APPLICATION: THE MAN WHO NEVER THREW ANYTHING AWAY

Regarding its relation to history, culture, politics and memories, it’s not surprising that many modern and contemporary artists have been using the archive as a topic, a context, a medium and an expression. The archive is no longer only defined through its academic and institutional contexts but also through what is no longer existed, or presented but kept and preserved of everyday life. [1]

Sue Breakell, in her talk The Archival Impulse, encouraged us to think as the archive both in popular and academic understandings. For her the dictionary definition of the archive as “a collection of historical records” no longer suits its present moment. Technology has democratized the institutional archive and expands it digitally, allowing one and all to collect and preserve their personal materials.[2] The archive, which was an instrument of governmental and colonial power, has now become a collective space of memories.

The archive has been conventionally understood as a formal of immobility, infused with concealment, enigma and authority. It houses inexhaustible designated documents and records that are kept in boxes, preserved but prorogued in time, anticipating to be discovered, rediscovered, and revived. As Susan Steward phrase it in Wunderkammer: An after as Before, “it is the relation to the past which creates the possibility of anticipation.”[3]

A huge part of the archival impulse has been to retrieve and readapt the existence, activity and materiality that the documents possess.

And yet, beneath the order and history that the archive works to maintain, lies ambiguity and chaos. One of the artists who is interested in this aspect of the archive is Ilya Kabakov. For his installation, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1996), he created an imaginary character who collected and kept all his ordinary, discarded items, and garbage, throughout his entire life. In the apartment space, which included three rooms, objects of all kinds accumulated yet are archived and organized in rather strict order:  they were systematically classified and arranged on desks, shelves, in sideboard, and on graphs that filled on walls. Each item was presented with a note that carefully describes its origin.[4] Still, the utmost order seemed like a frustrated effort to group and archive all the connections between the objects. The objects themselves seemed less appealing to be presented among the mass, however, together they challenged the notion of memories, and absence, of remembering and forgetting, which are usually associated with the archive. The act of retaining everything or dismissing nothing suggested a desire to hold on to memories, and conjured up nostalgias for a lived past. The objects were equally valuable. They were memories. And memories are equally valuable and significant like Breakell discussed.[5] Selecting is as stripping oneself of memories. The imaginary owner wrote, “To deprive ourselves of these paper symbols and testimonies is to deprive ourselves somewhat of our memories.”[6] Memories are interconnected and chained to one’s personal history. In this case the imaginary owner of the apartment refused to select his own memories.

Another aspect of the piece is the time-consuming and monotonous process of collecting, almost as an obsession, which pretty much parallels with the human consumption of objects and our current digital age of obsessive documentation. The installation is critiquing the process of selecting what to be preserved, what to be discarded, what is considered valuable, archival and what is not, all of which is usually controlled and obscured by institutions of power. Now when it is no longer limited to academy and federal, the archive can be built, selected and accessed and preserved both physically and digitally by majority of citizens. The archive has become more intimate and personal, just as Kabakov’s imaginary man’s apartment. The digital age has allowed us to easily document every moment, event and/or memory of our lives, together with organizing and storing it. Perhaps too easily, for that we have become obsessed with this process of documenting living moments no matter whether it is through texts, photos, or recordings.[7] We generate massive volumes of contents and materials constantly, in this process of retaining memories. Like the world the man lived in, our world is a “dump” of products of both our historical, physical and emotional consumption which are reflections of ourselves and our culture.

The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with no ends or borders, an inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbabe. In this refuse of an enormous city one can feel the powerful breathing of its entire past. This whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections, and fragments of culture.[8]

But like the man who collects everything, we are running out of space to accumulate memories. And like Breakell put it, “selection is inevitable, however problematic.” [9] We are facing a kind of archivist’s dilemma, having to classify our memories, trying to identify the garbage from the non-garbage and vice versa, that define both our personal and collective history.

The piece on the other hand, also reflected impression of the archive as “founded yet constructive, factual yet fictive, public yet private.” The garbage seemed personal yet impersonal. And though the objects each came with an attached history, their real identities and histories remained ambiguous and mystique. The ways they are chosen, arranged and labeled as a whole constructed a space of contemplation which is characteristic of the archive, described, by Steward, as a place of  “remembering, sifting, evaluating, shepherding, restoring”.[10]  This space consists of “found arks of lost moments in which the hereand-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.”[11] Letting go of past moments, or of garbabe is not necessarily refusing the person we was as the man worried, it could also open up creation of new memory and transformations of old ones. Breakell and Kabakov encouraged us to think of an archive not as something static but generative, continually changing and adapting. The imaginary owner of the apartment concluded in the end:

A dump not only devours everything, preserving it forever, but one might say it also continually generates something; this is where some kinds of shoots come for new projects, ideas, a certain enthusiasm arises, hopes for the rebirth of something.[12]

This optimistic view on the archive reflects the new archival impulse.