Connecting What Can/Cannot Be Connected

“Consider a temporary display cobbled together out of workday materials like cardboard, aluminum foil, and packing tape, and filled, like a homemade studyshrine, with a chaotic array of images, texts, and testimonials devoted to a radical artist, writer, or philosopher.“

This opening sentence to Hal Foster’s An Archival Impulse struck me immediately because I had this exact experience last weekend. While on a visit to the Catskills and doing some exploring I happened upon the Pine Hill Community Center in the tiny town (actually a hamlet) of Pine Hill, NY. Inside this building — which was the very epitome of what a community center should be, in my mind, as it contained: a library, radio station, free coffee all day, a bookshop (which was separate from the library?), computer lab, thrift store, dance floor, welding shop, etc., as well as several good humored people who were in deep conversation with one another about various goings on around town (I mostly overheard them discussing the health of various local/favorite trees and I loved it) — there was also a featured exhibition from an artist named Peter Mayer. I took a few photos which are here, here and here.

While the cardboard and aluminum foil were clearly prevalent traits in this work, the artifacts/images/texts were also present but required closer examination. The radical artist they were in tribute to, in this case, was the artist himself. This was a departure from the opening statement that Foster discusses in An Archival Impulse.

Foster’s densely footnoted article* is a survey across many artists and works of theory and criticism, with a focus on those who are drawing on “the archives of mass culture” and using the information artifacts within it to “inventory, sample, and share” in ways that present “a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory.”

I had not been previously aware of Thomas Hirschhorn or the tributes to philosophers via “interventions in public space” he has created in the form of alters and information kiosks. It was helpful to supplement this reading with Shannon Mattern’s presentation on Archival Aesthetics which presented an on-the-ground view on one of these, the Gramsci Monument in the South Bronx. This temporary installation was built in the form of a ‘complex’ near the Forest Houses of the Morissania section of the borough, which Foster would have likely and perhaps problematically categorized as a purposefully chosen host community of “minor status” — which Mattern also addresses. However, not unlike the Pine Hill Community Center, this installation included a radio station and a library, a computer lab and a snack stand, and more — and though this ‘intervention’ may have been built upon some queasy elements, it did have qualities that seemed to impact the host community in a positive way, as noted in the Archival Aesthetics talk.

Though the community in the South Bronx may not have been directly impacted by the actual works of Antonio Gramsci (the philosopher focus of Hirschhorn’s installation) during the duration of the project, Hirschhorn’s artistic motive and his method is quoted to be “to connect what cannot be connected” — a successful pursuit in this case, and an important consideration in the work of incorporating archival impulses into artistic practice.

Also just to quickly say that I loved learning about the work of Tacita Dean and especially the associative links and synchronicity behind Girl Stowaway.

* I intend to return to a lot of what is referenced in here!

One Reply

  • Thanks, Jed! And how exciting that you were able to see the “archival impulse” in action! Yet even though the Pine Hill Community Center did contain an art exhibition, I wonder if the site as a whole self-consciously employed the archival aesthetic. Was it calculatedly “cobbled together”? Did it “curate” the materials it inventoried, sampled, and shared? I wonder about the relation between “authentic” sites of bricolage — sites of improvisation perhaps necessitated by lack of resources — and Hirschhorn’s more calculated version. Glad to hear that both Foster and Dean provide a lot of food for thought!

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