I have already started to post some initial ideas here.

I would like to incorporate spirals into the archive somewhere as they are a motif I keep returning to. I would like to explore how they have been interpreted over time, but also how they represent time itself too. There are links there to the Spiral Jetty, Celtic symbology, geometry, astronomy that I would like to tie together somehow.

Then earlier in the course I did get into looking at desk, work and the history of the office. This is something that could be fascinating to archive and particularly linked to the recent global pandemic which made more people work from home and that boundary between work and home became more blurred. Expanding on that, maybe an archive of the pandemic itself as it was a hugely significant period in our recent history. I feel like I would do something very specific though as the pandemic itself is huge.

Then of course there is my love of the ancient Druids and linking it to Mnemosyne and creating a similar Atlas style but with Druid gods and goddesses and how they have been interpreted over time. Perhaps creating ‘fake’ photos to create their heritage.

I need to think on these and come back.

Description

Warburg’s attempt to ‘map the afterlife of antiquity’, focused on the renaissance. He chose Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the muses, as the patron saint of his project. Warburg created large black panels onto which he attached black and white images in a kind of grid. The photographs grouped together showed various appropriations of art objects and things such as developments in the representation of Mars over time.

It is a map of how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Focusing especially on the Renaissance, the historical period where he found the struggle between the forces of reason and unreason to be most palpable, Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the “polarities” that riddle culture and thought. Warburg believed that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights.

The Atlas functions cartographically, too, as it explores how meanings are constituted by the movement of themes and styles between East and West, North and South.

In its “last version,” the Mnemosyne Atlas consisted of sixty-three panels. Using wooden boards, measuring approximately 150 x 200 cm and covered with black cloth, Warburg arranged and rearranged, in a lengthy combinatory process of addition and subtraction, black and white photographs of art-historical and cosmographical images. Here and there he also included photographs of maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images drawn from newspapers and magazines. The individual panels, in turn, were then numbered and ordered to create still larger thematic sequences.

The actual panels of the “last version” are no longer extant; only black and white photographs (18 x 24 cm) of them remain, held in the archives of the Warburg Institute.

Reflection

This piece absolutely fascinates me. From a cultural, historical and emotional point of view. I find it incredibly interesting to see someone think about the Renaissance and links to the classical period like this, Greek myths are a huge interest of mine and I am always interested in how the Renaissance took some of these images. It goes back to an earlier thought I had in the course about doing something similar but with Celtic mythology. What fascinates me about the Celts is their almost been forgotten unlike the Greek and Roman Gods. Why is this? What would a Renaissance reimagining of Celtic gods look like?

References

Johnson, C. (n.d.). About the Mnemosyne Atlas | Mnemosyne. [online] warburg.library.cornell.edu. Available at: https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about.

Johnson, C. (n.d.). Aby Warburg | Mnemosyne. [online] warburg.library.cornell.edu. Available at: https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about/aby-warburg [Accessed 31 Jul. 2022].

ZKM (n.d.). Aby Warburg. Mnemosyne Bilderatlas (English) | 2016 | ZKM. [online] zkm.de. Available at: https://zkm.de/en/publication/aby-warburg-mnemosyne-bilderatlas-english [Accessed 31 Jul. 2022].

Reflective Notes

Idiosyncratic collections probing into particular figures, objects and events. There are many examples in art of these archival impulses. It was active prewar and even more so after.

In the first instance archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. They elaborate on the found image, object, and text, and favour the installation format as they do so.

Sometimes archival samplings push the postmodernist complications of originality and authorship to an extreme.

Yet the term also suggests a changed status in the work of art in an age of digital information, which is said to follow those of industrial production and mass consumption. The ideal medium of archival art is the mega archive of the Internet, and over the last decade terms that evoke the electronic network, such as “platforms” and “stations,” have appeared in art parlance, as has the Internet rhetoric of “interactivity.

The archives at issue here are not databases in this sense; they are recalcitrant material, fragmentary rather than fungible, and as such, they call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing.

In this regard archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute
origins than with obscure traces.

Further, it often arranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects (again, platforms, stations, kiosks . . . ). Thus Dean speaks of her method as “collection,” Durant of his as “combination,” Hirschhorn of his as “ramification.

Through mutations of connection and disconnection, this art also serves.

In a sense, Dean’s archival work is an allegory of archival work-as sometimes melancholic, often vertiginous, and always incomplete.

Perhaps the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other utopian ambition-its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place into the no-place of a utopia.

Key Points

• An archive is not just a database. It needs careful culturing and selection of materials.
• Archiving isn’t new.
• It is also different to curating a museum display.
• The development of an archive can be as interesting as the finished product.

My Thoughts

After reading the article I think I have a better understanding of what an archive is. Before reading I was thinking more along the lines of a database or museum collection but I think there are distinct differences. The creative process involves selecting and constructing the items. You aren’t just cataloguing everything you find or make about a certain subject. The process is more about careful consideration of what goes in and how that item tells the overall story. You aren’t just there to offer a balanced opinion like a museum collection would. An archive can tell a very political story if needed. Of course, everyone will make up their own mind after experiencing it, but you shouldn’t be afraid to make a statement through it.

Examples

One item I made which immediately springs to mind is a quilt I made out of my daughter’s old baby clothes. At the time I didn’t think of it as creating an archive but it has many of the qualities. I didn’t just make it from all of the clothes, but there was careful consideration about which pieces to keep. It is a quilt full of memories that evokes a feeling of nostalgia when I look at it. She uses it regularly too – hence some of the holes! It is very much a living piece. When I made it, it was out of the need to be able to keep some of the clothes but in a useful way as I wouldn’t have had the space to keep everything, and if I did then they would have been hidden away in storage. By making this, it meant I a regularly reminded of a time gone by.

References

Foster, H. (2004). An Archival Impulse. October, 110, pp.3–22.

According to Sue Breakall an archive is….

‘time and space bound, perpetually connected to events in the past’

Sue Breakall, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’, Tate Papers no. 9, Spring, (2008).

Artists often use archives to present and produce their work.

The word ‘archive’ comes from the Greek for governments as they were traditionally historical records kept in a physical location. The digital era has changed that and archives have become much wider spread.

Archives typically consist of ‘ephemera‘, that is items which weren’t initially intended to be kept for a long time. In the process of storing them in an archive, they are given a new status.

Jeremy Deller’s work An Injury to One is an Injury to All, is an installation, perhaps even a kind of collaborative performance work, but it can also be seen as an archive. Deller is recreating an event from the past, in the present. He uses people and their stories, newspaper reports, and memories as archives from which to represent a historical moment, which then becomes an archive itself.

Natural Disaster Archive

One type of archive I came across recently was archives made by Digital Humanities projects to document natural disasters. Archives such as UC CEISMIC.