Avec une pair de ciseaux / CRYPTICCRYSTALCLOUD 3

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VEGAN CURRY WITH CARROT, TOMATO AND EGGPLANT / BOILED BARLEY AND QUINOA / CABBAGE AND APRICOT WITH APPLE VINEGAR SALAD / FENNEL AND CHICK PEAS WITH DRIED TOMATO, SESAME SEEDS AND LEMON JUICE DRESSING.

AMONG ALL THESE ARCHIVES, THE ONLY MOVING THING THE EYE OF A BLACKBIRD. Whisper 19 : Nico Dockx, 16.03.2013. (after Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird, 1917 ) .

THE WHISPERING GALLERY, a collaborative work by Nico Dockx & Jan Mast, 2011 - ongoing.

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Index

p. 5-6

p. 97-113

p. 207-219

I have conversations, very slow conversations Nico Dockx

On microarchives Joseph Grigely

Untitled Asako Iwama

p. 115-124

p. 221-228

p. 7-11

Labels for Antwerp Archive Joseph Grigely

Untitled Sarah De Wilde

The necklace of Hélène Fourment and some other thoughts Els De bruyn

p. 13-15 Outside snow falls and cryptic crystals dance while I’m riding a white horse with Eco Jan Mast

p. 128-137

p. 231-234

Literary archives : the strange case of James Joyce Geert Lernout

Biographies

p. 139-162 Packing Nico Dockx, Louwrien Wijers

p. 17-48 The New Conversations (volume 1) / booklet 5.

with p. 28-37 Avec une paire de ciseaux Claudine Hellweg

p. 165-175 Rummage and rootle / Sketchscore for drawer 01 in Ulysses Sarat Maharaj

p. 179-190 p. 49-52 The light of nature and mind Egon Hanfstingl

Tearing the tissue of the present Johan Pas

p. 193-197 p. 54-57 The image’s point of view Jean-Baptiste Decavèle

All archives goes to heaven : the Rirkrit Tiravanija archive Berlin Jörn Schafaff, Rirkrit Tiravanija

p. 58-86

p. 198-200

Dailyness Yona Friedmann

List of items from RTA Berlin

p. 89-94

Situational art and archival practice Jörn Schafaff in conversation with Rirkrit Tiravanija

p. 201-204 The rhythm of return Molly Nesbit

p. 235 Colophon

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I have conversations, very slow conversations “Do I still have all the tapes that I have recorded? No, not all conversations, not everything. I started in 1963, and some things have been thrown away or even got lost. But, it is still here… in my head. And, when you told me you found another work of mine, I was thinking: “Oh, it is so nice this text still exists, it is really wonderful!” You see, things do not always get lost. You have to allow some life in all this. I have never really liked the idea of keeping everything. I believe, archives have to ferment and mold, and be eaten by rats and mice… haha, everyone has to enjoy. And, when you return to something in your archives and it still has a very clear communication, then you have something in your hands that is more beautiful than ever. Oh, we have cookies, that is lovely.” (excerpt from a conversation in between Nico Dockx and Louwrien Wijers, Herengracht 1, Amsterdam, 14/05/2010, Egon Hanfstingl and Helena Sidiropoulos are present)

Working with an archive (1) is an interesting and challenging example of double collaboration, where collaboration serves both as method and

subject matter and where ongoing conversations produce the specifics of this collaboration. It trembles. It stretches and squeezes our personal stacks of paper, engaging in creative perceptions for which we currently have no definitions. It is like the wind that carries us. You could feel the air. It perforates. My fascination with archives is that through a radical combination of precision and incompleteness they make of us collaborators in the process of developing a hybrid and holistic methodology that cannot be attained to other disciplines. I would say: “Only from wonder can come new archives, certainly not from analysis.” And, the best kind of archive, like rain, evokes a reordering of our cognitive and sensory fields, and simultaneously carves out space and time for dissolving and flipping over research whenever it tries to settle and fix into rigid, academic knowledge systems. It constructs itself in relationship to the future rather than through modes of remembrance. It breathes, it chews. Its memory fades, its knowledge blurs. Perhaps, the work should be like a meteorological system or an ouragan (2) movement. I mean, its behavior should be unstable, indeterminate and unknowable in advance and its authorship

dispersed across many initiators and participants of all sorts.

One of the strengths of art has always been that it proposes models that are not immediately applicable but continue to resonate, as we do not stand on solid ground. And, soil is something that should literally enter — and even dirty — the archive. To me, the archive is a living environment, it enters with a spider living in it. It is connected to its architecture, it is passionate. It produces reality. I like to embrace, not comprehend — which is something that very much coincides with the art of conversation. What can new conversations (3) mean or be? I don’t have a clear image to show you, but to make a work in the form of a conversation allows us to maintain our individual voices while clearly acknowledging our effort to connect. And, as it happens in conversations, our mind just stops. It stops your mind. It is a process that tries to draw a silhouette of a ghost, to delineate or even materialize something that is essentially written under erasure. In this play off between drawing (writing) and erasing, a new slowness (4) slips to us.

What is the meaning of this slowness? Personally, I think, it is a totally new time of knowledge production, it is a totally new situation of research. And,

alongside the most rapid, even vaporizing processes there will always be slow ones, some indeed of such extreme slowness that we cannot sense and measure their work in progress at all. They require more time and detract it from other things, and that is why they must be as precise and lucid as speed, because they must have no regrets. To me, the archive is not an object, but a complex editing process which shows its social feedback and architectural surroundings and produces information for others to use. I love this idea of coming together, and to create what extends beyond our individual life; to be a catalyst and finally to know how to disappear. To become a delay in glass.

Nico Dockx, 06.03.2013

2 At some times its matrix is unpredictable while at other times it precisely moves forward. Producing and being shaped by its surroundings, it sometimes lays dormant for another action to come. Not exhibiting a total oeuvre, but rather a mantra of playful impulses with various velocities and temporalities subtracting space and time like a slow silver spider carrying it elsewhere. Its curious nature engages and puts into resonance an energy of many kinds that whispers rather than states its points of view.

3 The new conversations is a series of events and publications organized and made by Nico Dockx and related to his PhD research proposal with the archives of Louwrien Wijers and Egon Hanfstingl (2010-2014) at the Royal Academy of FIne Arts Antwerp.

4 Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Nico Dockx, 15.03.2002, Musée d’Art Mo-

1 Whether it is my own archive (1997-ongoing), Chris Dercon’s archive (19992001), Robert Fleck’s archive (2002), the Laboratorium archive (2002), the Utopia Station archive (2003-ongoing), René Heyvaert’s archive (2004-2006), the New Reform archive (2006), the Palais des Beaux Arts Bruxelles archive (2003 & 2009), Yona Friedman’s archive (2009-ongoing), the Spaarnestad Photo archive (2009-2010), Louwrien Wijers’ archive (2010-ongoing) & …

derne de la Ville de Paris.

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The necklace of Hélène Fourment and some other thoughts Once, I described the archive of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp as a monster, permanently nibbling away space and time. Many boxes filled with papers, documents, books, and other materials. An archive that is growing quickly and where it is not always easy to find your way through. Every year, an accumulation of students’ administration dossiers, files on finances and personnel, reports of bachelor and master projects, research projects, and publications … — a lot of information that needs to be archived in one way or another. Difficult for me to handle, because I really don’t like to throw things away, but at the same time, I know that I can’t keep everything on my working desk. A paperless / an “archive-less” office? Not at the Academy. Not in my office.

envelope. Carefully opening it, she noticed a distinguished handwriting in black ink — a letter written in 1818 by one of Rubens’ descendants — about the necklace of Rubens’ second wife Hélène Fourment; and his intention to donate this precious jewel to the Academy.

That’s why I find archives so exciting: they contain all kinds of surprises and sometimes hide real treasures; and always memories of a historical, administrative, or personal past which are still actual today… generating new ideas and creating new potentialities. It makes you think, laugh, or cry.

It makes you act and react. It is not only the “historical” archive of the Academy that surprises us from time to time, but also our own daily facts and fictions that we produce there.

One thing really struck me on the 4th of May last year, when Nico Dockx invited me and some of his friends to perform together with archives. While getting to know better our invited guests during their presentations, I personally felt that Last week, a colleague of they all had in common: an mine — who works in the Acad- enormous, beautiful and sinemy’s library — was search- cere passion for their archive(s). ing for some documents about For example, listening to how architecture in one of our Yona Friedman talked about archive’s boxes, and acciden- his archive as a rubbish heap, tally bumped into this very old looking at how Louwrien Wijers

packed parts of her archive, and observing how precisely Joseph Grigely installed his archive in the exhibition vitrines: it is love! And, I’m pretty sure that this deep engagement with archives was so convincing that it even became contagious — almost like an archive fever (1).

I think it has infected many of us who participated and contributed to this one day event in Antwerp, hereby adding new conversations to the notion of “future archives” of which you can now read a possible translation on paper.

Els De bruyn, February 2013

1 Borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s book ‘Mal d’Archive / Archive Fever’ (1995).

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Letter written in 1818 by one of Rubens’ descendants — about the necklace of Rubens’ second wife Hélène Fourment; and his intention to donate this precious jewel to the Academy. © Archives Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

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Outside snow falls and cryptic crystals dance while I’m riding a white horse with Eco “What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

tinct species and missing links, flowers that survive in dim light, herbs that bring health benefits, colours of balloons, car components, viral diseases and their cures, space flight risks, sexual hotspots, the best songs of all times, the women Don Giovanni slept with, to keep track of our culture and civilisations, nature’s reserves, weapons of mass destruction, to ‘optimise’ the mobilisation and extermination of ‘undesirables’, ... finite lists of infinite reality.

We start lists to describe the Sometimes these accumulaunspeakable or surrounding in tions start a life of their own, a a reproducible, clinical way, to system that lives for the system, remember what we have seen, bestowing its consequences to communicate our preferenc- upon reality. es and selections — the paths we make through life, to verify Yes, there are intra-personal our failing memory and resur- lists too. The ‘usual suspects’. rect fading facts, to compre- Wishes, complexes, needs, hend where we are, have been, values, selections, progresses, are going to, to clarify choices, favourites, demands, pains, or just out of habit — to neuroti- hopes, desires, ... cally list, to trace, …

So many lists.

Slow manoeuvres in the dark.

An infinity of lists to defy death.

The beginning of all culture?

Because we don’t want to die.

(Eco thinks so. I nod.)

(Eco again. I shrug.)

We generate equally committed, painstakingly extensive lists Yes, we just don’t like to die. of all wonderful and horrible things we can fathom: distant We always try to make a deal galaxies and hidden stars, ex- with Death.

Escape destiny.

Run. Cataloging reality can be a way to deny it. Archiving to get lost.

Be lost.

Bye. Hello again.

Hi. Francis F. It’s been lightyears.

Many times the sun was hiding.

Did you see vast white landscapes?

Endless horizons?

I prefer mountains.

Were you there too?

Yes, I was. I don’t know.

I learned to forget.

What do you fear? Are you suffering?

No. Yes. Both.

They look for holes in my story.

Dark places that feel cold.

Things I managed to forget.

Somehow.

You see...

Are you hiding ?

Like a restless animal.

Tracking you down.

Do you want to go back in space?

The great escape?

Start over.

Safe havens protect you from life.

Chance.

We meet here by accident.

We are drinking together by chance.

I decided to start talking to you.

You chose to listen.

Don’t try to get there sooner.

I have been there.

And I came back.

Your today is a second of my past.

No, I move before your eyes.

Every time you blink, I visit then and now.

I move forward and back again.

You’ll never catch me.

I am your eclipse.

I jump into the sun.

Burning alive.

A story erased.

Killing people has always been an effective way to destroy their lists, and make stories vanish.

The romans were so proud about the effectiveness of how they eradicated all heathen from the conquered world by tracking down and murdering all the spiritual leaders, that they had to write it down.

You better all write it down, before somebody wacks you.

Zapp. Done. Gone.

Or because of time. tik tak

Roy Batty pleaded for more of that valuable asset : “I want more life, father.”

So, if everybody is effected by this deviation of our mind and genes, why do we even care?

Addictive drug Time.

We don’t.

(Francis and Eco point at me. I show them my middle finger.)

Nah, incorrect, I meant : most of the time, we don’t.

Extending life in time by cre- (Eco and Francis high five.) ating our personal archives.

Extension in time but also in Sometimes, we start to be inspace. Hybrid prolongations trigued when we recognise patof our mind. Mental protheses. terns within these obsessions.

Our attempt at strengthening The reflection of oneself. The immortality we find in our proand enhancing ourselves. jection. Our Platonic thirst.

Growing, reducing, twitching.

Living archives are merely and We wager our lists and compurely externalisations of our pare them to others. Hoping to brain. Brainwaves extended. see differences or similarities.

They could form a generalisa- To learn from them. And ultition of the personal. An attempt mately: adding another element at an abstraction while being a to our wagon. Another bullet on priori and staying a posteriori the list. strictly personal. Labyrinths of preferences. Fingers walking We love the recognition of simithrough pages. Enchanting larities, but we strive for the difference of reasoning. Richard them. By touch. Magic.

Rorty talks about the Strong Archives are magical instru- Poet as an abstract of the creaments. Yes. Not licensed to or tive, creating mind. He writes appropriated by the wealthy or about the Strong Poets anxiety knowledgable. They are the of influence. About how we are socially respected and toler- careful to protect our relative ated proponents of the neurotic uniqueness. The individual and collecting masses. Postcards, how he / she is afraid to be a model trains, dolls, tree leafs, replica, so therefor forming his butterflies, shoes, lovers, expe- / her own language and distincriences, supermarket points, ... tiveness based on his / her very own personal history.

It is everywhere.

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And are we really afraid to be replica’s? Aren’t we longing to transform these archival protheses into a portable form?

A memory chip perhaps?

Human2.

The invisible prothesis.

(Note to myself: buy more memory before I run out of space. Eco giggles.)

We might be replica’s already, with implanted memories, lasting remnants of experiences that try to differentiate us.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Roy: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

We all collect.

We all die.

But first, we all live too.

(Eco nods and shouts.)

Try remembering!

(Francis laughs and replies.)

Embrace forgetting!

(We all leave for a pint with the ghosts of Saturday night.)

Jan Mast, Brussels 17.03.2013

(the new conversations 4) 04.05.2012 kitchen / meeting room Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp Avec une paire de ciseaux. Kaspar Beelen & Patricia Beijsens & Vera Bohnen & Erik Boker & Zsuzsanna Böröcz & Kasper Bosmans & Thomas Crombez & Els De bruyn & Ella de Burca & Jean-Baptiste Decavèle & Valerie de Ghellinck & Johan Devrome & Sarah De Wilde & Tom Dietvorst & Nico Dockx & Arpais Du Bois & Inès Eshun & Alicia Frankovich & Natalie Gielen & Kim Gorus & Mathias Goyvaerts & Andreas Greiner & Joseph Grigely & Thomas Grødal & Erik Hagoort & Claudine Hellweg & Asako Iwama & Saori Kuno & Stella Lohaus & Mark Luyten & Sarat Maharaj & Sis Matthé & Molly Nesbit & Nele Ooms & Renato Osoy & Yiannis Papadopoulos & Johan Pas & Piotr Piskozub & Jörn Schafaff & Miriam Schwahn & Barbara Segaert & Lieven Segers & Sonja Spee & Nele Tas & Elisabeth Treger & Timothy Van de Laar & Sylvie Vandenhoucke & Hilde Vanpelt & Frederik Vergaert & Stefan Wouters & Lissa Zevria & Marc Zwysen & ...

THE NEW CONVERSATIONS (volume 1) / booklet 5 design : Jan Mast, based upon a Nico Dockx & Jean-Michel Meyers design © Track Report, Curious, archives Nico Dockx / Egon Hanfstingl / Louwrien Wijers, the artists and writers, 2013

Avec une paire de ciseaux Inspired and inspiring...

It all started with Louwrien Wijers: a charismatic, young woman in her early seventies. It started with her and her archives, which must contain boxes and bundles full of tapes, photographs and endless amounts of papers of all kinds and sizes. Nico Dockx, working as an artist with the notion of archives, must have met her at some point and started collaborating with her. In his conversations — more specifically the series called the New Conversations — which he organizes within the context of his PhD research titled The Art of Conversation, he questions Louwrien’s way of working and continues it — together with her — in his own manner.

I, myself, only saw a tiny part of Louwrien’s archive and was able to work with her materials. In 2005, our paths crossed when I curated an exhibition on performance artist Ben d’Armagnac. Ten years earlier, Louwrien published a catalogue on the young, deceased artist who until his death in 1978 had played a major role within the Performance Art on the one hand, and within Louwrien’s life on the other hand. She used to keep everything concerning the people who were her sources of inspiration or her guides in life. Obviously she was a very precious person to work with in relation to the Ben d’Armagnac exhibition. Not in the least because she kept in her archives quite some original photographs and particular documents of him.

On February 28th 1969, 27 year-old Louwrien first met Ben in Antwerp, while he was dismantling an installation in the Wide White Space gallery. Louwrien worked as an art critic at the time and arrived too late to see his exhibition. But soon she got captivated by his attempt to merge his life and his work, and got overcome by his quest for an existence that strives for the good, for a harmonious living together. In the Summer of 1969, Louwrien moved in with Ben and his wife, to start afresh as Ben used to say. This period in her life was a rite-de-passage: she swapped her white Morris and Parisian clothes for a spare and sequestered existence in an interior made out of canvas and driftwood blackened with tar, while wearing traditional Dutch costumes. Within this austere framework coming to terms with oneself and with each other prevailed.

Writing as Sculpture.

Since her involvement with Ben, Louwrien has dedicated her life to a permanent quest for a good life, a harmonious existence with the other and the self. To give a sense of direction to these quite general remarks: shortly after their initial meeting, Ben sent Louwrien the book Siddhartha

by Hermann Hesse as a present, a much read book in those days, about a spiritual journey of a young Indian ascetic who was searching for enlightenment. Part of her new life had to be a creative existence as an artist. It was an old wish to become an artist, although Louwrien did not renounce her writing talent either: “I found working with metal unique, I loved the materials and the tools.”, she writes in her preface to her book Writing as Sculpture, 1978 - 1987. “But vast sculpture that worked with the mental ability of living

people seemed much more of a timely thing to me. That was 1977. I changed from metal sculpture to mental sculpture.”

From 1978 on — the year Ben d’Armagnac died and Joseph Beuys was interviewed by her for the first time — Louwrien has worked on an oeuvre mainly consisting of writings. She wrote several interviews with Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, the Dalai Lama, and on a meeting of Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama that she arranged. Every interview generated the next, as every interview seemed to debouch in a request towards Louwrien to interview another person or to arrange a meeting. Eventually she assembled these interviews and other texts which all together lead to the first Art-of-Peace Biennale which grew out of talks between Joseph Beuys and Robert Filliou, witnessed by Louwrien. The Biennale was meant to be a meeting between artists, scientists and spiritual leaders to talk about the improvement of society and the achievement of peace for all. The book Writing as Sculpture, 1978 - 1987, was first published in 1992 in German (Schreiben als Plastik) two years after Louwrien’s major mental sculpture: the conference Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy (AmSSE), held in 1990 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as the second edition of the Art-of-Peace Biennale. Louwrien had indeed gathered many prominent thinkers from the fields of science, art, spiritual movements and economics to exchange thoughts, and convinced this would lead to an increased global tolerance and understanding.

On Friday the 4th of May 2012, I was in Antwerp to participate in the New Conversations #4, Avec une paire de ciseaux. The presence of Louwrien, whom I had interviewed in public a couple of weeks before on her time with Ben d’Armagnac, triggered me to come to this meeting. Her engaging personality and her natural wisdom always makes it worthwhile to see her. Moreover, I was hoping to get acquainted with the work she created after her time with Ben. I was familiar with it, but for some reason I had never actually engaged with it.

Nico had staged this edition of the New Conversations in the kitchen of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He would interview Louwrien, we would collectively cook a meal composed by Egon Hanfstingl, Louwrien’s partner, and several people would come to introduce their way of working with archives or archival matters in their work. But, unfortunately, Louwrien and Egon had not been able to travel to Antwerp. Packing more than thirty years of living and working had a much bigger impact on their body and soul than expected.

The meeting took place only a couple of days after their final move to Friesland in the north of Holland, away from the corner house at Herengracht 1 in Amsterdam, where Louwrien had been living since the summer of 1975.

She lived there across the place where Ben had once owned a boat to sleep in, and it was close to the Brouwersgracht where the Appel Art Foundation used to be the pulsing heart of Performance Art and related art forms.

Louwrien had received hundreds of visitors in her house, well known and less known persons. Leaving this place was not exactly an easy thing to do, full as this place was with memories and the immense archive that Louwrien built in her life. Nico had organized a celebration event during the last weekend of their stay at Herengracht 1: the New Conversations #3, entitled Conversations are tapes, not objects. New and old friends of Louwrien and Egon came together to send them of Amsterdam with a (visual) homage in

their nearly empty place.

Louwrien’s archive.

Louwrien was not in Antwerp on the 4th of May, but Nico gave her some presence by showing images of the last nightly hours they were packing archives together. Matthew Stone — a shared friend — had filmed Louwrien’s hands, tying up packages with simple brown string, which is characteristic of her way to handle her documents. “It shows her attachment to the stuff she ties together.”, one of the participants in Antwerp remarked after Nico showed these images. And he was definitely right. Nowadays it seems to be pretty out-dated to keep archival materials in that way, instead of storing it in plastic slipcovers, in folders and other materials currently used abundantly by so many. Louwrien’s method could be called rather organic, by any means ecological and definitely festive. I had experienced her opening up packages with archival materials as thrilling and surprising. Similar to unpacking a birthday present, even better because of the treasures they were holding. Louwrien herself is very well organized and her packages usually have a contents list, written in her lovely handwriting. The different packages are bundled according to a certain theme or event and are not necessarily an exhaustive collection, even though Louwrien archives very precisely and thoroughly. Based on her archive of Ben d’Armagnac, she was able to write a very detailed account of his life for the book she published on him for example. Remarkably enough she managed to give it a very objective tone by mentioning the exact time frame in which ideas are developed, works and exhibitions are made and personal matters are happening, even if she was personally involved. It might be a result of interviewing all people involved in Ben’s life in her straight forward way, translating their stories into a matter of fact tones.

The way Louwrien kept everything all her life, seems to be in sync with the notion of archiving in our present day society that has this urge to preserve everything. But, to Louwrien, her archive is not a space-consuming monster which is annoying to take care of because of its ever growing volume (a remark being made about the archive of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the preface to the New Conversations #4 program booklet). Louwrien decided at a very early age to dedicate her life to writing a historical document of her time, as she states in her text published in the brochure that introduced all the lecturers and artists participating in the Antwerp event.

To do so, she has always made notes of remarkable thoughts (and she still does, although using a smartphone these days), apart from the interviews she taped, and kept every document she ever came across. In Amsterdam she actually lived together with this ever growing archive. Bundled in packages and kept in boxes it was omnipresent in her house in Amsterdam, stored under the kitchen table, under her grandparents’ seats in the living room, in the hallway, simply everywhere. She didn’t bother that the dampness coming from the adjacent canal caused the staples and iron clips on the papers to rust. Nor did she mind the gnawing teeth of rats and mice that recurrently caused damage to her archives.

While translating my originally in Dutch written text to English, and in the meantime rewriting quite some parts, I realize that I am actually creating a fiction. As I mentioned in the beginning of my text, I only dealt with a tiny

part of Louwrien’s archive. Most of it I never saw, not even as a package or boxed. So, parts of my thoughts and descriptions are actually the fruit of my imagination and I do not have a clue whether I am completely beside the truth or quite close to it. I did not interview Louwrien, Nico or any other person who did work in or on her archives, as opposed to Louwrien, who always wrote on the basis of interviewing people. But who knows how many of them might have been affected by false memories? How much fiction actually seeped into the accounts Louwrien wrote? And then I wonder, does it matter? Isn’t there something else that’s at the core of Louwrien’s work, besides creating this historical document of her time?

The New Conversations.

Archives are a source of inspiration and creativity, not a collection of dead and closed chapters from history, that was a presumption made by all who came to talk about their view on working with archives. Nico invited people he feels connected with on behalf of his own archive-related work: all artists and art historians with very different ways of working and perspectives on art. People he already invited to participate in his other conversations and whom he will probably work with again in the near future.

La chain est belle was the title of the New Conversations #1 — apparently a programmatic title to the series, considering the fact that it was the first of eight conversation events that interlock like beads in a necklace through the themes addressed and the people involved. It should not be surprising that both Joseph Beuys and Louwrien are mentioned on the flyer of this first meeting. Joseph Beuys was the initial link in the series of interviews that led Louwrien to her Writing as Sculpture project. Joseph Beuys sent her to Warhol, asked her to arrange a meeting with the Dalai Lama (after she had interviewed his Holiness); her friendship with Robert en Marianne Filliou, talks with different important scientists and the foundation of the Artof-Peace Biennale, of which the AmSSE conference was the second edition.

All these events linked into a wonderful chain. And, this might have inspired Nico to establish the New Conversations. The title of the New Conversations #2, Sticky rice has a similar kind of programmatic character. Every New Conversations features a shared meal (sometimes jointly prepared by the participants) as a social event. It might lean on the common thought that the best conversations arise at the kitchen table and forge bonds of friendship.

But, equally important is the conviction Louwrien formulated in 1993 and that she still explores nowadays in her project Saint Society: “To build a firm society it is important that no one goes to bed hungry. Hunger is the only true dictator. On grains, vegetables and beans we can feed all our people and we will have enough water for all.” With the idea of a ‘Saint Society’, Louwrien reaches out to an ideal world in which individuals, nourishment and society merge in a holistic balance. In this line of thinking, the meals prepared are consciously composed — and certainly the one in Antwerp created by Egon, who works on ‘Harmony foods for health and happiness’ since 1993, which is related to the topics addressed in the AmSSE conference. The meals underline a conscious use of food (fresh, local and organic) and the preparation is chosen for its salutary effect.

The New Conversations #4 turned out to be a very inspiring day, even without three of the lecturers who could not make it to Antwerp. Five lectures and one performance were staged; and in a few vitrines some modest pres-

entations of visual material were on display as a supplement to the lectures.

In a separate space artist Sarah De Wilde presented a selection out of her personal photography archive. But she contributed also as ‘chef-the-cuisine’ together with artist Asako Iwama that day, making sure that the wonderful meal Egon had composed was actually being cooked.

How I use a pair of scissors? Up to this point my hands are itching to write a comparison between the conversations initiated by Louwrien Wijers and those organized by Nico Dockx by means of his New Conversations series. But, I realize that I would only superficially touch upon everything Nico has been and still is working on in his research project. Moreover, it is simply still too early for such a general overview, since this series of New Conversations is still in progress, with another one — a workshop in Ferwert / Hallum (Friesland) at Louwrien’s and Egon’s place — yet to come.

So, why not simply cut and paste? Make abstracts of the lectures highlighting the various individual perspectives on working with archives in each one of them. And, link everything together in order to create a possible account, my own story of the New Conversations #4 as a whole. That’s actually what Nico invited me to do. First of all, I will cut up the consecution of the program and write about the lectures in a different order. I start with the historical way of dealing with an archive as an archivist: Johan Pas showing, proudly, his concern with archiving the archive. Then there is the artist, Joseph Grigely, trying to define the relationship between an archive, an oeuvre and a collection. He shows clearly that a collection can turn into an archive, an archive can become an artwork, and an artwork can be a collection. There are even more variations since these distinctions are flexible over time. With the artist we get to the domain of literature which brings another pretty interesting perspective. It is taken even further, to the worldly domain and other continents, by the intercultural perspective of Sarat Maharaj. He tries to define the need for artists to work with archives, a domain inherently provoking inclusion and exclusion, and which needs to be questioned critically and has to be opposed by compassion.

There we actually touch upon the domain of Louwrien Wijers and her Saint Society. Molly Nesbit recreates two pictorial routes to talk about her ideas about archives as sources of reference that underscore the idea of repetition. Finally, the archiving of architect Yona Friedman’s oeuvre is both explained and shown by Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, who is working on and with Friedman’s archives. Yona Friedman himself brings up the most interesting remark on archives, in my opinion. He states that the archive is a ‘poubelle’, a wastebin gathering superfluous ideas out of which whatever new fiction can be created. The archive as a collection of left-overs, waiting to get a life. Finishing with the performance executed by Jörn Schafaff on behalf of Rirkrit Tiravanija sounds like a demonstration of this idea. And, it might be so, but it also is a remarkable demonstration of the value of the archive, which should never become an end in itself.

Johan Pas — an archive is a fertile ruin.

Johan Pas, an art historian specialized in artists’ publications since the 1960’s, builds and works on his own archive of these publications on a daily basis. It is an addiction he admits, but a creative one. He thinks of an archive as a fertile ruin — a construction site functioning like a revolving

door between the now and the past. An archive, according to Johan, is a tool to investigate the past and to create your own view on art history. And, he surely does construct many historical ‘overviews’, either in the form of exhibitions or books, as he shows with examples of his work. Moreover, he offers the audience an anthology of exhibitions and publications having the archive as topic since the end of the nineties, the time when it became a popular issue again after its heydays in the sixties and seventies. To think about the role of artists and art historians concerning the archive, Johan Pas adapts the Gordon Matta-Clark expression ‘an-architect’ to ‘an-archivist’. Their role should be to activate the past, break it open and shed new light onto it.

Joseph Grigely — on the relationship between the archive and the oeuvre.

Archiving is an essential part in Joseph Grigely’s oeuvre. Joseph communicates with most people by means of writing, or rather, written communication. As he is totally deaf and not many people master sign language, he drags those who want to communicate with him into ‘written speech’. In the early years of his career, Joseph started to use many piles of papers — full of unorthodox combinations of words and signs that resulted from these written conversations — as potential material for his art. Joseph addressed in his lecture the relationship between an archive and an oeuvre, wondering why or when an accumulation becomes a collection, a collection starts to become an archive or the other way around? In his own work it is pretty clear.

He has this enormous pile of 10.000s of scribbled on papers that eventually became archived. His artworks based in these written conversations — he defines them as ‘conversational still lifes’ and ‘grid paintings’ — are deliberately composed, featuring hundreds of papers that are purposely selected and edited. There, Joseph makes the distinction between an archive and an accumulation: an archive is deliberately shaped over time, it is edited or given a certain order by someone that inevitably inflicts his or her personal touch on this order. To question the difference between an accumulation and a collection, Joseph introduces the notion of failure and the microarchive. A microarchive is related to literature and includes several working versions with notes and crossed out parts that finally lead to a poem or novel. It archives the coming into being of this poem or novel. In between the various versions of one poem an enormous amount of new information is found; not in the least on prolific qualities of failure, as he points out in a poem by Keats.

Joseph continues his lecture with his trout flies for fishing that he bought on an auction and shows in one of the vitrines in Antwerp. These are ‘historical’ ones, handcrafted by people who had a reputation for tying especially good or beautiful ones. Through the flies he again talks about the notion of failure.

Some of the cards, holding several trout flies at once, have remarks about the quality of the flies, where things went wrong, what had to be improved etc. Remarks that give them the same quality as the micro-archive in literature. Through these trout flies Joseph tries to defamiliarize the notion of the archive, both in art and literature. He notices many questions with an open end in defining these matters and addresses them in this unorthodox but charming and enlightening way.

Sarat Maharaj — archives as an epistemic event: to know the other.

Sarat Maharaj starts his lecture with some remarks on the notion of the archive. First of all, he reminds us that our Eurocentric view seems to hinder us in discussing the archive in a larger perspective. He brings in this larger perspective by giving examples of non-European archives. He refers to some old cultures where the collective memory was the archive — a living archive handed down orally in grand epic stories over centuries, for example in India and South-Africa. In these ancient times, epics not only preserved stories, but also passed on knowledge about plants, medicine and other useful day to day knowledge from generation onto generation. Then, archives were non-static entities in several ways. In West-Africa archives are known for the turning into dust of its contents as an essential part of it. This inherent self-destructive quality has an effect on the value of a collection and the meaning of it. What if you cannot interpret objects of an archive? What is it worthwhile then? Sarat suggests to regard these objects as agents.

Archives, he states, are like a passage from past to future. He defines them as an epistemic event, in which new meanings can be created. To make this idea more specific, he refers to James Joyce’s Ulysses, to the bedside table of Leopold Bloom with its two drawers. One drawer is filled with highly personal stuff that can be easily put aside as rubbish. The contents of this drawer provide plenty of room to make up a portrait of the character of Bloom. The contents of the second drawer represent the official person as acknowledged by the law. It contains all official papers like a passport, health insurance papers, library card etc.; documents that create someone’s official existence in this world. Archiving, according to Sarat could be defined as a constantly opening up of drawers in which we do not find what we expect to find. Archiving as an epistemic event is accordingly discussed

by Sarat in relation to racial matters in South-Africa after Apartheid, when a new way to ‘classify’ people of different skin color was developed. In this ‘archiving’ of people, the responsibility to find new ways of knowing the other was completely neglected and created even more kinds of otherness and xenophobia than before. Artists, according to Sarat, took up the issue of archives to take this responsibility and to find new ways of understanding the other, of living with others and addressing them. A crucial attitude in this development is compassion and congeniality.

Molly Nesbit — archives for the sake of reference with a certain repetition.

Molly Nesbit builds her lecture “The Rhythm of Return” on two reconstructions that she eventually tries to bring together as a starting point of her talk and which she formulates as: “archives of whatever kind are created for the sake of reference and with the expectation of repeated visits; return trips with a certain rhythm.” She explicates these thoughts on the notion of the archive along two lines, featuring Michel Foucault and Chris Marker, both having their own way in researching the signification of words and images.

Molly presents their ‘routes’ against the red, flaming background (in both literal and figurative sense) of demonstrations and riots worldwide. She reconstructs all this on the basis of her (art)historical research of the images that both of them were dealing with in a certain period. These images she presents as a visual archive that inspired and influenced both men in their work. As for Michel Foucault, she sets out with a lecture he gave in 1970 in Buffalo, at that time a town that was ‘burning’ because of demonstrations and riots. It was shortly after his book “The order of things” was published

— the English translation of “Les Mots et les Choses” — for which he wrote a new preface which introduced the book as an ‘open site’. Molly wheels around this lecture, presenting themes Michel Foucault studied at that time related to his writing and teaching. Simultaneously, Molly reconstructs the flow of images that Chris Marker used to compose his films and books. In his case she talks about the film script for “Le fond de l’air est rouge: an account of revolutions in the seventies”. Molly ‘gathers’ images in the oeuvre of Chris Marker related to the red sky and the sun, which eventually end up in the film “Sans Soleil”. To bring these two together, Molly points out that this regularly focus on certain motifs — or should we call it a personal archive of images and thoughts?- during a long period, is one of the basic conditions of an archive. In the case of Michel Foucault and Chris Marker, they also created works that have an archival quality in / with themselves.

Molly Nesbit created a very dense lecture on the bases of thorough research, full of references and meanings in several fields. Art history, politics, sociology are all at play in her reconstructions, even if she talks only about half of these aspects. To unravel the full meaning of everything she said, one should actually start reading in many sources oneself, reconstructing her research, returning to the archives she used as references.

Jean-Baptiste Decavèle feat. Yona Friedman — an archive as a waste bin.

Yona Friedman introduces a much more playful thought on the matter of archives, or rather on his own archives, in one of the films made by JeanBaptiste Decavèle to preserve his oeuvre. As the architect himself is too fragile to undertake travels nowadays, he is represented by Jean-Baptiste, filmmaker and photographer who collaborates together with Yona Friedman since 2006. Yona Friedman talks in the film “Dailyness”, which was shown in Antwerp, about the archive as a ‘poubelle’ (I love the French word): a wastebin. His archive is like a massive accumulation of ideas and other stuff which turned out to be not worthwhile to work on any further. Good ideas and interesting projects were kept on his desk or drawing table to continue working on it. So, the archive … his archive is defined by him as a coming together of discarded ideas. He has stored in his house in Paris fifty years of working on architecture projects, models and exhibitions. Archiving by numbering and ordering everything, by putting it into some rational logic, did not seem very appropriate considering the little value Yona Friedman granted to his stuff. Instead, Jean-Baptiste decided with him to film and photograph a great deal of the archive. Part of this immense amount of audio-visual footage — resulting from this idea — was used by Jean-Baptiste to make the film “Dailyness”, the first film about the archives of Yona Friedman. While he is filmed from above, he opens file after file from his archives, placing every paper from a file on a wooden stool to be photographed. He shows an endless series of thoughts drawn and written on paper, reflecting in the meantime in the format of a voice-over on archives and archiving. Archiving is an accidental process, he muses, created by the person who puts it together.

From an archive … from his archive, for example, which he happily calls a wastebin … anyone could assemble a new image of the architect Yona Friedman, of his ideas. But, it will be an imaginary architect, that someone created as in a game, a detective game according to him. This possibility of the archive to become a game, to start a fiction, a story, is the value of the

archive. It is a fiction and leads to another fiction — but actually everything is a fiction: “we are used to live in our fiction”. Moreover Yona Friedman assumes that because some ideas continue their live in reality and others are documented and archived, in an archive the original chronology of a body of work is mixed up. The archive becomes a biography of ideas which gets more emphasized in this way than in a chronological arranging of facts.

Jean-Baptiste puts it slightly different. Since he has been working with Yona Friedman for a couple of years now, becoming something like his personal chronicler, he documents the recent projects — quite often installation-like works — too. He is trying to translate the basic principles of the architecture of Yona Friedman to a visual experience. These principles: working together, building a project with others and offering an open architectural structure for this purpose, is what Jean-Baptiste tries to extract out of the traces that are left from the oeuvre of Yona Friedman. And obviously he too writes his own history of the oeuvre in that way — even if he is collaborating on this project with the subject himself.

All Archives goes to Heaven — Jörn Schafaff feat. Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Now what to make out of the lovely performance that closed the day?

What way of dealing with an archive was represented in the act of destroying part of the archive in a paper shredder, clumsily put to work on the long table which had hosted all the other lecturers during the course of that day? To first describe what happened: Jörn Schafaff — who is working on a regular base on the Rirkrit Tiravanija Archive in Berlin — was sent to Antwerp as Rirkrit’s representative along with the instruction to make a sausage out of shredded archive materials. In some way, it was an appropriation of the “Literaturwurst” by Dieter Roth, a series of sausages made according to butchers’ recipes from shredded novels and magazines, using paper instead of meat.

As a true archivist, Jörn told us how he got to be Rirkrit’s representative and what his mission was. Subsequently he put the shredder into work and started feeding it the papers which were to become sausage ingredients.

But, not before he had first identified them. So, there were two faded fax papers, a letter from 1998 concerning the Sydney Bienniale, a flight itinerary, a small publication … and then, briefly after Jörn exclaimed: “… it does hurt a bit, but it is fun …” the machine broke down. I don’t think there was any intention to finally make a sausage. It would be a surprise if one would surface. But, the performance showed that in the end an archive should be of use, should be consumed and digested. It is an ingredient to create new stuff, new sausages, new stories. And, it should not be handled too austere.

At the end of my story of this day in Antwerp I would like to stress that I might have understood some of the lectures completely different then they were meant. They were my ingredients to write this account, which I tried to give an extra perspective with Louwrien’s work. Her interviews — which I haven’t really gone into at length — still evoke many questions. It surely was a brief acquaintance I made with them yet. I am looking forward to read more and more about them, returning to the issues brought about during the New Conversations #4. I left open one question considering the work of Louwrien. Isn’t there something else that’s at the core of Louwrien’s work, besides creating this historical document on her time? I was wondering earlier on. Obviously yes. I wrote of AmSSE, Louwrien’s major mental sculp-

ture as part two of the Art-of-Peace Biennale. Inspired by Joseph Beuys and Robert Filliou it was created out of the conviction that it would lead to an increased global tolerance and understanding. Sarat showed with his lecture that this is one of his major concerns too. The world we live in these days definitely needs more people fighting for compassion, for congeniality all over the globe. He defines a major task there for artists. Well, let’s do it!

Let’s sit around the kitchen table again, turn the wastebin upside down and create new perspectives for a better world (and some sausages). And bring them all out into the world … let’s not forget about that.

Claudine Hellweg Ostend, 31 January 2013

Addis Ababa 14.12.2012 > Antwerpen 17.12.2012

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pleasing Mother Earth.

The light of nature and mind

In ‘Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy’ of 1990 the participants stated the need for everybody to be an artist, a scientist and to realize one’s true nature, in order to be able to be successful economically, according to one’s needs.

In short: everybody has to have the chance to lead a happy life as an important part of the ‘Social Sculpture’ on this planet.

about the practice of inquiry, breath, food, consciousness and art There is the light illuminating matter in spirit.

What do we need? How to be happy and ethically sound? In a globalized world this is not a personal matter. Today, every human being is acting globally.

An interconnected global culture demands skills beyond the ‘frontier’ thinking of the colonial era, based on continuous expansion into the ‘wild’ with the idea to bring ‘civilization’. The end of this culture is evident.

So, what are the tools for proper understanding and precise practice? How to achieve ‘Direct Perception’, a term from lived ideas that had been devel- psychology also called ‘the oped thousands of years ago in ecological approach’, and also times of big artistic, scientific, a term from Buddhism. It means spiritual and material wealth on having a view on reality without the Indian subcontinent. The artificial pictures and thoughts. story goes that it were times of Like the Dutch painters have a high culture where material been trained to see reality ‘as and spirit were more combined it is’. Not tinted by one’s own thoughts and ideas. and not opposites.

As a child born in 1960, I loved looking in books with pictures of the Potala in Tibet, Mayan and Egyptian Pyramids, his- What is a high culture and how torical movies and so on. I day- to achieve a high culture, was a dreamed of the cultures alive in topic that came strongly around these places. The word high- 1986 in Amsterdam. Louwrien calls it: ‘Saint Society’. A mental culture kept my imagination. sculpture related to the ideas on ‘Social Sculpture’ by Joseph Lao-tse: Tao-te-king. Wu wei.

Beuys and others. To reach out In 1976 somebody said: “Read from a colonial, feudal, artificial, Siddharta by Herman Hesse.” It outdated materialistic and dualis the biography of Siddharta istic way of living to an inclusive who became a saint. Siddharta and supporting lifestyle that is

A very practical method is taught

by Shri Ramana Maharshi: “Inquiry is the most direct means of reaching beyond the illusions of body and mind. By fixing the attention on the ‘Real Self’, the source of body and mind and all other phenomena in this multiverse, you reach a direct realization. Direct realization is not merely intellectual mastery of ancient texts and outward

ceremonies.” Shri Ramana Maharshi gave us an upgrade to the ancient practice of diving into the light of the real self.

and lead to clarity and equa- Bhagavan refusing to do so. In nimity (Upeksa) of mind, while ‘Sattvic’ food he included milk, also being beneficial to the though an animal product, but body. The ‘Sattva Guna’ is the not eggs, which are considered most subtle of the three gunas too stimulating or rajasic. that work in our body. The other two gunas are: ‘Rajas Guna’ It was characteristic of Bhagavan Shri Ramana Maharshi and ‘Tamas Guna’. that he would never enjoin In general Shri Ramana vegetarianism on any devotee Maharshi refused to give unless asked, but if asked he instructions for physical dis- was quite categorical about it. cipline. When asked about It often happened in his lifetime, postures for sitting in medita- as it still does today, that even tion he replied simply: “One- without asking, his devotees pointedness of mind is the only would develop that aversion to animal food. good posture.”

When asked about celibacy he would not enjoin it but said that married persons also can attain Realization.

To help this investigation practice Shri Ramana Maharshi recommended eating ‘Sattvic’ food and loosely watching one’s breath. ‘Sattvic’ food helps to have a body supportive to subtleness because of less toxins in the system. ‘Sattvic’ food is taken in moderate quantities. Breath is regarded as the companion of thoughts.

A calm breath helps to calm the thoughts one has.

It can be said quite definitely that vegetarianism is beneficial to those who follow a spiritual path in the conditions of the modern world and especially to those who aspire to follow the path of Shri Ramana Maharshi.

We learn that this old Indian knowledge is the base under the Greek philosophical system. That made me explore the Eastern wisdom more.

But when asked about diet Shri Ramana Maharshi quite emphatically prescribed vegetarianism: “Regulation of diet, restricting it to ‘Sattvic’ (pure and vegetarian) food taken in moderate quantities. This is the best of all rules of conduct and the most conducive to the development of the ‘Sattvic’ qualities of mind. These in turn help one in the practice of Selfenquiry.”

Paracelsus talks of ‘das Licht der Natur und des Geistes’ indicating that there is no difference in the innate nature of matter and thought.

A ‘Sattvic’ diet, also referred to as a yoga diet, is a diet based The passage quoted continues on foods that — according to with a Western lady pleading Ayurveda, Yoga, and Jainism — that a concession should be are strong in the ‘Sattva Guna’ made for Westerners and with

The book ‘Vom Licht der Natur und des Geistes’ is a book with extracts out of the work of Paracelsus. It is a ‘must read’.

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way of letting the reader experience the conversations more fully. Without the writer using her brain to make it ‘better’, but fully respecting what is actually said by the persons interviewed.

One might say: Beyond colonial ways of thought that prevent to understand what is said.

Unedited talks that inspired me to come to the Netherlands.

In the spring of 1986 a friend gave me a book by Louwrien Wijers with the title: ‘His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet talks to Louwrien Wijers’. Louwrien did not edit her interviews with the Dalai Lama, Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou, Sogyal Rinpoche and others in this book. It was her

Western medicine and with the knowledge on food gathered by the late Georges Ohsawa from Japan, who made his views known in the West in the 1950s and 60s.

In 1992, I started the ‘Social Sculpture’ project ‘Harmony Foods for health and happiness’. Part of that project had been: what and how are the knives useful for the vegetarian kitchen? So, I created my own brand of ‘Harmony Foods’ vegetarian kitchen knives based on the Japanese vegetable knives, specially created to cut vegetables. The blade is thin and flat, sharpened to cut the vegetables with less harm. ‘Harmony Foods’ derives from the idea that food can have a harmonizing effect on body and mind so that more subtle views can be developed.

For me the importance of ‘Diet and Nutrition’ became already evident when I was learning ‘Ayurvedic’ cuisine while cooking in our house in Amsterdam Non-violent knives made for with the late Shri Harish Johari, ‘Harmony Foods’. three months every year from 1986 till 1998. The book ‘Diet By getting rid of the toxins of and Nutrition’ by Rudolph Bal- the rational material thought lentine made me understand and a polluted body, the light of the Ayurvedic medical system the real self can shine through. and how to combine it with Just before arriving in Am-

sterdam in 1986, I had found the books of Shri Ramana Maharshi and Paracelsus in a bookshop in Düsseldorf.

and met all the great teachers attracted by Louwrien’s lovely nature, sincerity and hard work.

I learned from Louwrien about the painters in Holland and how they were thinking and are trained in direct perception. I learned about the relative and absolute reality.

My main motivation had become: 1) To reach at a new authenticity instead of rehearsing long past ideas of others.

2) And being able to do what The role of art is now even more important than ever before beyou have to do. cause everybody is part of the This became ‘a more complete ‘Social Sculpture’ as an artist experience’ when Professor Ilya and an entrepreneur.

Prigogine told me in Copenhagen in 1996: “A cook can ‘Sattvic’ food in moderate quanunderstand my ‘theory of order tities is recommended for artout of chaos’ more easily than ists. a purely intellectual person, because a cook is creating order That thou art. out of chaos every time when preparing a meal and by this When talking of art and artists a cook is developing a more the question arises: what is an direct insight not hindered by artist? Is it a mythologist exploring a mythos and destroying his thoughts.” the mythos, as Raimon PanikThese words of Ilya Prigogine kar said? Or is it a being living hit me and it became the next in its innermost self and acting out of there? starting point of investigation.

Thank you Professor Prigogine.

So, what more we need to say?

The rest is silence.

When you are 26-years old a major change happens, John Cage said. That was what happened to me when I became part of the life of Louwrien Wijers

Egon Hanfstingl

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The image’s point of view When, in April 2012, I initiated together with Yona Friedman the digital, photographic and filmic shooting of his archives, we decided to do it in less than 3 weeks. One of the main ideas for him regarding this collaborative work was to have the possibility to go back to these archives from his computer when working on projects, hereby giving him the instruments for mixing all temporalities of the work in a present time.

Leafing through the archives, from box 199 to box 249, we processed more than thousands of documents, translating them into another archive of thousands of photographs in a very organized but natural way. Every single document passed through his hands.

One by one, he displayed these documents on top of his marvelous, painted stool to get recorded by my camera’s eye, each time I said: “Okay.”

During my lecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp I presented ‘Dailyness’ — a movie related to Yona Friedman’s archival

box n° 246. This work starts with Yona opening a plastic folder from which he takes out some recto-verso, handwritten pages. Actually, these pages are an inventory that he did a few years ago and which is linked to parts of his personal archives that got bought by The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Fortunately, I was simultaneously filming and photographing this part of his archives on April 24th 2012 from 11:33 to 11:41.

I write fortunately, because I consider it as a very particular moment in the making and recording of his archives. The movie was made at his 33 Blvd.

Garibaldi apartment where Yona is still actively working today, surrounded by models, drawings and many other elements of his life. In a very natural setting, in front of his working table, I was looking at his archives through my camera’s eye. He was sharing with me all these personal documents and traces, composing a synopsis for a handwritten film about some specific knowledge in time.

I like the fact that, in this short movie, the image is constructing itself totally in relation to what was going on in between the two of us at that very moment in time when working together on his archives. My eyes improvising the image, framing it by following his hands moving from page to page, and at the same time thinking about his hands turning one more time these various pages after many years of writing them. As he says, in the voice over at the end of the sequence related to The Getty Research Institute’s inventory list: “It is not only and just the eye that sees, but it is a step in a chain of processes and it is a fiction because it goes from the real object we saw that day to how our eyes and its related editing transform it today.

In this film the manuscript lasts just a few minutes, followed by xeroxed photographs showing the top of the archive boxes the way they were sent to The Getty Research Institute. Hundreds of regular white, cardboard boxes, with numbers and titles. The particularity of this image sequence in the movie is that the black background behind the xeroxed documents creates a visual depth which gives you the impression that these

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boxes could be displayed as models on the wooden stool. It produces a very special event in the film, “Very far from reality!”, he says, “Awaiting for me to shoot the next image.”

Then, many other points of view follow, almost all the content of box n° 246, which contains more or less 127 different documents related to various subjects: drawings, handwritten letters, architectural drawings, exhibitions drawings, articles, etc… The files related to The Getty Research Institute’s inventory list are numbered from IMG8798 to IMG8826. The first document we shot, starting with box n°246, just before the list, was a drawing made for a Japanese architectural magazine published in 2011. A drawing of a rabbit including the following text: “Le lapin pousse dans le potager”.

Our imagination grows within ourselves based on what we see and how we see it. And, of course, interpretation is related to what we see, then filtered by what we know. Fortunately and unfortunately.

these archives, also initiating a process of complementarity and internal transmissions.

I remember that during the shooting of these archives, I was sometimes recording three times the same document, capturing his hands passing each time he placed another part of the archive on that stool. The photographs really matter to me because they make a visual link in between the archives, their tactility, plasticity and temporality which are related to Yona Friedman’s usage and organization of these paper documents.

everything that I do because I live with a 25 millions pixels prosthesis in my head, and with 2 eyes that makes 50 millions pixels.

I could say that image is my language, and talking is just secondary within this process.

Images remain as the main visualization of ideas. Photographs and films are the last steps in a process, and they also represent an incredibly interesting field of knowledge and understanding that the archive cannot produce just by itself, especially when the photograph and/ or film comThe other day, we were talk- bines both the archive and its ing about the importance to source. I rarely print images also make paper prints of what from the archives as literal we do together. When I print documents at scale 1:1. To have a photograph, I always do two a good view on the archives, copies. One on A4 for him it is better to have a direct which goes into his archives, access from a pdf, a back-up and one on A3 for me that is full size frame which provides part of my work. The imprints the possibility to have multion A4 and A3 are the same: ple reading functions. It took 12cm/ 9 cm. Since my prints us more or less 4 hard drives have a very specific size, they to proceed it -and, it fits in a produce a visualization as well drawer. This morning, I went as a representation of what we out to deliver Yona a few of our collaborate on. Photography photographs and films which I in this context creates its own have put in a blue envelope. Its There is something very spe- space of access to the initial color reminded me of those cycific about all this. I am in the document as it will never re- anotypes, those instant prints middle of his archives together place it. It just develops a very made by architects at the end with him. Not in order to do particular perception of it. I of the 19th century, when they research but in order to gener- do one box of prints for each wanted to do a topographical ate for him a direct access to subject and I make a copy of survey.

3 historical films — made

by Yona Friedman himself — were in this envelope. One was filmed in between the 5th and 7th of September 1989 in Lichtenfels, when he was building a bamboo spacechain dome there. Another one relates to the building of a different space-chain dome in Terrasson, in the late 80s. And the last one is about the pavilion (of simple hydro-technology) in La Villette in Paris, filmed the 10th of June 1990.

Looking at all those images while editing them and turning them into black and white to correct its fading colors, allowed me to understand a very specific space and temporality of his ideas.

Nico Dockx and some of his alumni and master students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp around early September 2012. Both iconostases in Middelburg and Bargino are very specific directions and choices in the process of building this architectural concept. One of the things that I personally find very important is when you are doing these spatial adaptations, when you are building these iconostases, it brings the idea to a point that will allow you more architectural possibilities and experimentation in future collaborations.

then to move a dodecahedron or cube. During the 2 days and a half that it took us to construct it, my attention got focused on what was going on, I visually memorized something about the process of building an iconostase that was very much decisive for the choices I made when doing the spatial adaptations of both iconostases in Middelburg and Bargino. Personally, there, I somehow recognized what it takes to understand a space in order to be able to build something without a map, a model, or a drawing. And, it is also an inclusive process. One part is totally related to how one is able to get people involved in the process, to make them confident with their own understanding of what is going on here. With other words, to make the idea becoming their own idea. The iconostase project in Basel in June 2010 was very important, because this is where and when Yona Friedman decided to continue his idea in almost scale 1:1, presenting it as a potential museum. And, a great moment and experience for me to be there with him, and for what it involves and shares in between the two of us.

The iconostase is the immediate result of a process that was initiated by Yona FriedThe blue envelope that I man around the end of 1958 brought to him also contained when he did the first model some prints of the Icon- of a space-chain structure for ostase150 at De Vleeshal in a project he suggested to realMiddelburg. A kind of visual ize in Tunis. In 2010, I went inventory and / or archive of back to him in Basel while he what was exhibited during its was building Iconostase130 3 months presence in Mid- for the ‘Special Projects’ at delburg. Some other prints the Art Basel fair in collabowere related to the building of ration with Parisian gallery Iconostase185 at Antinori in Kamel Mennour. Then, he Bargino. I did the spatial ad- used metal rings of diameter aptation of the Iconostase185 130cm in order to build Iconaround mid October 2012, and ostase130 as this is our visual Iconostase150 I did in close perspective when looking at collaboration with Lorenzo something in the museum. I Benedetti and his team at De was continuously filming his From all the images that I Vleeshal as well as with artist actions, helping him now and brought back from this shared

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experience in Basel, I did two films. And, since they are based on our complementary points of view, they have multiple functions and status.

These films are part of Yona Friedman’s archives, as well as they are part of a body of work that I started some years ago.

A simple way to define it would be to call it something like a visual decomposition of a multitude of processes. It provides a level of complementarity in between both our ways of looking and thinking, our ideas and their possible visualizations and spatialisations. I may also call it: singular variations of specific perspectives and angles of view.

is a visual process, of course, and I felt like being an image within an image, a look within a look, … le regard sur l’image mirror. I understood his place as a time container in which there is no discontinuity, no fragmentation of time. By fragmentation I also mean no division of time. And, this is a very important aspect for me related to what it involves to share together some time. It matters a lot to me as an artist, from a human point of view as well as through my interest in engaging and generating ideas and processes rather than in producing objects.

As I said during my talk in Antwerp, Yona Friedman’s The other day, I was editing lifetime represents for me the a short film that he made on duration of history that I can July 29th 1987 of his apart- physically and intellectually ment in Paris at 33 Blvd understand as part of my perGaribaldi. I recognized many sonal memory, a memory that objects that I know because is part of my lifetime. Even if some of them are still there 1914-1918 is supposed to be today. This morning, entering the starting point of the 20th his apartment, my memories century, this period of time of those images were still very is old history, very far from clear, and I had this very rare me, very far from my own life. impression of experiencing a What I really appreciate about temporal continuity related his way of thinking and doing to visual memories and im- things is that it is never about pressions of that place. When going back to history, it is more entering his apartment, with about how to think our future this fresh memory of his by reinventing ourselves. I also films, I precisely felt them on proceed by accumulation, and me, physically and visually. It as a result there are hundreds

of photos that I need to print; many other films that I need to edit, some are mine, some are his, like this one from Madras in the 80’s, when he was building ‘the museum of simple technology’. Writing this text tonight, I am looking at the Ektachromes of this museum.

They were processed by King’s Color Lab, 35 Greams Road, Madras 600 006, in the 80s.

Jean-Baptiste Decavèle

Dailyness I see my archives as a trace ‌ as traces ‌ It is a little bit like the spiritual waste of an activity, because that activity, what one does, that is one thing and the residues from what one does go into these archives.

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I think that from all our historical knowledge, archeology has always been constructed from this garbage, these leftovers of our history. We know the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, Rome, and the Middle-Ages. I call it garbage, all those objects that haven’t been used, and that is the archive.

Even if I throw away my archives someone could still find them, and I can easily imagine that my drawings could serve as wrapping paper for some meat at the butcher — in fact that is what happened to some of Bach’s manuscripts.

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So, the archive is the unorganized, accidental trace from which people try to construct something.

The part of my archives that is at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, is typically like that.

It is not chronological.

There is no chronological order, I took an old document, I reworked it, and then it has passed from one box to another, it got mixed up with other things, with bills, contracts, some impersonal letters, sometimes even with family photographs. They are traces, and those traces allow to reconstruct an imaginary person. It is certainly not me that one can reconstruct from my archives. But, it is an image.

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At one point, I thought I had a responsibility with my archives.

But that is not true, I have no responsibility because they can be interpreted in many different ways. So, I simply keep my archives as a wastebasket that I don’t want to empty.

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And, I think that — when working with archives — it is not at all about the person who is at the origin of these archives. Above all, it concerns the interpretation of he / she who works with these archives and who tries to create something new out of them, even if it is something false. The personal archives of our various historical figures are completely falsified and it is difficult to reconstruct the real persons. They have become imaginary. So, I would say that archives are the waste of ideas, they are not the ideas. They are like packagings, as if you were to reconstruct that what one eats from the tin cans they came in. It’s interesting, it’s the work of a detective trying to find traces, the bloodhound who sniffs and I don’t know what he thinks.

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In the end, it’s a game. It’s like a detective story, and what interests people is this game. The political elections are a game.

It becomes more and more fake, and it has nothing to do with reality. It is the game, like a bad football match, etc. So, I find archives very important because they launch a game.

But, I do not consider them as a real tool for reconstructing a reality. It is great for exercising our imagination.

I think, what is interesting is that ideas are not transmittable, but they are always misinterpreted.

In time, the process that leads to an idea is badly interpreted. This corresponds to what I thought about architecture and other things: there is no static reality.

It changes, it changes every second and with every person who looks at it. And that’s very nice, I feel much better in a world like this rather than a world completely hierarchical and static in which everything and everyone must be terribly boring.

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The archive is a fiction — but everything is fiction. You know this phrase of Einstein? I find it the most admirable: “Don’t forget that every scientific theory is a pure fiction.” Everything is fiction; what you see is a fiction, it is nothing but your eye seeing upside-down. And your brain turns it, readdresses it … You see what you can or want to see, etc.

It’s not just simply the eye that sees, it’s a step in a chain and it’s a fiction because the whole chain goes from the real object you see, the eye that transforms it, the brain that interprets it, and it’s a long development of fiction to see what you see. And this fiction could be very, very different from what another person, right next to you, will see.

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In one of my slideshows there is a little chapter I call ‘traces’, two or three phrases: “We only know traces of reality and these traces are partly fabricated by ourselves”. These are not traces left by an event but those that we interpret; and that is very good, we are used to that. Sometimes there are realities. My objects are personal traces, objects that I don’t use, waiting to be used later, all that … like old clothes.

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The majority of the public is passionated with histories, and in reality these histories are traces. It is culture, and culture is dailyness, this dailyness that at each moment is interpreted in a certain way. And, that’s what we call archeology, that’s what we call history, biology, physics, … animal traces, the traces of events on a screen and then the interpretation of that screen. It’s all very far from reality. And we are used to live in our fiction. The two poles of the world are fiction and reality.

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The archive is not really autobiographical because chronology gets lost in the archive because it is not ordered by following that chronology. In addition, it links ideas that are sometimes chronologically quite distant. For example, the iconostase that I am making right now is linked to my ideas of 1957. The technique is related to my ideas of 1959.

Now, there are architect friends who have used this technique of a space-chain for a competition, and they used it in such way that I did in 1959, not in the way I do it today. In 2011, I used it completely different. That is to say, if you like, that it is the biography of ideas rather than the biography of the person. That is true for everyone: the relations with our own reality change all the time ‌, for health reasons, or because of changes in our environment, or real psychological changes.

I have always tried to say that it is the process that is important.

And the process is exactly what we don’t know how to write down.

It is impossible, mathematically it is impossible. Writers do nothing but write a process starting from their interpretation. It could be very interesting and pleasant to read a novel and imagine that the character in this novel comments on what the writer wrote.

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The chronology is necessarily false, it will say what I wrote on a piece of paper at a given moment without taking into account that I could have had this thought 10 years earlier. A composer who writes his / her score, does it sometimes directly like in the case of Mozart, or the jazz musicians who improvise on the spot, but we also know Beethoven’s notebooks and they don’t explain what he wrote. That’s not simply written down. These notebooks are rejects,… waste. When you cook, there are leftover products which do not explain everything.

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For the iconostase: in the beginning I realized that I was looking for structures that could change because reality changes all the time. In the iconostase, it goes to the extreme of separation, the structure can be permanently changeable as I don’t believe in eternity and perennity of things and that brings us back to the archives; the archive is a trace. It is not perennity, it is a trace. Ideas are not exactly tenacious, they are just ideas, that’s all. You cannot do otherwise than to carry your ideas. Everyone has his own ideas.

I have always had this principle idea that the thing is more important than its packaging, it is simply that. The inhabitant is more important than the architect, and the object exhibited is more important than the framework of the exhibition, even though that is not negligible.

Ideas are transmitted in their own way and that’s it. There are neither right nor wrong transmissions, nor good or bad ideas, it’s up to you to interpret freely. Now there are the elections, there is a candidate whose ideas I despise, but I will not say that his ideas are bad; me… personally, I hate them, and I don’t know which majority thinks the way I do. You know, all these things: cultures, aesthetics, democracies, etc. they are fictions — using Einstein’s words. They are fictions, we all have our own. And that is very good. Dogs also have their own culture. Cheers to Kopec!

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Yona Friedman

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The rhythm of return

for Nico Dockx’ conference on archives

was something like a photo editor’s picture archive and probably grew exponentially when he started to work as an editor at the Editions de Seuil in the early 1950s, most especially when he began to work on the series of travel books called Les petites planètes. Those books often credit his archive. It included many pictures that he did not take. To which he could return.

Archives of whatever kind exist for the sake of reference. They do not predict a unified field, much less a unified field theory.

They expect repeated visits, return trips. These returns will Le fond de l’air est rouge in have various, and unpredict- the original seventies versions able, rhythms. Michel Foucault, was hours long. It chronicles the philosopher whose work the revolutions of the sixties seemed to embody the archive, and seventies and their fate. in part because he addressed it The red orb on the book cover conceptually, would come back was predicting his next film, again and again over the years Sans Soleil, which is largely to Manet without ever finishing but not only about Japan. And the book on the painter he had yet he would make a point of started. In the end, it is said, he naming that film Sunless. Both had it burnt. Manet was con- films exist as compilations that signed to the realm of shadows repeat the rhythms in the work that issued from the still picture hovering behind the rest. archive. Were they really so Chris Marker also kept a pic- separate? Marker’s own footture archive going, but it was age elided with the work of other generated differently and not cameramen. Many elements Sometimes he put a group of so abstract. It comes with a came together to relay history. film stills together, as he did in shadow too — of Japan. See History can be close or far. In the book on China and called the flag sunk into the non-sky that way history mirrors the as- the pages courts métrages, on the cover of the book that in semblies in archives, though short films. Sometimes he 1978 published the script for his not exactly. For history needs a worked for Les petites planètes under a pseudonym, it seems film that in English was called voice in order to be heard.

— for these are still secrets.

The Grin Without A Cat and in French is called Le fond de l’air When did Chris Marker’s picture Certain places in the world and archive begin? Difficult to know, certain pictures in the archive est rouge. because it was personal, but it became confused. He travelled

footage of three little girls on a country road in Iceland in 1965, followed by a strip of black leader, nothing, to isolate it.

The script for this film, read by a woman relaying the voice of a photographer named Sandor Krasna, called it the image of happiness. One could say that le fond de l’homme est Krasna, the Russian word for red.

back as often as he could to Japan. The 1959 travel book Japon was written by someone who called himself Yéfime. As Japon was updated, its images mingled with the Mystère de Koumiko, the film Marker made in 1964. One of them graced the cover of the 1970 edition. Stills from the Mystère had been put into the second volume of the Commentaires, the book of his scripts, slightly illustrated, that came out in 1967.

Sans Soleil, the film made after Le fond de l’air est rouge, begins with Haroun Tazieff’s

The image of happiness, and others taken by Marker himself, would be mixed into many more images of Japan, and Guinée Bissau and the Island of Sal and the Ile de France. At the same time Marker published a book of photographs of Japan only, Le Dépays. The text for this book is not written using the same voice as Sandor Krasna’s. In Marker’s work the things seen and the things said about Japan did not complete one another, or put an end to the subject. He would keep going back. That made the archive all the more necessary.

He often went backward to go forward.

Twenty years earlier, after Japon and before the Mystère, Marker made La Jetée. It begins like this. A man narrates: This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upset him, and whose

meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III. Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the departing planes. On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling was bound to remember the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a woman’s face.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars.

The face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it: Or had he invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come? The sudden roar, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear. Later, he knew he had seen a man die.

The man of the story survived

the third World War and radioactive surface of the planet only to become prisoner under-

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ground. His captors used him for a time travel experiment, hoping that through his travel they could find an exit through which to save the human race.

He finds his own exit which leads to a love story and his death. His film has another film inside it too and that is Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But Marker’s film is very short.

To grasp the amount of time required, Marker condensed his shots into stills. Which is to say that this is a film made up of photographs. Each photograph shows a scene expanded by a soundtrack and a story, expanded by the techniques we have for grasping and setting out time. The promise of grasping time, of grasping the best of existence, is a beautiful promise and in La Jetée it is not kept.

But the potential of the still photograph to cross over in this way and to lead us out of the maze, out of the magazine and into other spaces uncharted to find the future outside itself was shown so beautifully that the film has become a touchstone as unforgettable as the image which first set it into motion.

Call it an archive too. Its frozen sun carries the seeds of another to come, and another, and another. Some of them warm.

Something like the grin of the

cat. The grin survives. Let it be the sign of the archive. Nothing less.

Molly Nesbit, 2012 The cheshire cat from Lewis Carroll’s

book, Alice in Wonderland.

A Japanese flag from the image archive of Jan Mast, taken during the making of Crypticcrystalcloud

by Dockx & Mast, Kytakyushu, 2005.

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On microarchives There are two voices in this essay: one voice speaks, the other voice writes. The voice that speaks — this one, the one that is italicized — does most of the narrating. This is the colloquial voice, the one that provides contexts and asides. The voice that writes does most of the research. This is the ‘academic’ voice. The colloquial voice is easygoing.

The academic voice is more reserved, guided largely by conventions of research as practiced in the fields of textual criticism and descriptive bibliography. The academic voice is most prevalent in this essay, which largely attempts to string together, through a series of examples, the relationship between archives and microarchives, and their place in our understanding of the ways art and literature are made and remade in the process of becoming public manifestations of culture.

1. A prologue: archives & collections It could be said that ours is an age of the archive, and that it

was the twentieth century that archive revealed a prescient consolidated the archive as way of thinking about the value both a resource of study and and potential of what might form of study itself. In recent otherwise be lost. And someyears we have been treated to times things do get lost, or ever work that explores the archive so close to being lost, when across a range of disciplinary archives of deceased people practices: the archive as phi- end up in the trash, where they losophy (in Derrida’s Archive are rescued and reshaped and Fever); the archive as a creative mapped as exhibitions that and methodological process work in a way to develop a (in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Inter- posthumous reputation — as archiv and Sven Spieker’s The happened recently to the AfroBig Archive); the archive as a Futurist musician Sun Ra and historical body that is at once a the art critic Gregory Battcock. history of everyday life as much as it is a history of religious Generally speaking, archives practice (the Cairo Geniza is are ‘private’ until by accident perhaps our best example). or agency they become part of There is also the archive that the public sphere. Perhaps the is at its most fundamental most famous of these archives level a resource on the history is Francis Bacon’s entire studio of exhibition practices and the — two rooms and 7,000 items evolution of the independent ranging from old brushes and curator, as it is in the case of dried paint tubes and books Harald Szeemann’s archive. In and slashed paintings and 2007 the Library of Congress empty crates of Krug chamin Washington, D.C. acquired pagne — all of which was transa sound archive collected over ported from 7 Reece Mews decades by the New York media in London to the Hugh Lane consultant and audiophile Tony Gallery in Dublin, where it was Schwartz — an archive that meticulously reconstructed. By included “foghorns and folk definition, every studio is an arsingers; street vendors hawk- chive — Pollock’s studio shack ing their wares; a shoemaker on Long Island is an archive of plying his trade; a Central Park traces of his dripping technique, zookeeper waxing poetic on just as Picasso’s opulent La the care and feeding of lions; Californie, and David Douglas hundreds of taxi drivers; and Duncan’s photo documentaa host of ordinary New York- tion of Picasso’s quotidian ers, just talking.” Schwartz’s and incidental moments, are

themselves archives. And arts lection.’ Neither archive alone, institutions have revealing ar- nor collection alone, but an chives too, particularly fringe entanglement of the two. My institutions that played an im- approach to this is to explore portant historical role in intro- the possibilities of the archive, ducing to the public otherwise and the various ways it manidifficult aesthetic genres and fests itself within contemporary practices. As an example, the cultural practices — that is, not Fales Library at New York Uni- just in relation to art and allied versity has a large collection fields like architecture, but in of archives of arts institutions relation to disciplines that utithat were part of New York’s lize what could called ‘archivdowntown scene beginning ing strategies’ — practices in the 1960s. These includes that evince a predisposition institutions like The Judson Me- to archive without consciously morial Church, which evolved calling itself ‘archiving.’ Two as a venue for radical perfor- questions come to mind, one mance and related happenings general, and one particular.

(Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, The general one is this: in what and Carolee Schneemann all ways might we critically engage performed there). Other insti- the moments of making that tutional archives at the Fales are too important as history to include those of The Kitchen throw away, and too unimporunder Martha Wilson, Group tant as cultural documents to Material, and the Public Art disseminate among the public?

Fund, as well as archives of in- And the particular one, the one dividuals like Richard Foreman, I am most concerned with presDavid Wojnarowicz, and Jimmy ently, is this: where an archive De Sana. The Fales began has bearing on the totality of organizing these archives in a lifetime of making — either 1993 as part of their Downtown for an institution or an individCollection, and over the years ual — what is the relationship has presented small exhibitions between the archive and the of this material — which are oeuvre? particularly compelling in terms of how they both present and Or more particularly: archives represent twentieth-century in relation to accumulations, accumulations in relation to colexhibition histories. lections, collections in relation The phrase I am thinking about to hoards, hoards in relation is this one: the ‘archival col- to piles, and piles in relation to

archives — it is a circular ontology. Sometimes the accumulation becomes the collection, and the collection comes with an archive, as was the case of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. In the early nineteenth

century, Soane had an idiosyncratic predisposition to collect fragments of architectural ruins from Greece and Rome, and with these he filled his house in London. The house of fragments subsequently became a collection when Soane left to the nation this house, the fragments, and their metonymized history. It seems almost ironic at first: a totality of disparate fragments. But this is one of the distinguishing features of any collection: its parameters are unstable. A collection is, as Walter Benjamin said in his

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wonderful essay “Unpacking my Library,” “a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”

How might we regard a collection in relation to an archive?

In several recent essays on archives, Sven Spieker’s book The Big Archive among them, the terms ‘archive’ and ‘collection’ are often used interchangeably. But these words and the ideas they bear come to us from very different historical angles, the archive deriving from storehouses for official documents in ancient Greece, and the collection deriving from the Enlightenment’s march towards worldly knowledge.

The sense in which we use the word ‘collection’ to reference objects of interest — scientific specimens and artworks alike — began in England in the 17th century when the diarist John Evelyn wrote about visiting Pierre Morine in Paris in 1651.

Morine, observed Evelyn, “had aboundance of incomparable shells, at least 1000 sorts, which furnish’d a Cabinet of greate price, & a very curious collection of Scarabies & insects, of which he was compiling a natural historie.” The comment is an important one.

What distinguishes a collection from an accumulation is a sense of modulated purpose. Behind

every collection is desire. An and/ or open set, 62-63, 403, archive can make no compara- 415-416; as compilation, 255, ble claim. A collection is often 404-409, 426; as depository, symmetrical, initially shaping 422, 450, 467-469, 552; excluitself from the possibilities sion and inclusion in selection within an accumulation, like the of, 63, 402-404, 407, 487, 543; quotations that make up Ben- inventories of, 452, 468; as lexijamin’s Arcades Project, or the con, 48, 420-422, 426; as list, photographs that accumulate to 69, 415; presentation of speciconstitute a portrait in the work men in, 408-412, 472, 512, 529, of Hans Peter Feldmann. The 551-553; preservation and, 421, shape might derive from pre- 720-722; private, 241, 255-256, scribed parameters that define 317, 401, 467, 552; public, 423, the borders of the collection, 449-451, 535-537, 570; as rechowever permeable they might ollection, 6-8; still life as, 452actually be. In an exhibition 459, 461; taxonomy and, 1-6, catalogue that accompanied 255, 442-428, 545-556; variety Alexis Rockman’s exhibition at and singularity in, 97, 462-469, Jay Gorney Modern Art in 1992, 481.

Douglas Blau compiled an alphabetical ‘index’ to Rockman’s As Evelyn noted in his descripexhibition — using the index as tion of Morine’s garden and an organizational tool to delin- rarities, his collection was eate the means by which we “curious.” In a sense, every catalogue the biological world. collection tries to be curious The words that appear most by invoking the composite frequently in Blau’s index are singularity of the individual who words that reflect on our desire assembled it, if not also the mafor empirical knowledge by as- terial contents of the collection sembling bits and pieces of the itself. world in a single place: within, for example, an encyclopedia, a museum, a curiosity cabinet, or even an attic. Blau’s index does not include the word ‘archive,’ but it does include the word ‘collection,’ like this: Collection: as catalogue, 29, 255, 410-412, 415-422, 441448, 466, 481, 739; as closed

Soane’s accumulation was rather modest in comparison with another great accumulation, that of the Cairo Geniza.

“Geniza” is a Hebrew term that suggests documents that are kept and stored — the Oxford English Dictionary reports that the word did not appear in English until 1903, when it was used to designate “a storeroom or repository for damaged, discarded, or heretical books and papers and sacred relics.” But more particularly, the Cairo Geniza was composed of everyday documents that were written in the Hebrew alphabet or contained the word of God — not just religious documents, but also business documents such as deeds, contracts, medical documents, poetry, and so on. Anything written with the Hebrew alphabet, including other languages in the Hebrew alphabet, like Greek, were deemed sacred and could not be destroyed — they had to be preserved, or stored away, in a Geniza.

Cairo’s Geniza was a storeroom in the Ben Ezra synagogue, which could only be accessed by a ladder. In a recent book about the Geniza, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole wrote: “for most of the last millennium, hundreds of thousands of scraps were tossed

into the Ben Ezra Geniza, which came to serve as a kind of holy junk heap.” It was only in the late 19th century that the importance of the Geniza was recognized, initially by the sisters Agnes and Margaret Smith, and later by Solomon Schechter, who was responsible for removing from the synagogue roughly 193,654 documents that made their way to Cambridge. In a certain sense, the Geniza came apart before it came together — over a period of decades many manuscripts were obtained piecemeal, by various private collectors operating both independently and on behalf of various university libraries. If Schechter had a good eye, he was also savvy as an opportunist. Fees and tips — euphemisms for bribes — were paid in the process of gaining access to the Geniza, and removing documents. There is a somewhat sordid history involved in the unmaking and remaking of the Cairo Geniza, but it is perhaps no more sordid than the histories of many collections that were assembled in the nineteenth century. The British were fond of collecting bits and pieces of Greece and Rome — even big pieces like the frieze and tympani that Lord Elgin plucked off the Parthenon — and by bringing a bulk of the Cairo Geniza to Cambridge,

Solomon Schechter did his part to expand the reach of the empire of ravishment to the south side of the Mediterranean.

What distinguishes an archive like the Cairo Geniza is how it reflects on the status of the documents that comprise it.

These documents are singular by virtue of the fact they are unexceptional: they document daily life. Like the debris in Francis Bacon’s studio, the narrative value of the archive transcends its material value. How much is a used Francis Bacon argyle sock that is saturated with dried paint worth? How much is an 11th century invoice for three goats worth? How much are their stories worth? In his staid and scholarly study on the place of the still life in Western art history, Norman Bryson points out that the distinguishing feature of the still life is its ordinariness, being composed of the detritus of everyday life, or what he calls ‘rhopography’ — from the Greek rhopos, that which is trampled afoot, or otherwise considered trivial or insignificant. Bryson opines the still life is void of narrative: “history painting is constructed around narrative,” he writes, “still life is a world minus its narratives, or better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest.”

This may be true in a literal

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sense; but the still life’s stories (for they are rarely singular) are bound up in their composition, and these stories are merely latent, always on the verge of unfolding, but requiring human agency to realize their potential.

by Richard Wollheim and I.A. how this process is consigned Richards and Robert Hughes to the place of the private. As (who was one of Bacon’s big- Derrida reminds us in Archive gest fans). There were also Fever, the archive is about a large monographs on Seurat location — it is a place where and Velazquez and Picasso. official documents are filed, And there were books that arkheion, and this place is hisare telling in curiously unique torically an architectural place, ways: Bruce Chatwin’s What like the Cairo Geniza, or the Am I Doing Here, Edweard rooms at 7 Reece Mews. But, it Muybridge’s Human Figure could be a shoe box, or a closet, in Motion (many of the pages or a computer hard drive, or it had been torn out), and Hugo’s could be the margins on a page Spanish Verbs Simplified. All (as it often was for Coleridge). together, there are 1369 books The archive is essentially an asfrom the studio and Bacon’s sembly point where that which country house enumerated and has no place has a place. The annotated in an Excel spread- energy, the importance, and sheet that is available online the beauty of an archive is from the website of the Depart- always latent. Bryson remarks ment of Art History at Trinity in his discussion about the College, Dublin. Bacon’s as- still life, what is unimportant semblage of modernist texts is always entangled with what was perhaps matched only is important, for the unimporby his assemblage of empty tant on the verge of becoming Champagne crates, which something other than it is, and included Taittinger, Le Mesnil, hence, is disenfranchised only and Krug 1971 Grand Cuvee. temporally. Eventually, at some He liked, with equal passion it point, the energy within the arseems, good art, good criticism, chive, if not the actual archive and good champagne. The itself, is recognized for the residual combination of art-in- role it plays in contributing to progress, texts, and alcohol, our understanding of the gencaptures the frisson of a com- erative conditions implicit to the plex compositional process that making of art and literature, as cannot be reduced to the mere well as allied forms of culturallysum of the contents of the room. based making.

Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews is a good example of the ‘still life’ on a grand scale: we can see in the reconstruction at Hugh Lane Gallery, and in photographic reproductions, and in the catalogue of the contents of the studio, all of the ordinariness that went into the making of Bacon’s paintings: the brushes stacked in butterbean cans, the dried Winsor & Newton and Lefranc & Bourgeois jars of paint, the photographs of George Dyer, the paint-punctuated pages torn from books, and the many books themselves: Richard Ellmann’s biographies of Joyce The attraction of the studio — and Wilde, poetry by Yeats and like the manuscript — is how it Eliot and Pound, and criticism retains a sense of process, and

By “generative conditions” I mean the conditions that affect the compositional process — or

more generally the changes to so unusual as far as revisions collaborative, but also because the work that take place in the go. Just look at the floor of of how the microarchive reprocess of bringing work to Bacon’s studio, where there flects on a particular body of the public. Such conditions do are so many trashed paint- work — how the microarchive not so much solve or resolve ings — good ones seemingly and the oeuvre become, to a meaning in a work as much as — with sections of canvas cut certain extent, a critical comthey might complicate it by in- out. It’s as if, as an artist, one ment on each other. Titles do troducing unanswered and un- must trash work to make work. not ‘explain’ the oeuvre, or explained possibilities — how Where work is both made and the individual work, but rather the work that ended up one way unremade, and where a work is create an extension of the work might have ended up another never really ‘completed’ in an through different media, and way. And how the process in- aesthetic teleology. It just stops. our interpretative engagement is one that requires a sense of volves a form of unrewriting on Along with everything else. constant movement between the part of the reader — backing up and going forward and In the time between 1959-1960, constituent elements of a work backing up yet again — an when Frank Stella was deep in — creating through this moveonerous process with some the middle of painting his iconic ment a sense of possibility that writers, like Hemingway, whose Black Paintings, he sat down precludes closure. novel A Farewell to Arms had with two of his friends, Carl forty-seven different endings Andre and Hollis Frampton, and The history of critical practices before being published, not to wrote on two sheets of paper a isn’t especially accommodating mention at least forty-four dif- list of titles for the various paint- when it comes to considering ferent titles. Some were pretty ings from the series, some of the interpretative opportunibad too. He tried “Love is one which were used, some not. ties that come with texts like fervent fire” and “Education The titles are largely evocative Stella’s list of titles, or Keats’s of the flesh” and “They who of dark or otherwise depressing worked-over manuscripts, or got shot,” but these were, as subject matter: hospitals; natu- the debris in Bacon’s studio.

Hemingway modestly noted in ral disasters; Nazi slogans; art- The twentieth century has given the margin of his manuscript, ists who committed suicide (like us many critical paradigms Keats’s friend Benjamin Robert to work with — hermeneutics, “Shitty.”

Haydon and the French painter new criticism, reader-response Shitty. You can tell right away Nicholas de Stäel) — and tragic criticism, and new historicism, that Hemingway wasn’t an Ox- fires, like the Coconut Grove among many other practices bridge sort of guy. But to his nightclub fire, and the Triangle — yet such practices work in credit, he recognized, in the Shirtwaist Fire. Assessing the a way to envelope the cultural process of revising A Farewell list, Stella himself called the text or object as a static event. to Arms, that what matters in titles “downbeat.” As both ar- The temporal attributes that are the end is what reaches the chive and microarchive, the list germane to the active process public. We want to think that is important for various reasons, of making — writing, drawing, Hemingway’s case is excep- not just as source material erasing, and so on — are gentional, but it’s not really quite whose authorship is implicitly erally unacknowledged by most

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schools of criticism. Except, finished work. It is in this regard perhaps, one: genetic criticism, concerned not with the ideal which is largely devoted to the of a final text as it is with mulimportance of compositional tiple viabilities that are spread movement and critical recon- across, and reveal themselves structions that take place when within, compositional time. we look at manuscripts like Keats’s, or studios like Bacon’s or Morandi’s. Genetic criticism emerged in France in the mid At this point, I want to discuss a 1990s. It is primarily concerned particular kind of archive, what with the genesis of a cultural I call the microarchive. The text, and considers all available microarchive can be defined resources that might have an as an understated moment in interpretative bearing on the re- the compositional process — visions to a work up to the point Stella’s list of titles for the Black where it is published — what is Paintings is a good example — called the ‘avant-texte’. Genetic but it might be so understated criticism is not media-based, as a single crossed-out word, nor is it genre-based: music, or a marginal notation. The theater, film, even painting are microarchive is most characterall viable subjects, inasmuch istic when it is most private, as as they all leave material traces part of the maker’s relationship of their compositional history in with his art, that is, as a diathe form of drafts, proofs, stud- logue with the self — and not ies, sketchbooks, storyboards, as a part of the public text. It is transcripts, and retakes. A not specific to any kind of art single etching or lithograph or literature, or other forms of might have many different design; it manifests itself wherstates as the plates are altered ever human making involves as the printing proceeds, the a sense of invention. What successive images not neces- follows is a discussion about sarily being differentiated on how mircoarchives appear in the basis of good or bad impres- genres as diverse as poetry sions, but on the basis of how and trout flies. My narrative the image is recomposed. Ge- also attempts to critically actinetic criticism is more broadly vate the microarchives so that interested in the compositional they reflect on a larger body of wastebasket — the stuff that work. is essentially not intended as part of the public purview of the The notion of the microarchive

2. Microarchives

has a scholarly antecedent in the tradition of the literary, or critical, ‘apparatus.’ The apparatus is a feature of many scholarly or synoptic editions, as it provides variant readings that can be found in draft versions of a work of literature.

By this means one can, to a limited extent, reconstruct the composition of a work. But the apparatus has orthographic constraints: it is inadequate in the matter of representing indexical marks and cancellations and other nonverbal marks, which are perhaps best described in the context of the microarchive.

My introduction to microarchives came more than 30 years ago when I began studying Keats’s poetry. At that time, I was doing research on Keats’s manuscripts and his markedup folio copy of Shakespeare, both of which were part of the Keats House collection in Hampstead, London. Most of his markings are unexceptional as marks: they consist primar-

it critically — we want to know spear’s Poems: I never found who the annotator is — but so many beauties in the soneven when we do know, as with nets — they seem to be full of Keats and his Shakespeare, we fine things said unintentionally are often left grappling with the — in the intensity of working out open-ended sense of purpose conceits.” that involves creating a semantic bridge between the mark Compared to Wordsworth and and the text. In this regard, Byron, if not also Coleridge, marginalia is a form of mark- Keats never mastered the making. Only it’s not always longer poem; he was less inclear what precisely the marks terested in narrative form than might mean — they extend he was in the way poetry prothe ambiguity of poetry to the vided the liberties to remake ambiguity of commentary. Col- language at the level of laneridge, who made marginalia a guage itself — even within the critical genre by publishing the morphological structure of the notes he wrote in books, even single word. In a letter to Fanny books owned by libraries and Brawne from 1820, Keats exfriends, described the process plained a situation that reflects as ‘spoiling a book in order to on his comment about Shakeleave a relic.’ It is perhaps also speare saying “fine things uninthe most forthright and immedi- tentionally:” I have been writing ate form of reader-response with a vile old pen all week, which is especially ungallant. criticism that exists.

The fault is in the Quill: I have Marginalia like Keats’s is im- portant because it archives There’s another reason mar- mended it and it is still very the act of reading as an active ginalia is important: it draws much inclin’d to make blind es. process — it records spontane- attention to how textual mean- However these last lines are in ous moments of this interaction, ing exists at the level of the a much better style of penmanwithout necessarily explaining narrative fragment: the word, ship thereof a little disfigured by or adjudicating them. One of the phrase, the line. This is the the smear of black currant jelly; the most unusual examples of focus of many of Keats’s marks which has made a little mark on marginalia I have seen is in a in his Shakespeare, and in his the Pages of [Charles] Brown’s copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s comments about Shakespeare Ben Jonson, the very best book Adventures Underground, in his letters. On one occasion he has. I have lick’d it but it rewhich was underlined in red when Keats was beginning his mains very purplue — I did not and blue by a child whose age long poem Endymion, he wrote know whether to say purple or and identity are unknown. The to his friend John Hamilton blue, so in the mixture of the anonymous authorship of much Reynolds: “One of the three thought wrote purplue which marginalia perhaps devalues Books I have with me in Shake- may be an excellent name for

ily of underlinings and strokes in the margins, what might be called indexical marks. However, Keats sometimes wrote a comment in the margins. And sometimes Keats was bold enough to emend Shakespeare — only because he was not confident that earlier editors had appropriately represented the complexity of Shakespeare’s intentions, which (if only because we have no manuscripts

by Shakespeare) could only be guessed at.

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a colour made up of those two.

Purplue? It’s a color that is perhaps less about the stain on the page than it is about the awkward blush of being guilty — licking and licking the jelly on the page of his best friend’s best book, and finding it won’t go away. Even in the context of a letter to Fanny Brawne — the woman he loved with unrequited grasping affection — he narrates his compositional tendencies with the same sort of revealing directness that he wrote to his publishers when describing how he composed Endymion.

The microarchive plays a distinguished role in Keats’s poetry by showing us how he struggled at times to work out individual images — a process that is not immediately self-evident in any work of art as it moves through the public domain. As an example, Keats’s effort to use the word “tinge” in “The Eve of St. Agnes” was a particularly fretful experience, as he tried two times to use the word before finally giving up.

His draft of the poem, which is part of the Harvard Keats collection, is difficult to read, but there is a consensus that he first tried to write: Tinging her pious hands together

and then changed this to: Tinging with red her hands together and then finally omitted the word altogether. Keats had previously used the word “tinge” five times in his long experimental poem, Endymion, which he wrote a year earlier. In the course of the 4,000 lines that comprise Endymion, Keats simultaneously entered and left behind everything that is both good and bad about his early poetry — the clichés, the mawkishness, and overdone images — as if it was one long compositional exercise. As Keats himself acknowledged, the poem was “slip-shod.” He wrote it to get past it, and many experiments — like his use of the word “tinge” — remain within the body of the poem, and it is no surprise that the reviews were unapologetic — John Wilson Croker’s Quarterly Review described the poem as being “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.”

And this is perhaps why the word “tinge” lies buried and forgotten within the apparatus of “The Eve of St Agnes.” Keats had gotten to the point where his criticism of his own diction became refined enough to con-

cede that newness for its own sake didn’t make for a good image, much less a good poem.

Between the “warm gules” and the “rose-bloom” that comprise the setting of Madeline’s midnight reverie, there was enough of a rosy scene without needing “tinge” (which is also awkward semantically, since Madeline is “so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint” — so why should she also be tinged?). By pulling from the stanza a word he desperately wanted to make work, a moment of drawn-out failure turns to his advantage. It is important to remember that Keats died young — he was only 25 when he told his friend Joseph Severn, ‘I can feel the daisies growing over me.’ His friends so loved him and his work, they saved every scrap of his writing and made transcripts of those scraps, and these combine to reveal an agonizing effort to find in his vocabulary what William Butler Yeats called ‘the right word which is also the surprising word.’

Keats’s poetry is filled with In a previous discussion about This reminds me of an incident surprising words, and one of “Bloomiest” and “Brightest,” that occurred more than ten the most impossibly awkward which appeared in Textualterity, years ago, I was sitting in the words occurs in the holograph a book I wrote over a decade New York apartment of a friend, of his famous “Ode to Psyche,” ago, I observed that the crux of having tea and a conversation. where he addresses Psyche, the argument isn’t about which A large part of our conversation the Greek goddess of unremit- phrase is the ‘better’ choice; had to do with the senses, and ting beauty. He says — he ex- rather, it’s a matter of address- how communication involved ing the fact that for Keats, the a wide array of unexplored claims: O Bloomiest! most viable choice is some- possibilities outside the norm O Bloomiest? It’s an awkward times the choice for which there of what it means to be human. phrase, for sure; but it’s also is no logic, no decorum, and Deep into the conversation, my a deliberate phrase. From no antecedent. Some years friend told me a story about a Keats’s manuscripts we know ago, the literary critic Paul de blind baby who had learned to he wrote it twice, in a draft Man wrote: “There is always a imitate — perfectly, so she said and a letter, and it also strange fascination about the — the sound of a refrigerator — appears in two transcripts bad verse great poets write and the sound of a car going made by friends. But “O Bloom- in their youth.” But even more over gravel as it approached iest!” wasn’t the phrase that fascinating is the unmisgiving the house. After a long pause was printed when the poem verse great poets write when in which we considered the was first published in 1820. they are at their best. If the implications of this, my friend Keats’s publisher discretely word “Bloomiest” is flawed as a turned to me and said: “Beauty changed it to “O Brightest!” syntactic construction, it could is difficult. Never Forget that.”

There’s a long story about also be said to succeed at doing how this might have happened, the thing Keats’s poetry does Beauty is difficult. This was as Keats was ill and did not best: upset the equilibrium of one of those things the English complete the task of proof- syntactic conventions and find Romantic poets figured out in reading the volume. All we are in a certain awkwardness a different ways and at different sure about is that the phrase difficult kind of beauty. It was times, if they figured it out at “O Bloomiest!” was published the English literary critic John all. If Byron understood this, as “O Brightest!,” and “O Bright- Bayley who aptly observed that he did so only reluctantly, and est!” has been the phrase print- Keats “turns what might appear then only with the help of Leigh ed and reprinted in the poem mean and embarrassing into Hunt. Hunt was an essayist and for the past 191 years. The what is rich and disconcerting; editor who published Keats’s famous repository of lexicogra- for at his most characteristic first poem. Years after Keats phy, the Oxford English Diction- Keats always disconcerts.” In died, Hunt was in Italy with ary, doesn’t include ‘bloomiest’ this regard, Keats’s poetry Lord Byron, and the two had as a legitimate word — it has emphatically stresses how the a conversation about Keats, bloom and bloomage and even logic of art has little to do with which Hunt describes as folthe logic of rational human lows: It was Lord Byron, at that bloomy — but no ‘bloomiest.’ time living in Italy, drinking its thought.

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wine, and basking in its sunshine, who asked me what was the meaning of a beaker “full of the warm south.” It was not the word beaker that puzzled him: College had made him intimate enough with that. But the sort of poetry in which he excelled, was not accustomed to these poetical concentrations. At the moment also, he was willing to find fault, and did not wish to discern an excellence different from his own.

It is decidedly not an ordinary excellence, of course. Purplue.

Tinging. Bloomiest. These aren’t etymologically correct coinages of the sort Keats himself so much admired in Shakespeare. Instead, they were coinages that reflected a vocabulary which both perturbed and perplexed his contemporaries, who considered him essentially coarse and lacking the refinement that would come from an otherwise learned poet.

Thomas De Quincey wrote that “only the anarchy of Chaos” could provide Keats with an audience that could forgive his linguistic indiscretions.

One might argue that only the public texts matter, and none of these words — purplue, tinge, and bloomiest — were public texts. The New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s, were ada-

mant that biographical informa- the microarchive leads us to tion and prepublication states the micronarrative, the sense of a text were irrelevant to the in which art is not so much final outcome of the work. As about the totality of its parts, as Kenneth Wimsatt wrote in his it is about how the parts themfamous essay, “The Intentional selves have both meaning and Fallacy,” “the design or intention beauty that can be read as both of the author is neither available a part of, and apart from, the nor desirable as a standard for whole. There is in this sense a judging the success of a liter- world in a word. A microarchive ary work of art, and it seems to is typically fragmented, and it is us that this is a principle which the fragment that metonymizes goes deep into some differ- the larger whole, and becomes ences in the history of critical a concentrated representation attitudes.” It is a valid argument, of that whole — like a ring rebut one that presumes that a covered from the wreck of the work of literature is a fixed form Titanic. Within the microarchive when it is published — which lies considerable consummate history tells us is generally not power, as it lays bare the smallthe case. All art and literature, est nuanced moments of human as much as it might be ‘finished’ agency. It is in the archive that when it is brought forth to an secrets are inscribed; false audience, is constantly being starts are mapped; tensions are remade by the editors and cu- memorialized. In the archive rators that affect the conditions every hesitation has no place to under which it is experienced — hide. Keats’s effort to make the even in ways contrary to the au- word “tinge” work in “The Eve of thor’s intentions — so a work is St. Agnes” shows an emphatic fundamentally always in motion, effort to make color touch, and it is less a static outcome than to create an optic/haptic sort of it is a set of transient possi- synaesthesia — and leads us bilities. The assumption that a into a world of Keatsian thinking ‘final’ text bears with it a finite about what he called “the feel set of interpretative possibilities of not to feel it.” is contrary to the realities of how art and literature are dis- Keats is an ideal subject for seminated. A single word en- genetic criticism because so tangled within a microarchive, much of his archive survives, like Keats’s “Bloomiest,” is not and it survives in improbgoing to tell us what a poem able ways: not just in his manumeans. It shouldn’t. Instead, scripts and letters, but also in

the transcripts made by friends how straw can be spun into series of paintings, Homage and acquaintances, and stories gold, and how the ordinary ele- to the Square. It was in many told by friends, like the story ments of everyday life become ways a groundbreaking exhibiLeigh Hunt recounted about art. We want to see just how the tion. Albers was fastidious as Byron. But it is important to re- magic works, and it is in drafts an experimenter, testing differmember that not all writers left of poems, and in the detritus ent shadings of a single color archives like Keats did. Some, of memorialized studios like in order to get an outcome he like Mikhail Bulgakov’s, were Bacon’s and Morandi’s that we wanted. One of his color studburned. Some, like Walter Ben- want to find the answers. But ies is captioned: “try again.” It’s jamin’s, were lost. Some, like the answer is that there are no like Keats struggling with the word “tinge.” Albers’s studies Osip Mandelstam’s, existed answers. Just more mystery. reveal many cancelled possiorally, because a written docubilities that were unrealized as ment was too incriminating in final forms, yet work in a way to the age of Stalin. And there inform those final forms. Almost were writers like Robert Walser, all of the Albers’s archive is in who wrote without revising. In the private hands of the Josef fact, Benjamin said of Walser & Anni Albers Foundation — it that he never corrected a single was never meant for public view. line of his writing. And, there are some writers, like Shakespeare, for whom the disappearance of all traces of their actual manuscripts leaves us with the beautiful and infuriating Not long ago at an auction of emptiness of not knowing what fly fishing tackle, I purchased they actually wrote or how they The place of the microarchive in a notecard and salmon flies art history is decidedly secure, that were in various stages of wrote it. particularly in diachronic exhi- being tied. The flies were tied “Making” is a complex, if not bitions of a single work, where by Helen Shaw, who in the midalso ineffable, process. We the history of the work’s making 1900s had a reputation for tying can never quite know all the and remaking is stretched out patterns with exceptional clarity practical and impractical rea- over time. The National Gal- and proportion. She also pubsonings and feelings that go lery of Art in Washington, D.C. lished several books on fly tying into the making of any specific organized many exhibitions and kept detailed tying notes. work of art. Yet, in our inexo- of this sort in the 1980s. More One such notecard consists of rable longing for meaning and recently, in 2011-2012, several a conventional ‘index’ card onto understanding, if not also for European and American muse- which was taped in-progress closure, we do not easily let go ums presented a traveling ex- salmon flies, and beside these of this desire. This is the Rum- hibition of the annotated color flies were inscribed marginal plestiltskin complex. It reflects studies that Josef Albers used notes. The fly pattern is known on our part a desire to know in the process of making the as the “Popham.” Like a Keats’s

3. Another kind of Microarchive

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manuscript, the card reveals significant compositional changes. “Retie” says the note.

“Retie wing & throat” it says.

The annotations are very light — some in blue ink and some in pencil, written with a symmetrical and knowing hand.

Fly tiers generally work the way a theater director does: the script for a fly is called a ‘dressing’ and there’s a certain allowance that tiers have in the matter of interpreting the dressing. Some materials, because of their rarity, might be changed — Kingfisher, for example, might be used as a substitute for Blue Chatterer, which is banned under international trade conventions — but in the end, what matters is the individual eloquence of the fly, and how each interpretation by a tier is a singular reflection of the tier. Shaw struggled to get this right in a way that reflects

Shaw’s own standards, ac- In the realm of fly fishing hisknowledging in her notes her tory, little has been done to own failures — the blue was create what one might call a too pale, she observed. The catalogue raisonné for the flies ribbing should be oval gold on that originated by any particular the yellow, and oval silver on tier; or a history of the filiation the blue, she wrote. She had of dressings for any particular forgotten the Indian Crow on fly pattern. While flies and fly the body — and made a pencil tiers have their own museums, note to remember it. She also such as the American Museum observed that she had options of Fly Fishing (in Manchester, in relation to two different color Vermont) and the Catskill Fly sequences: one option was the Fishing Museum (in Livingston Pryce-Tannatt color sequence, Manor, New York), it is rare for in which the body alternates flies to receive serious attention between orange, lemon yellow, in the context of mainstream and pale blue floss; and the cultural institutions. A unique Hales color sequence, which al- exception was when the Beiternates between orange, blue, necke Rare Book Library at and orange again. Both dress- Yale organized a modest yet ings were sourced by Shaw: revealing exhibition around the Pryce-Tannatt’s came from his flies and writings of Lee Wulff book How to Dress Salmon in 2010.

Flies, 1914; Hales’s How to Tie Salmon Flies, which was pub- Shaw’s “Popham” notecard is lished in 1892. Blacker’s The unusual, as tying instructions Art of Fly Making (1855) and go. It is ‘synoptic’ in the sense Kelson’s The Salmon Fly (1895), that it presents variant options are better-known as sources, for tying the fly body, both of but both books were rare and which could be read as being expensive, and not easy to historically correct. It also draws access for a tier in the midwest out the way that a fly is ‘comin the 1950s and 1960s — it posed’ by way of a process that would have required a special depends on the vicissitudes of trip to a major metropolitan both the materials at hand, and city with a research library, like the desired outcome. Generally Chicago. Both Pryce-Tannatt speaking, most tiers are flexible and Hales were reprinted sev- with respect to the composition eral times, and widely avail- of dressings, but not always. able — and dressings generally Some fly tiers were secretive reflect their broad accessibility. about their methodology, like

Franz Pott, a famed tier from Montana in the 1930s who developed a process that involved weaving badger and ox-ear hair, for which he had a patent. But secrets are hard to keep when it comes to flies, no matter how complex they seem. When the famed Catskill tier Walt Dette died in 1994, his obituary in the New York Times explained how, in 1928, Dette approached Rube Cross, at that time the dean of Catskill tiers, and offered him $50 to teach him his tying strategies. Cross told him to go to hell, and Dette ended up learning the hard way: he bought a bunch of flies from Cross, then untied them, one turn of thread at a time, while his partner Winnie Dette made notes of the process.

But even this doesn’t tell quite enough; it doesn’t explain the source of the materials, or the specific means by which a particular shading of dubbing for the body of dry flies was achieved.

There is a relevant comment in Edgar Allan Poe’s prescient essay from 1846, “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he said: “I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would — that is to say, who could — detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions

attained its ultimate point of the best tiers in the history of completion.” Contemporary fly American tying — Walt Dette, tiers often do this, both in books Fran Betters, Rube Cross, Dan and on YouTube, and they like- Gapen, Jack Gartside, and wise often describe the arcane others — charged for their requirements for certain dress- flies the prevailing market ings. Art Flick’s version of the rate, which, indexed to inflaHendrickson requires dubbing tion in 2012, worked out to apthat consists of urine-stained proximately $2.00-$2.50 per fur from a female fox. And, Fran fly. At this rate, the flies were Betters’ famous Ausable Wulff primarily fished. Sometimes a requires reddish-dyed fur from fly might be ‘carded,’ attached an Australian opossum, and the to a signed card — and someparticular sort of reddishness times flies might still be found is not easy to replicate — for with an original order request years, when Fran operated a or itemized list. Or they might small fly shop in Wilmington, have been issued as a selecNY, the only place to obtain tion or collection, which was a the correct shade of fur was common practice: the spring from Fran himself — little plas- 1975 Orvis catalogue offered tic bags that were sold for a A “Fluttering Caddis Selection” modest $2.85. Since Fran died and a “Minutiae Fly Selection.” in 2009, fur of the correct shade Jack Gartside’s 1990 catalogue has been unobtainable. Does it offered an “Eastern Dry Fly Sematter? In a sense, yes — it lection” and a “Western Dry Fly matters when one is consider- Selection.” And for decades the ing the value of the intentions New Brunswick family of tiers of the originator of the pattern, W.W. Doak offered a Miramachi inasmuch as those intentions Spring and Fall ‘Deadly Dozen’ are known or knowable — and selection of Atlantic salmon flies.

But most often, flies tied even in general, they rarely are. by the most famous tiers were The dilemma is that it is un- bought individually, then placed common to find flies dressed in fly boxes, and then fished —

by Shaw, or other originators some of them ended up in the of a specific pattern, in part jaws of a trout or salmon, if not because flies were made to be also up in a tree or down under used, not saved and collected a river rock — and those that — and because they are not survived in fly boxes would ‘signed’ in the ordinary sense often over time be consumed that an artwork is signed. Even by moths. This is why flies tied

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by their originators are difficult to find and identify, even flies tied as recently as the 1960s.

Shaw’s notes on tying the “Popham” are important in a way that Keats’s manuscripts are important, at least where the manuscript reveals rejected wording: both make evident a certain kind of failure, and the unacknowledged value of this failure. And both, while not quite memorializing failure, embrace its presence as a compositional fragment from which one might continue to learn. Failure is rather underrated, if not also understudied, in the arts. The cultural canon is largely built up on the basis of the masterpiece, not the masterfailure, and literary critics don’t generally study bad poems the way engineers study bad design — particularly design historians like Henri Petroski, who has written quite prolifically on the subject of failure in design. For Petroski, failure

is a necessary precondition for all successful design.

But what exactly do we mean when we speak of failure?

Failure is not always empirical or obvious, and there are occasions — as with Keats’s “O Bloomiest!” — where something that fails is also something that works, or might be regarded as beautiful, if only impossibly so. Consider as an example a selection of streamers and bucktails tied by Joseph Bates in 1945. Streamers and bucktails are a genre of trout flies designed to represent baitfish upon which larger fish feed, and Bates is a legendary figure in this genre of fly fishing history. He published in 1966 a book on streamers and bucktails that has yet to be superseded. The flies illustrated here look like ordinary streamers, but they’re not: hidden beneath the fur and feathers of each fly is a mass of lead weight. Ordinary streamers are nearly weightless, a size 2, which is about 5cm long, weighs 3/10ths of a gram — but these lead-wrapped streamers weigh up to 6.5 grams — more than 20 times as much. These are not so much weighted flies as they are feathered lures.

What was unique about the Bates streamers is the fact they arrived with a note in Bates’s handwriting taped to the fly box,

which said: “Early (1945) spinning lures — attempts to use weighted bucktails for spinning NO GOOD (except historical).”

Bates does not explain to us why the streamers were no good. Not here anyway. The microarchive rarely narrates the history of its own existence; that history typically lies elsewhere, folded into other narratives. In his book Streamer Fly Fishing in Fresh and Salt Water, which was published a few years later in 1950, Bates observed: “An excess of weight is very bothersome in casting and it usually impairs the action of a fly by making it logy... My observation has been that their weight detracted so much from their action that they took few fish and I know of no accomplished spinning anglers who favor their use today.”

Both as collection and as archive — it is hard to decide to which category Bates’s streamers belong — the flies function for us as historical touchstones.

As Bates himself said, the value

of the flies is historical — we use them to ‘read’ the development of the history of fly fishing in relation to the history of spin casting, and thereby develop in the process a critical model that is relational. This is one of the great values of any archive, and the microarchive in particular: it is an interruption within the oeuvre, and we can better explore the trajectory of the oeuvre — especially one like Keats’s — by studying the revisions that take place within it.

behave as a hydrodynamic form. In Carl’s fly boxes I also found four flies called the Ausable Wulff that had been tied by Fran Betters, who lived a mile up the road from Carl —you can tell Fran tied them because they are tied with Fran’s signature hot-orange thread. They look ratty and faded from years of use, and three of them have the hook points broken off.

In another important way, the fly boxes of ordinary fishermen, filled with flies collected over years from various tiers and sources, sometimes have within them straightforward stories that can tell us much about the genre of fly tying, if not also about the individuals who themselves tied the flies.

Carl Bruennig’s fly boxes are one such example. During the winters Carl lived in New York City where he worked as a hair stylist, and every Summer he drove six hours North to the Adirondacks, where, beside the Ausable River, he kept a small cabin with a field stone fireplace. When Carl died in 1987 his cabin and his flies passed onto his neighbor, and in the cabin today can be found a photograph of Carl and his dog from 1962. It’s a photo-

graph that tells us much about Carl. He is wearing stiff waders of rubberized canvas, and in his right hand he’s holding a homemade wading staff made from a tree branch. In his left They are no longer useable to hand he has folded over his catch fish — no good, shall we shoulder a fiberglass rod with say — yet decidedly too prean automatic reel. His creel is a cious to throw away. Are they modest mesh creel. This is not part of an archive? Are they the kit of a purist; it’s the kit of part of a collection? Canonical someone who does things his cultural archives do not necesown way, and does them with sarily have all of the examples passion. Among the dried and that we need to address the brittle flies that he left behind broad range of questions about are several stonefly nymphs, how the archive relates to the disproportionately round, dark oeuvre, or about how a collecgreen with light green collars, tion, even a small collection and the body criss-crossed like the contents of a fly box, with gold tinsel. They are ter- can devolve into an archive. rible ties; but an enigma about This is why trout and salmon flies is that even terrible ties flies, and their compositional catch fish — their functionality histories, are so important: they is not measured by their visual defamiliarize the archive as we appearance, but by how they know it through the archives of

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artists and writers, and this in turn reframes the most basic questions we have about art and archives.

At this point, I can come to a conclusion of sorts. Archives are everywhere. And likewise, microarchives. A microarchive is only a node within a larger network of compositional history, and it requires a form of interpretative engagement to activate the node and make it meaningful. While we can learn much about art by studying art, the more we look outside of art at other forms of human making, whether bridges or prepared food or trout flies, the more we understand art. The microarchive is revealing because it concentrates our attention on the minute moments of making — the otherwise unseen tensions that get played out over time, even in the micromoments of space between the imagination and the hand.

Joseph Grigely

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Fran Betters, “Hay- ally all his own patterns and stacks,” sizes 12/14/16, some experiments du jour). If early 2000s. you wanted Fran’s patterns which were also tied by Fran, Fran Betters is well-known you paid attention to the little among fly fishermen as an box in front of him. Every day Carl Bruennig’s fly iconoclastic fly tier — his best- the contents of this box varied, box, with four “Ausable known patterns like the “Hay- it was always a hit-or-miss Wulff” flies tied by Fran stack” and the “Usual” eschew proposition what one would Betters in the late 1960s/ conventional rooster hackle find in it. (Purchased directly early1970s. as a means of flotation. From from the tier) 1959 to 2009 Fran operated About Carl Bruennig not the Adirondacks Sport Shop, Fran Betters at his vise, much is known. During the a modest and unassuming fly late 1970s/ early 1980s. winters he lived in New York shop on the West Branch of Photo: Jan Betters.

City where he worked as a hair the Ausable River in Wilmingdresser, and every Summer ton, New York. In the Autumn Helen Shaw, Notecard for several decades he drove of 2008 Fran was inducted in / Instructions for tying six hours North to the Adi- the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame the “Popham”, undated, rondacks, where he lived in in the Catskills. He died in probably 1960s. (Pura small two-bedroom cabin 2009. (Purchased directly chased from Lang’s Auction, with a field stone fireplace just from the tier) 22 October 2011, lot 455) below the Wilmington dam.

The cabin was situated about Fran Betters, various Joseph D. Bates, Jr., one mile from the fly shop run experimental ties from featherwing streamer &

by Fran Betters. When Carl the mid-late 1990s. bucktail lures for spindied in 1987 his cabin and his ning, 1945. fishing gear were passed onto At Fran’s fly shop in Wilmhis neighbor. The flies shown ington, there were, gener- The patterns represented here here, and the fly boxes, were ally speaking, three different are decidedly canonical patfound in Carl’s fly vest. (Gift of groups of fly bins: commercial terns: they include five wellChuck Lyons, 2009) bins (which contained stand- known Maine featherwing ard and well-known patterns streamers (Black Ghost; Grey Carl Bruennig with his commercially tied), Fran’s Ghost; Col. Bates; Nine-Three; dog Bruschi. Wilming- pattern bins (which contained General MacArthur) and ton, New York, 1962.

Fran’s patterns tied by others), four New England bucktails and Fran’s ties (usually one (Edson Tiger Dark; Edson Digital copy of a photograph small bin with about a dozen Tiger Light; Mickey Finn; from Carl’s former cabin, compartments, consisting of Black-Nosed Dace). What mounted in a period frame. flies Fran was tying while sit- distinguishes these particular ting right behind it — gener- ties from normal ties is the

Labels for Antwerp Archive:

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fact that the shanks of the hooks are wrapped with lead wire. Normal ties would weigh about 0.3 grams; the leadwrapped flies weigh 20 times more — up to 6.5 grams. The label shown here, which is in the handwriting of Joseph D. Bates, Jr., was originally taped to the top of the Dewitt fly box in which the flies were stored.

(Private purchase, 2011, originally sold at the Richard W. Oliver Auction of the Joseph D. Bates, Jr. collection, February 1990, lot B-114) W.W. Doak, “Miramichi Fall ‘Deadly Dozen’” collection of salmon flies, ca. 1970s. (Private purchase from Dana Gray, March 2012) Don Gapen, signed “Muddler Minnow”, undated, late 1970s. / Don Gapen, cedar fly box, mid 1940s.

In 1936, Don Gapen moved to Nipigon, Ontario, Canada, where he ran a seasonal fishing lodge on the Nipigon River.

The Nipigon is a short waterway between Lake Nipigon and Lake Superior, and the river held large brook trout that migrated between the two large lakes. The Nipigon watershed hosts a baitfish called the Cockatouche, a form of

sculpin, and the “Muddler for angling collections — have Minnow” was originally tied asked for extra sets of the eight to imitate this particular fish. fly plates. Five hundred sets of The pattern was devised on these have been printed on August 27, 1937 while Gapen extra-heavy paper with the was fishing the Nipigon with names and originators of each three colleagues (Karas, The fly printed on the left of each Brook Trout, 2002). (“Muddler color plate.” (Private purchase, Minnow” was purchased from April 2011) Lang’s Auction, 25 April 2008, lot 401, and Don Gapen fly box Trout and salmon flies was purchased from a private inside Hardy Neroda fly seller on eBay, 2006) boxes, 1960s-present.

Girma Grigely’s first fly, Generally speaking, a ‘fly box’ February 2, 2011. is a vitrine containing a collection of patterns that may or An archive must by necessity may not be arranged around begin at some arbitrary point a specific species, a specific in time. Girma Grigely’s first water, or specific stage of insect fly, a pattern with no name life. Fly boxes are made of a using deer hair, seal, and Cree variety of materials: clear plashackle, was tied with his fa- tics such as myran, aluminum, ther’s assistance when he was and woods such as cedar. The 2 1/2 years old.

Neroda boxes shown here were made from Bakelite in the Joseph D. Bates, Jr. , 1940s and 1950s. plate 1 from Streamers Flies and Fly Fishing, Box 1. Salmon flies for both showing Don Gapen’s Canadian and Scottish waters.

“Muddler Minnow” as Mostly unknown tiers,1960sdressed by Gapen, 1950, present Ed. of 500 Box 2. Nymphs and leech patFrom a prospectus to Stream- terns for upstate New York and ers Flies and Fly Fishing: “Fly Western Maine. 1970s-present. dressers wanting to copy pat- Tied by Joseph Grigely, except terns and who do not wish to for the woven nymphs, which prop open the books to do so were tied by Gordon Rose and — plus people desiring an extra by anonymous tiers working set of fly plates for framing or for Hank Roberts in the 1970s.

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Box 3. Emergers and soft hackle flies for upstate New York and Western Maine.

2000s. Tied by Joseph Grigely.

Box 4. A variety of midge patterns, size 18-24, for upstate New York and Western Maine.

2000s. Tied by Joseph Grigely.

Jack Gartside, Sparrow nymph assortment, in original plastic box, early 2000s.

(Private purchase, June 2012) Joseph Grigely

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Literary archives: the strange case of James Joyce In literary studies we have recently seen a return to the archives. Around the turn of the millennium a new generation of young scholars rediscovered the pleasures of material work that went beyond the umpteenth re-interpretation of one of the same limited set of masterpieces. Scholars attempted to recontextualize these works instead of rereading the older rereadings, by placing the texts into the history in which they were written. The reading of a literary work has always involved a confrontation between a reader and a work that is always in some form distant in time and space, so literary criticism has always had a historical dimension, ever since philology was invented in the Hellenistic period.

It was probably in Alexandria that the first philologists (lovers of words) began to study the texts of Homer and of the other Greek writers in a way that was new, paradoxically by considering them as texts that were essentially old.

For the scholars who worked

at the Museion (the library and academy of Greek capital of Egypt) the status of Homer, Sophocles and the other Greek writers was such that they seemed to belong to a period that had ended. In this way these texts for the first time became classics, if only because they were no longer contemporary. They were seen as belonging to a cultural phase or to a civilization that deserved to be revived but that also was felt no longer to exist.

As far as we know, the Hellenistic period was one of the first of those moments in history when the idea of a classic era became important. There had been dreams of a golden age before: most cultures posit a heroic age now no longer there, alas, when the Gods walked the earth, animals talked and there was a paradise without sin and death.

But the difference here is that in the Hellenic period we had texts that were supposed to contain some of the essence of the Edenic period in the form of a limited selection of authors whose work was supposed to be exemplary of that period. The works of Homer and of the classic writers of tragedies were thought to represent in some exemplary fashion what it meant to be Greek.

The close study of these texts

became an essential part of the Greek paedeia, the system of education that was believed, more than anything else, to represent and to be able to pass on to the next generation “Greekness” (which for the Greeks was the same as humanism).

So if we can date serious literary studies to the Hellenistic period, the early literary scholars were always aware of the distance between their own time and that of the authors they studied. It could not be otherwise: first because they were very well aware of the linguistic development that separated them from the “classic era” and second they could not ignore the fact that all of their texts existed only in faulty manuscripts that needed to be corrected by the philologists.

We know (or think we know) that the library of Alexandria (and to a lesser extent that of Pergamum) were centers of study where copies of all the known works of literature and philosophy were kept for perusal and study by the scholars. This was also one of the few places where different copies of the same work would end up, so it is no coincidence that it was there that the first standard editions of Greek texts seem to have been pro-

duced. In a manuscript culture, no two copies of the same text will be identical and it is only after the mid-fifteenth century that our modern idea of a stable text becomes feasible: before 1450 no two copies of the same text were ever identical.

But the fact that there now was a limited “canon” of writers and works made it a challenge for some writers to pass off their own work as that of Homer or one of the other canonical writers. In a world where survival as an author was based on the fact that somebody else was going to copy your work by hand, that was not a bad strategy. Part of the restorative work of the Alexandrian philologists was therefore not just to establish “correct” editions of the classical texts but also to decide which of the alleged tragedies

by Sophocles or poems by Sappho were genuine. In the beginning exposing forgeries was fairly easy, but as the exposures became public, the forgers would learn from the mistakes and they would not make the same mistakes twice.

The American historian Anthony Grafton has shown how the resulting arms race between forgers and critics was mostly fought by the same people. The best critics

were also the best forgers, and quite a lot of the early philologists were involved in fraud.

In this process it must have become apparent (once again) that history creates a distance between a classic text and the present perspective of the contemporary reader, not just in terms of historical references, but also in terms of language.

The idea that the language of the golden age was a standard against which modern forms of the language had to be measured dates from the same period.

So from its very beginning in Greece, philology was a historical discipline that tried to bridge the distance in time between the reader’s present and the writer’s past.

In the Christian era the texts that were studied did change (Greek philosophers and writers were replaced by Christian texts and writers), but for this new canon the problems were not too different. The texts of the Jewish bible, of what now became the Old Testament, were just as alien for a Christian audience as the work of Homer. And in both cases one needed guidance to make sense of texts that sometimes contradicted each other, as the pagan philosophers did not tire to point out. These con-

tradictions were due to the fact that what we think of as the bible is not a single book but a collection of books written by different authors at different times for different audiences.

That this is true for both the Hebrew and the Christian bible did not stop the Christian (and Jewish) writers of the next eighteen centuries from treating the bible as a single book that (for most of this time) was considered to be the only book, the equivalent in a linguistic form of the Book of Nature that was the world.

As a result, there were at least three different kinds of problems with the bible: internal contradictions between different parts of the book, the differences between what the developing teachings of the church and what the bible said (or did not say) and finally the discrepancies between the bible and factual (scientific or historical) findings about the world. In a way, the central status of the bible in the Christian age, from the fourth to the twentieth century, offers an excellent demonstration of man’s ability not to read what the text plainly says. This was to a large extent due to the efforts of the church fathers, who took the biblical texts and turned Christianity into a philosophically coherent and

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closed system. This was then accompanied by an equally coherent system of interpretation of the biblical text in which all the contradictions were either ignored or explained away. It is one of the mysteries of the history of interpretation that it took Western civilization fifteen centuries to come to the conclusion (with Spinoza) that Moses could not be the author of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, despite the fact that the Jewish prophet’s death is described in the final chapters.

The reason why the book was not read properly was simply that for too long everything in it was simply taken on trust, as the Word of God that had to be true and complete. This is illustrated nicely by a letter from cardinal Robert Bellarmine to a correspondent who had pointed out to him that maybe Galileo was right about the earth revolving around the sun. Bellarmine wrote back that not only was Galileo’s view impossible to reconcile with Holy Scripture, the Council of Trent had decided that the Bible could not be interpreted against the opinion of the church fathers who all agree with the bible that the sun moves around the earth. As a result it was clear that this simply had to be true: “It would be just as

heretical to deny that Abraham had two sons and Jacob twelve, as it would be to deny the virgin birth of Christ, for both are declared by the Holy Ghost through the mouths of the prophets and apostles.”

The Council of Trent had tried to put a stop to the free interpretation of the bible in the first period of the reformation. But the first protestants were just as bad as the Catholic hierarchy in restricting interpretation of the bible to what they considered to be sound doctrine. Both Calvin and Luther viciously attacked whoever tried to read the bible differently from what they thought they saw there.

When Michael Servetus e.g. pointed out (quite correctly) that the doctrine of the Trinity was not biblical, he was first condemned to death by the Catholics, then escaped to protestant Geneva, where he was condemned by Calvin and burned at the stake, with his heretical book chained to his leg.

The punishment for bad interpretations of literary works tends to be more lenient, but there really is a connection between the reading strategies of orthodox readers of the Bible and some schools of literary criticism. Not only do literary scholars take over

a lot of the technical language of their colleagues in biblical studies (allegorical, typological interpretations, exegesis, hermeneutics), but the influence works the other way too, with some of the literary theories having a decisive influence on biblical studies. There is a whole field in biblical studies that is called the literary study of the bible, which concerns not only the study of the text as literature, but exponents of this school attempt to read the bible from the perspective of literary theories. Historical and critical bible scholars had demonstrated the radical disunity of the bible: they showed that the different books in the Hebrew Bible and the different parts of the Christian bible had all been written at different times, for a different audience and from different perspectives on the fundamentals of faith. In some extreme cases they demonstrated that these parts were divided against themselves, with different theologies (e.g. the Gospel of John in comparison with the other three evangelists). Or with different voices speaking in one text: there are at least four or five in the Torah (the first five books) so that some stories are told twice, like the creation of Man in the book of Genesis. In the sixties and

seventies a new generation of bible scholars thought that they could give the bible a new unity by showing how in the final form of the book there are literary techniques that give the text coherence. No wonder that even the Vatican’s biblical committee has embraced some of the findings of the literary scholars.

For the so-called New Critics in the middle of the previous century, the coherence of the literary text was part of the fact that it was an aesthetic object and that as such, it adhered to a set of rules that could be described and that did not need to include reference to the intentions (or the biography) of the person who had created the object. This is the famous intentional fallacy: it was wrong to think that in order to understand a literary work one had to know anything about the artist’s intentions, if only because these are not accessible except in the form of the work of art (the principle can be generalized to all art and all artists).

In the simplest communication model for the study of art, one can distinguish 1. the aesthetic object; 2. the person who made it on the one hand and 3. the person who perceives / reads it. But

New Critics and most of the literary scholars who followed them, have concentrated their energies on studying the first and the third element in this model, without any regard for the second. Umberto Eco’s semiotics was initially involved in this movement, but by the early eighties he realized (when he himself had become a writer of literature with Il Nome della Rosa) that this development of studying the work itself and the work’s reader, without any recourse to the writer had gone too far.

He was not prepared to subscribe to the central dogma of what Roland Barthes called “the death of the author”. As a example he chose the work of James Joyce, which had already been his focus in his doctoral dissertation Opera aperta.

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s last and most difficult book, the reader is confronted with 628 pages of extremely dense, multilayered and polyglot prose. This is the beginning of a chapter:

in twentyg have sigilposted what in our brievingbust, the besieged bedreamt him stil and solely of those lililiths undeveiled which had undone him, gone for age, and knew not the watchful treachers at his wake, and theirs to stay.

As the lion in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile (shall Ariuz forget Arioun or Boghas the baregams of the Marmarazalles from Marmeniere?) it may be, tots wearsense full a naggin

It sounds like English, the syntax is English, half of the words are English but there is something terribly wrong with the other half. We know that in German the word “Tiergarten” means zoo, but

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you cannot just half-translate a word like that, and German “Tier” is something entirely different than English “tear”.

The result is a riot of language, with words from all over the world invading the text, some of them Dutch and Flemish, as in this passage, where with some advance warning you can read (or hear) words like postzegel, negenentwintig, brievenbus en een uitdrukking als tot weerziens.

So far so good: each individual word can do more, can mean more than we expect. But where does that process stop. If I am not Dutch, I may be excused for finding likely equivalents in Irish or Kiswhahili, two languages that we know to be present. This quickly becomes a philosophical and aesthetic question: how far can we go in the process that the text itself seems to suggest. Is there no limit to the infinite semiosis, to the centrifugal force of meaning? The same is true for references to people or to events: we find Irish mythological heroes, Romans, countrymen, fictional heroes, generals, bishops: the American critic Adaline Glasheen collected a thick book full of names of the people in the Wake and she called a Census of Finnegans Wake.

Louis O. Mink did the same for the references to places in A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer.

Where do Mink and Glasheen stop, and where do other readers stop finding new interpretations? Where do we stop interpreting: is the text a sort of Rorschach test where readers can read into the blots whatever they want? The point about Rorschach tests is that the drawings in themselves do not represent anything: the observers (or patients) project their own mind, their hopes and fears, onto the picture. It is no more than a white canvas unto which one can project one’s hopes and fears. This is very close to what some of the more liberal theoreticians of art have claimed for works of art: there is no limit to art’s process of signification: every (great) work of art can be infinitely (re-)interpreted. In fact the quality of poly-interpretability is precisely what makes art of an object and what makes art great.

This move or this decision seems like a liberation and there are indications that the early proponents thought they were liberating the readers or observers from the oppressive regime of university critics who were obsessed with unitary meanings.

But if a work like Finnegans Wake (or any other piece of art) can have (or carry or be the occasion of) an infinity of meanings, does that not also mean that it has no meaning at all? And if great works of art are defined by the strange property of being able to be the focal point of infinitely many interpretations, who gets to decide whether that is the case? What is it that stops me from interpreting every work of art in an infinity of ways, of finding an infinity of interpretations for a particular work? And why stop at works of art? The history of the bible has shown that this one book can give rise to divergent and different interpretations.

Maybe this is not an infinite number, but reportedly there are at present 40.000 Christian churches, each with a markedly different interpretation of roughly the same set of books. Surely this does not make the bible great literature.

Even worse: on the one hand we have the fact that one and the same text can give rise to many different interpretations and on the other hand that, apart from a few of the texts in the Hebrew bible, this text was never even meant to be read as literature.

In this respect it is always interesting in literary

criticism to read the expression, “it is possible to interpret this as …” Haven’t we learned from the history of bible study that it is always possible to interpret any text in any which way we want? In no other discipline is there such a freedom of interpretation as in literary criticism and the introduction of Freudian readings has made everything possible. This is the paranoid form of interpretation and in fact it is now no longer uncommon to claim that all texts are able to mean the exact opposite of what they ostensibly say. In fact: everything that is white is in reality black, because otherwise it would not so desperately attempt to convince us of being white! In the case of a radical limit-text like Finnegans Wake this is all the more true: there are critics that have claimed that all language aspires to the condition of Wakese.

excluding other possibilities of meaning. Communication is only possible when an utterance has a definable meaning and that only happens when there are many more things that it cannot mean.

If we accept Finnegans Wake as an example of the limit-form of meaning, as a text that most people would accept as carrying much more meaning than “normal” forms of language, then we can also make the case that even Wakese, crammed as it is with other languages and with references to all kinds of literatures and cultures, can only mean something by excluding some meanings and some references. With Umberto Eco we could claim that in this endeavor we may even continue to exclude the author’s intentions: instead we should work with what Eco calls the intentio operis, the intention of the work. This is the meaning that the work, created by The most important objec- an artist at a particular time in tion to this set of ideas is that history, for a particular audiif a text can have an infinity ence that shares a cultural and of meanings, it can have any historical background with meaning at all and it ends up that artist. meaning nothing whatsoever.

The implications of The structuralists already such a decision are such that knew that language is a game if we truly want to know what of differences: when we say or meanings a book like Finnewrite, we can only mean some- gans Wake (and any other thing by our utterances, by work of art) can have, we must

widen the horizon of our enquiry. We must read or observe the work against its historical background and in the case of the Wake that context has disappeared. In the late Summer and early Autumn of 1922, Joyce began to work on a new and still nameless book. In one of his notebooks we find a number of corrections to the text of Ulysses, which had appeared in the Spring and which needed a new printing.

But these brief notes stop and they are replaced by short notes, taken from a variety of sources (such as newspapers, periodicals, books) and later used in the book that would be known for a long time as “work in progress” and that would appear in May 1939 as Finnegans Wake.

It is only because in 1939 Joyce did not throw out or destroy the notebooks that for seventeen years he filled and later used in the writing of the work, that we now know how that most fascinating of modern works of literature actually came into being. Joyce kept most of the notebooks (some were lost in the meantime) and most of the manuscripts on which he wrote the first drafts of each of the many sections that would make up the final version, and he kept most of the second and

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third manuscript drafts, the typescripts, the proofs for the periodical or limited edition publication, the galley proofs and the page proofs, sometimes more than twenty stages of a text’s development.

The manuscripts survived because Joyce gave most of them to his long-time maecenas Harriet Weaver: her money made it possible to work on the book full-time and in return she received all of the previous drafts and stages. In addition Weaver had been very active in helping Joyce in all kinds of practical ways and after the war Miss Weaver donated all of the work to the British Library in London.

The notebooks had survived the war in the possession of another woman that had done a lot of work for Joyce.

Sylvia Beach, owner of the most famous English language bookshop and lending library in Paris, had foolishly suggested to Joyce that her bookshop would publish Ulysses in France when that work had been banned by both British and American authorities. Although this adventure would earn her a place in modern literary history, she must had no idea that her decision would mean that for more than ten years she would become not just a publisher, but also a

secretary, proof reader, manager, impresario, banker and spokesperson for Joyce and for the members of his family.

At least after the war Sylvia Beach made some money when she sold her collection of Joyce materials, which contained the Finnegans Wake notebooks, to the University of New York at Buffalo.

It was in 1977 that Michael Groden, a young Joyce American scholar, collected all of the existing Joyce manuscripts in a vast publication project with Garland Publishing in New York. This company was and would be publishing manuscripts and notes for quite a lot of British and American writers (Shelley, Wordsworth, Austen) and in this case Groden created what the publisher called “The James Joyce Archive”: a collection of all the materials that had survived on the genesis of Joyce major works, not surprisingly little in the case of the earliest works, and quite a lot in the case of Joyce’s last book (about half of the archive).

These materials have been available to Joyce scholars in facsimile form since the late seventies, but it is surprising that so few of the academic specialists in Joyce’s work have ever even bothered to look at this treasure trove, which al-

lowed Hans Walter Gabler in 1984 to edit the text of Ulysses in such a way that it repaired most of the damage that had been done by the Dijon printers who, in very difficult circumstances, had introduced so many errors into the text that Sylvia Beach had been forced to include a disclaimer in all of the copies of the first edition.

It is only in the last fifteen years or so that Joyce scholars have begun to take the manuscripts seriously, helped by the fact that new manuscripts and new notebooks have become available.

It is hopeful to observe that especially younger critics have taken up the challenge of studying these new and notso-new documents in order to find out how Joyce actually created Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The advantage of this so-called “genetic” approach to the works of Joyce is that it is more radically historical than some of the earlier critics had attempted. In recent years Joyceans had already rediscovered history by themselves, reclaiming Joyce for radical politics, for Irish nationalism, for cultural studies, for Catholicism. But the problem is that the view of these critics of the historical reality in

which Joyce lived and worked was always extremely narrow.

Most often critics would find a copy of an old magazine, or a movie, or a book and then attempt the relevance of this one artifact to the work of James Joyce, whether or not there was a clear and discernible link with the Irish writer.

A colleague of mine wrote an entire book on Joyce’s interest in advertising (the hero of Ulysses makes his living canvassing advertisements), but he did so without any reference to Joyce’s documented interest in advertising. The same is true for any topic you can think of. It is interesting to philosophize about Joyce and Dante, or about Joyce and sports, or about Joyce and fascism or about anything at all and if it is interesting enough there is bound to be an English professor somewhere who has done precisely that. This is what literature professors do: I remember another who wanted to write a book comparing the work of two writers for the sole reason that they had never had anything to do with each other.

Typically this type of criticism will start from one or two items and then find or create links with bits of Joyce’s work. Now that we have a James Joyce Archive, the work of the Joyce critic has changed

dramatically, because now we can document exactly what it was that Joyce was reading at the time that he was writing this or that section of Finnegans Wake. In the case of the very first months of work on his new book, we have the notebook that contains a few corrections to Ulysses and these are followed almost immediately by a series of notes taken from one of the Irish newspapers that we know Joyce was reading. In addition he also read articles in journals and the same notebook (which we call VI.B.10) allows us to confirm something that we know from the correspondence, that Joyce was particularly interested in a trial in England where a wife and her young lover had been condemned to death for the murder of the husband. Joyce read the sensational newspaper reports and used a whole series of street interviews commenting on the case in part of his new book.

While it would certainly be possible to find connections between Joyce’s complex book and nearly every court case in Dublin, London or elsewhere, in this case we have textual evidence that Joyce was not just taking notes on a case, but that these notes later became an integral part of his work. In

fact these notebooks document seventeen years of reading and collecting material for inclusion in Work in Progress and they thus function as a record of Joyce’s interests at this productive time of his life. With the manuscripts, typescripts and proofs of the different sections that would eventually become Finnegans Wake, we have an almost complete archive of the genesis of one of the most influential modernist works of European literature.

We know what it grew out of, how it developed, changed direction, became something else in a process that took seventeen years. Limiting ourselves to the finished product alone, the book as published in May 1939, would greatly diminish our pleasure of reading and studying it.

Geert Lernout

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27/4/2012_20:44movie_pt1_00:36 filmed / photographed by Matthew Stone on April 27th late at night the day before the New Conversations #3 took place at Herengracht 1 in Amsterdam, celebrating Louwrien Wijers.

Egon Hanfstingl (EH): No, but what do you want to eat?

Louwrien Wijers (LW): Yes, what do you like to eat? I also think that is a very good question.

Nico Dockx (ND): Yes, something that digests well.

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LW: Yes, easy to digest, very good.

ND: Yes, something that is not too heavy.

LW: Yes, not too heavy.

EH: Yes. ND: And, something vegetarian.

EH: Yes.

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LW: Yes, vegetarian and not too heavy.

27/4/2012_20:45movie_pt2_01:36

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LW: How do you?‌, we have a lot of pasta in the kitchen, don’t you think that could be nice? Nico, you see the scissors somewhere?

ND: The scissors? I don’t see any scissors here?

LW: Oh, of course, Egon has taken those scissors upstairs.

ND: Yes? LW: I think so. Yes.

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ND: I will go upstairs and get the scissors. That is also something …

LW: Yes, I will still do something with…, but we don’t have scissors? It is ok.

ND: I will get the scissors.

EH: But, ‌ I will go briefly to Albert Heyn to get some vegetables or so.

LW: Yes, and maybe some ‌

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EH: Tofu or something?

LW: Yes, or some other things they have,‌ these little vegetable balls are perhaps also very nice.

EH: Yes, but we have to‌ What?

ND: The scissors?

EH: Well, they are somewhere on the first floor.

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LW: You have the scissors?

ND: Yes, but I haven’t’ seen them?

EH: How is that possible?

ND: No, I couldn’t find them?

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LW: No, they are really very difficult. Scissors are really difficult.

Scissors are the most difficult thing, I think.

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27/4/2012_20:47movie_pt3_01:19

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LW: Oh yeah, now I lost it. Ah, now I have to start all over again.

Matthew Stone (MS): You don’t want to tape that?

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LW: No! There is something here ‌ behind there, damn ‌ I have never been packing my archives so badly. That is probably because Matthew is filming me or so.

EH: I briefly have to go to the market.

LW: Egon, have you found the scissors?

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EH: Oh yes, those scissors. I really do not have the time for that.

LW: Oh, it doesn’t matter.

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Rummage and rootle / Sketch-score for drawer 01 in Ulysses

unedited transcript of his lecture during the ‘Avec une paire de ciseaux’ (the new conversations 4) event organized by Nico Dockx at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp on 04.05.2012, recording: Nico Dockx, transcript: Thomas Crombez.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, or, friends. I should like to begin by thanking Nico for inviting me, and Els De bruyn, for actually making it possible for me to get here, and to the Academy, for organizing what seems to be a day with a special sort of atmosphere for discussion and exchange.

How Nico actually manages to get us together is a bit of a mystery. He uses all his charm and seduction, it would seem.

And suddenly we are here all together in Antwerp. I would

rather have not been, but it is credit to him.

chive. So: the virgin, the vegan, the vegetarian, the nuttarian, the fruitarian — these must be the invented concepts to which we begin to look at the making of an archive and what its implications on a larger scale might be.

I should also like to thank Asako (and Sarah) for the vegan food today. It is always splendid, whether here in Antwerp or in Berlin. I have always enjoyed and looked forward to and felt terribly fulfilled with the vegan fair by them. It’s not entirely coincidental that my contribution today is an excerpt from I should immediately say that my larger construction of the we should try to be not too archive over many years, which Eurocentric in our notion of the is called ‘The Vegan Archive’. archive. First, let’s remember Difficult as the term might be that for civilizations outside to begin with, we should think Europe — as it was once for of a kind of evolution from the Europe, and still is for many carnivorous archive — the all- cultures within Europe — the consuming archive that eats archive was memory itself. everything, captures everything, The absolute expansive nature and draws it into the mould of of the memory, for which we the structure of the archive — use the phrase ‘prodigious to a non-carnivorous archive, memory’, was essentially what which might be a vegetarian the archive was. Take some of archive, or, as I am boldly dog- the great reciters of the epics matic, I shall call ‘The Vegan in India today. They gather in Archive’. their mind all the writings of the Vedas, not the written writings, When I truly become the pure but all the phrases of the anfood fundamentalist, then I cient philosophical speculations hope it shall become the nutta- of India, and then also the two rian archive. The nuts archive is great epics, the Mahabharata a wonderful concept, because and the Ramayana, which, in you can hide all your craziness their simplest version, are thirty behind the idea that you just times the size of the Iliad and simply live on nuts and fruit. the Odyssey put together, and James Joyce himself pondered then of course the commenveganism, vegetarianism and tary, which are woven into the all the rest, but he joked about it verses and the memorization of and called it the virginitarian ar- these ancient epics. This day,

[Four non-Western positions]

the sacred houses of Benin, offered back to the gods. the great houses of the Igbo in Ghana, they were stunned All the excess of production of to find that all these collections an economy was simply collectwere in such bad condition. ed and dumped in the temple If we turn to South Africa, we Nobody had obviously gone cellars; of no use to anybody might find a similar if less spec- around with a feather duster and not convertible into capitacular archive in the figure of and polish. The idea of things talist currency. This freezing of the Sangoma. If we turn to West weathering and slowly turning excess in society, this function Africa, we might find much the into dust seemed central to of the archive is something we same impressive living archive the concept of the archive, the suddenly come across when in the figure of the village griot. collection or the sacred house. we find this vast collection in Let us bear in mind that vast One might say that colonial Thiruvananthapuram. When the bodies of data, commentary, violence at some point went colonial authorities suspected ethnological and botanical and out and collected the great ob- that there was this wealth medical observations, observa- jects from the sacred houses of and tried to open the doors, a tions about states of mind and Benin, created a vast heap of flood of cobras came flashing body, are woven into these ar- them, and made a great bonfire. out at them. Everybody fled. chives. It is received, repeated, This was the plainest punitive It gave the idea to the movie understood and commented expedition of West Africa; the Indiana Jones and the Temple upon without a single word burning of the objects of these of Doom by Steven Spielberg.

You can see where it comes being written down. Without sacred houses. from, except that the film took a single ‘object’ functioning in this notion of the prodigious The third of the non-Western the event itself and set it somepositions from which we might where in Egypt. It was part of a memory. begin the journey into our con- kind of non-determinate oriental The second point in trying to temporary subject, is the recent landscape. Today, as the Indian think from outside Europe into finding of the great treasure in secular state asks the question, the West, is that the archive the temple cellars of the South ‘who does this belong to?’, the has to do with both preserv- Indian temple of Thiruvanan- authorities in the temple say ing something but also living thapuram. Many of you may that it belongs to nobody. It bethrough the process of its have followed this, because in longs to the gods. We cannot in weathering and withering. The the 1930s there was a forcible fact appear in court to defend archive is not something sub- attempt to open the cellars of whether this wealth should now stantially permanent for ever the temple, to see what was be considered ‘treasures’ of the and ever. That notion is rarely stored down the ages. The Indian nation, and if we should one that we come across in Indian temples were known to build lovely vitrines and glass the non-Western world. When contain vast amounts of wealth. cases, and commission musethe colonial expeditionaries ar- These are all the wrong words ums to put them onto display, rived in West Africa, and saw to use, because they cannot because this is the expenditure the great archives and collec- be discussed as ‘wealth’ or of excess. tions of the Yoruba in Nigeria, ‘treasure’, but simply as waste You can see the themes that you can therefore find what we might call the living archive in the most literal sense in figures such as these.

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Georges Bataille had explored outside the West are narratives in looking at restricted and gen- of detachment. Are our interests eral economy. Of course this in making archives narratives of totally befuddles modern legal attachment? This attachment to thinking. How could you enter artefacts, to things, to objects, into legal cases with the gods? to goods — giving them value, ‘Do they exist?’, is the first ques- putting them together — is a tion that passes the mind. What wonderfully preserving logic of I wanted us to bear in mind is our contemporary world. But it that it is a non-capitalizable is at the same time, we should body of material. It cannot be not forget, a kind of captivity of translated or transformed into the object. Who are we to think capital. This is what completely that objects are absolutely inert defeats the modern mind. You and dead things? Why should can see how a contemporary not objects be also treated as artist like Maria Eichhorn, in agents, that are able to shape attempting to look at a public the world? They do shape the limited company, tried precisely world. You can see that I am to ponder this moment of capi- here touching on a theme that is tal. When you could gather fifty very contemporary in debates thousand Euros of capital, put in philosophy and cultural life. it in a glass case, and display it We have the rights of man, the in Documenta 11, and create all rights of woman, human rights, the laws to prevent that capital animal rights — but beyond that, from actually expanding, from can we imagine such a thing as any interest accruing to it, from the rights of things? Or are we any profit being extracted from going to laugh at it and think: it, from any capitalizable activ- this is taking us too far, don’t be ity to it — that in freezing this, such a fanatic, let’s be reasonshe, for a moment, asks: what able — what do you mean by happens if the whole capitalist the rights of things? The Rights system, based on derivatives, of Things is in the first place a expansions, multiplications, is manifesto written by two artists, suddenly put into deep-freeze? Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala — very much like in the cellars Thorsdottir. It is in fact evolving of the temple at Thiruvanan- from the nineties. We can see a totally different relationship thapuram. being called upon with regard The fourth point in this prelude to our relations with objects is: are these objects that we that we think have no agency collect valuable or valueless in them. This theme has some goods? These narratives from real connection with Belgium.

Don’t think me mad for saying that. I’m thinking of the writings of Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and their commentaries on the great English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who we unfortunately think of in England as a little crazy.

He first spoke of that continuity between all forms of life, taking in those things that we normally think of as dead, inert lumps that we can move about at will, and treat or maltreat or ill-treat as we will. So things are not chattels. They are active agents which shape the world.

For further reference, in thinking this issue you might want to look at how François Jullien has developed this in regard to ancient Chinese thinking. The shape of the landscape itself acts as an active agent in constructing our presence and our consciousness in relation to it.

[The two drawers in Ulysses] I hope you can see that this is a larger thematic, out of which I am carving out this clip, which is from ‘The Vegan Archive’. It looks at the archive as a passage from past into future. The archive ostensibly is about the past, but actually it’s all about the future. This is one of the odd things about it. The second point I would like to make, apart from this notion of

the passage into the future, is: this drawer, which is a print I did papers, testament, title deeds, can we think of the making of for an exhibition in New York. certificates, bonds, stocks… All the archive and the experience Just simply to evoke the rub- the public documentation that of the archive not simply as fid- bish that accumulates. Earlier, makes us people or citizens of dling around, as ‘rummaging architect Yona Friedman used the state. Without that body of and rootling’, as I call it — but the phrase poubelle, and I think props, that scaffolding, we are really as an epistemic event, in this notion of rubbish is very im- nobody in the eyes of the state. which a new way of thinking portant. Joyce uses the cesspit, But without the medication, and knowing and experiencing the midden and the rubbish the domestic trivia, the little the world comes into being? heap as the opening models of card from one’s lover, you are There are two drawers that mind, memory and archive in nobody from within; you are Joyce mentions towards the Finnegans Wake, a very difficult not an experienced, embodied end of Ulysses. I half wanted to but very beautiful section. You person. bring the copy of Ulysses and can read it a hundred times and read it to you, but that would be still not understand all of it. As These two drawers point to a little too caught-up in the sub- Joyce said, it must be unread- two dimensions of the self, the ject. I don’t want us to be too able, unspeakable, unthinkable, public and the private, that deep into Joycean scholarship, and indigestible. So you see he increasingly intersect and get mixed up. What I call the ‘digthat’s another kind of seminar. had a diet in mind for this. itizable’ or ‘downloadable self’ In the penultimate chapter, he mentions two drawers, in which The list of objects in drawer one emerges: the self that can be two bodies of documents and becomes what I was construct- organized as material and put things are kept. These are not ing as a ‘sketch score’, that is, onto a memory stick. It somethe ‘bloomiest’ of drawers, they an attempt to create a sonic how adds up to what we might are Leopold Bloom’s drawers. construction. This would be a call the iPhone pandemonium One of them might in fact be score that could be read, just of contemporary life. Who you called the ‘Bloomiest’ of draw- listing out some of the objects are and what you are can ers, because Bloom has in it in drawer one and drawer two. simply be bodies of data that some of the most intimate ob- The way this has been orga- are moved around. jects of his life. He has secret nized was as follows. I asked letters that he has been writing, anybody doing the Powerpoint sort of ‘lonely hearts’ kinds of presentation to reorganize this letters, fragments of things, in the way they wish. I think right down to body problems, it would have been better to These two drawers I wish to ointments and medications. I distinguish between rummag- link to two maps, which were can’t go into the gory details of ing through drawer one — we also kept apart in the drawers this, but I think Joyce wants us see everyday personal private of the Apartheid state in South to be reminded about the fragil- items, smudges of the clandes- Africa. After the end of Apartity of the body and its vulner- tine and so on — and drawer heid, we were able to see how ability, and the embarrassment two, which would hold all the the city planners planned the official papers that define racial segregation of the South of having ailments of the body.

I didn’t want to duplicate that in one as a citizen: immigration African cities and the whole of

[The violence of classification]

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South Africa, moving the black population from the West coast — which was rich with minerals, diamonds, gold etcetera — to 13% of the land on the East coast, the most fragmented bits of land, which were called the Bantustan. This is the city of Durban, the city where I was born, and in 1952 the ‘Group Area Proposal’ introduced that each of the four major racial groups (race is not assigned to the concept, but it’s part of the governmentality of the period) would have its own area, and how they would be shifted out from one area, which would be declared for white occupation, and moved to designated areas in and around the city. These proposals were immediately contested, sometimes in the courts of law, but sometimes bulldozers arrived and simply bulldozed people out of these areas and declared them for white occupation.

have the two major classes of archival categorization: black/ white. Then the white world divides into the Afrikaner-Dutch world and the English-speaking world, the Nederlandse wereld and the Engelssprekende wereld. Against that, the black world. First, the African indigenous world; then those of mixed descent (those produced out of the marriage or relations between whites and blacks), and then those who were of Indian background, who came during the time of the British Empire but were now immediately classified as ‘alien’.

a global history? In order to remind ourselves how archives open out; they are a constant opening of drawers, where we do not expect to find what we do find. The memory of people has often being visualized as some vast cabinet structure, or vast architectural structure, in which in different rooms or cabinets bodies of data exist.

I leave this body of material here, because we want to move on and perhaps mark that what happens at the end of Apartheid is a rush to desegregate the cities. After having spent fifty years, with great painstaking detail, to segregate the city and barricade them one from each other, have roads end at a certain point so no race manages to cross over to the ‘wrong’ side — the end of Apartheid meant that everybody must now live together, because we are now integrated as a happy family.

You can see how problematic that can be. First of all, after living for so long separately, it seemed a little bit difficult to live with people who were ‘other’, who the system had classified as other.

So in fact the whole of my life I’ve been classified as ‘alien’, which is rather nice when I became an aging professor. I began to think it’s a rather nice classification to live with. It’s a bit Martian; it’s as though you’ve landed from outer space and you don’t belong anywhere.

Though I do belong to SandNew areas had to be developed wich Street, in London, which is from scratch by people classi- the street I live in. It was named fied under ‘IECA’ (Indian, Eu- after Lord Sandwich, who acturopean, Colored and African), ally gave his name to the sandwhich is the terminology used wich. He was too lazy to get up in the fifties. As the Apartheid from the gambling table and state gets more and more get his dinner, so they slapped fine-arty, as it were, about its together two pieces of bread The concept of other is a very racial classification, and as the and gave him his meal. I feel special one in South Africa.

Race Classification Board sets that this patch is where I belong. Having classified all the race itself up to demarcate the racial Now, why am I speaking in this groups and the ethnic groups divisions of South Africa, those very personal way about a very the Sotho, the Zulu, the Xhosa, distinctions fall away and we personal history, and also about the Venda - the system still

found that there were some the creation of the notion of you couldn’t put into boxes, genocide, and on the other and that group was called the hand it would lead many to re‘other’. When it came to which organize themselves under the university the ‘others’ would go Apartheid state and to feel that to, there began another prob- they could continue the same lem. Where would they live? sort of story that had been tried Some families were classified out in Europe in and up to the as white, but then also of mixed end of the Second World War. descent. And if the neighbours If genocide, as we thought, complained that a child had ended in the mid-century — perhaps too much of tanned and it doesn’t, because we then complexion, that child was begin to see the rise of postcoclassified as ‘other’ or black lonial genocide in Congo, in and sent off to another school, Uganda, in Rwanda, but also or the whole family quietly in Europe itself, as we look at fled to Canada. I’m making it the Balkans and the former amusing but you can see this Yugoslavia — we see that the was a cruel history. We should problematic of living with the not forget the violence of clas- other is precisely the question sification, of creating boxes, of the classification of the ardrawers, and demarcations and chive. Who belongs in which divisions. The public persona drawer? Who should go out and the private identity that are of this drawer and in the other created are immediately caught drawer? up in a network of political and power relations. We shouldn’t This might not always appear withdraw our studies of the ar- to be actual genocide, but it chive from that larger network is what I would call xenocide.

Xenocide is always with us: the of the political situation. fear of the xenon, the other, the At the end of the war, the ca- foreigner, the other, the illegal, tastrophe of the murder of Euro- the immigrant, the unknown, pean Jewry was revealed, and the sans-papiers, the illégal. the Holocaust was seen as the Whatever phrase we use, these backdrop to the reconstruction are the others that cannot be of Europe. The genocide of the brought into the civic archive minorities was recognized: of of the state. We refuse to bring the Roma, of gay people, but them into the civic archive and essentially also of one ethnic therefore make them the subgroup classified as the other; ject of xenocidal attitude. We the Jews. It would lead to both constantly seek ways of elimi-

nating the other, either through genocide or through erasure of the other by the demand of assimilation: become like me, let’s lump everything together in one drawer. If you want to be here with me, become like me, look like me, behave like me, speak like me. This demand for assimilation is at the core of xeonocidal drive.

Under the study of the archive is what I have called xeno-epistemics. This is a larger body of writing and concepts in my work, just as the ‘prodigious memory’ is based in oral language, not written language, and orality is put against textuality. Orality, which I have called clitorality, in order to distinguish this clitoral, uterean, vaginal space from the phallic space of the civic archive. This clitorality is part of the notion of xeno-epistemics.

It is a way of knowing the other and other ways of knowing, that we have to invent in order to engage with the other. To know the other only through the ways we have is already a violence towards the other. Part of the responsibility of archiving is inventing new ways of knowing the other, in which we open the ground for understanding, mutuality, reciprocity, and an exchange of compassion. This is why I think it is important that artists have taken up the concept of the archive, and ex-

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plored it. Through art, it is possible to invent other methods of knowing the other.

Xeno-epistemics can also be seen as quite distinct from the word epistemology, which is already to laden. As Roland Barthes drew the distinction between semiotics and semiology, epistemics says that we have here a more hybrid, more mongrelized kind of discipline.

It’s not a discipline, it’s something being invented. It’s a terrain of inquiry, a body of truth, a never completed kit of tools and methods and approaches.

Whereas epistemology is at the end an -ology, and once you have an -ology you have a formal university discipline, organized by tradition and centuries of convention, its methodologies given. It’s got a received relationship in which we pay homage to our great professors, learn from them, and eventually, when they are at their doddery last, they bestow on us their responsiblity of carrying forward that ready-made -ology.

Whereas xeno-epistemics is a hybrid thing. Anybody can get involved in it. Anybody can invent a method, saying ‘this is how I will explore and think about the other, this is how I’ll experience the other’. This possibility of a democratized practice lies in the heart of

xeno-epistemics. I want to give tate, and see how the mind runs this distinction that I draw a away. It’s thinking of shopping, Joycean form: e-pissed-e-Moll- having chocolate, it thinks of ogies, he-pissed-emologies, he everything under the sun. is pissed, right? He is drunk.

Think of a professor who’s got This is what Joyce is constantly a lot of knowledge in his head; exploring. My unpacking of the he’s drunk with knowledge, he’s word epistemology does not really appear in Joyce, but this pissed. is a project inspired by Joyce, Let’s forget those -ologies. And not the literal ‘what’s actually Molly is of course the great in the drawer’. We might then figure, who is a great peer, the see how important the notion great pisser among the many of embodied experience is in pisses in Ulysses. It’s a really understanding the archive or great book if you want to un- the mind. Though we might derstand the meaning of how think of the self as downloadbody and mind function and able, the fact that we download are interrelated. The corpore- something means that we have ality and the mental nature of to engage with it. There is an our humanness are constantly experience and a lived relationintersecting. The body some- ship that has to be taken into times appears as having a will account. Once again, the point of its own. We even say: the where this lived relationship body has a mind of its own. between ideas and abstractive Then when we try to be mindful, thinking perhaps comes togethin both the way in which Henry er is through art practices. I’m Ford used it, to talk about being using art here quite loosely, but mindful about the job on the some of you here know that I’m factory assembly line, or wheth- a spoilt Duchampian, and by er we talk about it in a Buddhist art I do mean something unway, being mindful in the sense known that you cannot define in of being so focused that you advance of itself. This unforeare full of mind and at the same seeable practice that produces time empty of mind — whether something that we cannot know we use these various notions of ahead of time, is what I have in the mind, we still have to cope mind. with that body, to which this lump of muscle in the head is Once again, it’s not simply tied. That mind, too, has a body about saying that there are of its own. It runs away in all the epistemologies of reason, directions. Sit and try and medi- and then there are the somatic

epistemologies. It is not about affirming or privileging one of the two; that we should be very cold, cerebral, analytical about the archive, and that now suddenly artists have got into the act and say: no, let’s not be so municipal, agragrian-like about archives; let’s be arty, let’s get in there with the body and the emotions and let’s be all messy, chaotic about it. That’s not the kind of simple distinction I want to make.

But somatic epistemologies constantly bring us back into the fact that we are connected to certain struggles, to certain practices, for the production of knowledge and new enlightenment. By enlightenment I do not mean spiritual or transcendental enlightenment, but also political enlightenment. The struggle for rights is an enlightenment. When women come together, somatic epistemologies emerge and are constructed.

When immigrant groups come together, African, Caribbean, Asian, East European, however we box them and put them into whichever drawer, they come together in a struggle which produces new knowledge.

This is why I cannot agree with those theoreticians of our time who say: this new knowledge will only emerge from the global South. The point is that

the global South is here, in our midst. The other was once at the edge of our empire; we sent out handsome anthropologists to go and photograph them and report what sort of native babbling they used. But now we natives are here. We are in the midst of self. The other is here around the corner, shopping with us. We are the other.

the archive becomes important. Because there is no total theory that we can put up for the art archive. There is no total archive under which we can comprehend all the work on display. That detotalized view of thinking, knowing and engaging with the other is what we see in these experiments with archives and art.

In this complicated, convolut- The last point takes us back ed relationship between self to South Africa. In the great and other, we cannot simply mountain range which forms privilege the knowledge of the the fringe of the Southern Afindigenous, aboriginal world rican part of the continent, lies of the South in contrast to the the Drakensberg, as many Cartesian clarity of the North- Dutch-speakers among you ern epistemologies. These are might recognize, the mountain beautiful things, too, and we of the dragons. The Zulu, from have to learn to rub up Con- the other side of the mountain, fucian constructions of knowl- named it Ukhahlamba which edge against Cartesian, in the was the ‘barrier of spears’. You way that Ezra Pound tried, and can see what a formidable perhaps failed, and had obnox- image this ridge of the escarpious politics going with it, side ment had for those crossing it: by side, antisemitism and god by the Dutch Voortrekkers, or knows what other prejudices, the Bantu people, or the Khoikbut nevertheless gave us the hoi people, or the San people, idea that epistemologies might the aboriginal people from the be both concrete and abstract; South — this mountain is the Cartesian and non-Cartesian; very point at which we might and that lack of fit between begin to speak of the archive of them is something we have to humanity. This is where homo live with in the contemporary, sapiens first appeared. The end rather than to yearn after some of that long rift valley from which unified, total home. This frac- the African post-Neanderthal tured, fragmented, dispersed hominid emerges and travels to patches of epistemology is Europe. I ask you at this point what we have to live with. This to think of the caves, first of all is why the artists’ practice of in the Drakensberg, the largest

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clothes — got his first job to passage across the ancestral come to South Africa, to defend archive, he begins that joursome traders who were being ney that all archives should hounded by the Boer Republic produce. The book that comes authorities, he arrives in Johan- out of this journey, in the city of nesburg and begins to write a Durban, comes precisely when few articles. A man approaches he begins to see this segregahim in a vegetarian restaurant tion in the city, enforced by the in Johannesburg. This is 1908. government. He strips off his I’m always astounded that there English clothes and begins to was a vegetarian restaurant in dress as an English peasant.

Johannesburg at the turn of the He begins his transformation At this point, this ancestral ar- twentieth century! Far more en- of the body, in order to look chive, which is in many ways lightened than many other parts different, to identify with the inbrushed aside when we dis- of the world — even today. The dentured sugar plantation workcuss the caves of Lascaux and man says to Gandhi, ‘I think you ers (amongst whom was my Chauvet, then I think we have to will find this book interesting to grandfather), to work with them. see for today a rereading of the read’. Gandhi accepts it very This translation is called ‘Sarvoarchives of the cave paintings of politely, and the man says, ‘I daya: Compassion towards all Europe, discussed by Bataille shall come and wish you good- things in the universe’. It would soon after their discovery in the bye when you begin your train become the foundational text for the struggle against the Brit1940s. Lascaux is commented journey to Durban’. ish Empire, which Gandhi will on in the 1950s by some great French commentators, but The train journey to Durban carry back to India after twenof course in that wonderfully is across the Drakensberg. ty-one years in Durban.

Frenchy way. It is all very much: Ghandi receives the book, and ‘this is where the birth of art it is John Ruskin’s Unto This The words that come up to takes place, the birth of man, Last. Ghandi begins reading it mind are ‘compassion’, which is the birth of Europe…’ Well, I’m as the train speeds through the a cheapened word. It’s a word sorry, there was another earlier mountains. He gets more and given to us in the meditations ancestral archival moment. It more involved in this reading. of the Buddha. Compassion He’s not able to put the book means: how could you be with was in the Drakensberg. down. He reads it furiously, he’s the other, that is all it means.

This is not again to say: Af- not able to sleep. He reads it Not ‘charity’, and, I’m afraid, rocentric against Eurocentric, all through for the twenty-four also not that over-used, slightbut to begin to see that the hours, and arrives in Durban ly art world word ‘hospitality’. common archive of humanity completely transformed. He Let’s look for other inventions to has to be affirmed and mapped. decides to change his life. He speak of this moment of being And that’s a job still to be done. begins immediately to translate with the other, of sharing with As Mahatma Gandhi — who Ruskin’s Unto This Last into an the other, without immediately was a young lawyer, trained Indian language, Gujarati, and calling it charity or compassion in London, dressed in English in this act of translation, of the or hospitality. How would events collection of cave and rock art of the world. It overlooks the city of Durban, from the end of Natal. Natal is such a powerful Portuguese term used to describe the province, meaning the ‘birthplace’, the place of the nativity of Christ. This is also the archival sediment of Christianity arriving in this part of the world.

be organized? Or, as Ivan Illich, that thinker who thought many of these things well in advance, used the word ‘conviviality’ — a rubbing up together of people, living together, being together.

Is that a possibility that the archive opens for us today? In Europe, as the clouds of xenocidal thinking gather around us? Let us not forget the French elections; the situation in the Netherlands; let us not forget the terrible massacre in Utøya, in Scandinavia; let us not forget the persecutions that continue in the Balkans and in Eastern and Central Europe. All of these tell me that the xenocidal thinking that we thought would disappear together with genocidal activity, still is there and demands archival practices.

Sarat Maharaj

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Sketch-score for Drawer 01 in Ulysess, Sarat Maharaj, London 09.11.09

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Tearing the tissue of the present

Archives, Amnesia, Addiction, Anarchy, Aesthetics, Art & Academia. (1) My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas i.e., “printed matter” Robert Smithson, 1972 (2)

1. Fertile ruin — Slow machine Whoever was writing down some of the words spoken during the presentations or taking pictures of the event, was creating an archive. (3) At least, when he/ she kept these records and stored them. Taking notes and making images: it seems the most natural thing to do. Most of us are afraid to forget. Things might be useful to us later, and knowing that you threw away a bit of important information, is indeed a very frustrating experience.

The archive is a cure against amnesia. As a collection of information about a government, an institution or an individual person, the archive saves the material traces of its activ-

ity through textual and visual documents. It offers both the materia prima for our collective memory and provides us with the illusion that we can leave physical traces that can be of use for the next generations.

can act against the grain of his / her time.

The word ‘archive’, as is well known, comes from arkheion meaning ‘power’. The archive used to be the place where the documents of the government were kept. Those documents were both proof and tools of power. So, ‘archiving’ also means ‘having power’ in the way of controlling, manipulating and distributing information.

‘Knowledge is power’, as they say, and archiving means collecting and controlling knowledge. So, while at first sight, archiving seems to be a boring activity for historians and the like, it is not so harmless and innocent as it seems. Archives are always political.

On the one hand the archive seems to be an end in itself: it is the place where information ends up when it has stopped being relevant and has become obsolete. In a company or an institution, bringing stuff to the archive, usually means: ‘we don’t need it anymore, but we are not allowed or do not want to throw it away either’. This is the purgatory of information; the wastebin on your computer screen, before you decide to empty it. This is the archive as dead matter. On the other hand, by the decontextualization of its On top of this, ‘the archive’ has contents, the archive is a start- become a real trend in coning point for new insights and temporary art, leaving traces processes. In that sense it is in artistic, critical and curatorial a fertile ruin. Conceptual artist practices since the late nineties.

Alan Sekula once defined the Maybe it has something to do archive as a ‘clearing house of with the power of the Internet meaning’. This ‘clearing’ has (which is a tremendous and the effect of making room for continuously growing archive new meanings and functions. of archives) and the way inforArtists are quite often the first mation is being produced and to see the possibilities of out- processed at a dazzling pace. moded and obsolete things. I Then, the physical archive bebelieve the Dadaists were pio- comes a ‘slow machine’ that neers in this. Indeed, by looking could slow down our daily race back and appropriating obso- on the information highway. lete media and motifs, the artist

My presentation therefore will be about the fascination for the archive, and the way this fascination materializes in both my own practice as a collector, writer and curator, as in the practices of contemporary artists (often also functioning as collectors, writers and curators) and curators. I’ll try to combine some subjective (some would say romantic), personal reflections with objective, factual information. The illustrations are taken from my own archive (the physical, not the virtual one on my desk). My point of view will therefore not be a theoretical one, but one that is imbedded in my daily practice as an art historian and book lover who works in the present, but by doing so reflects upon the past.

This position of being both in the present and in the past actually is very dear to me.

And here the notion of the archive kicks in. It functions as a revolving door between past and present. In the archive, topicality disappears (which is the passive, dustbin function), and history appears (which is the active, creative function).

As a filter it is situated between the endless number of events of the contemporary and the narrative constructions of historiography. So the archive is a breeding ground for countless stories embedded in the end-

less rows of files, dossiers and boxes. Looking at an archive makes one dizzy, but also makes one very focused. The archive is both a nightmare and a wet dream, a graveyard and a treasury.

Trained as an archaeologist who considers the soil to be an archive stuffed with information, I tend to see the archive as an entropic system that contains obsolete information and generates the possibility for new meanings, and, at the same time, the tools to deconstruct them. This cycle of containing, recycling, constructing and deconstructing, in my opinion is the most important aspect of the archive. Every archive seems to cry out the words ‘there is no truth, because every today will become a yesterday and every yesterday has the potential of being reactivated to become a future day’.

Therefore, I perceive archives as ‘holes’ in the tissue of the ‘today’, which allow the past to penetrate the present. I believe that is very comforting. But by doing so, archives also have a strong subversive potential. Archives are essentially anarchist.

They question the dogmas of the here and now, and they share this function with libraries (archives of out of print publi-

cations), museums (archives of obsolete and / or precious objects) and ruins (archives of historical sensations). I think it is no coincidence that Robert Smithson, who is one of my favorite artists, has written extensively on these subjects.

Ruins, museums, libraries and even books function as archives. They are containers of retrievable information, waiting to be disclosed. Every archive is a collection, but not every collection is an archive. I believe that, to be called an archive, a collection should have a cultural and / or historical potential.

It should be a tool to construct a historical dimension for the present. You might respond by remarking that every collection, even a collection of cigar butts, might have a historical value, and that is true. However, in order to become an archive, in my opinion, a collection should, in the quality and the quantity of its documents, at least contain the possibility for a historical narrative. And that is a pragmatic, not a mere theoretical point of view.

2. The addiction of the archive I have always been an avid collector of things that could connect me with the past (es-

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pecially books and magazines, that often can be called archives in their own right), but my fascination with the archive as a historical source only became clear to me during my PhD research about the Antwerp International Cultural Centre (ICC), an avant-garde laboratory for conceptual art, video and performance in the seventies and early eighties. (4) During this research I almost lived in the institution’s archive for a few years, which is located in the library of the M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp). In the morning I plugged into the seventies and at 5pm, when the archive closed, I disconnected.

Sometimes it took a while to get myself in tune again with the time I was actually living in. It was like experiencing Huizinga’s famous ‘historical sensation’, not once, but for hours and days. Every sensation, even the historical one, can be a kind of kick. Being and working in the archive, felt to me like being intoxicated.

For the first time I experienced the fact that the archive can be quite addictive, and this in two ways: working in an existing archive (I like the idea to enter an archive with a laptop and to come out with a book); but also creating an archive on your own, around a certain topic of inter-

est. Every new bit of informa- took the form of ‘alternative’ or tion has the potential to change ‘temporary’ archives, some of the meaning of the whole col- which were realized together lection. In this way, the archive with artists. In 2007, together becomes a work in progress with the artists Vaast Colson, that will never be finished, and Nico Dockx and Dennis Tyfus this keeps one alert for every I curated Kopstoot! in de acquisition and always hungry Brakke Grond Amsterdam, that for more. Collecting, bringing contained documents from together, ordering and studying several Antwerp artists’ initiastuff (in my case, printed matter tives starting in 1977 (5) A year from the neo-avant-gardes of later the Antwerp-based gallery the 60s and 70s) is very addic- De Zwarte Panter had its 40th tive. More and more, collecting birthday and for that occasion and studying become a way of I created a show and a book living. Being addicted to histori- with materials taken from the cal sensations means perma- gallery’s archive. (6) nently living in the archive, so to speak. During my research, Thomas Crombez and I constiwhich focused more particu- tute the research group Archilarly on conceptualist practices Volt, that seeks to explore the of the 70s and the postmod- nexus between the artistic and ern turn of the 1980s, I also the academic use of archives became aware of the fact that related to (neo-)avant-garde a lot of artists of that generation art. Our first project took place were fascinated by documenta- almost two years ago in this tion, information, and by archiv- school: a documentary exhibiing. And this proved to be a tion, a series of performances very inspiring insight. I learned and a publication (a complete that art historians and contem- reprint of the magazine Force porary artists could have a lot Mental) paying tribute to the in common. Once again, the Antwerp artist’s duo Club Moral, archive is the link. with whom we closely collaborated on this project. (7) Some Since my research on the ICC, time ago, together with artist I have been making exhibitions Lode Geens, I created a tempoand publications for which I rary archive of artists’ multiples have tried to find a proper way from the 60’s until today, (Multito communicate the power ple Visions) using pimped IKEA of the historical documents. Billy bookcases as temporary Quite often, these exhibitions showcases. (8)

as the one of Paul De Vree, De ments results in a sensation of But I also like to use my own Zwarte Panter or the ICC, with ‘historical joy’. The daily use of archive as working material. files, dossiers, books, boxes, books and magazines gives the That started already in 2001 slides and videotapes, seem researcher of my generation with Le Petit Cabinet d’un not only to contain, but also the illusion of being trained in Amateur de Ruines (with docu- to become history. The break- the quick scanning of the informents on the motif of the ruin in through of the PC in the 80s mational value of a publication combination with contemporary has disconnected information and even a bookshelf or a comphotographical works, the title from the media of paper and plete collection. But this senreferring to a fictive archive of ink. In the 90s the Internet and sual and sensational contact ruins). (9) I also made a show the WWW generated an explo- with the historical document is on artist books from my collec- sive growth of digital archives. threatened by the digital revotion (Multiple/Readings) and, As a matter of fact, every user lution. Although the paperless together with Vaast Colson, cu- of a PC can be considered office is still a fiction, and books rated an expo on Belgian artists’ an archivist: he / she keeps and magazines are still being books (Bookshowbookshop) files and messages stored on published, the ‘possible’ end of for which we both started from the hard disk and in this way the physical archive seems to our own personal collections. the PC user has to manage create in some of us nostalgia.

(10) The catalogue is a poster this information by selecting, with images of all the books on keeping, retrieving and delet- And this is not only true for display, contained in an archi- ing. In comparison with other old school historians. The val folder. At this moment, I am information and communication last fifteen years the contempreparing a book and an exhibi- technologies (such as fax and porary art world has become tion on the Belgian poet-critic- telephone) the digital revolution fascinated, even obsessed, by publisher Paul De Vree and his has taken over very quickly and the archive. Once a symbol of international network of neo- has penetrated our daily lives boredom and dustiness, the aravant-garde poets and artists, in quite an aggressive way. The chive has evolved into a fertile mainly by using his personal slowness and tactile reality of and fashionable metaphor for a archive and library. (11) It is an analogue archive might be lot of cultural and critical practices. A few years ago the art indeed quite exciting to indulge an antidote to this. critic Sven Lütticken criticized in the treasure of books, magazines, letters, photographs and Is it an exaggeration to put that this fashion of the archive in films, but it is a tough exercise we are not yet fully used to the the activities of artists, curato imagine an appropriate form immaterial character of digital tors and theoreticians. He saw to communicate this vast rich- information? The Flemish histo- the archive as no more than a ness and dazzling complexity. rians Jo Tollebeek and Tom Ver- slogan with a huge amount of Digging into the archive of an schaffel described Huizinga’s sex appeal, but no relationships artist is like being an archae- ‘historical sensation’ as a motor with the problems and possibiliologist of the avant-garde. A for ‘historical interest’. For them ties of real archives and collectoo, the physical contact with tions. Indeed, the archive has strange but inspiring paradox.

However, traditional archives original sources and docu- been used not only as a tool

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cians, a strategy that resulted into a fashionable fetish.

At that time VEKTOR was in an archive of more than a founded in Vienna. It was a thousand interviews, of which collaboration between archives a first selection was published and databases of contemporary in 2003. This way, Obrist is art from art institutes, museums constructing a real verbal arand libraries. The idea was chive of the contemporary. In to link these geographically the same period the book Indispersed archives through a terarchive. Archival Practices central Internet interface, and and Sites in the Contemporary to stimulate academic research Art Field was published, a huge on the archives of contempo- compilation of theoretical texts This current fascination with rary art through exhibitions, and artistic statements about archives goes back to the late symposia and publications. and around archives, related 90s. Contemporary art exhibi- The focus was on the artistic to the donation of Obrist’s own tions such as Deep Storage. production and reception of archive to the Lüneburg UniArsenale der Erinnerung (Haus the late 60s and early 70s. An versity. In one of the texts, the der Kunst, Munich, 1997) and example of the output was the director of the M HKA Bart De Archiv X. Investigations of exhibition Wiedervorlage d5. Baere described the effect of Contemporary art (Centrum für Eine Befragung des Archivs activating archives as a ‘living Gegenwartskunst, Linz, 1998) zur documenta 5 (Kassel, heritage’. were early symptoms of the 2001), in which documents of current revival. At the end of Szeemann’s legendary docu- The exhibition Dear ICC: Asthe 20th century, digitalization menta of 1972 were combined pects of contemporary art in was reaching cruising speed. with interventions and installa- Belgium 1970-1985 that I was The Austrian National Library tions by contemporary artists able to make for the museum in implemented its new digital such as Tobias Rehberger and Antwerp around the same time catalogue. This rendered its 2,6 Stephen Craig. The project was (2004 / 2005) could be seen as million index cards completely to replace the publication of the pointing in that direction. It was obsolete. Afraid for the loss of handbook Archiving the Pre- based upon scholarly archival this piece of modernist heritage, sent. Manual on Cataloguing research, but I also collaboratartist Heimo Zobernig organ- Modern and Contemporary Art ed with Boy & Erik Stappaerts, an artist who provided an instalized a traveling show with the in Archives and Databases. lation that was called an ‘active 84 slick index card cases from the sixties. The redundant in- But there are other, more pri- archive’. It contained archival formation system had become vate initiatives that point to a material, but at the same time a readymade installation. In the growing interest for archiving provided the opportunity for book, an original index card is the contemporary. Since the the museum staff to scan and inserted as a rare relic from a early 90s curator Hans Ulrich digitalize the paper documents paper era. The obsoleteness of Obrist has been interviewing from the ICC archive. The artist the paper index card turned it artists, scientists and theoreti- also invited artists and theofor understanding the past, but also as a metaphor, an artistic strategy and even an aesthetic device. When fascination turns into fashion, things tend to become superficial.

3. Curating the archived - archiving the curated

rists and so used his archiveinstallation as a platform for a discussion of ‘the museum of the future and the archive of the past’. The installation, which looked like a slick retromodern constructivist pavilion, made visible the potential of the archive as a mediator between past, present and future. Since that time, the ‘archival turn’ in contemporary art only seems to have accelerated and I will only mention a few examples.

In 2005, the Dutch magazine Open dedicated a complete issue to the theme of ‘collecting and remembering in contemporary art and culture’. That same year, the 50th birthday of documenta was celebrated with a traveling exhibition Archive in Motion: 50 Years documenta.

Also in 2005 the Akademie der Künste in Berlin invited eight artists to fool around in the institution’s archives and to make a work on it, one of them le maître archiviste, Christian Boltanski.

In 2006 the Royal Museum in Mariemont organized a conference on art & archives in the context of a retrospective of the Belgian artist Denmark, at which occasion I delivered a first draft version of this lecture.

In 2006 there was the reader The Archive (edited by Charles Merewether, 2006) and in 2008 the exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Con-

temporary Art (International center for Photography, 2008, curated by Okwui Enwezor).

Both Merewether and Enwezor were key note speakers on the Archive / Counterarchive conference in Prato, Italy 2009.

In 2010 Archivologie: Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten was published by Knut Ebeling and Stephan Günzel and the Antwerp “Letterenhuis” distributed a free little guidebook about archiving for writers and collectors.

A few months ago, there was an exhibition with the seductive title Secret Archives in the Les Contemporains Galerie in Brussels. So, the fascination and the fashion seem to go on.

The fact that we, by invitation of Nico Dockx, were gathering in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp around the notion of the archive can be considered adequate proof of this.

that moment, the museum also showed the work of the Flemish conceptual artist Jef Geys, in which the archive plays an important role. The contemporary fashion of the archive allows a new reading of artistic practices from the recent past. Artists of the 60s and 70s like Jef Geys were the first to use information and its presentation as art. The connection of works of art with documents and vice versa has had big consequences for our relationship with both of them.

4. Archives and / of the avantgardes

Most of the times the museum’s archive contains all kinds of stuff, also aesthetically uninteresting documents, whereas the museum collection and especially the presentation is based upon unique, visually attractive and presentable objects. The The ‘archive fever’ of the late discrimination between artisti90s and early 21th century had cally attractive or not is deterother effects as well. Museums mined by time and place. In the for contemporary art started artistic practices between 1968 to have a closer look at the and 1978, the art historical rich potential in their often- canon was critically questioned neglected archives. About five and radically transformed by years ago, the Van Abbemu- conceptual artists and curators. seum in Eindhoven introduced In that period, the borderlines the ‘Living Archive’ in which the between documents and ob‘hidden information’ from the jects became quite blurred. museum’s archive is put into Today, a Marcel Broodthaers’ dialogue with the collection. At invitation card, still in the files

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of a museum’s archive, easily could be presented in the museum’s galleries tomorrow.

So, archives of contemporary, post 1968-art have another kind of potential than regular ones. This new vitality of the archive can also be seen in current art-historical research. The doctoral thesis and the book of Ann Reynolds on Robert Smithson (Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, 2003) were not based on Smithson’s wellknown sculptures and earth works, but on his personal archive and book collection. The writer explains that it was her intention to contextualize the work of Smithson in the frame of reference of the period in which it was created. Smithson himself used to collect all kinds of ‘printed matter’ from pulp and SciFi to art historical and scientific publications. This collection offers an insight into his inspirations, intentions and ambitions and that is why an inventory of his library has been published in several recent catalogues.

This way Smithson’s library has become as important for our understanding of contemporary art history as, let’s say, his landmark earth piece The Spiral Jetty.

In the 60s and 70s, progressive artists such as Smithson presented an archival para-

digm shift. The amnesia of the earlier avant-gardes (futurists, constructivists etc) was turned into an archive of the neoavant-garde. At that time, the work of the early avant-garde that had repelled the ‘passeism’ of museums, libraries and archives, itself had become a part of documented art history.

Every future at some point in time becomes history, and in this process of digestion the archive plays a crucial role. The artistic strategies of the 60s and 70s in their turn are studied and read in a historical way, and today they have become a source of inspiration for younger artists. Art history seems to repeat itself. Where the artists in the 60s witnessed the dematerialization and quick distribution of information through early mass media (radio, television and illustrated magazines), the artists of today are confronted with the digitalization and evaporation of physical information carriers through the use of PC, the Internet and the new social media.

site-specific art, process art, media art, arte povera, body art and video art, created an urge to document and register. In his essay Inside the White Cube of 1976 artist and writer Brian O’Doherty had already noticed the ambivalences of the process-inspired art of the late 60s and its traces in documents and photographs: Documents and photographs challenge the historical imagination by presenting to it an art that is already dead. The historical process is both hampered and facilitated by removing the original, which becomes increasingly fictitious as its afterlives become more concrete. (12)

O’Doherty obviously knew what he was talking about. Almost nine years before, he had compiled what might be called the first post‑Duchampian exhibition in a box: the famous Aspen 5-6 issue of 1967, stuffed with writings by artists and theorists, artist’s books, vinyl recordings of interviews with statements by artists, a film reel with avantgarde footage of the 20s and At the end of the 60s, the art- the 60s, and even an easyworks underwent the same to-assembly scale model of a changes as the bits of infor- minimalist sculpture. Sol LeWitt, mation did: they became less Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, object-orientated, less perma- Tony Smith, John Cage, Robert nent and therefore easier to Morris, John Rauschenberg, distribute. These processes, Marcel Duchamp, Roland Baras can be seen in concept art, thes, Susan Sontag, Willliam S.

Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Merce Cunningham and others were involved. All that in a small cardboard box that could be sent by mail. In the colophon it is summarized as: 1 box 1 book 4 films 5 records 8 boards and 10 printed data. The energy of radical 60s art, packed in a white minimalist archive!

Following in the wake of this practice, conceptualist artists were reacting against the traditional art objects and they saw the creation, the ordering, the presentation and the distribution of information as a valuable alternative. In this ‘aesthetics of administration’ (a label coined in 1989 by Benjamin Buchloh) the archive is a recurring motif.

Robert Morris, On Kawara, Art & Language, Hanne Darboven, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, Stanley Brouwn, Gerhard Richter, Didier Bay, Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager and Anne & Patrick Poirier and to name just a few, used the forms or the structures of the archive, the last five names referring to the post-conceptual movement of the so-called ‘Spurensichering’. In most cases these artists manipulated, transformed or parodied conventional methods of storage, conservation and retrieval systems. In this way, these practices can be read as

a kind of ‘informational critique’ by Lucy Lippard in 1969 and (as an artistic parallel to the 1970 also refer to an archivist well known concept of ‘institu- aesthetics. In 1968 and 1972, tional critique’). the Städtisches Museum of Mönchengladbach informed In the Belgian art scene of the the public about its recent ac70s we should refer to archi- quisitions through leaflets in vist and museological strate- small, cardboard file boxes with gies in the museum fictions the title Beleg I and II. (‘Beleg’ of Marcel Broodthaers, the meaning document of proof). system pieces of Jef Geys, the The same year, the catalogue of Musée de l’Homme of Jacques documenta 5, designed by Ed Lennep, the Museum of mu- Ruscha, boasted the looks of a seums of Johan Van Geluwe, sturdy orange plastic file, with the administrational parodies a weight of about 5 kilograms. of Guy Bleus, the sociological Also in 1972, the catalogue / enquiries by Daniël Dewaele, reader about Toeval (coincithe ‘dead archives’ of Denmark dence) by the Rijksuniversiteit and the Archive for Small Press Utrecht was put in a plain folder & Communications of Guy from an office store. The AmeriSchraenen, which he himself can art historian Alexander described as ‘an archive as an Alberro points to the crucial artistic concept’. importance of the exhibition catalogue at that time: The catalogue becomes a show’s physical trace, evidence of it, the remains that can be examThis archival turn of the 70s ined, the fossil, as it where, that even affected the look and also dates the exhibit, placing feel of printed communication. it in history. The exhibition cataArchives became an aesthetic. logue that memorializes the In the wake of Aspen maga- artwork, archiving for the future, zine, exhibition catalogues of also serves as a marketing tool. that period often mimicked (13) mini-archives. In 1969 the landmark exhibition When at- Archiving and artist marketing titudes become form already go well together. Conceptual looked like a standard file from artists saw this very well and an archive. The index card this awareness materialized catalogues of the conceptual- into sophisticated catalogues, ist ‘numbers’ shows curated artist’s books and magazine-in-

5. Archival aesthetics

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terventions. So it’s no surprise that in the end the catalogue replaced the show or even the work, as in some of the pioneering publication projects of New York dealer Seth Siegelaub, about which Sol LeWitt remarked: To do the show as a catalogue is just a terrific idea because it involves one very, very important aspect of the work, which you call the documentation. Which is, from my point of view, as important as whatever is done. (14)

and curators started to be their own archivists and historians.

Sometimes they even became archaeologists.

Consider the following example. Shortly after the legendary conceptualist and site-specific exhibition Sonsbeek 7: Buiten de perken in different parts of Holland, two Dutch artists, Paul Bonger and Rick Vermeulen, decided to look for the traces of the ephemeral projects and site-specific works. From November 1971 until June 1972, Siegelaub’s many publications the two surveyed all the origi/ shows (like the legendary nal locations of the show and Xerox book of 1968 and Janu- described and photographed ary 5th — 31th of 1969) in many the remains (if there were any) ways managed to create a short- of the works. They even mancut into the existing processes aged to trace down the broken of dissemination art information. pieces of a huge Donald Judd As primary information they sculpture in a scrap yard! The were created to get straight into 360 photographs and descripthe archive, entering history tions were filed on standard at once, bypassing the cycle index cards and published in of producing a work, having it three volumes that were dephotographed and reproduced signed as old school index card in the hope to have it published containers. The archaeological and become ‘historical’. So, research resulted in an archive creation, documentation and of disappeared and discarded information fell together, the pieces. Another example from two last words becoming the the same year is the book Dofetish concepts of the radical kumente zur aktuellen kunst art scene around 1970. This is 1967-1970. Material aus dem illustrated by the title of an early archiv Szeemann, that doesn’t group show about conceptual contain any reproduction of an art at the MOMA in New York artwork, but looks like a scrapin 1970: it was simply called ‘In- book with newspaper clippings, formation’. Conceptualist artists invitation cards and covers of

magazines and catalogues.

Indeed, contemporary art seemed to become ‘historical’ so quickly that its documentation already needed special care and exposure.

6. Archive fever — the 90s Sometimes the similarities between the archival practices of the 60s and 70s and those of a contemporary generation of young artists can be striking.

Maybe the parallels between the technological transformations of communication then and now provide an explanation. Just like it was the case back then, a lot of artists today question the material aspects of the artwork and they try to perform their research in the form of projects and proposals.

Also, some of the younger artists today are using strategies of collecting, archiving and documenting. Not only of their own projects, but also of institutions or historical events. It seems that after the artistic context, the landscape, the body and art history, the material memory of the archive is now being explored and exploited (again).

One of the first post-conceptual artists to reintroduce the motif of the archive in the 90s was the Russian artist Ilya Kaba-

kov with his ‘total installations’, collecting, making inventories, 70s, for instance by bootlegging referring to the hard life in the presenting and distributing or manipulating the classic artformer Sovjet Union domi- data. In a lot of cases these ist’s books of Edward Ruscha. nated by absurd paperwork tactics seem to be connected Artistic practices and recent and Kafkaesque administration. with a well documented art art historiography seem to find His publications often have historical knowledge of the each other finally. a deliberate anachronistic, bu- 60s and 70s neo-avant-garde. reaucratic and ‘archival’ look. Several artists, born in the late In the current generation of BelChristian Boltanski also picked 60s or early 70s, explicitly refer gian artists we can recognize up the archival approach in his to the artistic practices of that an archaeological and archivist installations and artists books era. Especially those almost approach in the artist’s books of the 90s, that contain pho- legendary oeuvres of landmark and media installations of tographic footage referring to, artists like Marcel Broodthaers, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, which seem among other things, the Holo- Robert Smithson and Gordon to grow into a kind of metacaust. In the already mentioned Matta-Clark seem to inspire a archive. Luc Tuymans, just like exhibition Archiv X (1998), the young generation of nomadic, Gerhard Richter, integrates the concept of the archive was site-specific and installation historical document in his paintthe starting point for installa- artists. 90s artists such as erly practice, and this archival tions and projects by Clegg & Fischli and Weiss, Tacita Dean, aspect is clearly shown in a catGuttmann (showing an archive Tobias Rehberger, Liam Gil- alogue of 2006 that adopts the of archives), the Belgian art- lick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cory look of a file with documents. ists Guillaume Bijl (with a fake McCorkle, Renée Green, Sam The site specific installations locker room) and Patrick Coril- Durant and Joachim Koester of Richard Venlet use doculon (with an archive of nails). In (known under the label of ‘re- ments, works of art and matehis text for the catalogue, phi- lational aesthetics’) all refer in rial from institutional depots to losopher Boris Groys referred their video-works, installations reveal something of past and to the necessity of the archive and photographic projects to present. Christoph Fink seems for historical and modern think- the conceptualist and archivist to refer to the walking projects ing. Without archives (and by heritage of concept art, mini- of British land artists when he that he also means libraries mal art and land art. Smithson documents and registers all his and museums) there is no past, in particular seems to be a moves, walks and travels in the no present or no future. If the source of inspiration for a lot of form of artist’s books and inarchive indeed is so crucial artists. His iconic project Par- stallations. Jasper Rigole runs for our being in the present, tially Buried Woodshed from the International Institute for and this present is so hard to 1970 has triggered a complete Conservation, Archiving and grasp because of its fast pace, corpus of contemporary art Distribution of Other People’s it seems almost logical that art- works that implicitly or explicitly Memories (IICADOM). Wesley refers to this piece. Artists such Meuris has made a few, almost ists are reflecting upon it.

Indeed, a lot of oeuvres of the as Jonathan Monk and Eric Do- abstract, archive installations.

90s seem to be influenced by eringer deliberately imitate the And, of course, Nico Dockx the notion of accumulating, print strategies of the 60s and uses archives of people and / or

191

institutions for his installations, publications and performances, using them in this project as a tool for events, conversations and interactions.

Did this archival trend in contemporary art have any effect on the Belgian cultural process or did it result in political decisions about archives and modern heritage? Not immediately, so it seems. Guy Schraenen’s Archive for Small Press and Communication, founded in Antwerp in 1975, was bought about ten years ago by the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen, because no Belgian museum had the means or the inclination to purchase it. Since then, things seem to have slightly improved. In 2002 the Flemish Government implemented the so-called Archive Decree, which provided structural support for some archives and documentation centers and the founding of an Archive Bank Flanders. But this new arrangement did not seem to show much interest in archives of modern and contemporary art.

Again, we have to rely on the private sector for initiatives, an example being Lieve Laporte’s internet archive on Belgian art, kunstonline.

In 2004, however, SMAK and M HKA started a collaborative

project on ‘the conservation ing archives can be called ‘anof archives in the field of con- archivist’ (the way Matta-Clark temporary art’, to investigate used to be called an ‘anarchithe museums’ archives and to tect’.) And this ‘creative’ dealing develop a strategy to manage with the archive can inspire and make them available to the academics in terms of how to public. A book was published in disclose and present archival 2006 (that actually borrowed its matters. On the other hand, the approach and look from a 1920 critical toolbox of the academic manual on archives). Since then, researcher might help the artist both museums have gone their in finding ways to present and own way, M HKA experimenting represent the past. The fuzzy with a digital ‘ensemble bank’ positions of artists, critics and that contains all the information curators in the 60s and 70s (works and documents) they might be a source of inspiration can collect on a selection of art- here. Artwork and art history ists who are considered as cen- are both fictive constructions tral. The vogue for the archive that reveal our constantly shiftcan probably further enhance ing views on the past. The arthe awareness that the Belgian chive, in the broadest sense of museums of contemporary art the word, is the perfect missing should take up their roles as in- link between the two. stitutions of collective memory, instead of being mere art gal- Johan Pas, Antwerp, May / July / Sept 2012 leries or Kunsthalle.

* Today collecting, curating, ordering and presenting old and 1 new data belong to the practice This is a text in progress. The first version of both artists and art histori- was a chapter in my PhD (2005), which ans. Maybe we should begin to was reworked a few times in the form rethink radically the traditional of lectures and presentations, and has borders between these two been published in several versions, in positions. Both, artists and art Dutch and in English in 2005 and 2006. historians, develop a critical This way, this text in its own way ‘grows’ and a creative attitude towards and ‘changes’ in the course of the proinformation from the recent or cess. Just like archives. less recent past. Both perform a creative act upon existing ma- 2 terials. In a way, artists who are Robert Smithson, Language to be using, imitating or deconstruct- Looked at and / or Things to be Read

(Dwan Gallery Press Release, June

2002 (with catalogue)

1967), in Nancy Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson. Essays with illustra-

10

tions, New York University Press, New

Multiple / Readings. 51 kunstenaars-

York, 1979, p. 104

boeken 1959-2009, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Antwerpen, 03-

3

04.2011 (with catalogue / book) and

Avec une paire de ciseaux, (the new

Bookshowbookshop, Belgian artist’s

conversations 4), Royal Academy of

books from Verheyen until today, Be-

Fine Arts Antwerp, 4.5.2012

Part, Waregem, 04-06.2012 (with catalogue)

4 Published as: Beeldenstorm in een

11

Spiegelzaal. Het Internationaal Cultu-

Neonlicht. Paul De Vree & de neo-avant-

reel Centrum en de actuele kunst 1970-

garde, M HKA, Antwerpen, 10.2012-

1990, Lannoo, Campus, Leuven, 2005

01.2013 (with catalogue / book)

5

12

Kopstoot!

Antwerpse

postpunk

en

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube:

nieuwe underground, Vlaams Cultuur-

the ideology of the Gallery Space,

huis De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam,

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1986

11.2007 / 01.2008 (with catalogue)

(1976), p.70

6

13

Een andere avant-garde. De Zwarte

Alexander Alberro, Patricia Norvell, Re-

Panter (1968-2008), Museum Plantin-

cording Conceptual Art, Berkeley, Los

Moretus

Angeles, London, 2001, p.11

/

Prentenkabinet,

10.2008-

01.2009 (with catalogue / book)

14 7 Club Moral rvstd, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, 11.2010

8 Multiple Visions. Archaeology and topicality of the artwork in / as edition, NICC, Antwerpen, 10-11.2010 (with catalogue)

9 Le Petit Cabinet d’un Amateur de Ruines, Orion Gallery, Oostende, 02-05

idem, p.122

193

195

the weekend if I can bring Jörn to Antwerp to do your lecture! otherwise, I am very happy to do it myself. more about that very soon sooner. the idea of shredding it afterwards I like a lot and I will get my father’s Jörn Schafaff/ Rirkrit Tira- shredder! for the booklet you can ask Jörn to send me a vanija series of photographs of your archive. great! I am curious to receive those images soon ever soon. can he send those photographs before 15th of April?”

All archives goes to heaven: the Rirkrit Tiravanija archive Berlin 1: HOW THINGS CAME ABOUT FOR THE EVENT IN ANTWERP (EMAILS)

Rirkrit Tiravanija to Nico Jörn Schafaff to Rirkrit TiraDockx [4. April 2012 07:55:06 vanija [12. April 2012 12:51:28 MESZ]: MESZ]: “[…] For this, as part of the “[…] it seems that travel and lecture, I will have papers accommodation concerning from my Jörn Schafaff archive Antwerp are arranged for me send to you in Antwerp, you now. As I understood from will need to have an office your initial email you are size paper shredder which you going to write a text that I will use to shred as part of my will present during the event lecture. (Would it be possible on May 4th. Will you send it to have Jörn travel to give to me in advance? Is the idea the lecture? Is there a budget of shredding documents from for that? If not it will be fine the archive (copies, I suppose) to have you do it yourself). I during the lecture still on? Apthink the booklet could be a parently, there are things to go series of photographs made into a vitrine for the exhibition. by my archivist Jörn Schafaff What objects do you want in it? in Berlin of what he thinks Or is everything clarified with is an important aspect of the Nico regarding this? I started to take pictures of the archive archive.” which I will send to Nico.”

Nico Dockx to Rirkrit Tiravanija [4. April 2012 20:21:11 Nico Dockx to Jörn Schafaff [12. April 2012 16:29:40 MESZ]: “[…] for 4.5: I will check after MESZ]:

“[…] can you send me before monday evening the 16th of April some images from Rirkrit’s archive for the small booklet I will be making for the event on the 4th of May and the publication afterwards. I will be designing it on Tuesday the 17th of April and the 18th it will go to print. also send captions to the images if necessary — ok? I also need very short biographical info from Rirkrit (and also you!) + a short abstract of what you are going to do in Antwerp on the 4th of May! in the program, I reserved 20 minutes time for your presentation / talk / performance of shredding Rirkrit’s archive (did I understood it correctly from Rirkrit that you will come to perform the shredding of his archive?!) I will have a shredding machine available for you. can you send me some archival materials from Rirkrit’s archive by secured fedex or something to Antwerp before? to be placed in a vitrine as part of a little exhibition I am making that day presenting archives from all involved that day.”

Jörn Schafaff to Rirkrit Tiravanija [16. April 2012 14:02:21 MESZ]: “[…] Nico urges me to send him a title and abstract for

the presentation of May 4th. “If you follow these instrucHe wants to put it in the flyer tions carefully I shall give you he’s designing. I have already these two sausages to sell and sent him photos and my short soil and slice and save and bio. Still waiting for your short save and do whatever else you bio from neugerriemschneider. wish without restriction! so; Would you please be so kind to (don’t be or get angry now) update me on these matters?” get a recipe from a butcher, a recipe for sausages and follow Rirkrit Tiravanija to Jörn this recipe (exactly), so that Schafaff [16. April 2012 everything in the recipe that 16:04:55 MESZ]: is not MEAT, in the dough “[…] I think your performance or the mass (whatever that’s / talk should be titled “all ar- called) included — spices, chives goes to heaven”, I mean water, gelatine, onions, garlic you should (since I’m doing etc etc; PUT IT ALL IN, and this in the gallery in Berlin) or then in place of meat use the could not have to say much but pages of the book [shredded give him a recipe (Dieter Roth) documents from the archive]!” for a sausage (to be made from the shredded archive) as your abstract!”

3. THE TURE

LEC-

Nico Dockx to Rirkrit Tira- a) How things came vanija and Jörn Schafaff [24. about for Antwerp (see above) April 2012 20:13:28 MESZ]: “is it: All Archives Goes to Heaven or All Archives Go to The text for the abstract is a Heaven” quote from > Dieter Roth, Literaturwurst.

Letter to Jörn Schafaff to Nico Dockx Hanns Sohm, 1964, quoted [24. April 2012 23:17:46 in Dieter Roth: Books + MulMESZ]: tiples, edited by Dieter Dobke “it is: ‘All Archives Goes to and Hansjörg Mayer (London: Heaven’.

Hansjörg Mayer Editions, Like ‘The Days of This Society 2004), p. 9. [WITH ADJUSTMENTS BY JS] Is Numbered’.”

2.

THE STRACT

AB-

He further explained: “From time to time I take books I can’t stand or from

authors I want to annoy and make: sausages c. 40 cm long, 8 cm thick, should end up as an edition of 50, titled on the outside, signed, numbered, DM 100.”

(Letter from Roth to Hanns Sohm, spring 1964, quoted in Dieter Roth: Books + Multiples, edited by Dieter Dobke and Hansjörg Mayer (London: Hansjörg Mayer Editions, 2004), p. 9.

SO, WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT RIRKRIT’S RELATION TO THE ARCHIVE? WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT MY WORK, MY POSITION? (A THOUGHT: NOW I AM YOUR AVATAR BUT YOU WILL BE MY PRODUCT.) “ALL ARCHIVES GOES TO HEAVEN”: THE TITLE POINTS TO THE ARCHIVE’S DOUBLED STRUCTURE: WHEN MICHEL FOUCAULT ESTABLISHED HIS DEFINITION OF THE ARCHIVE IN HIS “ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE” IN 1969, HE USED THE SINGULAR FORM “ARCHIVE” TO DISTINGUISH HIS CONCEPT OF A METHOD FROM THE

197

INSTITUTION WHICH IN FRENCH IS REFERRED TO IN THE PLURAL FORM “ARCHIVES”.

b) The Shredding Starting the office shredding machine that is placed on the speaker’s desk.

Starting to feed the machine with documents selected from the Rirkrit Tiravanija Archive Berlin.

Commenting the documents before shredding (not planned).

Switching from black and white to color (from faxes to invitation cards).

Ending the process as one card gets stuck in the machine.

End of lecture.

199

201

List of items from RTA Berlin: ---Category: RTA02 (Artwork / Other)

Category: RTA08 (Occupational docu-

Duchamp Title / Name of item: Monte Carlo Bond

ments)

(No. 12)

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: La Bien-

Year / Date: XXXX Unknown

nale di Venezia

Medium / Type of item: Slide

Title / Name of item: Rirkrit Tiravanija

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Kosit

Material: 35 mm positive film, color

business card - Curator 50th Venice

Juntaratip

Dimensions: 5 x 5 cm (framed)

Biennial

Title / Name of item: When Kosit Went to

Artwork RT reference: -

Year / Date: 2003

the Death

Exhibition RT reference: -

Medium / Type of item: Business Card Material:

Year / Date: 2000 Medium / Type of item: Video

Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 cm

---

Artwork RT reference: -

Material: VHS-PAL, colour, sound Dimensions: 27’20’’

Category: RTA05 (RT / Private imagery)

Exhibition RT reference: Utopia

Artwork RT reference: -

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Antoinette

Station,50th Venice Biennial: Dreams

Exhibition RT reference: ----

Aurell

and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the

Title / Name of item: Photograph of RT at

Viewer, 16 June - 2 November 2003,

the beach

Venice. (Group show)

Year / Date: 2000 Category: RTA03 (Artwork / RT / Visual

Medium / Type of item: Photograph

material)

Material: c-print, color

--Category: RTA09 (Private docu-

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Rirkrit

Dimensions: 15.5 x 23.5 x 3 cm

Tiravanija

Artwork RT reference: -

ments)

Title / Name of item: untitled 2001

Exhibition RT reference: -

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Landeseinwohneramt Berlin (Registration

(demonstration no. 3) video footage Year / Date: 2001

Office Berlin)

---

Title / Name of item: Anmeldebestäti-

Medium / Type of item: Video Material: VHS PAL, color, sound

Category: RTA07 (Private correspond-

gung - Registration confirmation RT

Dimensions: each: 18.9 x 10.4 x 2.5 cm

ence)

Year / Date: 2000/04/28

Artwork RT reference: untitled 2001

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Elizabeth

Medium / Type of item: Photocopy

(demonstration no. 3)

Peyton

Exhibition RT reference: Yokohama

Title / Name of item:

Material: Postcard from

Dimensions: 21 x 29.7 cm (A4)

Triennale 2001, Mega-Wave: Towards

Elizabeth Peyton to RT

Artwork RT reference: -

a New Synthesis, 2 September - 11

Year / Date: 1997/03/17

Exhibition RT reference: -

November 2001, Yokohama, Japan.

Medium / Type of item: Postcard

(Group show)

Material: -

---

Dimensions: 10 x 15 cm ----

Artwork RT reference: -

Category: RTA11 (Catalog / Other)

Exhibition RT reference: -

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Philippe Parreno

Category: RTA04 (Artwork / Other / Visual material) Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Marcel

---

Title / Name of item: Alien Affection Year / Date: 2002

Medium / Type of item: Catalog

Category: RTA14 (Literature)

Medium / Type of item: Sharpening

Material: coated paper, fluorescent

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Ken

Block

color on cover, transparent plastic dust

Knabb (ed.)

Material: Stone in wooden box

cover

Title / Name of item:Situationist Interna-

Dimensions: 4 x 16.2 x 7 cm

Dimensions: 24.3 x 18.1 cm

tional Anthology

Artwork RT reference: -

Artwork RT reference: -

Year / Date: 1981

Exhibition RT reference: -

Exhibition RT reference: -

Medium / Type of item: Softcover Book Material: -

----

Dimensions: 15.5 x 23.5 x 3 cm Artwork RT reference: -

Category: RTA12 (Press / RT)

Exhibition RT reference: -

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Scott Hanson Gallery

---

Title / Name of item: Outside the Clock: Beyond Good And Elvis - invitation card

Category: RTA15 (Occupational object)

Year / Date: 1989/07/11 - 1989/07/29

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Unknown

Medium / Type of item: Invitation Card

Title / Name of item: Folding Chairs

Material: -

Year / Date: 1994

Dimensions: 12 x 17 cm

Medium / Type of item: Study

Artwork RT reference: untitled 1989

Material: Linen with metal support

Exhibition RT reference: Outside the

Dimensions: each: 40 x 32 x 23 cm

Clock: Beyond Good and Elvis, 11 - 29

Artwork RT reference: untitled 1994

July 1989, Scott Hansen Gallery NY.

(from barajas to paracuellos de garama

(Group show)

to torrejon de ardoz to san fernando or coslada to reina sofia) / untitled 1994

----

(wetterpanorama) Exhibition RT reference: Cocido y Crudo,

Category: RTA13 (Press / Other)

14 December 1994 - 6 March 1995,

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: The

Museo National Centro de Arte Rei単a

Kitchen

Sofia, Madrid. (Group show)

Title / Name of item: Gretchen Bender:

Lost Paradise, 21 October - 11 Decem-

Total Recall - brochure

ber 1994, Kunstraum Wien, Vienna.

Year / Date: 7 - 9 May 1987

(Group show)

Medium / Type of item: Brochure Material: -

---

Dimensions: 18 x 21.5 cm Artwork RT reference: -

Category: RTA16 (Private object)

Exhibition RT reference: -

Artist / Author / Manufacturer: Unknown Title / Name of item: Knife sharpening

----

block in wooden box Year / Date: XXXX

203

Situational art and archival practice

Jรถrn Schafaff in conversation with Rirkrit Tiravanija

a reaction to the things you had criticized before? As you have said over and over again, your work focusses on generating experience, understanding and meaning through use rather than through discourse alone.

Rirkrit Tiravanija (RT): In a way my work has always been against fixation.

materials on display. Which brings me to our topic of today, your archive that I have been building for you since 2009 in Berlin. There seems to be some odd relation between your situational approach on the one hand, and the concept of the archive as an apparatus to preserve documents on the other hand. What was your motivation to get the archive started in the first place?

Jรถrn Schafaff (JS): Over the past 25 years or so, a lot of your art has been situational. JS: What do you mean by that?

In the second half of the 1980s, you started out by doing site- RT: By fixation, I would mean RT: Well, there were several specific work, criticizing the to have the ideas moving, per- reasons, one of it was that in museum as an institution that haps open to external influence, the late 1990s and early 2000s, fixes cultural meaning. Your open to chance and the unan- during the time that I lived in work pointed to the ways that ticipated. Perhaps because I Berlin, I had collected a lot of Western museums represent am more interested in the mo- things in that room and had non-Western cultures, how the tions and influences of the audi- continued to ship things there tradition of the museum is fo- ence, than the objects at play later on. I needed to know what cused on the belief in generat- or produced. The public and was in the room because I had ing and mediating knowledge their interaction impressed onto lost track of what was there. through the display of objects. the work itself, how that operaIn the early 1990s, you shifted tion could shift and change the JS: What were these things and towards constructing situations weight of the context and shift why had you kept them? which still addressed the ideo- the importance of objectness logical conditions of the sites of art.

RT: All kinds of things, private you exhibited in, but also creatdocuments, photographs, cored their own sites. These works JS: One could say, then, that respondences related to my were still addressing culture this shift was an attempt to deal work, parts from shows I had and the way we relate to it, but with the problem on a structural made, etc. I had kept everywere semantically more open level, to avoid repeating the thing, partly out of an old habit, and ambivalent. Rather than logic of the authoritarian struc- partly because it has been providing strong statements ture you were criticizing. Obvi- useful on some legal level. from your side, you set a frame ously, such situational work is which offered various entry difficult to preserve because, JS: You mean your residential points and invited those who let strictly speaking, the activities status? themselves get involved to enter of the people have to be conthe process of meaning produc- sidered a constitutive part of it. RT: For example. For me being tion. In what way was this shift You cannot just put the framing Thai, immigration has always

things is to remind me of what I Generally, when I start to write forgot. Today, everything is au- it is more about emotional tomatically memorized. Already things, you know? My friend when you receive a message, it Gabriel Orozco, for example, is automatically stored. Access has shelves of notebooks in to it is easy. Earlier on in my which he has written down art life it was letters and faxes. every single idea, every single There are a lot of things within move of his work. He is like a those documents that tell you chess player who writes down about certain things that hap- every move of a chess, of every pened and I don’t necessarily chess game ever. Compared have memory of it. So, when I to that I am not so systematic, see a piece of paper with a note I am more instinctual. Not inon it then I remember what I did stinctual in a kind of reactive at one moment or maybe even way, though. I mean, I know JS: Was there another reason things I wanted to do but that that I have ideas that I have why you were interested in I didn’t do, that I forgot about. kept in my head for ten years When we get to work on the and sometimes I forget about what is in the room? archive together, for me it is in- them so but then some day I RT: I realized that I became teresting when you present me see a note and then maybe it more interested in memory. some items and say: “What’s becomes more relevant again.

For me, the archive is like a this thing? “ and then I go: “Oh, It has a lot to do with thinking memory. In a funny way, a that was this and that.” This and filtering and letting it sit memory is not a fixed situation, way of working makes me re- and then, maybe at some point, it is something that is open to member things because I tend something happens. change. As you had mentioned not to keep those things in my the situational aspect of my head. Usually, I am thinking JS: So, having this archive and having me as a kind of catalyst work, there are different memo- more about the present. is helpful both in rememberries of those situations. In this room, I thought, there would JS: But still you find it useful to ing but also in generating new be at least some memory that go back to older works, older ideas. situations, or ideas. How is I have of them — or not. that related to your working RT: For me, the process is the JS: What exactly do you mean method? Was that memory memory. The process of you, by having memories there? As function another reason for of us, going through this idea of making an archive is what I see it, a memory is something keeping things? brings me the memory, and you have in your head, right?

What do you consider to be the RT: Not necessarily. The thing that’s it for me. I am interested status of the items in relation to is that I don’t make so many in a certain kind of clarity but I notes and I don’t write so many am not interested in making it your memory? things down and I don’t make more clear to myself. It is like RT: Ok, the status of those a drawing of every idea I have. washing dishes, at some point been an issue. I may be a bit paranoid with this but I’ve always wanted to have enough evidence at my hands to proof I was actually working as an artist.

Or recently, when my landlord in New York wanted to kick me out of the apartment I’ve had for so many years, having kept every piece of correspondence or checks or whatever actually came into use because then I could show that I actually exist.

As you know I travel a lot.

205

you have to wash your dishes to start something else. For me, it is enough to know that is there, to have someone who is taking care of things, that some order is being established. It is not like I am going to sit down and go through all those papers again myself.

JS: There are two interesting points in what you just said.

One is the notion of order, we’ll come back to that later. The other is that if you are not interested in getting an overview of the things in the archive yourself, it makes even more obvious that to establish an archive involves at least the potential that somebody else will use it.

RT: I came to think it is more for other people. In the last years I have more and more been confronted with people wanting information about my work. I am really happy to say to this art historian: “Call Jörn, he knows where things are.” Maybe it is there, maybe it is not, but you will know. I think that’s great!

I do think it is really more for other people.

JS: You mean, you have become more and more aware of the fact that your work is becoming part of art history? In a funny way, this leads back to the beginning of our conversation, only now it is your own work

that is becoming the object of people’s perspective or on a fixation. And the archive helps moment at the time. You try to doing that. Which brings us to make history objective but it is the other point I wanted to come completely impossible. back to, the function of the archive to provide a certain order JS: So, maybe we should conof things. On the one hand the sider to get rid of the categories idea of the archive is that it is I established. neutral, not more than a storage of data that is the source RT: (laughs) I wonder about for the production of knowledge. that, because I think, it would On the other hand, there are become more of a labyrinth of already decisions being made, trying to figure things out. If you starting with the decision to make a label, it doesn’t mean have an item included or not. In that other people understand our case, I created categories your labeling. to distinguish the different kinds JS: There seems to be a paralof items that we have. lel between how you consider RT: Which is interesting be- the possible use of the archive cause there is a subjectivity and the way one can make use going into naming the category. of your work.

You make that system through RT: Right, again using or an the subject. attempt to access the archive JS: Which is what you have would become another way into the experience of the been addressing in your work? idea, the experience of what RT: In a way, yes. The museum could become, a possibility, an and art history as an institution experience, and arrive to the make certain kinds of decisions meaning. and those decisions are made by people. A museum is not an JS: So, the traditional notion open, neutral thing. It works as of archive doesn’t necessarily if it is scientific, as if it implies apply to what we’ve been esa certain kind of objectivity, but tablishing? in reality it is not objective. It is as if the truth exists there, but RT: Maybe, a good thing to think in reality it isn’t, it is just one about the archive is that it is truth, or part of a truth and much less objective, it is much those truths are based on one more personalized. person’s perspective or ten

JS: In what way personalized?

RT: Well, I think it certainly is by focusing on a person, it already says: “This is one person’s point of view onto the world.” It is biographical, not like a wellmapped out story, but maybe that is what my life is anyway.

This process of memory we talked about, going through those things and starting to understand what they were, it even becomes a kind of portrait of a person. What one finds there, or what’s missing, too.

JS: But a portrait that at the moment, now in November 2012, consists of approximately 7500 parts!

RT: Sure (laughs).

207

209

vanishing mementos collective knowledge displaced emancipated library

we had no contact since 2000 I could not even remember how he looked like or spoke

211

and, the day I traveled to the North in October 2011 to see the house of my grandparents which my father inherited I knew it had been washed away by the Tsunami

213

I heard from my sister that half of my father’s library had been moved to that house 2 years ago

within an unknowable time scale books were gathered by my father about groundlessness and migration on which he worked through his own interest, which is very much related to where he came from books were the most important things for him from the first one he bought he collected many books and always annotated the date and time of purchase, and where he bought them, as well as his name this was his ritual

215

there were thousands of books written by others

217

with personal annotations of my father completely drowned in sea water washed by waves sunk into salt water starting to mold and falling apart

resonance between water and materials the creation of unreadable books the figurative becoming nonfigurative dissolution of function

219

without being seen this archive will remain in that space there where only a roof protects it from rain

an encounter between sea water and books an enigma of coincidence

221

Asako Iwama, 2012

223

225

227

229

231

Sarah De Wilde

233

Biographies

international symposia, research days,

Her professional trail is marked by

research-based master classes in

project based collaborations with

Nico Dockx is an artist, writer, curator,

visual arts, and the coordination and

alternative art spaces, museums and

publisher, and researcher working out

editing of diverse research-related

private companies. She also worked

of an ever curious preoccupation with

publications.

on independent projects in public

laboration with others, his interventions:

Jan Mast is an artist — but prefers

curated several exhibitions in museum Het Domein in Sittard (NL), of which

space. Between 2003 and 2006 she

‘living’ archives. Often outcome of colpublications, sounds, texts, images,

to be defined as ‘a renaissance man’

exhibitions, lectures, performances,

in a vain attempt to escape ‘limiting’

the last project was a retrospective

and conversations investigate the

labels — with an eclectic and broad

exhibition on Ben d’Armagnac. Her

relationship between perception and

background. He feasts on emersions

main concern in all these projects is

remembrance, allowing multiple inter-

of literature and exploring the limits of

to bridge the gap between (highly

pretations and translations to emerge.

media — from drawing to immersive

conceptual) contemporary art and

He has been awarded with a DAAD

new media installations — to express

those people who are not familiar with

grant (2005), Ars Viva price (2007),

his devious but beautiful visions,

it (but like to get acquainted).

and Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge-

translating his personal anxieties

prix Emile & Stephy Langui (2009)

into Urbild rooted visual experiences

Egon Hanfstingl witnessed Beuys,

together with Helena Sidiropoulos. He

while knee-capping all the gods so

Spoerri and other interesting persons

is doing a PhD research on the ‘art of

generously over-referenced in these

in between 1975-1979 in his hometown

conversation’ at the Royal Academy of

biographies. Kra-pow. He lives and

Düsseldorf, and hereby experienced

Fine Arts Antwerp, and is co-founder of

works in Ghent (BE). He is artist, writer

the vibrant art scene of that time. Since

an experimental, pedagogical structure

and gallerist, but he is also an archival

1986 he has been working for and with

Extra Academy (2010). Since 1998 he

system researcher, book designer,

Dutch artist Louwrien Wijers. In 1993

has been showing his works nationally

cocktailmaster, fashionista and code-

he founded ‘Harmony Foods for health

and internationally and producing more

juggler. He is in love with the world.

and happiness’ as a social sculpture project based on fresh, local, organic

than 40 artist books. He is co-founder

Since 2005 he has been showing his

of interdisciplinary projects as Building

work nationally and internationally. He

food and related to topics of ‘Art meets

Transmissions (2001) and Interfaculty

is co-founder of various cross-over

Science and Spirituality in a changing

(2007) and has an independent DIY

projects like Morphologies (2003),

Economy’ that he experienced while

publishing label Curious (2001). He

LIGHTMACHINE agency (2005) and

assisting in the project’s realization

is represented by LIGHTMACHINE

Interfaculty (2007). He is represented

from 1986 until 1996. In 2003 he

Agency and galerie Esther Donatz.

by LIGHTMACHINE agency.

started to work on Art=Life=Work, a

Els De bruyn studied Social

Claudine Hellweg is an art historian

Louwrien Wijers. In 2012 he started

Sciences (option Art&Culture) and

and freelance curator / writer based

Human Resources Management at

in Ostend. She is curator of the Océ

educational social sculpture research

the University of Antwerp. Since 2008

Art Foundation in Venlo (NL) and

center for Food, Art and Content.

she is coordinating all research and

coordinates the art program ‘Partners

project opening up the archives of ‘Beauty Salon Friesland’ in Ferwert, his

PhD projects at the Royal Academy

in Art’ of the Belgian cooperative

Jean-Baptiste Decavèle is a photog-

of Fine Arts Antwerp, including the

financial group Cera. Moreover she

rapher and filmmaker who researches

organisation of different national and

writes articles on contemporary art.

representations of memory and who

Periscope Press. Since 2002, together

made exhibitions in Paris, Ivry-sur-

prominent issues, he developed such

Seine, Winnipeg, Toronto, Vancouver,

visionary concepts as mobile

with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit

Rome, New York, Ile de Vassivière,

architecture, the spatial city, feasible

Tiravanija, she has curated Utopia

Antwerp, Lyon, Cape Town… and

utopias and self-planning – all of them

Station, an ongoing book, exhibition,

has also taken part in video festivals

still very topical. He has had his work

seminar, website and street project.

in Italy and France. He received the

exhibited at many leading international

‘Villa Médicis Hors les Murs’ award in

art venues as the Lyon Biennale, the

Joseph Grigely has exhibited exten-

1999 for his project Entre Ciel et Mer,

Yokohama Triennale and the FIAC in

sively in Europe and the US. His work

Voyage Aide-Mémoires and again in

Paris in 2011, the Venice Biennale in

is in collections that include the Tate

2001 for Nostalgie, la Demeurance et

2003 and 2009, The Drawing Center

Modern, London; Kunstmuseum, Bern;

l’Icône, with Tatamkulu Afrika. His work

in New York in 2007 and Documenta

SMAK, Ghent; the Whitney Museum

has always been related to collabora-

12 in Kassel in 2002. He is a unique

of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent exhibi-

tion: Hervé Le Tellier, Elina Löwensohn,

figure who ignores the boundaries

Michaël Lonsdale, and Nico Dockx.

between disciplines and has written

tions include the Centre Pompidou,

Since many years, he has been

and provided drawings for more

Metz; CAPC, Bordeaux; the Museum

sharing time with Yona Friedman in a

than fifty books on his research into

of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; and the

very close exchange between architec-

architecture, ecology and language.

Architectural Association, London.

ture, film, photography, archive,

In the past ten years, France’s Centre

He is represented by Gallery Air de

and representation of spaces, land-

National de l’Edition et de l’Art

Paris in Paris. His books include

scapes and ideas. Now, his work is

Imprimé (CNEAI) has built up a close

Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual

divided between a very strict and

and fruitful relationship with him,

Criticism (1995), Blueberry Surprise

precise film practice and multiple

resulting in a number of exhibitions:

(2006), St. Cecilia (2007), and Exhibi-

processes in which he proposes and

(2007) Dare to make your exhibi-

tion Prosthetics (2010), as well as

generates exhibitions, like Du Breuil

tion, and Gribouillis: models scale

essays on disability theory and body

in Paris, Balkis Island in Ile de Vas-

1/1, Chatou, (2008) Tu ferais ta

criticism. He is Professor of Visual &

sivière, Architecture without building

ville, CNEAI and Arc en rêve/ CAPC,

Critical Studies at the School of the Art

in Middelburg, and which he considers

Bordeaux, (2009) Yona Friedman,

Institute of Chicago.

as experimental stages and displays

Improvisations: animated films(1960-

that he documents as potential

1963) and works without plans, in

Geert Lernout studied literature in Ant-

unrealized films for which each

partnership with the Musée d’Art

werp, Dublin and Toronto. He teaches

participant, each person who is part

Moderne de la ville de Paris.

English and comparative literature at the University of Antwerp, where

of the creative process is a potential narrative figure of his / her own

Molly Nesbit is Chair and Professor

he is director of the James Joyce

functions and fictions.

in the Department of Art at Vassar

Center. He publishes in English on

College and a contributing editor of

European literature; and in Dutch on a

The architect, theorist and author Yona

Artforum. Her books include Atget’s

variety of subjects as Bach’s Goldberg Variations, The Bible and Religion. His

Friedman is one of this and the previ-

Seven Albums (Yale University Press,

ous century’s leading thinkers on the

1992) and Their Common Sense (Black

most recent book in English is Help My

history of architecture. At a time when

Dog, 2000). Pre-Occupations, a col-

Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion

urban planning, mobility, globalisa-

lection of her essays on contemporary

(2010) and in Dutch Jezus in Amerika

tion and migration were increasingly

art, is forthcoming, to be published by

(2011)

235

Louwrien Wijers — visual artist and

Rudolf Arnheim Professor, Philosophy

in the M HKA (Museum of Contempo-

writer — calls herself sculptor. After

Faculty, Humboldt University, Berlin

rary Art Antwerp, 2004). He is author

being 18 years (1968-1986) an adept

(2001-02) and Research Fellow at the

of several books and articles on

of Joseph Beuys, she also sees writing

Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht

contemporary art and he has curated

and speaking as sculpture. Her work

(1999-2001). His specialist research

several exhibitions in museums, art

is mental sculpture and / or material

and publications focus on Marcel

institutions and libraries in Belgium

sculpture. Her biggest mental sculp-

Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard

and abroad. He teaches modern and contemporary art history and on artists’

ture is ‘Art meets Science and Spiritu-

Hamilton. His writing covers Monkey-

ality in a changing Economy’ executed

doodle, Visual Art as Know-How and

publications at the Royal Academy of

in 1990 and 1996. Compassionate

No-How, Textiles, Xeno-Sonics and

Fine Arts (Artesis University College)

Economy was her focus from 1998 to

Xeno-Epistemics, Cultural Transla-

in Antwerp. Together with Thomas

2005. It brought her the conclusion that

tion, North/South divisions of work,

Crombez he leads a research group

manufacture and ‘creative labour’.

on the nexus of archives and the neo-

and that ‘No Lying / No Stealing / No

Recent publications: Studies in

avant-gardes (ArchiVolt). He is chief

Killing / / Grains / Vegetables / Beans’

Non-Western Modernities and Beyond:

‘Satisficing not Maximising’ is the trend,

editor of Track Report, the journal for

is a firm basis for a successful world

‘Small Change of the Universal (British

artistic research of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He is a member

household, or world economy. Now,

Journal of Sociology Vol.61.3, 2010),

thanks to Nico Dockx who reminded

Hungry Clouds Swag on the Deep in

of the international ZERO research

her of her old inspiration from 1993,

Santu Mofokeng, Chasing Shadows,

group that prepares a compendium

she works on a ‘Saint Society’ where

Prestel 2011. He was co-curator

and an exhibition on the international

the influence of food on our future is

of Documenta 11, 2002. Together

ZERO movement (1957-1965). He has

the main point. To build a firm society

with artists Ecke Bonk and Richard

published extensively about post-1958

it is important that nobody goes to bed

Hamilton, he curated retinal.optical.

Belgian art and its international context,

hungry. Hunger is the only true dictator.

visual.conceptual... at the museum

and on artist’s books, such as Multiple/

On grains, vegetables and beans we

Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam,

Readings. 51 artists’ books 1959-2009

can feed all our people and will have

2002. He was co-curator of Farewell

(2010) and Neonlicht. Paul De Vree

enough water for all. Furthermore

to Postcolonialism, Guangzhou, 2008

& de Neo-avant-garde (2012). He is

we will become more peaceful when

and Art Knowledge and Politics, Sao

editor, together with Nico Dockx and

we stop killing so many thousands of

Paolo Biennale, 2010. He was the

Els De bruyn, of a forthcoming two

animals, who since beginningless time

chief curator of the Göteborg Biennial:

volume book on both the history of the

have always been our very best friends.

‘Pandemonium: art in a time of creativity

Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

fever’, 2011.

Sarat Maharaj was born and educated

(since 1663) and on artist’s driven pedagogies since the 60s (2013).

in South Africa during the Apartheid

Johan Pas earned a Ph.D in art history

years. He is Visiting Research Profes-

a the Ghent University (2005) with his

sor at Goldsmiths University of London

research on the International Cultural

ing as a research associate at Collabo-

where he was Professor of Art History

Centre (ICC, Antwerp) and its pioneer-

rative Research Center 626 “Aesthetic

Jörn Schafaff is an art historian work-

and Theory 1980-2005. He is currently

ing role in the presentation of concept,

Experience and the Dissolution of

Professor of Visual Art & Knowledge

video and performance art during the

Artistic Limits” at Free University Berlin.

Systems, Lund University & the Malmo

70s and 80s. The dissertation resulted

In 2009 he co-founded the study

Art Academies, Sweden. He was

in a monograph and a museum show

program Cultures of the Curatorial at

the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.

Asako Iwama is an artist and cook.

That same year he started to establish

Her practice has developed around

the Rirkrit Tiravanija Archive Berlin.

the idea of the ontology of eating.

Referring to the ethics of food, its

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the

social aspects and relation to nature,

Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely

she seeks to transform the perception

recognized as one of the most influen-

of nourishment within her practice and

tial artists of his generation. His work

work.

defies media-based description, as his practice combines traditional object

Sarah De Wilde studied at the Royal

making, public and private performanc-

Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and

es, teaching, and other forms of public

lately has been showing her work

service and social action. Winner of

within both group and solo exhibition

the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the

formats. The breaking of huge waves

2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by

on the base of a rocky cliff / the

the Guggenheim Museum, Tiravanija

vastness of open space / the scent

was also awarded the Benesse by

of fresh peeled mandarin, … These

the Naoshima Contemporary Art

may be concepts or places that

Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian

would typically inspire, they seem

American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist

archetypical memories and are part of

Award. He recently had a retrospective

a common conscience but at once they

exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld

are intensely personal and private. In

along with previous retrospective

Sarah’s work, the individual imagina-

exhibitions at the Museum Boijmans

tion becomes a critical authority, which

Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, MAM

permits freedom to make connections,

in Paris and the Serpentine Gallery in

between the mental and the real space.

London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of

Whether the used media is writing or

the School of Visual Arts at Columbia

installation, or goes from speech to

University, and is a founding member

photography, to film / video to sound /

and curator of Utopia Station, a

music to gardening to cooking, there

collective project of artists, art

is always an opportunity to drift away,

historians, and curators. Tiravanija

into some unspecific daydream for a

is also President of an educational-

while.

ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER located in Bangkok — where he maintains his primary residence and studio.

237

Colophon

TR 13/01 Avec une paire de ciseaux. (the new conversations 4)

THE NEW CONVERSATIONS

04.05.2012, 10h-22h, lunch / lectures

Š Track Report, Curious, archives Nico

/ archives, kitchen / meeting room,

Dockx / Egon Hanfstingl / Jan Mast /

Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp,

Louwrien Wijers, archives DOCKX &

Mutsaardstraat 31, 2000 Antwerp

MAST, the artists and writers, 2013

publisher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

Eric Ubben

(volume 1) / booklet 5-12

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

editorial board

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording

Thomas Crombez, Bert Danckaert,

or otherwise, without the prior permission of the

Els De bruyn & Nico Dockx

publisher. Every effort has been made to determine

chief editor

individual works. If any proper acknowledgment

and acknowledge the copyright ownership of Johan Pas

has not been made, or permission not received, we invite copyright holders to inform us of

coordination

the oversight.

Els De bruyn translation, proofreading, transcript Thomas Crombez, Els De bruyn, Nico Dockx, Lieve Laporte, Geert Lernout, Jan Mast & Johan Pas graphic design & concept

D/2013/411/1

DOCKX & MAST, Ghent, 03.2013

ISBN 9789490521189

print GuidoMaes.Printingdeluxe, Ghent edition 200, numbered, including 2 unique 10cm x 15cm photographs, 04.05.2012 with the support of LIGHTMACHINE agency, www.lightmachine.info

/ 200

239

241

Images p. 1-17 + p. 48-240 by Jan Mast on the occasion of Nico Dockx’ archive desctruction / shuffle on 26.09.2004 at studio Mark Luyten, Korte Leemstraat 8, 2018 Antwerp in preparation for CRYPTICCRYSTALCLOUD, DOCKX & MAST, 2005-ongoing.

243

WANDERING OVER MOUNTAINS WALKING BETWEEN THE CLOUDS IN THE SHADOWS OF ETERNITY ENDLESSNESS AHEAD (CLOSER TO YOU) HERE, NOW, I TOUCH THE SUN (I FEEL YOUR WARMTH) AND OVERLOOK THE SUBLIME OK, I MIGHT BURN MY WINGS SPIRALLING UPSIDE DOWN FILLED WITH DESIRE Whisper 18 : Jan Mast, London ( U K ) , 02.2013.

‘Wanderlust I-IV’ ( s eries of 4 paintings, 4 x 120 x 80 cm, 02.2013 ) .

THE WHISPERING GALLERY, a collaborative work by Nico Dockx & Jan Mast, 2011 - ongoing.

AVEC UNE PAIRE DE CISEAUX. (THE NEW CONVERSATIONS 4) 04.05.2012, 10H – 22H, LUNCH / LECTURES / ARCHIVES, KITCHEN / MEETING ROOM, ROYAL ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS ANTWERP, MUTSAARDSTRAAT 31, 2000 ANTWERP

CRYPTICCRYSTALCLOUD 3 DOCKX & MAST 2005 – ONGOING