What it is not
Hollis Frampton and Peter Gidal London, May 24, 1972
A script reading
Patrick Ward
Gil Leung, The Politics of Montage
Charles Youle and Bevis Martin
Jacques Rivette Celine and Julie go boating
Archives, whether personal, private or public, are documents of what is understood to be useful or valuable, worth conserving
for posterity, for history. This process of individual, corporate or state legislated selection is concerned with the preservation of
certain objects, events of experiences that are seen to be important in some way. These records are always made for future usage,
to communicate that experience or information to another, be this person or community. Even the objects and events recorded
solely for personal use are retained for a self in the future, as a memory aid to reminiscence. The condition of the archive is
always, in this sense, a consolidation of the present moment as a future history. It is simultaneously an extrapolation of experience,
as rememberance and a document of investment, as expectation; as a record it references what it is not.
The premise of the archive is to retain experience. Attempts to conserve the transitory nature of experience in the concretion of
the archive tend towards reification; imbuing the object or data with the qualities of the time or place it documents. This transfers
the value from the time past to the object present, making it accessible and also commodifiable. That artworks have relevance to
the archive is synonymous with a notion of their practical distillation of "the eternal from the transitory"*. Artworks, in this sense of
the new, are thereby posited as a more truthful form of recording than factual information. This is not due to any particular
empirical accuracy rather that the work appears to retain something that might be lost in a document, or evoke something that
resists conceptualistion. Artworks therefore have this very specific position of being both opposed to the archive's innate empiricism
through their indeterminacy, whilst simultaneously pertaining to its positive project through their definition.
The notion of an artwork's potential to retain and express radical temporality implies transformation, the expressed but unintended**.
Yet the archive's principle of identification configures this enigmatic quality of alterity in terms of what the work could be (for future
history): the open work or the future artwork. This acts to validate and so positivise the indeterminacy presented. In response to this,
the re-use, or re-contextualisation of archival documents in an aesthetic remit attempts to question and engage with the temporality
of such valorisation. Rather than effecting a transfer of aesthetic reflectivity to the materiality of the archive, the element that
pertains to an artwork appears as these parts brought together. Artworks are less their discernible criteria, but are instead defined in
and against their relation to them; what the work refuses, suspends or conceals. If the archive has the important position of
referencing what it is not, artworks sustain the valid but uncertain position of being defined in relation to this.
Gil Leung
*Baudelaire, Charles, 'The Painter of Modern Life', Modern Art and Modernism; A critical Anthology, By Francis Frascina, Charles
Harrison, Paul Deidre, Open University, p.23
**Duchamp, Marcel, 'The Creative Act', from Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston,
Texas, April 1957, http://ubu.artmob.ca./sound/aspen/mp3/duchamp1.mp3. Last accessed 15 June 2009