Interview with Martha Wilson

2011

Symposium: Artists’ Records in the Archives. New York Public Library, October 11, 2011.

Archives and Records, 2016

Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Dramatica, 2021

How to make the archives live again for a contemporary audience? Based on the writings of a famous historian, Arlette Farge, and on my own experience in working with archives I am arguing in this article that the archive researcher should take inspiration from artistic creativity and artists should pay more attention to the scholar dimension of their research, while both need to understand they are accountable to the next generations for which they need to re-write the historical narrative in a responsible way, as close to the truth as possible. Keywords: archival research, Farge (Arlette), reviving heritage, performing arts, historical narrative.

Stedelijk studies, 2020

2017

Author(s): Carbone, Kathy Michelle | Advisor(s): Gilliland, Anne J | Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of the inaugural artist-in-residence program (2013-2015) at the Portland Archives a Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon. Despite over the past two decades of abundant artistic engagement with archives, a concurrent increase in artist-in-residence projects within institutional archives, and a rich humanities-centered discourse about artists’ archival endeavors, significant attention has yet to be given by the field of archival and recordkeeping studies to the ways in which artists respond to records; to the kinds of conceptual, aesthetic, and physical work artists do with records; and, to the kinds of social and cultural relations into which archives enter through art practice, production, circulation, and reception. Moreover, the field lacks information about how people respond to records, what records can inspire people to do, what kinds of things can be done wit...

PhD thesis / University of Amsterdam / Faculty of Humanities (FGw) / Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (AHM) Contemporary art challenges the traditional idea of a musealium as well as institutional procedures related to collection care and preservation. Conventionally, visual artworks have been perceived as fixed, unique, material entities created and finished at a particular time, and museum approaches to collecting and preserving them were established accordingly. Nevertheless, contemporary art often resists this definition and undermines dogmas of material authenticity and artist’s intent, as well as the conviction that an object’s integrity resides in its physical features. Taking as its focus the triangle of relationships between an artist, a museum and a contemporary artwork as collectible, this study investigates how contemporary artworks by Mirosław Bałka, Danh Vo and Barbara Kruger are collected, documented and conserved in today’s institutions. It looks at how (and whether) new methods developed in the field of contemporary art conservation, such as the artist’s interview, are adopted by museums, and attempts to identify factors undermining their effectiveness. By looking at contemporary art as a new paradigm of artistic practice and building on notions such as musealisation, art project as art form and art object as document, this study works towards a theoretical model that address the incompatibility between a traditional museum approach to collecting and preserving and the features of contemporary art. By employing and extending concepts introduced by conservation theorist Hanna Hölling and the notion of ‘anarchives’ by media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, this study adopts the model of the ‘artwork-as-(an)archive’. Starting from the premise that our future understanding of contemporary artworks can only be constructed through traces of documentation, this model grants documents a status equal to that of art objects and obliges institutions to care for them on a similar basis. Besides its capacity to facilitate conservation, the artwork-as-(an)archive model is here considered as a space for collaboration between artists and museums, a space to be collectively shaped, filled and nourished that fosters transparency and inclusiveness.

Performing Archives / Archives of Performance, 2013

2013

Titled Archival Practices in Contemporary Visual Arts: A Model and a Source, the conference aims to gather contributions on archival art and archival research for contemporary art, considering them as two complementary aspects of a broad and complex field of investigation. On one hand, the archive serves as a structural model for artists from diverse backgrounds and engaged in various fields. On the other hand, authors' archives provide essential resources for historiographical studies on contemporary art, offering valuable information and direct testimonies. This dual focus necessitates engagement not only with the present but also with a relatively short historical span. The 5th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive invites scholars at any stage of their careers, as well as visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to reflect on contemporary archive-based visual arts and contemporary archival sources and collections. We welcome proposals for 15-minute theory and practice-led presentations (followed by 15-minute panel discussion) from various disciplines, including: photography, cinema and new media, art history and theory, anthropology, museology, philosophy, cultural studies, visual and media studies, and fine and graphic arts. These presentations should offer an in-depth investigation into the conference topic.

Photography and Culture, 2008