Would you like to root through the past of ‘New Work Network’ and replay the records?
NWN offers a bursary (min 3 months) to support a project examining our archival holdings and representing our historic and ongoing role in the development of Live Art and interdisciplinary practices in the UK.
new work network
Archival Correspondent Proposal. Eleanor MacFarlane.
An archive is dormant unless awakened. It is sleeping material, as useless as if it had never existed. It is evidence of past organisation, to be reorganised, redreamt, remade.
We can turn an artistic archive into an abstract enterprise - a mechanical elephant, a virtual cloud, a catalogue. We can arrange it according to colour, or size, or importance of thoughts.
The archive is a mass of material, ideas, masquerading as having a regular relationship with each other. It is merely a cluster of ideas, an arrangement of what has gone before. It can reordered, disordered, compacted, scattered. A library in a book, a book in a sentence, a sentence in a word.
In art something is made of materials. It becomes more than the sum of its constituent parts. It takes a leap, makes new connections, severs associations, subverts expectations.
As archival correspondent I would expect to be surprised, to be thrown and distracted by material. I imagine I will find fissures in ideas to explore, leading me to unexpected vistas. In fact, I will be looking for such byways, perhaps to be led by punctuation, or smudges on the paper, or the smells of musty files.
Perhaps there will be messages, hidden codes, things unsaid. Perhaps the whole archive needs translating into a new language and back again, like Chinglish or Engrish.
I have my own vast archive of material as an artist – drawings and writings since childhood, photographs, videos and others, which I keep live, organise, refer to. It is my visual language, my thoughts made manifest. My artistic approach is methodical with a tinge of chaos. In life I am rather organised, but after I’ve been working I look round and wonder who made all that mess. When the exhibition opens, it is done, and the backstage work is complete.
The role is for archival correspondent. It could be for archive artist, or archive writer, or archive archivist. But correspondent, or in other words, communicator, or disseminator.
Forgive me for quoting Wikipedia:
Reporter vs. Correspondent: A correspondent generally includes some of his/her own perspective on the news. For example, a correspondent is expected to provide considerable context to the events being chronicled. A reporter, on the other hand, offers largely fact-based reporting. In Britain the term 'correspondent' usually refers to someone with a specific specialist area, such as health correspondent.
As archival correspondent I’ll approach the New Work Network archive from the perspective of a curious interdisciplinary artist, an organiser, a writer. I believe in a generous approach to art. I like giving people things, leaving things for finders, swapping things for ideas. I’m used to maximising budgets, and having no budget. Depending on what I find, I initially like the idea of disseminating ideas, quotes, materials from the archive by way of small packages, delivered by hand, by post, to an imaginative and helpful list – to friends, museums, artists, hospitals, colleges, left in bus stops, in cafes, on trees. Perhaps I will set up a swapsies system.I will whisper a low-tech viral campaign, infiltrating blogs, the press, rumours.
Then the archive will exist in the minds of many.
Is there a message the NWN would like to be disseminated by their archival correspondent? I imagine you would like awareness raised, the project to be relevant to interested and allied parties, but also I imagine that you are willing to see what happens and to give the role space to breathe.
I would not come to rearchive your archive, but to pick a thread from it, several threads, and knit them into something different, or possibly into a great knotty mess. Then I will divide it all up into multiples, and share out what I have found, little abstract notions which will bring with them feelings.
I’ll share my feelings about the joy of delving into the archive by pulling out and passing on thoughts about time, about time passing, about receiving presents, about what trace is left of us in scraps of paper. Perhaps it could all be cut up and sewn randomly into books. There is a multiplicity of aspects to be gleaned from this project. Our own minds are our personal archive. Perhaps this model could make us reassess.
I’ll blog and update and be open about my journey and discoveries and process. I’ll use online sites, social networking, twitter, LinkedIn, artists sites – NWN, artists newsletter and others, and point as many folk as possible in the direction of this project from outside the artistic community. I may arrange collaboration with others when it comes to sending out, inviting suggestions of people and places.
In my roles as Artistic Assessor in Visual Arts at the Arts Council, and also as a freelance book reviewer, I am required to write from the perspective of an individual and individualistic artist – a subjective objectivity. I interpret and translate artistic elements into my own language. As an artist I create my own archive, internal and actual, and translate ideas into form.
I am able to organise projects, having devised all aspects of art exhibitions, including my solo show. I believe strongly in new ways to share out art and the art experience – I actually like the gallery system, and love to show my work within galleries. But equally I have experienced some of my most profound artistic moments in odd places – on the street, travelling, in conversations. I’m sure we all have. After all, art is a human activity, and it is in the human arena that I think this project would come alive. It is not purely an intellectual exercise, although grounded in a rigorous methodology.
I see the role of archival correspondent as an artistic one, a challenge to read between its lines. I will wake up and reanimate the archive, and introduce the element of now. It will perform its function by informing the perspective of now, distilling what has been into what may be.
I know I haven't told them exactly what I will do, which I think is what is wanted in proposals, but I have been honest in my approach, and anyway, I rather enjoyed thinking about this and imagining having an archive to play with. It may be a credible enough proposal if they allow for my back-up experience and CV which shows that I can follow through.
With the MA touching on archive material this would be an especially fruitful project. I've not really thought much or dealt with archives before, apart from my own, and apart from reading about other people's research and findings, and now it seems like a wealth of opportunity and exploration.
4th April 2011
9th April 2011
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