Welcome to Issue Fifteen of Related Materials
Unicode, leather jackets and cardboard - just another month in the archive
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
Greetings to friends old and new. It’s been a while since my last newsletter as I was writing my conference paper at the last minute preparing for the Born Digital Collections, Archives and Memory conference that was held at the University of London in April. If you’re interested in my thoughts on how CD-Rs bridge the gap between physical and digital archives, my paper from the conference is now up on my website, and the site as a whole has had a general refresh.
On with this month's three vaguely-related-to-archives things!
Reading: multidimensional citation by Laura Coombs, Laurel Schwulst, and Mindy Seu, 2002
Kicking off this month with an essay recommended by Christina Crowder in her presentation at the afore-mentioned conference, as she talked about digital heritage projects run by the Klezmer Institute. She described how they came across this essay partway through the project and it excited them as a way of trying to describe the complex lineage of klezmer melodies.
The essay describes the use of the ⋱ symbol - in Unicode, the “Down Right Diagonal Ellipsis” (U+22F1) - to convey, describe and explain the genesis of ideas through citation. Starting with the desire to correct a mis-remembered quote, the trio explored the potential of the symbol to express how multiple people contribute to an idea:
“Our mark (⋱) is similar to an ellipsis (…). When used within a quotation, an ellipsis depicts something omitted. Relatedly, ⋱ can be thought of as a prompt that asks, “Who is missing?” Through its form, ⋱ also acknowledges its imperfection. Listing a few names may not come close to recording the vastness of the network of people who helped surface an idea, but it’s a start. In other words, ⋱ is not necessarily a call to look up each person cited, but rather an acknowledgment that no one comes to an idea alone.”
I was straight away reminded of the passage in Foucault about reading Borges’ quotation of a ‘certain Chinese Encyclopedia’ which classifies animals into a series of unlikely, impossible and overlapping categories (if you’re unfamiliar with it, the full quote can be found here). I was introduced to that multi-citation paragraph by Dr Sara Dominici and then later came across exactly the same quote published in Charles Jencks’ introduction to Bizarre Architecture - except he was referencing E. H. Gombrich’s quotation of the same passage. I quoted Jencks referencing Gombrich in my introduction to the archive but now feel like I somewhat bottled-out of referencing the whole messy chain.
Explaining the context of a record’s creation has always been at the core of archival description, but the current framework - ISAD(G) - has struggled to keep up with the modern complexity of archives. It, and the software based on it, requires a one-one relationship between creator and record that doesn’t allow for all the things that make archives fun.
As an example: it seems to have been fairly common practice in the 1990s to reply to a fax by annotating your answer on the bottom and faxing it back. Now imagine you’re cataloguing this and you only have one field labelled ‘Creator’ in your archival software. The best you can do in this scenario is to put both sender and replier in the creator field, but with no opportunity to explain the relationship between the two people involved. Then consider the same process but with a contemporary email chain, and you can quickly see how the digital record becomes like a game of exquisite corpse, except with all the previous contributions visible.
The use of ⋱ is straightforward and explicable but also extremely unlikely to catch on in academic circles, not least because most people dread normal citations, let alone having to keep track of all their antecedents. However I applaud it as a general call to acknowledge wider networks and to think of how we can surface them in our work. (Archival cataloguing geeks will also see echoes of the new conceptual framework - Records In Context - in this approach, but that’s a discussion for another forum).
Exhibition: Bonnington Vitrines #27: Nottingham Subcultural Fashion in the 1980s, Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham (until 10 May 2025)
To Nottingham next, for the latest in the very strong series of Vitrine displays at Nottingham Trent University. This time the focus is on 1980s fashion, a subject that is currently looming large in the cultural imagination between the recent (excellent) Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern and the forthcoming Blitz Club show at the Design Museum. The Bonnington Vitrines show is not jumping on this trend, but reclaiming Nottingham’s place within the fashion eco-system of that time.
Nottingham has a long history with fashion - from its former status as the centre of British lace production to the start of the Paul Smith empire. Perhaps emboldened by Smith’s success in the late 1970s, several graduates from Nottingham Trent University stayed on in the town to run their own labels rather than being lured away to the capital. Through archival material, mostly sourced from private collections, the exhibition explores the conditions that enabled that the Nottingham scene to thrive. Just as Outlaws highlighted the importance of Kensington Market as a space to sell and buy fashion, and Taboo as a place to wear and see fashion, Nottingham too had its own network of shops, clubs, and even its own (short-lived) press. Fashion requires a community to exist.
These conditions are described in detail in a series of essays by Ian Trowell commissioned by the gallery alongside the exhibition. Trowell’s memories will be both deliciously and painfully familiar to anyone who took their first tentative fashion steps in a small town pre-internet (Canterbury and a pair of blue PVC trousers in my case). Trowell also uses his own personal archive to explore how fashion is captured - through photographs, through his diaries - when the clothes themselves don’t survive (thankfully my trousers do not).
Alongside the invitations, fabric samples, advertisements and photographs in the vitrines are a number of national (=London-based) glossy magazines. As well as featuring the clothes of Nottingham-based labels in photoshoots, many ran features on the scene, including interviews with the designers. I’ve been thinking a lot about magazines at the moment as I’m knee-deep in architectural ones in the Jencks’ archive and also reading a memoir of working at the Japanese magazine 花椿 in my spare time. The Bonnington Vitrines show points to magazines’ curious status as both documenting and creating sub-cultures. Trowell’s essays mention visiting certain shops because he’d read about them in i-D magazine (the relaunched version of which also ran a nice piece on the exhibition). These shops had to exist for the magazines to write about them, but they probably wouldn’t have survived long without the magazines generating more demand for them. Magazines therefore exist as slightly untrustworthy witnesses in the archival landscape - is it featured in the magazine because a movement is happening, or is the movement happening because it’s featured in the magazine?
The exhibition closes this Saturday; but if you can’t get there in person the online sources are well worth your time.
Exhibition: Naer Het Levin by CFGNY at Hot Wheels, London until 25 May 2025
And finally, from the archive of a community to a speculative archive created by a collective. The new show at Hot Wheels London by CFGNY, an artist collective founded in 2016 who [to quote their bio] ‘continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian”: an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other’.
Naer Het Levin is an extraordinarily multi-layered show - both physically and conceptually. Displayed within a wooden structure referencing the the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum are multi-authored pencil drawings and cardboard furnishings and ornamentations, left deliberately incomplete. The drawings themselves are still lifes, playing with notions of China that exist in the West - from luxury and the exotic to mass production and foreign-ness.
The drawings, passed between members of the collective (again, the exquisite corpse), include depictions of both contemporary trinkets and a 17th century travelogue. The travelogue was produced by a European who never left the confines of the port, and later supplemented by his publisher who’d never set foot in China. Like the fashion magazines discussed above, these type of sources inject an instability into the archive - both a kernel of truth that is then distorted through its reproduction and a fundamental untruth made into historical fact.
The gallery's location near the British Museum, and the wooden display structure gives a sense of having stumbled into a forgotten museum storage loft where, instead of dust, the contemporary world has seeped into the past. Highly recommended.
Bonus track: Exquisite Corpse 1 by Tara Clerkin Trio [Bandcamp link]
A fairly easy choice this month, by the Bristol-based Tara Clerkin Trio and released as part of the multi-authored album The Hearing Experience. Broadly falling into the jazz/experimental category of your local record shop, this extended track goes through at least ten sub-genres during its 9 minutes.
Thanks for reading, and I'll try to make it less than three months before the next issue.
Anna