Dogs have Barkives, Cats have Meowseums

I am drawn to the aura of Tacita Dean’s work, specifically the process, particularly with Girl Stowaway. I am sure there exists, in a vacuous alternate dimension devoid of chaos and serendipity, a boring version of an archival art piece which resurrects a historical Jeinnie, projected in a wall-to-wall carpeted gallery cave where humans on awkward first dates sit squishily on that flat couch while looping fluorescent assaults of the ken burns effect gradually make them realize they learned everything they needed to know from reading the embossed didactic glued to the wall. Deep in the throes of trying to impress one another with pseudo-intellectual endurance for art gazing, each first-dater hopes the other will initiate the gesture to move on. In the real world (in this dimension, or as marvel nerds call it, earth 616), Dean’s work is catchy and vibrant. Why? I cite captured coincidence.

The extroverted making of art (and perhaps, due to its pensive and temporally absorbent nature, archival art) might be the best exercise we have for trapping exotic, wild coincidences for dissection under epistemological and existential microscopes, to be prodded and picked apart by whatever theory pierces the skin, hoping to bottle any organs of intellectual merit.

Unpacking my own experience of exposure to Dean’s work suggests Girl Stowaway as a piece takes many forms across its scope, including the form of journalistic reporting on what feels like lived performance art and true crime investigation and testimony. Where Stowaway ends or begins as art, whether it exists on visual media, or through story, or in interview about either (or all of the above), is not easy to pinpoint. In the middle of a course brimming with examples of well ordered orders and neatly cataloged catalogs, I find that difficulty to be refreshing.

While I understand the broad labeling of this sector of art as archival, I do not understand how fabricating your subject’s history (which she did, and which I am ALL FOR!) does not constitute a disqualification of sorts. We have explored how empirically flexible the archive can be compared to its dusty colloquial stereotype, but I still feel as though, for the sake of its own historicity, archival should be an adjective associated with minimal invention, fabrication, or fill-in-the-gaps creation. Foster describes archival art as art that “not only draws on informal archives, but produces them as well”, and I took informal to mean still possessing a reasonable degree of empirical integrity. I seem to still have this childish definition hammered into my head in verb form; to preserve a subject in its congenital truth, or to freeze from all subsequent biases. Susan Breakell explains that archive as a verb did not exist in her dictionary before 1988, and the use of it as such generates lexicological discomfort. That discomfort is the type of sensation, one of casual grieving for the loss of a reliable concept, that archiving should effectively preclude, no?

NO. Of course not.

The fabricated can simultaneously be the most integral part of archival art, and a vehicle for truths. Consider Cheryl Dunye and Zoe Leonard’s piece in which the fictional Fae Richards is invented and brought to life through the presentation of an archive of her life as a lesbian African American actress and singer in golden age hollywood, amalgamating the true experiences of many under one persona. It is a work of art that showcases the ability for its format to double as fiction and fact, discussing very resonant themes for black female artists of that (or perhaps any) era in a manner that may exceed the profundity of an alternative piece based on any single, historical individual.