Translating the Personal Archive - Contemporary Artists and Materials of Life

Translating the Personal Archive |

Contemporary Artists

and Materials of Life

By Riccarda Hessling

University of Amsterdam | Faculty of Humanities

Research MA Artistic Research

Student number: 10623124

Supervised by Dr. Sophie Berrebi

Table of Contents

Prologue

0 | Archives

The Archive 07

The Personal Archive 11

The Term 17

1 | Allure

The Lure of the Personal 20

In Contemporary Art 23

2 | Metamorphosis

3 | Invasion, Confusion & Translation

Invasion 55

Confusion 59

Translation 63

Conclusion

Prologue

I believe paper is an especially tempting element in my life and for that reason I hardly ever manage to pass by a genuine papeterie without entering. I certainly remember the offerings of coloured paper, odd patterns, handmade envelopes, fine notebooks and distinctive knickknack of each such place I have been to. Once I have bought some of the items I will take them in possession: Journal entries, letters, thoughts, definitions, explanations, quotes, and simple notes will find their way onto these papers. Every time I move house almost countless numbers of relicts related to my personal life or to my educational career seem to emerge from all corners and niches of my home – together they form an archive of my life, an unintended collection encompassing neat letters, ugly scribbles, spontaneous as well as planned notes, some of no relevance and others of importance.

The inevitable selection ends in creating new boxes, folders and envelopes. It happens only rarely that I actually study all of these relicts but once I do their depths appear fathomless – even to me as their creator, the matriarch of this accumulation, the archivist who grants them a raison d’être. I must surrender and accept a piece’s existence merely for the reason that a former version of myself did, while being surprised in other moments how easily I abandon relicts which I have carried with me for many years. The whole process lacks logical motives. It is not logical. Neither for me, nor for others. But are personal archives, personal because they contain the personal documentation of one person’s life as well as his or her personal touch on ordering and structuring these materials, ever logical? Are they possibly too singular to understand them universally, yet need to be perceived one by one? And what is more: What will happen to them in their future? How should they be mediated for generations to come? Even if the amount of material can be safeguarded, approaches need to be found to keep a personal archive’s unique personality guarded. The approach suggested in this thesis is an artistic approach to the personal archive. It questions how artists address personal materials, how do they get hold of this uniqueness that is

hidden behind the obvious? A literature study of theoretical works on the archive will give insight to its nature and will reveal the specifics of the personal archive in more depth.

The archive is used as a universal notion, leading to an inflation of the term

archive, which has become a loose signifier for a disparate set of concepts.1

These concepts are applied widely in an array of fields such as in philosophy and epistemology, in art and cultural sciences, in history of media, science and technology.2 _{There it is not only the contents of archives which stand}

central, yet also the archive itself. While the dispersion of the term appeared irritating at first, the manifestation of the archive as being either highly specific, concerning its material or type, or used rather metaphorically to e.g. shed light on our remembrance culture, opens unexplored discursive interstices.

The focal point of this study is the exploration of an interstice, a shape of the archive that is unexhausted in archival discourse, as its idiosyncrasy makes it difficult to apprehend. This is the personal archive. It encompasses all personal materials, which represent a person’s smaller and greater life events, relationships, opinions and experiences. Readers might be au fait with it as it contains the spectrum of materials of life that can be found in personal surroundings, sometimes more and sometimes less organised. Within this thesis the term personal archive will be used when referring to such accumulations. Accumulations which are not merely personal due to the materials documenting a life, but also due to the way the personality of the owner is intertwined in the structure and organisation of the materials. The immaterial aspect will unfold during the progression of this research.

Whilst exploring the personal archive’s singularity I am interested how it is possible to mediate the personal archive and let viewers witness its

1

p. 10.

2

Kulturverlag Kadmos, p. 7.

peculiarity. This study analyses approaches taken by art that consider the collections of personal materials and the processes that influence them. With this approach, I want to illuminate the artistic possibilities of reflecting upon the personal archive outside secure walls, dusty attics and private desks in an artistic manner.

This study leads the reader through the transformative process of the archive from being a personal phenomenon to being an artistic translation. It is structured by four central chapters: Archives, Allure, Metamorphosis and

Invasion, Confusion & Translation. Archives explores the concept of the archive

before moving on to the elaboration of the specific archival form, the personal archive. This section stresses the importance of granting the concept of the personal archive attention. Thereby, I intend to initiate processes of fully acknowledging the personal archive as a singular concept, highlighting the necessity of demarcating it from other archival shapes and finally clarifying the crucial terminology.

The first chapter Allure reflects on the force of attraction emanating from personal materials and attempts to understand this fascination of both individuals and artists for these matters. For this reason, this chapter is split into two sections, one focussing on the allure of the personal in everyday life and the other emphasising its integration into contemporary art.

The second chapter Metamorphosis focuses on specifically chosen examples of artworks employing the realm of the personal as source. These examples function twofold, either in translating the accumulations of individual materials of life into representations, thus using personal collections of one or more individuals in their works, or in creating entirely new productions which mirror the personal realm and use it to arrive at new perspectives. In the course of this study the terms production or translation will therefore be used when speaking of the artworks depending on their intrinsic approach or initial source. This study will furthermore highlight concordant concepts that come to the fore through both artistic translations and productions such as the works by Susan Hiller or The Atlas Group (Walid Raad).

The final chapter Invasion, Confusion & Translation detects concepts, which explain the artistic translations in an overarching manner and provide insight onto the possibilities of artistically devoting oneself to the personal realm.

While the concept at stake – the personal archive – is part of our everyday surrounding, often hidden in boxes of rooms or drawers of desks, it remains a complex expression of our quotidian activities and (parts) of a life span. Highlighting its value and reflecting on artistic approaches which contribute to its integration in the arts, and as such its preservation as cultural matter is the underlying rationale of this study.

0 | Archives

The Archive

The concept of the archive has become increasingly prominent in recent years and has been looked at in cultural, historical and artistic discourse through different lenses. The archival turn, taking place in the early 1990s, might generally be depicted as the phase in which the archive conceptually shifted from ‘archive as source to archive as subject’3_{, not only functioning as}

repository but also as space for investigation. The most influencing works on the archive come from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida both using the notion of the archive in different approaches. Michel Foucault is regarded as the first theorist who has created a philosophical view on the archive.4 _{In his}

book The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault identifies the archive as a factor in the relationship between power and knowledge. He uses the archive to describe systems that govern ‘the law of what can be said’, ultimately grouping, composing, maintaining or blurring knowledge or ‘all the things said’ in accordance with specific regularities of the prevailing state.5 _{It was}

Foucault who clearly differentiates between the archive as an institution (archives) and the method of processing and getting hold of the material (archive). Saving and collecting underlies a process of selection which implicates an active process. The archive is not a passive place, a dead institution but an active medium that has power. In this sense it is not a place that keeps the cultural memory but that creates it. The archive does not present the past as it is, instead it determines the way the past is structured and which information is accessible or not.

Derrida on the other hand, in his book Archive Fever, which was originally a lecture on the Freud Archive held in 1994 in London, applies not only archival debates but also Freudian theories such as the death drive and the pleasure principle to elaborate on the nature and the functioning of the archive and modern inscription technologies. Derrida looks back on the original meaning of the word archive, coming from the term arkheion and

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originally being the house of the archons holding power over official documents, guarding their existence and possessing the right to interpret their content. 6 _{The archivists grant access to files which fulfil the}

predetermined requirements and which are considered important. They are leading figures in archives, who make vital decisions about whether and how particular materials can be integrated into a system of order and classification. This system of power regulations shape the archive, in the words of media scholar Wolfgang Ernst, as ‘a very precise (and thus limited) institution’, in which archivists act according to internal rules and methods, a modus he refers to as the ‘hidden realms of power’.7 _{It is the rules and}

methods constituting the archive as ‘there could be no archiving without titles (thus without names and without the archonic principle of legitimization, without laws, without criteria of classification and of hierarchization, without order and without order in the double sense of the word.)’.8 _{Beyond this internal power the archive has been known for}

belonging to institutions of authority. Accordingly, memory studies scholar Aleida Assmann stresses that ‘without extended archives of data, there is no state bureaucracy, no strategy to organize the future and no control over the past’.9 _{Assmann does not follow the metaphorical reduction of the archive as}

cultural memory. Instead she assigns the archive the special role of mediator between memorising and forgetting. It is the passive role of the archive which functions as a memory storage that distinguishes it from museums or libraries which have an active role in keeping memory alive.10

While definitions of archives encompass their function as repositories of collections, containing historical documents or records related to places, institutions or people, a common association is often based on imaginations of long shelves storing files, never to be opened again in a building filled with material on hold, and only comprehensible for the adept. And while it

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appears that this perception is not entirely false, it does not represent the archivist’s intention. The strict view of former archive scientists who define archives as mere storage places has widened. According to the Society of American Archivists (SAA), archives contain ‘materials created or received by a person, family or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator (…)’.11 _{Archives gain societal importance when their material}

offers value for research and preservation. In this respect archives are comparable with museums, libraries or other cultural institutions collecting and preserving for society, especially when perceived as storage capacities for collective memory. In this view, the archive acts as ‘neutral, or even ethically benign, tool’12 _{securing the most significant documents of the}

collective past. By emphasising the relevance of archives for society, they are increasingly presented as independent, serving according to the ideology: ‘By the People, of the People, for the People’13_.

Diversity and flexibility are assets of archives in the present. According to the head of the Tate Archive Sue Breakell, the term lately comes to embrace any collection of objects, also digital objects, which are gathered together and actively preserved.14 _{This development results in highly specific archives,}

which focus on one particular type of record or one particular theme. As stated by Ashmore et al. the interest in different types of archives has grown visibly in ‘a plethora of work [that] has begun to consider everything. Less formal collections, considering everything from family photograph albums to postcards and recorded birdsongs’.15 _{The acknowledgement of this wider}

array of materials stored in archives lines up with the recognition of the specificity of different archival shapes such as the art archive, the political

11

Archivists, p. 30.

12

http://archivepublic.wordpress.com/texts/arjun-appadurai/

13

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archive or the digital archive. Individually they add new challenges to the general anthology of the archive. Together with the turn to explanatory work on the part of archival institutions there is a change of image of the archive which is also associated with the possibilities of the ‘digital revolution’16_{, an}

influential factor, which becomes for instance noticeable in the way institutions make their archives digitally available for their audiences to access (see for example the New Museum Digital Archive of the New Museum in New York or the Rijksstudio by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam). The trend of increased digitalisation is furthermore visible with other archival shapes. For instance, while Walter Benjamin’s archive containing about 12.000 pages of manuscripts, correspondence, and personal documents, has yet only been accessible in the Academy of the Arts Berlin, other archives are following the digital turn. Albert Einstein’s archive, which encompasses around 30,000 documents such as his scientific works and notes, but furthermore personal documents such as diary entries, travel reports or his Nobel Prize correspondence, has been digitalised and published online in 2014, made accessible by the Princeton University Press.17

Institutions regularly facilitate the preservation and presentation of the personal records of individuals yet often they focus on the personal archives of politicians, scientists, writers, journalists or academics,18 _{usually known}

and relevant in a broad context. The personal archive should, however, also be considered insightful for the entire width of the archive discourse, especially due to its singularity and idiosyncratic nature that is based on the individuals who create them – regardless of their social background. Each individual shape of archive functions under an own set of rules and conditions, which differ and possibly even oppose to standards universally thought to be applied in archives. How singular and thus influential the differences between general perception and specific type of archive can be, becomes evident when reflecting on specific types of archives such as the personal archive, which stands central in this thesis. In that context it is not only institutional archives or the archives of celebrities that mediate

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important insight on the differences between archival shapes but also the archives of regular individuals – purposefully or accidentally created – that are of interest. On first sight the term personal archive denotes a simple concept, yet as will be elaborated in the following subchapter, it is rather complex and provides insight on how important specific formats of the archive are.

The Personal Archive

In differently shaped portfolios we collect documents of a life span ranging from swimming badges to master diplomas, passport photos to job applications, old plane tickets to language certificates, printed out speeches to used conference badges, personal letters to speeding tickets. Director of the Villém Flusser Archive, Siegfried Zielinski, argues that we miss precise labels for such ‘heterogeneous conglomerates of evidence of anterior presence’ and we therefore ‘come to our own aid by summarily calling them all archives and thus in doing so move them down to the level of highly sorted and administrative orders – or raise them to this level: it depends on your point of view’.19 _{It is difficult to outline such accumulations – whether}

named archive or differently – and even attempts of describing my own archive of personal documents feels imprecise and fragmentary. Words can hardly grasp what I have lying in front of me. It certainly feels highly personal, due to its material but also due to its structures: The gaps, fragments and jottings that exist between the material structures of personal documentation, the fact that some report cards are more crinkled than others, testifying about my young self not finding the importance in documents like these, the stains on notes from my teenage years, the combination and order of things, conscious and unconscious decisions, questions on why I filed certain things and others are nowhere to be found, all this cannot easily be put just into words.

If we allow ourselves to label these conglomerates as archives, the specification personal is crucial in emphasising the personal content and the personal dynamics which are inherent. One might feel that the personal

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archive’s idiosyncratic character will avert concrete definitions and it appears one must proceed stepwise in order to comprehend more precisely. For this reason it proves difficult to narrow down the exact contents of a personal archive to a specific type of material. While I would argue that it is mostly documents that constitute an archive, it appears difficult to exclude other types of objects from what is understood under the term personal archive in this work. It therefore seems reasonable to place focus on the content’s characteristics and find a common denominator there, instead of within their materiality which can differ so greatly.

Chair of the Special Interest Section on Personal Archives of the Canadian Association of Archivists and practicing Literary Archivist Catherine Hobbs belongs to one of the few researchers who have investigated specifically the personal archive in depth. According to Hobbs, funds found in personal archives contain the documentation of individual lives and human personality and while events of life are mirrored especially in documents, the human personality comes to the fore through ‘the idiosyncratic, the singular view of people as they go about doing the things that they do and commenting on them’.20 _{The personal archive is the result of personal}

archiving, a process that is reflected in the momentary product of this action. The materiality of the personal archive is combined with divergent methods of archiving, which vary just as much as the personalities of each and every one of us. In the subchapter entitled Archives, Documents, Traces of his book

Time and Narrative (1978), philosopher Paul Ricoeur elaborates on the notion

of documents, as they are initially part of the initial definition of archives.21

He argues that ‘in the notion of a document the accent today is no longer placed on the function of teaching (…); rather the accent is placed on the support, the warrant a document provides for a history, a narrative, or an argument. This role of being a warrant constitutes material proof, what in English is called “evidence”, for the relationship drawn from a course of

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events’.22 _{And although during a life span one collects documents as}

warrants for life events, how one individually treats the material differs greatly. The personal archive reminds us that ‘many individuals work and construct their vision of their world in many ways on their own or for a major part in solitude’23_{, which results in a large variety of possibilities. Each}

possibility encompasses an intimate richness, which comes into being through the creator, on the basis of his or her individual choices, conscious or unconscious. It is therefore difficult to confine the personal archive to defining boundaries, as it is not any other person who decides upon the definition but each creator for himself.

Before moving any further, an issue that lies between the lines of this section must be reflected upon. The difference between the process of archiving and the archive as a result must be elaborated. Put rather bluntly, this is a question of time and location. While institutional archives commonly are ascribed the label of ‘archive’ from the moment they are announced to be one, this question might be answered differently as far as personal archives are concerned. Personal accumulations of materials develop while they are being made. The process of personal archiving takes place while the archive’s creator assembles the parts of the archive and places them into a – consciously or unconsciously – formed and possibly altering structure. Commonly this happens in the environment of private space where personal documents are kept. The SAA refers to such papers as personal papers, labelling ‘documents created, acquired, or received by an individual in the course of her affairs and preserved in their original order (if such order exists)’.24 _{Such personal papers are highly likely not grouped together but}

scattered in several spots, therefore not truly mirroring the physical appearance of an institutional archive. And even so, institutions presumably handle different truth claims than the personal archive, determining a document’s relevance and whether it should be included in the archive or not. Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler puts in mind that accredited

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knowledge and power is produced among other factors by ‘political forces, social cues, and moral virtues’ and has the power to enable the disqualification of ‘other ways of knowing, other knowledges’.25 _The

individual acting outside an institutional context also excludes, as he selects what to include in his narrative according to personal sanctions. These are, however, neither institutional nor absolute. With entrance into the institutional realm, the personal archive might therefore undergo a second round of selection, possibly altering former personal decisions. As such the intimacy of the personal archive, which will be mentioned repeatedly in this thesis, refers to a state of the personal archive, which is essentially non-institutional.

The benefit of exploring personal archives is predicated on a personal intimacy captured over many years while the collection of personal materials is archived, sometimes in subtle manners, other times highly creative. Noted archivist and scholar in archival studies Terry Cook portrays the allure of the personal record as its ability to narrate ‘[…] our inner life as human beings, those dimensions of the emotional and psychological forces that can shine intense light, through recorded memory traces, on what makes us human: our loves and hates, our deepest relationships, our spirits and souls’.26 _{As the}

personal archive contains highly personal views on life’s experiences, it almost naturally represents a departure from collective formality and systematic organisation as known from other types of archives.27

The title personal archive bears no mystery about the fact that such types of archives circle around a person, who commonly is also the creator of the archive or leastwise was involved with its formation. While it is likely that some of these accumulations generate unintentionally during a lifetime, there might also be other reasons for their occurrence, which are based on deliberate motives. What could be an individual’s intrinsic motivation for developing such a conglomerate of materials? The reasoning to collect might

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not differ from the aim of most archives, which is namely collecting in order to remember and preserve. According to sociologist Harriet Bradley, archives function as repository of memories. She argues that on their basis we constantly strive to reconstruct, restore, recover the past, to present and represent stories of the past within our narratives.28 _{What we have lost, we}

can retrieve through the material traces that we preserve. While this drive to retain might partly correlate with the requests of institutions and bureaucracies to constantly retrieve and prove former achievements as well as to document and manifest particular formalities, it is also personal considerations that cause us to safeguard.

Such motivation reminds us of Freud’s idea of the mystic writing pad which functions like a ‘materialized portion of one’s mnemic apparatus’: One must only remember ‘the place where this “memory” has been deposited [in order to] then “reproduce” it at any time.’29 _{The need for external memory storage}

might be one of the main explanations for our desire to create and keep, to remember and retrieve. Put differently, we want to preserve memories in a secure niche we can rely on, access and which only we ourselves can have control of. Ashmore et al. agree that ‘humans have a certain penchant for preserving their things, all kind of things’.30 _{Just like a nation strives for a}

national history, the need for personal preservation might relate to the desire for a narrative of the self. Personal records carry this narrative value contributing to the process of ‘storytelling and de facto autobiography – of the self presenting or representing the self’.31 _{Recordkeeping, keeping a}

diary or composing a personal archive are methods of sustaining the narrative of our own self.32 _{This motivation thus affects what we keep and}

what is added to the narrative. Be this as it may, professor in Library and Information Science Richard J. Cox points out that we do not only keep what we want to present about ourselves but that we likewise exclude

28

12, no. 2, p. 108.

29

Whitechapel Gallery, p. 20.

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particular material from the collection. We keep what we are most comfortable with and want to include in our presentation of the self, just as much as we are what we do not keep and what we deliberately choose to exclude, marginalise, ignore and destroy.33 _{It would therefore be false to}

presume that the personal archive is consistently complete and unshaped by gaps and fragments. Instead it is the gaps and lacunae of the personal archive that render it specifically intriguing and incomprehensible for the external beholder.

For the archive’s creator himself, the situation is likewise not entirely comprehensible. Philosophical questions of how much we are in control over and aware of our emotions and actions also play a crucial role in this context. How can we understand these processes taking place in the personal archive? Anthropologist Michael Taussig establishes a connection between notebook and personal archive. He points towards the thought that notebooks function as collections and perceives them as methods of keeping the current self in touch with former selves through the medium of external observations and remarks.34 _{In his view, the notebook is a collection based}

largely on chance, as chance determines what enters the notebook and what does not. Taussig, however, proceeds by relating the processes of the notebook to the magic encyclopaedia, which develops a life of its own, becomes an extension of oneself, a collection that one cannot entirely control and into which notes, thoughts, ideas and observations ‘gravitate by chance’. 35 _{Almost like an écriture automatique, an unconscious or}

uncontrolled writing flow, the collection advances by itself leading to a narrative integrating partly intended yet partly accidental elements. For this reason the notebook differs from the diary which itself represents a system of chronological order or design. Just like the notebook ‘lies at the outer order limits of order because it represents the chance pole of a collection

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rather than the design pole’36 _{, the personal archive cannot be placed in the}

same design category as the archive in general.

During its creation the personal archive is flexible and able to constantly adept to the rules, which its creator applies. While the methods of institutional archives also transform according to the Zeitgeist of the surroundings they function in, their changes require awareness and sometimes even justification, a compromise that the personal archive does not demand from its creator. Accordingly, it is not only the magic of the encyclopaedia, it furthermore is the instinctiveness, structuring the notebook or the personal archive, which is not present in the universal archive. Taussig quotes Irish poet W.B. Yeats in order to point out the necessity of the natural and casual accumulation of notes kept in notebooks. Yeats’ thought reads as follows: ‘To keep these notes natural and useful to me I must keep one note from leading to another […]. Every note must come as a casual thought then it will be my life. Neither Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book for to do that is to exchange life for a logical process’.37 _{Possibly this}

attitude can be projected onto the creation of the personal archive. This natural way of collecting and the automatic processes mainly determined by chance are equally as important as the intended processes planned and realised in order to influence the presentation of the self: both are what makes up the personal archive and what makes it so intimate. The interlude between automatism and intention plays a relevant role in the comprehension of the personal archive and will also be a constant factor subtly reoccurring in the analysis of artworks in the second chapter. Before that, some elaborations on the terminology used in this study are necessary.

The Term

The concept of the personal archive has been described in the previous section in order to elaborate some of its important characteristics. Nevertheless, what it encompasses precisely, the motives ruling within its creation and the processes structuring it have been outlined somewhat carefully as its limits, borders and possibilities should not be generalised. In

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the following passage, the terminology of the term personal has to be clarified, especially for the following chapter, which will analyse artworks I consider helpful in understanding the difficulties and possibilities of working with the personal archive.

A question which has repeatedly emerged during my research focuses on my choice for the term personal instead of the term private archive, especially as during my investigation I noticed that these two terms are often used interchangeably. However, as I adopt the specification personal throughout my work, I believe it is necessary to justify this distinctive use. In the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (2009) the terms private and personal are synonyms of each other. However, additional words that are listed as equivalents for each differ slightly yet crucially. While personal refers to something that is distinctive, characteristic, unique, individual and idiosyncratic, under the entry private one will find the terms own, special, exclusive, but furthermore confidential, secret and classified. This difference in words illustrates how the term private has, among its nature of describing the personal, also some excluding qualities.

I believe that semantically speaking the term private forms the contrary to

public. When thinking of private the starting point of my reflection lies

within a different realm, namely one that is strongly separated from the public dimension. The private takes place behind closed curtains for a reason and the separation between inside and outside is where, in my opinion, the focus is put on. There is no private without public, there is no inside without outside, there is no inclusion without exclusion. The term

personal first and foremost is linked to a person, to the processes occurring

on an individual and unique level. While private points towards the conclusive shape of the archive being not accessible and open for public,

personal places emphasis more on a development based on personally chosen

regulations. For this reason the term personal archive will be preferred in this thesis.

Why is this important for this study and what effects will this distinction have? The personal archive, I would argue, is something that occurs, not something that exists. And it occurs on the basis of personal behaviour, taste,

characteristics, choices, emotions, context and situations. Entailing that the personal archive is mainly shaped because of and due to these personal factors, its shape of existence therefore only becomes determined while it is forming. Just as many shapes can be labelled as archive, many arrangements and collections can be entitled personal archive and most often it is up to the creator yet also the recipient to label accumulations they encounter.

In this study the term will be applied for accumulations of material that document the personal life of an individual. This is also the prevailing criterion for the artworks being discussed in the chapter Metamorphosis. The choice for particular works aims at exploring concepts, which address accumulations resembling the personal archive by implementing personal documents illustrating an individual’s life in highly diverse manners. As I strive to unravel the possibilities of working with personal archives, artworks employing personal documents and accumulations are considered as equally useful in providing insight into the prospects of artistically highlighting the personal archive. The following chapter elaborates on this endeavour.

1 | Allure

The Lure of the Personal

A commodity I am repeatedly encountering being sold on flea markets are historical and personal photographs. One can browse through filled shoeboxes and purchase photos showing portraits or family pictures, typical memories like young women sitting on a bench, walks on the beach, birthday parties. Most often they share similar characteristic traits such as white edges, sometimes in an old-fashioned wavy cut, or a stamp on the backside indicating the laboratory they were developed at. I myself have purchased several of such photos and once I was asked how I make a decision about which ones I buy. I immediately knew the answer: It is the ones that contain more than you would think on first sight, that might appear ordinary at first but later turn out to be filled with hidden secrets. At the IJ-Hallen flea market in Amsterdam I came across a particular piece, which remains my favourite. The photo (see Image 1), possibly taken around the 1920s, shows a room full of people, sitting at long tables, all dressed formally and facing the photographer. The sheer number of faces is almost

countless and over time it seems as if more and more are appearing in the scene. Looking at it, I suddenly felt hundreds of eyes piercing through me or ruthlessly observing me and when starting to embrace this feeling I could not help but to find this situation peculiar. I realised that the true meaning of this picture will never be known to me. These faces are caught in an image for which there is no explanation only speculation. Unless I decide to research it extensively to unravel the origin of and the reason for this photo, it will remain my made up story. It was precisely the responsibility of keeping this picture alive and adding a narrative to it that made it highly attractive to me, sensing that I would carry this photograph with me for years. French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his reflections on the act of collecting and the collector as person, describes the effect that occurred to me as such: ‘For while the object is a resistant material body, it is also, simultaneously, a mental realm over which I hold sway, a thing whose meaning is governed by myself alone. It is all my own, the object of my passion’.38 _{In this sense, the photograph became mine, bound to my}

interpretation and enabling me to intervene in a story that was not my own. It allowed me to partake in a situation that I normally would never be part of: imagining to sit amongst those people, at this time and this space allowed to mentally re-enact the emotions I would have had. It was the escape from my own reality into someone else’s. Could my experience give some insight into the motives that lead us when buying old photos? Does it somewhat explain the attraction arising from old documents, diaries, letters, notebooks? And could this clarify why such personal documents are becoming increasingly popular in museums, archives and also in artistic practices? Does it justify the shoebox filled with personal photographs on the flea market? If so, what is it precisely that makes the ‘personal of others’ so captivating?

Before moving on to the analysis of the artworks, which consider the personal as their source, this question needed to be elaborated in more depth. The act of purchasing an old photo or looking through someone

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else’s old notebook implies different motives. Possibly it is general nostalgia. A longing for the past in which life allegedly seems easier to comprehend, compared to contemporary diversity and multifacetedness of intertwined and interdependent contexts that build up individual lifeworld – a term coined by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl to describe the world experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life – in globalised society. Another explanation could be trivial voyeurism, grasping the opportunity of entering into some other person’s private life. Or it could be a more unconscious motive, namely one’s own desire not to be forgotten after one has departed, and by investing into the remembrance of other people, one acts as one wants other people to act after one’s death.

Above these motives, however, diving into documents of another person provides a glimpse of the lifeworld of another time or another person, a notion of a reality impossible to witness, a brief insight into an unknowable world. But what does this insight we feel consist of? In his book Camera

Lucida, Roland Barthes reflects upon the question why he feels attracted by

certain photographs and not by others. He divides the photograph into two elements. Firstly, he notices the studium, which refers to the information a picture carries that is interpreted culturally, linguistically or even politically.39 _{Secondly, he points towards the punctum, which is a detail of the}

photograph that breaks the studium as it does not refer to information but to something hidden in the image, an element which rises from the scene, shoots out of the image and touches the viewer in an indescribable manner.40

It lies beneath primary information and can be described more precisely through emotions than facts.

It is possibly this combination of facts and emotions, studium and punctum that enables an immersion of a different kind for the beholder. Both are needed to circumnavigate the impossibility of experiencing an alternative life. It is these documents that have the ability to provide a cut-out of the distal reality from somebody else but also from the past. Moreover, it calls for a

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highly subjective entry point, which differs for each and every beholder individually. As the punctum of a document is neither fixed nor controlled, it becomes a subjective endeavour allowing viewers to connect with what they see in their own personal way. Even though it is impossible to overcome the missing sensual perceptibility, material traces of the past or from another person might provide an occasion for inducing a psychological state which allows temporal, mental transcendence of current reality into one’s own intuitive idea of how it felt like to be part of that other world. When thinking of my purchased photograph or the letters and small swiftly written notes found in my late grandparents’ house, it is both the information I might retrieve as well as the emotions only I experience that are the base of my fascination with the material traces of the lives of others. The interest in archives, as well as in personal materials of others, has also migrated to the field of contemporary art. How this fascination has developed and where it becomes visible will be elaborated in the following section.

In Contemporary Art

The archival was present in 2012 at dOCUMENTA (13). For example when artist Mario Garcia Torres used collected photographs from archives, the internet and individuals for his video piece to research the One Hotel in Kabul, the residence and artistic project initiated in the 1970s by conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti. Or for another dOCUMENTA (13) production entitled

The Worldly House, when artist Tue Greenfort created a concentrated archive

inspired by Donna Haraway’s research on ‘multispecies co-evolution’ and consisting of materials, texts, books, videos, and documentation from more than 100 artists. It was also evident in Ida Appelbroog’s large-scale installation entitled I see by your fingernails that you are my brother, when her archive of offset prints of sentences and phrases spoken, overheard and noted by the artist herself over many years, was presented to visitors. This shows that while archives have repeatedly earned their entry into the artistic spectrum in the past, they still remain relevant today. This is possibly enhanced through the emergence of artistic angles such as artistic research,

which was a strong focus of dOCUMENTA (13)41_{. In moments when art and}

research merge, the archive can become a valuable source of information and methods.

However, the archive and its architecture became relevant in art much earlier than 2012. The rediscovery of artistic strategies such as collage, montage and assemblage principles used in the 1920s and 1930s, influenced artists to use the act of collecting and collecting as form of expression, already slightly positioning the archive or archival structures into artistic interest.42 _{Later, in the 1990s, the archival turn became fully noticeable,}

through an increased appearance of historical and archival material in works of art.43 _{Finally, since Hal Foster’s influential article entitled An Archival} Impulse (2004), it has been established that within contemporary art one can

notice a reoccurring urge to work with the archive as concept. This expresses itself once the found image, object and text is interlaced with installations, collections, combinations, ramifications or rhizomes of artistic practice.44

The possibilities appear numerous, yet what are the conditions that designate works of art as archival art? It might be based on two main factors. First of all since such works address the found document, retrieved from official archives as their source. Furthermore and secondly archival art can be named as such as it arranges materials in a ‘quasi-archival architecture’, to use a term employed by Foster.45 _{A certain sense of order, classification,}

hierarchy and structure found in many archives can be referred to as the ‘aesthetics of the archive’, a design manifested in the works of archival artists46_{, also through the use of display methods such as the typecase,}

inventory lists or the glass cabinet.47 _{In other words, the archive as concept}

in the arts can emerge in two manners: as source and through aesthetics.

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Next to the archive as source, an archival aesthetic or layout might furthermore be employed to convey a degree of realness48_{, representing}

structures which beholders perceive as trustworthy frame, known from either institutional or personal contexts. As such the archive might constitute a valuable frame for artists to represent a matter, which requires an underlying conviction of evidence. ‘The spoken word, the found object, the trace left behind become faces of the real. As if the proof of what the past was like finally lay there before you, definitive and close. As if, in unfolding the document, you gained the privilege of “touching the real”’. 49

In order to mediate such an emotional framework, artists might be tempted to make use of the archive functioning as source or aesthetical design, to convey to the beholder the sensation of encountering material traces of another life or another time. Andy Warhol’s serial work Time Capsules illustrates the possibilities of conveying the realness of the personal. In 610 cardboard boxes the artist collected various types of documents such as dinner invitations, personal correspondence or travel souvenirs, things that were not necessarily collected because they were extraordinary, but because they were ‘there’ on his desk.50 _{Warhol thus used the material and aesthetics}

of the personal archive, to present to the beholder fabrics of the real. Accordingly, it appears, the archive becomes highly interesting for artists when they aim to convey their own personal life or that of another person in a plausible manner, which might decipher the interest for the archive as a concept.

According to Foster, archives are especially valuable for artists, as they are fragmentary, and as such human interpretation is needed for their comprehension51_{, a role taken over by the artists. Archival art appears}

beneficial in this endeavour as it is ‘concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces’ and as it values ‘unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects that might offer points of departure again’.52 _{In short,}

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archival art values the elusiveness of particular materials instead of condemning it. As such it functions to explore realms which can hardly be explained fully. Keeping this in mind, it appears that this type of art could encompass a suitable attitude for working with the personal archive, thus the personal material of one or more individuals. As has been discussed earlier the personal archive, the accumulations of individual materials come in a large variety of possibilities and can hardly be described under one all-embracing definition. It is crucial to keep in mind that ‘people in their private lives are not programmatic or entirely planned or rule-driven or procedure-bound as they make their documents’.53 _{Issues of chance,}

unconsciousness, idiosyncrasy and intimacy propagate the thought that the personal archive as concept should not be defined determinedly. Foucault who approached the concept of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge underlined the complexity of the institutional archive as well as one’s own archive by stating ‘It is obvious that the archive of a society, a culture or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively. On the other hand, it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, (…)’54_{. With this thought Foucault highlights a paradox}

entailing that an archive’s creator cannot employ the same syntax he used to structure his archive for describing it. In order words, the syntax inherent to the archive does not serve the purpose of describing it sufficiently.

This challenge, posed also by the personal archive, is interestingly pinpointed in the following question formulated by novelist George Perec (1974) in his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces in which he reflects on the everyday and the particular attention it requires by stating: ‘The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual. (…) How do we speak of these common things, how to track them down, how to flush them out, a tongue, to let them, finally speak of what it is who we are.’55_{. In times where the world has}

become too fast, too novel, too diverse and too elliptical we must not go far lengths to find a subject of interest: ourselves. The reasons for artists to

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nevertheless pursue the interrogation of the personal archive can have different motives. It is possibly the ‘urgency of visual information in the age of mechanical reproduction’56_{, it might furthermore be a method for}

understanding the self in more depth. In an environment where behaviour is also guided by external factors such as technology, our own behaviour again becomes intriguing. As a result art takes on the challenge of representing something, which is difficult to describe in the endeavour of creating a mirror for the self.

Through the following case studies I want to analyse the relationship between artworks and the personal materials of a person. By investigating how four different works of art reflect upon the personal archive while almost functioning as conceptual tools for understanding it in depth, I want to explore how this complex concept can be approached. In Metamorphosis I analyse the artworks of the artists Hans Peter Feldmann, Amie Dicke, Walid Raad and Susan Hiller. While Hiller gives insight into the effects of invading the personal realm, Feldmann is mostly concerned of what to discover inside. Amie Dicke surprises with being concerned with one specifically chosen characteristic of one particular personal archive, and Walid Raad lets us recognise the labyrinthine effort one must invest to raise above the archive, to fully understand. The four different endeavours will be elaborated in depth in the following chapter.

2 | Metamorphosis

This chapter introduces the artistic processes of four artists. Its purpose is to give an impression of how artists encounter different personal concepts such as a personal collection of Freud, the personal handbag of a stranger or the personal collection of a historic icon and how they individually choose to work with what they encounter. Furthermore, this chapter presents the work of Walid Raad which is exceptional as it uses the personal not as subject but as a rhetoric device. It becomes evident that the different examples are not strictly using the concept of personal archives as introduced in this thesis. Be this as it may, they give relevant counsel on how to register and transform the personal, making them useful in comprehending the possibilities of addressing accumulations of materials that fall under the term personal

archive. On the basis of catalogue and Internet research, in the following

chapter, I attempt to analyse my observations and put my impressions into writing to comprehend some of the possibilities of artistically communicating with the personal in more depth.

Things

Money, buttons, ballerinas, sunglasses, lipsticks and keys. Money, business cards, earphones, a map, a little note and keys. Money, cigarettes, candy, a notebook, a hairbrush and keys. Money, gum, receipts, a pocket mirror and keys. The work of art entitled Handbag as Museum is an installation featuring several arrangements of objects that all originate from women’s handbags (see images 2 and 3). All together they present a great variety of objects, which differ in function yet also in how easily we make sense of them. Some might be understood as regular everyday items, which require little explanation. Some are loaded with hints, some more obvious than others. The eye, which recognises that a theatre tickets was used in Berlin, for instance, is able to form conclusions such as a handbag’s location before its acquisition. Finally some objects contain unreadable knowledge found in closed diaries or rumpled receipts. Some objects conceal their information, some generously offer it for inspection, and others are so peculiar that they refuse arbitrary interpretation.

Arranged on black surfaces, these objects lie side by side, each in its own way, influencing a unique constellation. It is an experiment undertaken by German artist Hans Peter Feldmann who purchased several handbags from women, in order to display their contents at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2012. With his work he demonstrates how the conventional handbag is more than a practical solution to carry our daily objects.

They remind of a time capsule safeguarding frames of a person’s everyday life, which result in material collections from days, weeks or months of an individual’s personal quotidian culture. As such they constitute a space of intimacy built on the relationship between owner, bag and its contents. It is an intimacy that develops for different reasons. Firstly, handbags contain matters, which usually remain hidden. Not necessarily because they are bizarre or unusual, yet in contrary because they represent our humanness and communicate that we all share common habits. These usual details of life disclose our vulnerability or imperfectness and hence become highly personal to us. Secondly, intimacy develops once the handbag carries and conceals some of our habits: it opens up a different space for possible mannerisms, which we might prefer to hide away, such as our sense for order.

Feldmann uses all of this to conduct an experiment: What is initiated once everyday objects are displayed and once intimacy is diminished? The first element implemented by Feldmann is the glass showcase. He uses it to initiate a process, well described by the phrase: ‘A tiger in a museum is not a tiger, but a tiger in a museum’. What anti-museologist  Kenneth Hudson,

known for his innovative approaches of addressing also controversial sides of the museological discourse, is referring to with this phrase, is the process of

musealisation. This notion describes the functional change objects undergo

when being institutionalised and displayed, when passing through the metamorphosis from being an object into becoming a museum object. Transferred from the handbags into an incomparable and increasingly static surrounding, the objects’ function has shifted: Objects in movement and in use become static objects on display.