Currently watching: Pacific Standard Time Symposium: Artists & Archives at The Getty Research Institute 12/11/11
http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/e…
The keynote is from Sven Spieker: New Archival Practice.
He quotes Thomas Hirschhorn; “To connect what cannot be connected – that’s what my job as an artist is.”
He talks about the 1980s (romanticised) archive, considered as a random collection of artefacts and that the new archival practice is no longer archaeological study, with a move away from the notion of artist as producer. He describes the archival turn as disorientation in curatorial practice exemplified as showing (archival) documents of art rather than actual art (documentary realism). In the Q&A he outlines a return to the aesthetics of montage, collage and bricolage (a la 1920s Kurt Schwitters), a connecting of narratives rather than meta-narratives and the relationship to politics.
The second part is a series of artists’ talks from George Herms, Suzanne Lacy and Mario Garcia Torres. The most relevant to my research is George Herms’s talk which is an interesting introduction one of the founders of Californian collage art. “’Think of the American archives of art as your waste basket is what Paul Carston said to me in 1980.” he opens with. His works include The Librarian (1960) made from several books regularly thrown away on the dump in the North Californian town of Larkspur where he lived. He describes his work as “tossed salad assemblage.”
