Think About
What role does documentation play in your creative process? Has it always been this way? If not, how has it changed? How do you want the archive of your work to be experienced by future generations and artists? What is the difference between documentation and archive?
Play
This week I want you to Commit to a daily documentation of your process, and outcomes, even if never done before. This can be in any format (writing, photo, video, audio). I just want you to document what you do all week. These can remain private, or you can share them in our individual and group check ins. We will reflect on your experience at the end of the week.
Prompt One
Holding a camera, aimed away from you and ready to shoot, while walking a continuous line down a city street.
Try not to blink. Each time you blink: snap a photo. -Vito Acconci entitled Photo-Piece (1969)
Prompt Two
In 60 mins or less, create a performative piece of work in which the documentation alone is the artwork.
Prompt Three
Photograph the areas within your neighborhood that you find visually engaging.
Capture parts of your neighborhood that have changed since you have lived there and the parts that have remained the same.
Dig Deeper
Why It’s More Important Than Ever to Document Your Artwork, Artwork Archive
What do we know about art and history, and why do we know it?
As we are experiencing a global pandemic—a time that we will record in history books of the future—we’ve been thinking more about the power of recording present events.
Largely, what we know about the past is constructed by what has remained from that time—whether that's records, accounts, or objects. However, our understanding of the past is limited. Not every perspective, event, and creation lives to tell the tale.
In the 2020s, things are different.
Disrupting the Archive and Why it Matters to History, Artwork Archive
How have archives been constructed in the past?
Join us in critically asking how we remember and how we record history through artwork.
By looking through the lens of the “archive” and history-making, we can try to evaluate our present, account for gaps in the past, and begin to investigate alternative ways of writing history.
Traditional archives are not comprehensive. They are incomplete, inaccessible, and fragile.
Traditional archives tell limited stories and preserve select histories. Paper archives are housed in official spaces of authority and power like government buildings—or in an artist's case, a museum. Aside from being limited in their content, these archives are difficult to access and at risk for damage.
The Performativity of Documentation, Philip Auslander
Document or Artwork? A Panel Discussion on Archives in the Art World, Dedalus Foundation
Panelists:
Anna Gurton-Wachter, Archivist, The Keith Haring Foundation
Kate Haw, Director, Archives of American Art
Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Independent Curator, and Clinical Associate Professor of Visual Arts Administration, New York University
Paul Ramírez Jonas, Artist, and Associate Professor, Hunter College, CUNY
Moderator:
Julia Pelta Feldman, Former Dedalus Fellow in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, and PhD candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Out Side In: In His Arresting Work, Lyle Ashton Harris Looks to the Recent Past for New Ways Forward, ARTnews, Maximilíano Durón
Over the course of a decade or so, Harris’s accumulation of photos and videos became so extensive—some 3,500 slides, countless hours of footage—that he eventually gave it a name: the Ektachrome Archive.
AKA Daddy, Lyle Ashton Harris
Lyle Ashton Harris returned to performance in 2018 for the first time in over a decade with AKA Daddy, presented at Participant Inc. (New York), which included a new experimental multi-channel video installation representing a highly personal engagement with loss through ritual expressions of public grief and mourning.