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Potential: Ongoing Archive
John Hansard Gallery,
Southampton
Matt Price |
I
had geared myself up for a long day in the gallery,
sitting in room after room rifling through musty filing
cabinets, endless drawers, mysterious files and
semi-labelled boxes. So I was partly disappointed,
partly relieved, to discover that 'Potential: Ongoing
Archive', curated by Anna Harding, did not look or feel
like an archive. Rather, the exhibition aimed to chart
how the 11 featured artists use archives as part of
their research processes, as subject matter or as a
starting-point for a body of work.
The most
straightforward manifestations of the curatorial
criteria were Helmut Kandl's Portraits Austria
1942-44 and A Doctor from Vienna (both
undated). Kandl discovered 14,000 numbered and dated
photographic negatives in a derelict house, taken over
three decades by a doctor with a passion for cameras.
The images depict such diverse scenes as men repairing
telephone lines, family holidays, high-jumpers, cub
scouts, peasants, Nazis, graveyards and, one can but
assume, shots of the doctor and his wife in the nude. No
personal information accompanied the negatives, not even
a family name, and most of the places depicted would be
anonymous to all but the most proficient of tram
historians or avid followers of Austrian vernacular
architecture. Stumbling across such an extensive,
beautiful and personal archive must surely be the holy
grail of every archivist, and so looking at Kandl's
selection of slides the viewer shares in this special
sense of privilege, fascination and sheer
pleasure.
Any desire the visitor may have had to
learn of curious, obscure and bizarre pre-existent
archives was indulged only occasionally, most notably in
Naomi Salaman's Changed Press Marks of the Private
Case (2001). Salaman presented microfilm
documentation of the 'Private Case', a section of the
British Library originating in the early 19th century
and formerly inaccessible to the public, dedicated to
erotica and anything else deemed inappropriate for
public consumption. The microfilm contains images of the
cards that the archivists used to declassify the books
gradually. It was a pity that very few titles of books
were included on these cards, but the names of the
authors almost made up for this: in addition to the
occasional Marquess, Viscount and member of the French
clergy, a plethora of double-barrelled continental
writers, semi-asterisked noms de plume and
pseudonyms of the depraved and blatantly unstable rolled
past the eyes. Entertainingly, several publications had
gone missing from the collection, in spite of having
been locked in the private offices of the British
Library.
Artists creating or developing their own
archives included Nils Norman, Nasrin Tabatabai, Ella
Gibbs, Barbara Steveni and Christian Dorley-Brown.
Continuing his exploration of formal and do-it-yourself
urban spaces, Norman presented six panels introducing
the history of adventure playgrounds; the only drawback
was that the viewer was left wanting to see considerably
more of his project. Computer-based archives from
Tabatabai and Gibbs made interesting contributions
without making tediously overbearing and unrewarding
inroads into IT in the gallery context. Indeed Gibbs'
archive of the Programme series of events she
organized for the 'Temporary Accommodation' exhibition
at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London last year shows
what an asset new media would have been to the arts labs
of the late 1960s and 1970s. Conversely, presentation of
the material Steveni amassed during the Artist Placement
Group years (and subsequently from O+I) demonstrates
that digital archiving can easily lose the aesthetic and
tactile appeal of original documentation. Dorley-Brown's
Revisits 1987-2002 (2002) involved the artist
photographing all the tower blocks in Hackney 15 years
ago and then returning to do the same earlier this year.
The 58 pairs of images reveal, perhaps surprisingly,
that only a small number of the blocks have been pulled
down in that time and that, rather than having decayed,
the borough seems generally in a lot better condition
now. With its images of gentrification, modernization,
developments in car design, architecture, social policy
and urban planning, this series is not only
exceptionally beautiful but also thoroughly
intriguing.
Running through the exhibition and
the accompanying publication is the theme of art's
capacity to contribute directly to the betterment of
society, implicit not only in the work of Steveni,
Norman and Dorley-Brown but also in Jakob Jakobsen's
New Emotional Map of Southampton (2002). Rita
Keegan's small series of photographs of her
grandmother's aprons and Jonathan Faiers' Dissolves:
A Stolen Life, 1946 (2002), in spite of their
merits, struggled to justify their presence here, but
perhaps this reflects Harding's courage to create sparks
through tangents, oblique connections and the
unexpected. | |
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