwezor and International Center of Photography, Archive Fever.
7. Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 4.
8. For examples of artists who work with non-institutional archives see Foster, “An Archival Impulse” and Enwezor and International Center of Photography, Archive Fever.
9. See: Osthoff, Performing the Archive and Lane, “An Interview with Barbara Steveni.”
10. See: Heusermann, Fraser, and Pratorius, “Questions for Andrea Fraser.”
11. For examples of fabricated archives that address missing histories, see: Bryan-Wilson and Dunye, “Imaginary Archives” and Lepecki, “After All, This Terror.”
12. See: Holder, “Local Studies: Fiona MacDonald”; Vierke, “Archive, Art, and Anarchy: Challenging”; Pinther, “Artists’ Archives and the Sites”; Bracha, “Artists and the Film Archive”; and Attie, “The Writing on the Wall.”
13. I use the term, “the archive(s),” as an amalgamation to speak about at the same time: “archives” (institutional repositories of collections of records); informal archives (historical materials found outside of institutional archives); and, “the archive” (as concept).
14. Although sparse, archival scholarship about artists’ work with archives is burgeoning. See: Bracha, “Artists and the Film Archive”; Clarke and Warren, “Ephemera: Between Archival Objects”; Breakell and Worsley, “Collecting the Traces”; Magee and Waters, “Archives, Artists and Designers”; Vaknin et al., All This Stuff; Carbone, “Artists in the Archive”; and an issue of Archives and Records (2015) dedicated to archives and artists, Breakell, “Archival Practices and the Practice.” There have also been a number of symposia and conferences (this list is by no means exhaustive): NUI Galway, “Performing the Archive”; Arnolfini, “Rethinking Archives”; Getty Research Institute, “Artists & Archives”; Tate, “Out of the Archives”; Goldsmiths, “Past Is Prologue”; Ghani and Potter, “Radical Archives Conference.”
15. Diana Banning, email message to author, 28 April 2014.
16. Portland Archives & Records Center, “Become an Artist-in-Residence at the City of Portland Archives.”
17. The Portland “Percent for Art” ordinance requires that 2% of most publicly funded capital construction projects be set aside for the creation and maintenance of public art. Regional Arts & Culture Council, “Public Art Program Overview.”
18. See: Thompson, Living as Form. To note, socially engaged art is sometimes formulated as “social practice”, “community practice”, “participatory art”, or “site-specific art”; however, each of these terms – genres, really – are not exactly synonymous.
19. Affect and agency in regard to archives is currently a vibrant area of research and gaining much traction in the field of archival studies. See: Gilliland, “Permeable Binaries: Societal Grand”; Cifor, “Affecting Relations”; Gilliland, “Moving Past”; Lee, “Be/longing in the Archival Body”; Gilliland and Caswell, “False Promise and New Hope”; and Gilliland, “Studying Affect and Its Relationship.”
20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 256.
21. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War, 36.
22. Ibid.
23. O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 11. [italics in original].
24. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 6.
25. Jacklet, “The Secret Watchers.” Also, it was the Portland Tribune that informally dubbed these files, The Watcher Files.
26. Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, 14. [italics in original].
27. Ibid., 28.
28. Imatani and Sand, “Passing It On.”
29. In this paper discuss a small number of works Imatani and Sand created in the second half of their residency, with a particular focus on the work of Imatani. To read about the artists’ archival experiences and works from the first half of their residency as well as more on Sand’s work, see:
32. Imatani and Sand, “Art, Archives,Activism.”
33. Ibid.
34. Archival theorist Michelle Caswell notes that “[n]ot all events are recorded; not all records are incorporated in archives,” and always, states scholar Rodney G.S. Carter, there are “distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences.” Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, 10 and Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid,” 216.
35. Spieker, The Big Archive, 3.
36. Harris, Archives and Justice, 39.
37. Thomas, “The Watchers at the Gate.”
38. Ibid.
39. Sand, in discussion with author, 23 May 2013.
40. Ketelaar, “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons,” 224.
41. Imatani and Sand, “Passing It On.”
42. Imatani and Sand, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Imatani, in discussion with author, 1 January 2015.
46. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 172.
47. Ketelaar, “Archives as Spaces of Memory,” 16.
48. Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 76.
49. Imatani, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
50. Ibid.
51. Imatani, “Viewing Archives through an Artist’s Lens.”
52. Cook, “Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth,” 26.
53. Imatani, “Viewing Archives through an Artist’s Lens.”
54. Imatani and Sand, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
55. Imatani, “Viewing Archives through an Artist’s Lens.”
56. Imatani and Sand, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
57. Imatani and Sand, “Passing It On.”
58. Imatani, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
59. Ibid. The three maps are of The National Organization of Women March, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Revolutionary May Day Committee March, and the Women’s Night Watch Flashlight March.
60. Imatani and Sand, “Passing It On.”
61. Imatani, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Imatani, “Viewing Archives through an Artist’s Lens.”
65. Ibid.
66. Imatani, “Art, Archives, Activism.”
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 44.
72. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvi.
73. Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives,” 132.
74. Ibid.
75. Ketelaar, “Archives as Spaces of Memory,” 12.
76. Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, 17.
77. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 22.
78. Ibid., 13.