A voice in-between: the Women's Audio Archive Marysia Lewandowska artist/archivist/collector of missing texts

Abstract

This article looks at Marysia Lewandowska's Women's Audio Archive (WAA) considering it as an important feminist precursor to a more widespread interest in archives throughout the visual arts. Framing the discussion on this pivotal example of an artist's alternative archival practice is a consideration of a paradigm shift in archival theory. Picking up on Terry Cook's drawing together of postmodernism and archive theory, the article looks specifically at Victoria Worsley's diagrammatic description of the ‘in-between space’ of the archive to draw a link through time between Worsley's conception of the ‘New Model Arkive’ and Lewandowska's recorded collection. Worsley describes a living archive as a subjective territory encompassing feelings, emotions and the irrational chaos of life. In relation to this, I argue that Lewandowska performs uncertainty through the archive taking up the double position of guest and host in a foreign culture. From this ambiguous position, Lewandowska struggles with questions of public and private, power and disempowerment, presence and absence and displacement through language to negotiate a creative praxis. The argument contains a detailed exploration of voice as the primary medium for WAA, using Mladen Dolar's analysis of its particular ambiguities as a medium to relate back to the in-between status of the archive as Worsley conceives it. Finally, in relation to the conditions of our current knowledge economy, the article asks if a consideration of WAA could contribute to new imaginings of the archive as a moving and hospitable place.

Keywords::

• voice
• subjectivity
• politics of memory
• in-between spaces

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marysia Lewandowska for making time to speak to me about the Women's Audio Archive, Helen Smith whose thoughts on Derrida provided valuable insights and my supervisors Professor Anne Douglas and Dr Alexandra Kokoli for their support.

Notes

^1.Bacon, Arkive City, 201.

^2.Cook, “We Are What We Keep,” 181.

^3. Ibid., 182.

^4.Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism.”

^5. Ibid., 7. This is a summary of Cook's description of Foucault and Derrida's work.

^6.Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,” 3.

^7. Ibid., 4.

^8. Cook quotes Le Goff's assertion that ‘the document is not objective, innocent raw material but expresses past (or present) society's power over memory and over the future: the document is what remains’. Le Goff, History and Memory, xvi–xvii

^9.Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,” 8. See also Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, 6–7, 57, 151, 200.

^10.Foster, “Archival Impulse.” Specifically, Foster writes on artists Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant and Tacita Dean revealing how their practices differently intersect with the archive to produce works.

^11. Foster is keen to emphasize the archive as a site of preproduction not postproduction. Artists are drawn to the incomplete beginnings in archives that he describes as ‘found arks of lost moments in which the here and now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.’ Foster, “ Archival Impulse,” 15.

^12.Worsley, “New Model Archive,” 142–3.

^13. Ibid.

^14. Two significant examples of performative feminist archives include Bring in Take Out Living Archive initiated by an international and cross-disciplinary group of feminist cultural producers, curators and theoreticians under the name Red Min(e)d who gathered around the CRVENA association for art and culture. And the nomadic Re-Act Feminism, “ Performing Archive,” which traveled through Europe between 2011 and 2013 presenting a feminist performance archive alongside talks, workshops, performances, research, exhibitions. More details of these archives can be found at https://crvenared.wordpress.com/ongoing/bring-in-take-out-living-archive-la/ and http://www.reactfeminism.org.

^15. Benjamin, ‘I'm unpacking my library.’

^16. Benjamin in Bassin, Female Sexuality, 23.

^17. See note 12 above.

^18. Ibid.

^19. Interestingly, this connection between nomadism and the archival impulse is to take one step further in Enwezor's analysis in “Archive Fever” where, via an extensive exploration numerous art practices and their relationships with photography and moving image, the archival impulse is also related powerfully to the conditions of exile and near extermination. Julie Bacon echoes this in her assertion that the archive is not simply a portal but also a burial site.

^20. Benjamin in Bassin, Female Sexuality, 23.

^21.Lewandowska, “Womens Audio Archive,” http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/. All direct quotes and details from tapes within the archive can be found on the index page of the website where tapes are listed by number and name. http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/index.php

^22. Ibid., http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/introduction.php.

^23. Lewandowska in interview at ICA with director Gregor Muir http://www.ica.org.uk/blog/womens-audio-archive/.

^24. For more details on the negotiations project that created the website see http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/negotiations.php.

^25. WAA.004, WAA.064, WAA.050.

^26. WAA.069 and WAA.005.

^27. WAA.004.

^28. Instead, Lewandowska mentions ‘a kind of thinking that could be between a negative and a positive that challenges that reality between an outside and an inside world … A place that could contain conflict and contradiction’. WAA.050

^29. WAA.013.

^30. Lewandowska's position in relation to this felt exile is not negative – in one conversation with Jane Weinstock, WAA.050, for example, she notes that her outsider position is an advantage. Also she speaks in several places but most notably with Barbra Fischer of wanting to be outside or at least wanting to cross between the art world system (inside) and other communities where there could be ‘more possibilities’. WAA.005.

^31. In conversations with Weinstock, WAA.050. Gronau, WAA.004. Philip, WAA.005. and writer Claudine Dannequin WAA.003.

^32.Worsley, “New Model Archive,” 141.

^33. One pivotal but arguably incomplete (see also WAA.054, which includes discussion of the book between Griselda Pollock and Lubiana Himid) account of Feminist art practice's extended engagement with the question of the visual representation of women can be found in Parker and Pollock, Framing Feminism.

^34. WAA Introduction, http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/introduction.php.

^35. WAA.014a – WAA.017, WAA.074 and WAA.042 respectively.

^36. WAA.050.

^37. In relation to representation, one example of this balancing act is in the constant play with metaphor in the archive, which sits side by side numerous recordings of Joe Spence, whose photographic works evidence the possibility of representing the body in feminist praxis.

^38. A record of that seminar, “Work of Art as Labour” between Ross and Kokoli can be found at https://discussionsart.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/the-work-of-art-as-labour/ and more details on Ross', “Acts of Memory” a performance series in 60 Acts of solo, collective and multilingual recitations from memory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be found at http://www.actsofmemory.net. Kokoli also published an article on the subject entitled “Remembering, Repeating and working through in Anniversary - an act of memory by Monica Ross and Co-recitors (2008-).”

^39. In the book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 37, Freidrich Kittler sees it as more than a co-incidence that the first sound recording equipment was developed at the same time as psychoanalysis. He describes sound recording machines as displaying the same kind of ritual magic that was originally attributed to mediums channeling spirits so that the record functions as a kind of hallucinatory wish fulfilment. To Kitler the tape's lack of consciousness, recording everything without distinction makes it an ideal analyst. He asserts ‘technological storage reveals everything and makes the past speak’, 83

^40. See note 36 above.

^41.Dolar, Voice and Nothing More.

^42. This term is derived from Lacan and is a pun used to describe what makes puns in language possible. As opposed to the logic of the signifier that is based on a structure of differences lalangue works on similarities and reverberations. It is also a moment of enjoyment.

^43.Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 141.

^44. Ibid.

^45. Ibid., 73.

^46. WAA 005.

^47. Dolar considers the role of voice in Socrates, Kant, Freud and Heidegger

^48.Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 102–3.

^49. More than Benjamin Lewandowska' conception of writing parallels that of Kathy Acker who in WAA.058 talks of her writing as a social activity. When she writes she is ‘with’ other books and also trying to imagine a different relationship to the reader that often involves directly speaking her texts in clubs etc. Acker also speaks of the I ‘being subordinated to the question of the text’. WAA.058.

^50. An audio of Philip's, Poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” that appears in the volume She Tries Her Tongue can be found http://www.nourbese.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Discourse-She-Tries-01.mp3.

^51. Dolar sites Derrida as arguing for the primacy of voice over writing in the history of metaphysics as well as providing an extensive analysis of the different enabling roles voice takes up in the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin. On the other hand, he also writes on the considerable disruptive presence voice was seen to have when equated with music and femininity quoting Plato on disturbing music, which can be ‘unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions … till finally it overthrows all things public and private’, 44. Carson's text ‘Gender of Sound,’ also details the disturbing qualities of female voice as perceived by Western metaphysical history.

^52.Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 121.

^53. Ibid., 123.

^54. Particularly relevant discussions of the gap are in WAA.004 (Gronau) and WAA.004 (Condé) and WAA.050 (Weinstock); however, I have chosen Philip's response as it seems to be most resonant with Lewandowska's idea of gap as a poetic notion.

^55. WAA.005.

^56. This meets Kristeva's theory of the uncanny in Strangers to Ourselves where she also moves the Other to a position within. More specifically Kokoli also writes on the recorded voice and the uncanny in “Voice as Uncanny Index,” 6–15.

^57.Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 5.

^58. Lewandowska uses the word gap in conversation with Philip among others but particularly in WAA.003 Lewandowska says

At vulnerable times you find yourself occupying the space of the gap rather than something solid so maybe living not even on the edge – which is already pretty risky but living inside that gap which is very problematic in terms of survival.

^59. See note 36 above.

^60. Ibid.

^61.Basin, Female Sexuality, 10.

^62. See note 36 above.

^63. More specifically, theoretical Feminism is described by Lewandowska as a safe ‘enclosure’ comparable to functioning within the academy where you can only ‘question so much’ and ‘never challenge the outside framework’. Finally, she says ‘there is a lot of interesting and seductive theory that I cannot bridge with my life.’ WAA.004.

^64. Ibid.

^65. The recording device is defined by Kittler as objective in that it records everything indiscriminately. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 86.

^66. See note 12 above.

^67. See note 36 above.

^68. In the same conversation, Philip explores silence as a powerful counter argument to colonialist history. Dolar also details the function of silence in relation to psychoanalysis, which allows the subject's voice to have a kind of surplus echo – speech is returned having passed through the ‘loop of the Other’ as voice.

^69.Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 56.

^70. Lewandowska in interview at ICA with director Gregor Muir http://www.ica.org.uk/blog/womens-audio-archive/.

^71.Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 14.

^72. Dufortmantelle conceptualized a very particular type of movement, a getting lost that relates to hospitality but more generally hospitality like speech (and most like a conversation) involves a back and forth between subject positions.

^73. Lewandowska clarified this point to me when I spoke to her about the archive in November 2013.

^74. See note 36 above.

^75. Ibid.

^76.Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 79.

^77. In some sense, this feeds into the debate within performance art on forms of documentation and archiving. Peggy Phelan for example positions performance as antithetical to documentation and recording as it ‘becomes itself through disappearance’ Phelan, Unmarked, 146. There is also an anxiety around a disappearing legacy. One counter argument to Phelan's assertion is Rebecca Schneider's argument that despite disappearing something remains of performance art and this is a challenge for archiving to come to terms with.

^78.Oshima, “Artist Groups in Japan and UK.”

^79. WAA 057.

^80. See note 36 above.

^81. Ibid.

^82.Worsley, “New Model Archive,” 142–3. Worsley lists several characteristics that feed into this creative disorder at the heart of her Arkive: contingence, ambiguity, iterability, fragmentation, instability, unfixedness, serendipity. WAA embodies all of these characteristics.

^83. I am indebted to artist Smith for this perspective on Derrida's writing, in conversation.

^84.Bacon, Arkive City, 205.

^85. Ibid., 201.

^86. Ibid., 204.

^87.Derrida, Archive Fever, 3.

^88.Bacon, Arkive City, 206.

^89. WAA 013.

^90. Other here refers to Dolar's use to define voice as the foreign kernel within the subject.

^91.Lewandowska and Ptak, Undoing Property.