Welcome to Issue Eight of Related Materials
where everything is at least a little bit archival
Hi, and a warm welcome to both new and old subscribers. I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
In this newsletter I think aloud about three things I’ve watched, read, seen or heard in the last month and how they relate to the work I do with archives. As trailed last time, this is going to be an unusually reading-heavy issue as we’ve just adopted two cats who don’t believe humans should be moving very often.
Reading: Scrap by Calla Henkel (Hachette, 2024)
We’re starting today in the Thriller section of my local library, which is definitely not my natural home. However Scrap is not a normal thriller. Written by artist Calla Henkel, I was immediately drawn in by the blurb:
Recently dumped and stuck with the mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. […] The conditions: Esther must include every piece of paper she’s been sent, must sign an NDA, and must only contact Naomi using the burner phone provided. […]As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the near-two hundred-boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family – until, mid-project, Naomi dies suspiciously.
You say scrapbooking and detritus, I hear: archives. Especially since this newsletter was a project born out of an intense two-week stint of listening to podcasts while boxing up papers in a Scottish garden.
The material for the scrapbooking project has (deliberate) echoes of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, where the artist swept whatever was on his desk at the end of the month into a box and sent it off to storage - including correspondence, drawings and pizza dough. Naomi Duncan’s husband is a minimalist who doesn’t want anything cluttering up their immaculate home, but she has been secretly collecting everything and now wants to present it to him on his birthday as a gift (or does she?). It also references one of Henkel’s previous artist projects where she and Max Pitegoff photographed their friends’ tax receipts in a domestic setting.
Despite a few mentions of Derrida thrown in for good measure, of course, this is not really a novel about archives (not least since one of the provisos is that Esther can’t throw anything away!). Esther’s scrapbooking job is a device that provides her with access to knowledge about the family that she wouldn’t otherwise have. In this way the book reminded me of the (absolutely terrible) Netflix series Archive 81 which sees an AV archivist hired by a wealthy individual to preserve a series of VHS tapes - again, with a series of strict and bizarre conditions about how the project was carried out.
In both instances, the archivist-type role is seen as someone who has privileged access to intimate information, to the extent that strict boundaries have to be placed on that trust. In each case, the archivist oversteps those boundaries and becomes obsessed with the subject matter. “I reminded myself to take a breath; it didn’t matter. It was just a job.” says Esther in Scrap. What both Archive 81 and Scrap accurately convey is the (sometimes) unrelenting repetitive nature of archives work, and how it’s easier to care about the collections if you care about the people who created them. Some degree of emotional involvement is inevitable.
What they get wrong is that, to the best of my knowledge, there aren’t incredibly wealthy individuals lining up to give out well-paid work like this; but if you are one of those individuals, please call me! If I notice any evidence of a murder I won’t tell anyone, I’ll be too busy listening to J-pop. Scrap is great fun and I recommend it for your summer holiday reading list.
Reading: On Listening in to the Scientific Mundane by Rebecca Collins (Performance Research, 28(4), 130–138 [Open Access, I think?]
Embedded as an artist-in-residence within a physics laboratory, Collins listens in to the mundane in two ways. Firstly to black matter, a substance which is all around us but poorly understood by physicists - she recounts a senior physicist proposing a toast to being closer to knowing what dark matter is not. And secondly, to the nature of scientific experimentation: while laboratories communicate to the public through the spectacular, most of science is anything but.
Little flashes of recognition lit up my eyes as I was reading this, as archivists are often drawn by our organisations’ PR department into communicating in a series of ‘firsts’ and ‘discoveries’ rather than the (literally) quotidian reality of our collections. I previously touched on the parallels between scientific experimentation and archives in Issue 4 of this newsletter, so I was excited by Collins’ notion of listening-in as moving away “from representations that frame the unknown as stable and certain” and the spectacular, towards “the mundane procedures…and lengthy logistical processes”, archives having A LOT of the latter.
Collins describes her practice as “invested in exercising attention” and concentrating on an “ethics of relationships”; in particular, she attends to the “collaborative work of living”. These descriptions of the listening-in process, of working as an eavesdropper, also share many echoes with that of the archivist, as hinted in the discussion of Scrap above. Our work sees us surrounded by a multiplicity of voices each day, trying to tease out and understand the relationships between them. Yet Collins also emphases the active role of the listener, not knowing yet what effect her listening will have on the laboratory who is hosting her.
The archivist as listener-in would therefore be someone who is both attentive to the mundane in their collection, and conscious of their own activity within and on it. Collins ends by positing that attentive listening can be practiced as a form of positive resistance against global logics and imposed hierarchies. This is, of course, particularly relevant to a profession that *literally* imposes knowledge hierarchies upon the collections we care for. While changes are in progress for new ways of presenting our metadata, in the meantime we can be deliberate about which voices we’re choosing to listen to and how we represent those relationships, as well as resisting the simplified, spectacular, narratives that it can be tempting to draw from our collections.
Watching: Bernard Leach films Korea and Manchuria, 1935, with commentary by Professor Lee Ihn Bum, Sangyung University, Seoul [Original film from the Mingei Film Archive, currently on display as part of the Art Without Heroes: Mingei exhibition at the William Morris Gallery, London, UK until 22 Sep 2024]
Before we collected the cats and I stopped leaving the house, one of the exhibitions I made sure to see was Art Without Heroes: Mingei at the William Morris Gallery. I was particularly excited about the exhibition design by Hayatsu Architects, which absolutely did not disappoint.
Clay exhibition cases aside, the work that most stood out for me was this 17 minute film. While Mingei is most heavily associated with Japan, its growth as a movement coincided with a period when Korea was under Japanese imperial rule. The movement’s founder, Sōetsu Yanagi, had lived in Korea during the 1920s and opened his first museum in Seoul focused on everyday pottery. The exhibition at the William Morris Gallery seeks to re-centre the role of Korea within the Mingei movement.
British potter Bernard Leach filmed in Korea and Manchuria (also under Japanese rule at that time) on a visit with Yanagi in 1935. The footage is of daily life - markets, houses, pottery and clothes. Professor Lee Ihn Bum’s commentary expertly pulls together the conflicting values within this footage: no-one in Korea would have thought to film these scenes because they were so mundane so it required the eye of an outsider; but also, as a colonised country, very few Korean people would have had the wealth to own a film camera. Leach and Yanagi liked the pottery made for every day use in Korea precisely because it was poor and unaffected, and without them it probably wouldn’t have achieved such recognition. However, in recognising it they also took many good examples away with them where they can now only be seen in Japan.
The film is an excellent concise introduction to the thinking through the different viewpoints captured within many archive documents - the documenter and the documented - especially through the sharpened filter of colonialism. If you’re interested in understanding more about Japan’s rule of Korea, I can highly recommend Morgan Giles’ poetic and visceral translation of Yu Miri’s The End of August.
Bonus track: Beetroot Train by Philip Jeck and Chris Watson [bandcamp link]
I didn’t intend for this month’s newsletter to be themed on the mundane; in fact I didn’t notice the thread running through my selections until I started writing. But having realised, the only appropriate soundtrack I could think of was a piece based on field recordings, and no-one does them better than Chris Watson. This is from the Oxmardyke album based on Watson’s recordings at a rail crossing, which he worked on with Jeck shortly before the latter’s untimely death. Whereas most music based on field recordings veers towards the ambient, this track is almost pop in comparison. I was fortunate to see Philip Jeck play live several times, and treasure a memory of seeing him perform in the atmospheric surroundings of Wilton’s Music Hall.
That’s all for this month. Over the next few weeks I’ve got a ton of exhibitions lined up, including the particular exciting looking Paper Cuts at the Peltz Gallery - but do drop me a line if you spot anything that you think I might be interested in.
Thanks for reading!
Anna