Caring for the Archive

Through archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized. And archivists are an integral part of this story-telling...The power of archives, records, and archivists should no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability.
~Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook (Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory)

In our mad time, we must consider the control that those who work with and work from “The Archive” hold over us. When there is a loud and obnoxious call to return to times of “past glory” and confusion runs rampant surrounding a false “golden era” of recent history, it is imperative to prioritize considerations of our use and misuse of “The Archive.” Nostalgia runs on a fuel of archival material made new again, both re-enacted, re-imagined, and re-constructed. All those who choose to manage or use archival material must take into account their role in this, they must acknowledge this whether or not they choose to ultimately reject or embrace the responsibility. When we encounter the old made new again, we validate or invalidate the structures of our present, and begin the preparations for a planned future that will either mimic or refuse the past. Historically (and currently) marginalized and vulnerable voices are either silenced yet again, or are finally heard at last.
When artists choose to engage with archival footage, audio or text, they must necessarily approach this decision with care and awareness of the power they wield. In many instances, it is the artist themselves who are nostalgic for a prior time, often as obvious as their childhood, who embrace both outdated mediums and archaic subject matter that more often than not address subject matter that is firmly located in an arena of the past. How are these ‘content makers,’ ‘creative generators,’ ‘culture interrogators,’ and ‘curatorial distributors’ recognizing their role and then making progressive strides to counter the backwards slide off the proverbial cliff that threatens our desperate democratic institutions? It’s almost impossible to envision a society where the iterations of the past do not serve an agenda, but let it be permissible to picture a culture where those who are the keepers and users of history are asked to discuss and understand the implications of their work, and its role in contributing to a more ethical and just world or a deeper level of hell.
Recently, the MAR collective presented a project in Den Haag involving some of these vary aspects. They chose to create a number of short videos from only archival (mostly YouTube excavated) footage. The event surrounding the launch of a website that streams the 13 videos as one feature film, and the compilation film itself were an exercise in precisely these questions of “The Archive,” consisting of who uses, how they use, and to what end they use, that are so pressing in our current milieu. The singular videos, never more than three and a half minutes long, string together to make a roughly 45 minute “feature,” that reads like a swirling mash-up of images and audio cooing like lullabies for bored millennials. Ripped video games, gimmicky commercials, classic black and white movies, classic ‘art house’ cinema, how-to-instructionals, color-filtered science experiments, obscure cartoons, and 90’s home video vacation footage fly by accompanied by robotic voice-overs and poor quality auto tune or synth lab orchestral classics. From Bach to Back to the Future is the feeling one gets, served up or on the rocks, with a “Damn, don’t we just miss the days when women looked like Mia Farrow?” side of nuts.
The issue here is not that the individual artist’s use of dated material (which of course is hard to avoid when creating video work out of prior videos--all prior work is dated, yes) the issue lies with the lack of recognition of the need to ask how to position themselves as handlers of “The Archive” and their responsibility regarding our collective narratives. If any artist was interested in whether the substance of their construction could engender nostalgia or a longing for the past and what that might mean, it was not apparent and this sorely lacking element was hard to ignore. Additionally, the majority of videos contained conformist imagery that only reinforces a certain hegemonic impression over us. When pressed on these matters, the artist who goes by the moniker ‘Rebel Crowe,’ was both surly and uninformed, quote: “Categorically, I much prefer the past in fact. Contemporary life can feel incredibly frightening and it’s that very fear that I’m addressing in my work of course. Find me anyone who doesn’t want to watch things like Game of Thrones etc...when the world feels out of control, it’s easier to curl up with Netflix and wine.” The artist of today is neglecting the need to be troubled by their role in nurturing this urge.
The launch of a website, on the other hand, could be perceived as a fresher mode of creation and distribution for video work that expands beyond a simpleton’s trip down YouTube memory lane. The curation of the project hits a high note with the information of the impending degradation and gradual dissolution of the website holding ground for the compilation video. Within two weeks of the launch the videos return to their individual lengths, a week after that, they only remain as the raw unedited source material, in half a week they are back to pure screenplay/note format, and at last for only a brief day the site is empty, supposedly in honor of the memory that originated the project but additionally as a fertile holding ground for new ideas. This gesture is a nod to an awareness of the fragility, malleability, and unattainable nature of history and memory. It alludes to a worry that should be shared, an anxiety that should be mentioned, that we are guardians of archival material and must proceed with prudence.
To abstain from these concerns is indeed, taking sides in favor of the norm, the status quo of mainstream culture, and allowing a downward spiral toward demagoguery. Artists engrossed with “The Archive” need to confront, head-on, current intellectual concerns about intentionality, instrumentality, representation, and power.

A take on
Fred Moten's
Black and Blur; consent not to a single being
Chapter 9: ROUGH AMERICANA

In Moten’s ninth essay in the collection he considers a collaborative creative work in the form of an LP titled Rough Americana. Rough Americana is the (re)formed legacy of an improvisational performance by DJ Mutamassik and Morgan Craft recorded live in Brooklyn, NY in 2002. Through Moten’s writing, we encounter the album itself, as he gifts us with a phonic, emotional, poetic, and blurred impression. He highlights several of the ‘tracks’ and in succession relates his critical (non)interpretation with an impression/impact/memory for us to gain insight from.
Machines feature heavily in this body of musical work, and there is a general din of gruff (rough) sound in tandem with melody. Moten writes, “It’s not that every sound is in Rough Americana; rather, every sound is possible there, here.” In each listen to the entirety of the album, there is again the potential for the “extraordinary” as it enters a realm of “the everyday beauties and brutalities of a global sonic field structured as much by war and migration as by the constant insistence and celebration of the locale.” Moten finds the music propelled onward by the strain between its declaration of a “new and unenclosed musical commons and its depiction of the sounds that attend to the ongoing politico-economic enclosure.” He names this genre, Black Music. And he shares that he is “greatly tempted to call it Great Black Music, ancient and futorial, for the questions it raises.”
To Moten, these questions concern the how and what of the Rough Americana sounds as well as the who and where (we are). More importantly he asks, is the music good or is it good because of/despite the concepts surrounding it? Does this matter? He unravels these queries by highlighting the way the sounds carry and (dis)articulate the simultaneity of terror/pleasure that is incorporated and enfolded into itself. This is a crucial act for music that “gets with a program of refusal by refusing to get with the program.” It radically challenges the habitually normative calls for “authenticity” all while being undeniable. He then states that the music sounds good and that it matters “that and how it does.”
Then, in (re)calling the historicity of string musicality in the Northern American tradition (or rather, strings themselves) he troubles the ease with which with we might conjure that category up by listing all that has been done to strings. They have been “pulled, broken, bent, yanked, tied, bitten”...and so on. In Rough Americana, Morgan Craft begins the collection of sounds by demonstrating stunts with strings, and “the materiality of his imaginary playing is shocked and amped so that a whole history of enable technical disability comes out as a whole new virtuosity.” This takes place in front of blank screen on which a constructed background projects. At times Craft seeks to avoid this new soundscape and then suddenly he swerves into its heart. Simultaneously, DJ Mutamassik finds herself upending the conventions of the rhythm section, dividing and multiplying it. Worrying and violent, these tracks arrive at the limit and then proceed push past it into “failure.”
Describing the numbered tracks, Moten calls each a “portal between sets of scenes and series of illuminated phrases that gathered in the formation of a soundscape already given but composed, found but recombined, fugitively performed and on the run from preformation.” The creators here are working archivists, escaping the grasp, working ways out of, rather than into. It becomes a “sound(e)scape.” Searching continually, the open free land where one would move is virtual, space is creatively “re-fused” and sutured together in the silences, long and short that lie among the portals. A track titled “Air Raids,” features (as many do) a sample, but attempts to identify them do not matter to Moten. At stake instead, “is the profligacy of the break within a serialized persistence, imposed by the conventions of the album/CD itself,” which makes its own narrative with ideas of artistic work. This continuous break (itself consisting of breaks) constantly moves to complicate the concept of the whole, entirely.
But he goes on to write that any consideration of the break must be “mixed and remixed” with the awareness that its break with traditional sound/music happens through a “massive condensatory drive.” Out of it a fresh form of music and concept of time are born. The curated brokenness of the rougher cuts emerges from gains, losses and mergers. “Salvage, recovery, and invention situate against the placebo of bad, inaccurate imperial news.” After mentioning several other tracks including, “Amid Debris” and “Memphis USA,” Moten concludes the essay with expansions and additions to his original questions, these now regarding the “impossible being of what we listen to again, now, and have been listening to all along--the music of another common tongue, another common logic, another (natural and unnatural) common law.“ In cases like Rough Americana, where the soundscape pushes past the boundaries of all that is familiar, into lands previously unknown (to the historical landscape of “false universalities”) it becomes “possible and necessary to look for what one has come upon again, as if for the first time: the new thing, the other thing, the black thing that it takes a certain madness of “the work” to understand.”
“The New Black Music is this: find the source and then open it.”

The artist is truly also the curator, working with both sides of themselves to create something worthwhile. If one half were missing, it would not be possible to create meaningful work. The artist must forge a relationship with their inner curator as the wild and untamed must align itself with the controlled and restrained. How can you know what night is if you do not experience day? How can you tell that something is sharp if you have never felt softness? It is the contradiction of reality and existence that challenges us to be free---open to possibility and chance while simultaneously remaining steadfast and strong, rooted to some core belief even while we sway and move with the changing winds. In art making; the act of letting abandon in, letting everything go and making whatever the fuck you want. In curation; the act of pruning, arranging, rearranging, pruning even more all over again and choosing the best from the rest. The relationship between the curator and artist united in one person is the evolution of human potential, forged in the maturing possibility of creative art.

(thoughts on the the curator and the artist)