“I think it’s a crime that Cage makes tapes at all,” says Nam June Paik as mentioned in Siegfried Zielinski’s AnArchaeology for AnArchives. I really stuck onto the humor and underlying meaning that this statement revealed regarding our tendency to preserve and urge for historical precedence. It reveals the true essence of art, a cataclysmic moment meant to be felt and understood in its present context and state. This is intrinsically tied to the work of Dieter Roth or “Rot”, whose work Insel (1968) is destined to diminish through natural decay, and forced to be felt in the moment. It makes me wonder in regards to performance and installation works, which function solely through the presence and interaction of the spectator, if their memory shouldn’t be preserved through documentation, but solely left to the trail of spectator experience and memory…Ann Hamilton, whose piece Mattering I found particularly inspiring, creates a physical and spacial layering of meaning, material, touch, and interaction. The part performance part installation piece questions the ties between the physical and the mechanical and the negative space these narratives get lost in. While I am captivated by the documentation, I wonder if this negates the ephemeral and performative intimacy that the physicality of the space offered.
As mentioned in Mattern’s Archival Aesthetics, Hamilton reveals her interest “in the hierarchies of our habits of perception”, where we have historically prioritized “the discursive structure of words” and textual information. But words are limiting, and somewhat inadequate at articulating or expressing human intuition and experience. It got me thinking about the impossibility of archiving religious experience or a “religion”, as it is purely created through individual experience. Historically, scriptures, texts and prophecies are perceived has being the primary tell all source of a “religion”, but the very human intuition that ignite those prophecies fall through the cracks, ultimately silenced by words. In Islam, the Quran and its scriptures are typically viewed as being the fundamental guiding source of Islam’s principles and truths. But the Quran did not originally exist in written nor textual form, but solely through a thread of memorized recitation, orally passed through individual practitioners. The Quran is thus stitched and printed through their voices, but are they heard? And how can an individual experience be archived-or even properly conveyed?
It was also an interesting experience to view Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue– with its endless layering of flattened meaning and context, through my laptop screen, yet another flattened plane of personalized layers of “knowledge”, tabs and applications. My own digital landscape became yet another tab lost in the narrative. It made me wonder if the physical space I embody, that which I share with my digital counterpart and the scattered physicality of my notebook, pen, and library book, are stripped of their physicality and dimensionality due to the ultimate reliance of the digital to process and formulate my once physical ideas.
Thank you, James! This is your fourth and FINAL post! Whoo-hoo! I really appreciate your thoughtful engagement with these texts. You raise a number of provocative questions: how do we — or should we — archive works that are meant to be ephemeral? How do we preserve performance or spiritual experience? I think our reading of Diana Taylor in early November will shed some light on these issues. And yes, our own screens merely add another layer of mediation to Henrot’s piece. While many artists would likely argue that experiencing their work on the small screen, outside a controlled setting, compromises the work, I imagine Henrot’s piece would only be enhanced by our viewing it on a laptop — or even on a phone.