![]() London-based artist Uriel Orlow uses film, lecture-performance, and installation to discuss images, memory, and narrative, and his work frequently intersects with archives. The relationship between art practice and archival structures has become a critical focus in terms of my own theoretical and practical explorations of image description, with the rules and methodologies of “archiving” becoming the practice.įrom a position inside the institution, both theoretical and material understandings of archival thinking and techniques can be afforded. For the last decade or more, I have been working within archives in a large university library, and during this time my practice has taken a distinct “archival” turn. Indeed, in his essay, “The Body and the Archive,” artist, theorist, and frequent writer on matters archival, Allan Sekula, when discussing the archival aspects of early physiognomic applications of photography, argues, “The central artifact of this system is not the camera but the filing cabinet” it becomes “a merger between optics and statistics.” 1 The techniques of image organization were becoming important and dynamic considerations in my own visual practice. Here, with one foot in technical media and one foot in collection management, I occupied a curious pre-digital space between camera, image, typewriter, and filing cabinet. As an artist, I was already a proponent of image sets, where notions of interdependencies and interrelationships between objects take precedence over the representational assets of the single image. ![]() My relationship with archives and image collections began with a five-year stint as slide curator in a London art school. The examples here, including my own, traverse material culture, cultural theory, performativity, and media archaeology-a thematic that is, after all, as pertinent to archives as it is to art. Although archive professionals may not be the expected audience for the practices discussed here, there may be an opportunity for the reverse flow of “work experience”: an unpicking of the methods and thinking of art research could be useful and constructive when taken back into the archive. It is also important to note that these works make space for complex and abstract thinking around images and image sets, and around language itself, whilst still maintaining the structural discourse of the archive at some level. ![]() It is a practice that does not oppose but instead utilizes and builds upon archival standards, and aspects of archival thinking permeate the various practices of artists cited in this essay, notably through the application of performative working methods that position their work within an established genre of indexing and categorization. ![]() Such work does not constitute radical thinking in terms of the archive but becomes radicalized by way of its passage into the milieu of art research, where traditional hermeneutical analysis generally persists. I will discuss how my appropriation of archival techniques of image description results in a “writing and reading” of the image that contests traditional art historical models of image analysis and appears radical when placed alongside them, if one is to understand “radical” as a departure from the norm. Whilst not wanting to initiate a discourse on specific artworks of my own in this limited space, there will be a detailed discussion as to how the associations between art, work, and archives have become central to my own practice and research. I will demonstrate how visual practice can work with, and in consideration of, prescribed standards and open up theoretical debate that is pertinent to archives yet lies outside of conventional archive or art theory. A performative approach can be taken to the production of artworks that is comparable to that of the archive in terms of following a predetermined structure and controlled methodology, and with direct links to archival thinking. Work that takes place inside archives and work that is designated as art are often perceived as conceptually distinct practices, yet it is possible for the two to share common techniques and methodologies.
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