{"id":1468,"date":"2015-02-03T18:22:43","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T18:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1468"},"modified":"2015-02-03T18:22:43","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T18:22:43","slug":"archive-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1468","title":{"rendered":"Archive fever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artists have re-discovered the cabinet of curiosities, which is to their and our advantage, argues Laura Gascoigne.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Easy enough to say at a time of rationing when there are few varieties of artist about. When Gombrich made his famous statement in 1950 there were only painters, sculptors, the odd avant-gardist and the usual sprinkling of con and piss artists. But now that artists come in more varieties than Heinz, with less flavour, his distinction no longer helps.<\/p>\n

Things were different then, when artists were still distinguished as a class by the whiff of romance that clung to them. Even piss artists gave off a whiff of something more than drink. But archival artists? They smell about as sexy as musty ledgers. And archival artists is what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come down to, though in our zero hours culture few can stick to just one thing. So Akram Zaatari, who gave a lunchtime talk at the ICA in November, is a filmmaker, photographer and archival artist, as well as a curator.<\/p>\n

Where to draw the line between the last two isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t clear. In recent years, as artists have watched curators steal more and more of their limelight, the enterprising ones have found ways of edging them out. Rather than merely producing art, they are collecting it, organising it, archiving it. In Zaatari\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a wide range of documents that testify to the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s postwar society\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 which he collects, examines and recontextualises\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but it could be anything. It could be an inventory of all the exhibitions held in Belfast between March 1968 and March 2001, or a list of everything the artist has put in her mouth for the previous eight months, hopefully minus the recontextualisation.<\/p>\n

Producing things, in a Boris economy, is for bottom-dwelling cornflakes. But sorting things into clever little piles and columns is white-collar work. It requires a system and a language to explain it, putting the artist on a level with curators and directors. If you speak their language, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re one of them. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not some troglodytic creature blinking in the light whose presence needs explaining to the public. Speaking the interpreters\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 language saves them the bother.<\/p>\n

In 2009 Tate Britain had a show called Classified that included a display of shells collected by Damien Hirst and a cabinet of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcarcheological\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 finds retrieved from the Thames by Mark Dion. It drew attention to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the way artists use ordering systems in their work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and how they \u00e2\u20ac\u0153often use these networks and relationships in ways that reveal the inherent instability of meaning.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The implication was that artists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 systems were more exciting because there was more madness in their method, but this wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t apparent from the installations. Hirst and Dion both used standard methods of display for objects that logically belonged together. Similarly, Dion\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new Maritime Artist installation for Porthmeor Studios in St Ives could belong in a local history museum.<\/p>\n

What drives our need for ordering systems? Derrida called it \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcarchive fever\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s basically fear. We want to find patterns in the world around us that will help us survive the present and predict the future. Fear has a good track record for motivating artists \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it inspired the art of the Sublime \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but that was fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown stimulates the human imagination, whereas fear of the known \u00e2\u20ac\u201c information overload \u00e2\u20ac\u201c shuts it down. In the two centuries since Burke, art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s imaginative possibilities have been shrinking as the pool of unknowability drains. Contemporary artists are driven by a new sort of fear, the fear of the known \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the terror of drowning under a tidal surge of facts or being buried under a mountain of knowledge. There is simply too much of it about. What is an artist to do? Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures defined an artist as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153someone who notices things\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. But noticing everything is a contradiction in terms.<\/p>\n

The international exhibition at last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, touched on this very problem, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the impossible desire of knowing and seeing everything\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the digital information age. While containing work by several archival artists the exhibition was not itself an archive, more of a mammoth walk-in cabinet of curiosities selected by its curator Massimiliano Gioni. It attracted record numbers and, for the first time, bigger crowds in its final weeks than at the preview. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153After the opening five days of the exhibition, the yachts all departed and the following six months were characterized by the presence of the backpack crowd,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d announced the Biennale president Paolo Baratta in the closing press release.<\/p>\n

Interesting, the wily old doge with his finger on the art world pulse publicly disassociating the Biennale from the superyachties and turning for validation to the backpack crowd, like an Aussie publican. Bashing the rich art crowd is the coming trend, to judge by coverage of last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Frieze Art Fair in The Guardian, previously fawning but now dismissing the event as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an elitist shopping mall\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Art defined by its price tag \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153just a big lump of money on the wall\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, as Perry described it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is losing its allure. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got the thumbs-down from the backpackers, who are buzzing like bees around exhibitions on the popular encyclopedic model also adopted by the Hayward touring show Curiosity: Art & the Pleasures of Knowing at Newlyn Art Gallery and Discoveries: Art, Science & Exploration from the University of Cambridge Museums at Two Temple Place, both opening in January.<\/p>\n

The wunderkammer is the new white cube. You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be an insider to enjoy these shows, you needn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t worry about whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s art or you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re being suckered, because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not so much about the art as the pleasure of knowledge administered in tasty bite-sized chunks. We live in interesting times. The continental drift between rich and poor is splitting the art world, leaving the private collectors of wall-mounted money on one side and the exhibition-going public on the other. The aspirational classes have lost interest in wall-mounted money since they gave up aspiring and switched off. The \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchandbag and hipster test\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of fashionable art proposed by Grayson Perry is being replaced by the backpack test, and the vulgar taste of the one percenters by the wisdom of crowds.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s funny to think that just 10 years ago the other ICA \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the International Council of Archives \u00e2\u20ac\u201c felt the need to launch an Archive Awareness Campaign. It had little impact on the Tate and the V&A, both since accused of dumping picture archives \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the Tate\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s saved from the skip by the Mellon Centre, the V&A\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ending in an industrial shredder. A thematic archive \u00e2\u20ac\u0153wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a method of classification that was really necessary any longer,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said the V&A. Tell that to the archival artist and cabinet curator.<\/p>\n

Pluralism is a problem, as Perry pointed out, but here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a suggestion. Why doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t everyone move up a place? The archival artist can occupy the seat of the museum curator, the museum curator can replace the museum director, and the museum director can shuffle off and become head of an Oxbridge college. That should leave a seat empty for an artist with a pad and pencil to perch on, noticing things \u00e2\u20ac\u201c particular things \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and jotting them down.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Laura Gascoigne<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Jackdaw, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artists have re-discovered the cabinet of curiosities, which is to their and our advantage, argues Laura Gascoigne. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Easy enough to say at a time of rationing when there are few varieties of artist about. When Gombrich made his famous statement in 1950 there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-1468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1472,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions\/1472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}