Homage to Zoe Leonard’s Tree + Fence series.

I realized yesterday that I don’t understand the world. This is not a new realization but it hit me pretty hard. What made me think of this? A commercial for Hefty trash bags.

Trash bag technology is still progressing. There are people out there coming up with new plastics, forms and scents to make using trash bags better, maybe even a delight. (“I love this bag!”) And yet Kodak has stopped research on film. I don’t get it. I guess, trash bags aren’t in danger of becoming obsolete but it still doesn’t make sense to me. How much better can they make a plastic bag? And will any consumer really care?

I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. I hate this.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing but I don’t care if anyone else does. I don’t know how to talk. I don’t care about talking about my work. Fuck you. I don’t care if you like it or want to pay for it. Walk by it. That’s fine. You don’t make me feel better or worse on how you feel about my art. Is it art? I don’t care if it is. I make it because it makes me feel good. I make it because it’s important to me. I make it because I want to. I don’t make it for you. You ruin it for me. You make me over think it. My hand is too prevalent and not universal. My hand is not present and makes it uninteresting. If I’m here its no good if I’m gone its no good. I’m not sure it matters what you say. I like my stuff and it makes sense to me. It makes sense to others. Some people will always understand, some people will never understand, some people will understand some of the time. There isn’t an answer, why bother trying to find the answer? Why try to find the ultra-universal? It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. People will make the connections they want to make. There is no art movement. This is no group. There is no art. Is it art? Or is it just me? If you reject it you don’t reject me because I don’t give a fuck what you think anyways. I just don’t care. You’re opinion doesn’t effect my relation to my past. That’s what this is about. My relation to my own past. And if you don’t care you don’t care. If you see your own history, your family’s history, I love that. It’s amazing. People are amazing to be able to relate things to themselves. That’s fine. Run with it. But this work is not about you. It’s about me. You don’t need to understand that. You don’t need to care about that. You don’t need to care about me. You just need to care about you and if you don’t that’s not my problem.

Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1995.

Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression was originally a lecture given by Jacques Derrida on June 5, 1994 at a colloquium in London. This lecture-turned-book is divided into six sections, the Note, Exergue, Preamble, Foreword, Theses and Postscript. While each section covers a different aspect of the concept of archive the book as a whole defines the history, role and definition of the archive especially as it relates to Freud’s “archive.”

Derrida starts with the Note, a breakdown of “archive” starting with the word “Arkhé.” This term recalls the ideas of commencement and commandment.  Commencement suggests that, as in nature and history, there is a there where things take place. And commandment, as in law, that there is a there where things are ordered with authority. He continues in this way talking about the history of archives. The meaning of “archive” comes from the Greek word “Arkheion,” the house of the archons, magistrates. This was the place where documents were filed and the archons were their guardians. This allowed documents to be gathered together, ordered, protected but also available. This brings Derrida to another point about how documents were gathered together. These files came from private to public spheres but it doesn’t necessarily mean from secret to nonsecret because an archive is a place of shelter. It “shelters itself from [its] memory which it also shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets” (2).

Derrida discusses the idea of citation in the Exergue. He first suggests that the archive “is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional,” because it preserves but in an unnatural way which Derrida perceives as an archival violence (7). He goes onto describe how the process of archiving is observed in printing and circumcision. In his discussion of printing the need of an external place for an archive becomes a central point. This need relates to Freud’s concept of the death drive, the self-destructive drive to return nature to the state before one’s birth. “There is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of remission” and this compulsion to repetition “remains…indissociable from the death drive” (11-12). The death drive inciting us to destroy and provides the impetus to archive.

He also discusses how technology changes the archive. The archives of Freud, for example, would be much different if he and is contemporaries used email. How the archive exists is determined by the archivable materials, regardless of how technology allows archives to exist each archive exists in the anticipation of a future. He ends this section by speaking of circumcision, it is a private inscription but also a document that can be compared to printing in that it leaves traces of itself on the skin.

In the Preamble Derrida seeks to define his use of the word “impression” in his title, which has three meanings for him. The first meaning is that of a literal, physical impression onto something, “that of an inscription which leaves a mark at the surface of in the thickness of a substrate” (26). In other words, writing, making symbols or printing. The second definition of the word “impression” is the one that probably first comes to mind as the notion or feeling that is associated with a specific word.  And thirdly he defines “impression” as it relates to the larger title of “Freudian Impression” he gave his lecture as the impression left by Freud. The  “undeniable impression…that Sigmund Freud will have made on anyone, after him, who speaks of him or speaks to him, and who must then, accepting it or not, knowing it or not, be thus marked” (30).

The Foreword is dedicated to a discussion of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s book, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Derrida states that it is Yerushalmi’s undoubted belief, and a major concept in his book, that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. But Yerushalmi also says that it is something that wont be known until the future. This leads Derrida to question what will become of the archive of psychoanalysis if in the future it is titled as a Jewish science, it would change the relationship of the science to its own archive. The brings into question the relation of the archive to the future, the question of the archive “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (36). This relationship is very important because you cannot know the effect or importance of the archive until the future becomes the present. With the possibility of the archive of psychoanalysis retrospectively becoming a Jewish science this conveys the incompleteness of all archives, something to be remembered when dealing with any archive.

Not surprisingly Derrida presents his theses in the Theses section. He starts the section by giving a clearer definition of archive fever, describing it as “to burn with passion. It is to never rest…from searching for the archive right where it slips away… It is to have a compulsion, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). He then goes to state in his first thesis that Freud created the concept of archive as material and virtual as something that is in the psychic space but that “cannot be reduced to memory” (92). His second thesis returns to the early mentioned death drive without which the archive would not exist. By taking the documents to be archived out of the owner’s authority it ensures that they will be kept safe from the individuals self-destructive tendencies. And the third thesis states that no one has shown the archontic principle of the archive better than Freud, which deals with the “law, of institution, of domiciliation, of filiation… The archontic is at best the takeover of the archive by the brothers” (95).

In his Postscript Derrida recalls his definition by talking about the desire to get closer to the origin of the archive. The archive creates a desire to find traces of the actual event or artifact but it is an impossible desire. Also, it is impossible to know what has been left out of the archive, what secrets of the past are still unknown. “One can always dream or speculate are this secret account…But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The secret is the very ash of the archive” (100). It is impossible know what has been burned or destroyed and will never be recovered for the archive.

Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse” October 110, (Fall 2004): 3-22.

Hal Foster examines three contemporary artists whose work uses the concept of archives in his essay “An Archival Impulse.” While there are many artists who use archives today he chose to look at Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean. Before he elaborates on each of their work he first discusses some of the qualities used in archival art.

The first and probably the most notable function of archival art is to “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end [archival artists] elaborate on the found image, object, and favor the installation format” (4). While pop cultural sources are often used, many artists also use obscure references. Because these sources are found, issues of originality become important and the idea the archival art as an art of post-production is an easy assumption. With the Internet readily available “information does often appear as a virtual readymade…[this] might imply that the ideal medium of archival art is the mega-archive of the Internet,” Foster suggests that while art has absorbed much of the language of the digital age, like “inventory,” “sample,” “share,” and “interactivity,” archival art remains an obstinately physical calling for “human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing”  (4-5).

Another aspect of archival art is its similarities to the museum. Some artists play on this relationship and the concept of collections, but this art is produced using a different set of guidelines because the artists “are not as concerned with critiques of representational totality and institutional integrity…[suggesting] other kinds of ordering—within the museum and without” (5).

The artist working through archives often attributes archival language to their work such as “collection,” “ramification,” and “combination.” This reinforces Foster’s last attribute of archival art in that it “not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private” (5). Archival art uses public or private collections or found materials to create new public archives, placing the information within a new context to be interpreted by the viewer.

The three artists Foster highlights produce very different works within the category of archival art. He first looks at Thomas Hirschhorn who creates direct sculptures, altars, kiosks, and monuments. Each of these installations focuses on historical figures, such as artists and philosophers, and attempt to “expose different audiences to alternative archives of public culture” (7). While some pieces come across as devotional, (the altars), and some more informational, (the kiosks), most of the figures represented have special importance to Hirschhorn. His personal investment makes each piece about more than the informational content provided and displays a sincere desire to acquaint his viewers with figures in the “avant-garde past threatened with oblivion” (10).

Tacita Dean uses many mediums to recall “lost souls” in her work. Foster notes that archival artists are “often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects” a theme undoubtedly present in Dean’s work, she presents the past as always incomplete. In one example of her work she retraces the steps of a stowaway girl and records the coincidences that seem to echo the girls journey that ended in a shipwreck. Another work creates a visual archive representative of the voyage of Donald Crowhurst’s failed attempt in the Golden Globe Race. While some would attempt to look at history as including a redemptive quality Dean is does not, instead she exposes a “romantic fascination with ‘human failing’” (16).

The last artist Foster discusses is Sam Durant. Durant is similar to Dean in that he uses multiple mediums in this work but differs in that his source material is much more eclectic pulling from the histories of rock-and-roll, art, architecture, literature, social activism, as well as others. He often pairs these materials in a way that seems to encourage disorder. One example is his citing of Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed installed on the campus of Kent State, the site of the shooting of four students by National Guardsman. Durant continues to combine iconic pop culture events with national tragedies like Woodstock and Altamont. His work combines the utopian with the dystopian creating a “cultural-political archive of the Vietnam era” (19).

Ending with Durant’s seemingly disordered pairings, Foster suggests that another aspect of archival art is its will to make connections, “a will to relate—to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs…to ascertain what might remain for the present” (21). The desire to create these connections comes from a cultural-memory that already appears disordered and disconnected, a way “to recoup failed visions in art, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia” (22).

Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books; New York, 1968. Pg 59-67.

Walter Benjamin belongs to a group of people who he feels is becoming extinct. He is a true collector, more specifically a book collector. In his essay Unpacking My Library he takes a serious if not humorous look at the act of collecting and the relationship between the collector and his or her possessions. The inspiration for this essay was the act of unpacking his library after its two-year storage.

Benjamin sets the scene not by describing orderly rows of books usually associated with libraries but talking about the disarray of storage. His imagery helps set the mood and can inspire a sense of anticipation of rediscovering each object, each book. Benjamin states that there is a “spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions” elaborating further saying “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (60). The anticipation of unpacking his library is not only caused by being reunited by the actual books but also by being able to relive the experiences associated with each book.

It is a little ironic that the book or object is not the ultimate pleasure of collecting but it also incorporates the thrill of acquisition and the history of the object: “Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object” (60). These things overshadow the functional, utilitarian aspect of the object. This is emphasized when Benjamin suggests that most books in a library are not actually read by the owner.

One of the most important aspects of the relationship between the collector and his objects is that act of acquisition. Benjamin takes the majority of the essay describing the various means of acquiring books and retelling stories of some of the books within his library. The first means of acquisition and “the most praiseworthy” is by writing the book oneself. This concept turns every author into a collector who is unhappy with what is currently available and while its an unexpected concept it has whimsical merit. Another of the ‘free’ methods of adding books to ones collection, and the most common, is by borrowing them and not returning them, which he suggests is a conscious act for the habitual collector.

Purchasing is a much more varied means of obtaining books and it “has very little in common with that done in a bookshop by a student getting a textbook, a man of the world buying a present for his lady, or a business man intending to while away his next train journey” (62-63). A collector is much more strategic in his purchasing methods, “their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position” (63). Apart from buying books in stores auctions are another arena for buying books but this can be more dangerous as the collector needs to pay attention not only to the books but also to other bidders. Also, auctions can allow collectors to get carried away with winning the bid. The last means of acquiring books is through inheritance and this is the soundest way because “a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property” (66).

At the end of this essay Benjamin returns to the memories incited by the objects talking about how his library conjures memories of “where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me” (67). He reasserts that it is the relationship of the collector to his or her objects that is important to the collection because “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner,” no one will be able to order a collection with the same understanding that the original owner did (67). Collections can tell, for the collector, not only the historical story of the object itself but also the story of the collector—“ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67).

Mom: Lida died at about 2:45.
Me: OK.
Mom: So, I guess that’s that…

The conversation took place at 3:45 PM CST, April 21, 2009. My mom’s godmother, an amazingly progressive and vibrant woman, died just an hour earlier. Calculating my movements in reverse I figured out exactly what I was doing; I had just sat down to watch an episode of Hell’s Kitchen online, Season 5 Episode 11.

Death puts things into perspective by trivializing most activities. So, I guess that’s that.

But why do I have to part with my memories; memories that are contained in such a state of scrap that externally they resemble garbage?

What kind of memorials begin to appear to prevent the past from being buried? How can a relationship with the past exist in which memory functions as an active process, allowing continual reconsideration, rather than as a form of entombment, to which archives and museums are sometimes compared?

So by taking flight into the [archive] love escapes extinction.

Many years will be spent searching, studying, classifying, before my life is secured, carefully arranged and labeled in a safe place—secure against theft, fire and nuclear war—from whence it will be possible to take it out and assemble it at any point. Then, being thus assured of never dying, I may finally rest.

Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.  Even after a “proper mourning,” a sense of self may be fully infected by the residues and memories of the lost object, in which case mourning is a process with no beginning and no end.  An intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.  My sense of loss goes in two directions, past and future, the loss of youthful expectations and the premeditated mourning of the things I know will change. Both of these can extend to places and emotions that exist outside of my grandfather’s house but because I know that he is aging and wont be around forever I feel that this is an important place to start addressing it.  I want to start by finding the things that are lost-past, describing events, remembered physical details and emotions that I associate with his house. I want visual evidence that supports my memory, to see if my memories still have a physical reference, to prove the validity of what I say or remember so that it cannot be contested. A record of memory.  Maybe this is my way of trying to prevent them—my memories, objects, and grandfather—from being lost. Maybe this is more about my denial than about my sense of loss.

How do we retain access to memory and history?  If I distrust my memory—neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well—I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing or in photographs. I have only to bear in mind where this ‘memory’ has been deposited and I can ‘reproduce’ it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory. Then I am in possession of a ‘permanent memory-trace’.  A record of memory.  I need to gather the evidence of what I might forget—people I love, people I hate, experiences, places, events, important moments, as well as all the little stupid things that make up a life, as an external brain. If history is a true narrative, documents constitute its ultimate means of proof. They nourish its claim to be based on facts.

But really, if you think about the narrative that collections or assemblages of things make, the interesting thing is that there are always at least two possible stories: one is the story that the narrator, in this case the artist, thinks she’s telling—the story-teller’s story—and the other is the story that the listener is understanding, or hearing, or imagining on the basis of the same objects.

What distinguishes a pile of necessary papers from a pile of garbage? To deprive ourselves of these paper symbols and testimonies is to deprive ourselves somewhat of our memories. In our memory everything becomes equally valuable and significant. All points of our recollections are tied to one another. They form chains and connections in our memory which ultimately comprise the story of our life.  To deprive ourselves of all this means to part with who we were in the past, and in a certain sense, it means to cease to exist. Why must we look at our past and not consider it our own, or what is worse, reproach or laugh at it? Why do I have to part with my memories?  As long as memory exists that’s how long everything connected to life will live.

What does an archive allow? What systems do we rely upon and methods do we develop for coping with uncertainty as well as for organizing our lives? In what ways are what we remember, memorialize, organize and archive predicated on chance operations?  The only value these things have is that I have assigned some kind of value to them.  I am trying to see immortality and meaning through objects, and at the same time I am trying to say that my own process of accumulation is really quite analysed and thought through.  So by putting the remnants that I collect into these boxes I’m using the box as a frame to draw attention to something placed within it. Of course, a box isn’t a frame, it’s a space; and in that sense everything that I’ve done in each box is an installation within an installation.  A sanctuary of the mundane and the banal.  These objects, however, are my memories—my story—and they will never be more than mere curiosities to a viewer. To obscure them is to create a blind field. It animates life external to the box.  The box demands that the viewer fill it with objects and images, and yet whose?  Absence in and of itself creates a disturbance that opens the possibility of projections that shift the mirror of identification and desire to the viewer.  In this way I can reinvest my loss into the social.

Works Cited

Boltanski, Christian. “Research and Presentation of All That Remains of My Childhood 1944-1950” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg 25.
Freud, Sigmund. “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg 20-24.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud The Hogarth Press: London. Vol. 14, pg 241-258.
Green, Renee. “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg 49-55.
Hiller, Susan. “Working Through Objects” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg 41-48.
Kabakov, Ilya. “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg 32-37.
Min, Susette. “Remains to be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. LA: University of California Press, 2003, pg 229-250.
Ricoeur,Paul. “Archives, Documents, Traces” The Archive. Ed. Charles Merewether. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg 66-69.
Scribner, Charity. “Left Melancholy.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. LA: University of California Press, 2003, pg 300-319.

Who:

• Me
• My Maternal Grandfather
• My Sisters

For Whom:

• Me
• My maternal grandfather
• My (late) maternal grandmother
• My mother
• My sisters
• Anyone who misses his or her childhood
• Anyone who has lost a family member
• Anyone who is afraid of losing a family member
• Anyone who has had to deal with change
• Anyone who might forget something they loved

What:

• Photographs
• Text
• Boxes
• Paper
• Labels
• Recordings
• Tape

Where:

• At my grandfather’s house
• With me

How:

• Photographing
• Archiving
• Writing
• Collaborating with sisters

Why:

• Because I am afraid of change
• Because when my grandfather falls asleep sometimes I pause to make sure he’s still breathing
• Because I hate calling my grandfather because if he doesn’t answer I begin to panic
• Because I am afraid of losing my grandfather
• Because I don’t know if I’ve dealt with my grandmother’s death
• Because I am angry that I have to grow up
• Because I’m afraid of the fallibility of my memory
• Because I hate when my mom cleans my grandfather’s house
• Because I hate when things get thrown out
• Because I might forget
• Because things get harder as you get older
• Because the world seems to be getting worse