Emergent Archival Methodology: Understanding the Role of the Archive and the Mechanisms of Collection in Curatorial-Based Contemporary Art Practice
Leland McHugh
AAD Dissertation Studio 4 2020–21
Extracts from Leland McHugh, Emergent Archival Methodology: Understanding the Role of the Archive and the Mechanisms of Collection in Curatorial-Based Contemporary Art Practice
Dissertation Studio 4 The Conquest of Joy Tutor: Aleks Catina
School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2021
It has been pointed out by some art critics (Bellow) that the contemporary obsession with the artifact reflects a period of stagnation in art, characterized by use of artifacts as readymade works. In Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself (Bellow), Bellow asserts that art has lived beyond its ends, but not its means, seeming to “survive its own demise by recycling its history and its relics.” This sentiment may have some applicability in art practices which use a traditional museum archive as medium, such as Kosuth used in Play of the Unmentionable. This is due to the traditional museum archive having a limited repository of objects, those objects having been predominantly curated under rather specific parameters relating to the emergence Enlightenment-era intentions for museum categorization. Undoubtedly this exhibition would be known to Bellow, whose aforementioned essay was published in 2005, and it was likely Bellow’s intention to implicate Play of the Unmentionable specifically due to its oft-regarded status as one of the earliest and clearest examples of archive-based methodology. The implication in this criticism is that nothing new and therefore nothing valuable can be produced by such methodology. Against that idea something has to be said for the undeniable, revolutionary effectiveness of synthesis through recombination as evidenced in the cut-up technique used in the works of figures such as multi-disciplinary artist Brion Gysin, and writer William S. Burroughs. Investigation into art practices like that of Oliva Guigue further prove the narrowness in application of Bellow’s point about archive-based art being unable to produce novel understandings of objects and artifacts exhibited. In 2018, Guigue’s Museum for a Future (2018) won the ALife Art Award grand prize at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo (Guigue). The focus of this and her ongoing Tamesiology project is 20th and 21st century technological artifacts washed ashore on the banks of the Thames. The activity of scavenging the muddy riverbank at low tide is known as ‘mudlarking,’ and due to the unique industrialization-era deposits of iron in the Thames, there are mineral-artifact amalgamations that can be found nowhere else in the world. Guigue’s practice revolves around collecting, photographing, studying, and categorizing such objects. She works as a kind of archeologist of the recent past. Ultimately an exhibition of photographs, Museum for a Future focused on artifact collection. Guigue created a portfolio of “hexaptych compositions,” (Guigue) or photographs which show the specimens in her collection from every angle. Tarnished and falling
apart, Guigue’s batteries, coils, mobile phones, and bits of circuit board are nonetheless beautifully rendered in an online portfolio. Her work in this project is a meditation on the production of technological waste, and the creation of a found-objects archive. In her ongoing project Tamseiology (this comes from the river’s ancient name Tamesas), the use of archivization as a methodology is more fully apparent. Here, she uses invented hierarchies to contextualize the objects by their relationship to one another.
(Image 3) Guigue’s Tamseiology practice includes a six-tier categorization system encompassing every type of substance found on the riverbank. This taxonomy created by Guigue includes; “indigenous matter, imported natural matter, modified imported natural matter, transformed imported natural matter, pseudo-minerals, and agglomerates of different materials,” (Guigue). Any single object that she finds while mudlarking can be filed according to this system. It appears to be a common interest among artists who exercise an archive-based practice to produce systems of organization among a class of objects which result in new ways of looking at these objects. The production of categories is central to this goal because the objects in a collection are not “intrinsic objects'' (Stewart), they are in fact defined by their relationship to one another or the context of their acquisition. In the case of Guigue’s Tamesiology project, her efforts are “an extrapolation on the geology of the anthropocene''
(Guigue) which uses fine art signifiers such as museum-style display, and scientific method to communicate ideas about the relationship between industrialized production of technology and contemporary matters of ecological concern.
Archives and Their Objects One such way in which Guigue uses her archival work to promote new understandings of ‘artifacts of the anthropocene’ is through exploring “pseudo-mimesis” (Guigue). This word describes a situation where man-made objects have come to resemble naturally occurring things through exposure to weathering and other natural processes. The objects in the Tamseiology project can also be displayed according to similarity in appearance, so therefore these pseudo-mimetic objects can be grouped with ancient things - rubber cables next to centuries-old bones being one example. In considering these object pairings, Guigue’s practice and obvious interest in the archival medium can be seen to exist within the idea of the autopoietic, or self-regulating and ever-expanding nature of art and interpretation of artworks as expressed in Prof. Simon O’Sullivan’s (artist and theoretician) Art Practice as Fictioning (or Myth-science). Consider for a moment the Deluzian idea that art is a future-oriented endeavor; consistently self-referential, the signs and signifiers present in any singular work therefore accretional, and the potential audience being one that exists at any point in time as long as humankind exists and preserves its art. It follows that there is theoretically no end to renewed interpretation of an artwork as future audiences will always have more to work with, so to speak. I think perhaps it is the intention of many contemporary artists using artifacts and archival methodology to engage with precisely this property of art which eschews temporal boundaries. The artifact, especially when intentionally paired with modern objects, provides artists with the opportunity to open a discussion about the past and present not as separate narratives, but as part of one varied, interconnected, and cohesive story. It may be that a large part of the allure of artifacts to contemporary artists is the ability to use fragmented insights into the past as a means to explore and evaluate the present, and in doing so ultimately to speculate on the course of time going forward. This thought is
reflected in the title of Guigue’s project Museum for a Future, which won her the 2018 ALife Art award where it assumedly must have come across to the judges as a very contemporary, ‘in’, and forward-thinking effort. Clearly, the ability of artifacts used in archive based art to open wider discussion about time and the trajectory of humankind’s existence lends itself well to artists working with themes of environmental status and preservation. O’Sullivan further makes note in Art Practice as Fictioning of the emergence of what he refers to as the “so-called ‘archival turn’ in contemporary art” (O’Sullivan) - this being the very subject of investigation within this text, often referred to here as archive or curatorial-based work. In his opinion this work has the goal of producing new understandings of the categorized objects and their relationships, often without transforming the objects archived (or more accurately the general perceptions of such objects). The product of such an endeavor he believes to be merely “new groupings of the what-already-is,” (O’Sullivan). I would argue that the contemporary artist using archivization as methodology is aware of the autopoietic nature of art, their decisions in establishing categories within the archive informed by it. In the case of Guigue’s Tamesiology archive, her pseudo-mimetic pairings can and do produce more than merely new groupings. Instead, a genuinely more multifaceted understanding of the relationships between the objects is shown. The decision to display objects in this way comes from Guigue’s own initial confusion over whether certain objects were ancient or modern, composed of natural or man-made materials (Guigue). She demonstrates that when shown together the objects are often indistinguishable to the human eye. In doing this, the Tamseiology archive addresses tacit, base perceptions most people have of man-made objects in their recognizable factory-state by showing the condition they are in after they have been subjected to natural processes of erosion and chemical alteration. Drawing this visual parallel between the ancient and modern highlights properties of the modern objects which do not readily spring to mind as most people are unfamiliar with how these objects behave after they are out of circulation in our society, out of sight and out of mind. By showcasing this seldom considered reality of the objects our society discards, Guigue’s work brings to the minds of her audience the relationship between our disused tech and the natural world.
(Image 4) Through examination of a few of the core mechanics at work in determination and definition of categories in a collection, it can be better understood how the execution of an archival methodology affects the identity and integrity of featured objects. By the very nature of categorization, when an object enters a collection it ceases to be a singular thing and understanding of its properties both material and abstract becomes enmeshed with a group of objects ostensibly related by common properties (Stewart). It is reliant upon the creator of these categories to determine what the shared properties of the objects are, and these decisions influence the outcome and impact on the observer of the collection. The curator (an artist working with archival methodology in this context) takes an active role in shaping the observer’s experience often by playing on their preconceptions, subverting them in the case of Guigue’s pseudo-mimetic object relationships, or asking the viewer to search for an unexpected relationship using exploitation of pattern-seeking mental processes. It is a well documented and researched feature of the human psyche that we as a species are pattern-oriented, which is generally thought to be an evolutionary tool. The phenomenon known as apophenia is a testament to humankind’s rampant unconscious desire to find patterns, even when there is no logical
indication that a pattern is present. Pareidolia is a prime example of this phenomenon wherein the fusiform face area of the brain, our in-built facial recognition technology if you will, recognizes what appears to be a face or similar form in inanimate objects such as wood grain or a burnt piece of toast (Hadjikhani). Further on the mechanics of categorization relating to archive-based methodology, theoretician Susan Stewart writes in Objects of Desire (circa 1994) that: “The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality” (Stewart). This insight provides further credence to the possibility that contemporary artists enacting an archive based practice chose to do so because in a collection, an object’s histories and potentialities become altered by its relation to new objects. Guigue used this function of the archival process to address issues of an archeological and ecological nature, producing categories and pairings which alter the perception of her scavenged artifacts to a desired effect. It is easy then to extrapolate from Guigue’s work how this method of curation can also be applied with great effect to the work of artists concerned with anthropological questions. This is because, through manipulation of the archival process, an artist has the opportunity to use the insular, time and space-eschewing logic of collections to engineer understandings gathered from an archive which are greater than the sum of their parts, through careful consideration of the interrelationships between archived objects.
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