Welcome to Issue Fourteen of Related Materials
This month we're asking: if no-one looks at the archive does it even exist?
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
Starting with a quick announcement: on Thursday 27 February I’m leading an online seminar as part of the Society of American Archivists’ Archival Vistas Briefings series. Titled ISAD(G), Technology and Me, my talk will look at the impact of descriptive standards on my work over the last 20 years, a period which has coincided with the wide scale implementation of archival software.
If that sounds geeky - you’re correct, it’s going to be super geeky, I’m so excited. Regular readers will know that cataloguing and metadata is my thing, so I squealed when I received the invitation to talk for a whole hour on the topic. It’s open to everyone and you can register at https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/LY1DPr4DSpSNc03DcBcXHg#/registration The seminar will also be recorded and available on YouTube next month.
On with the newsletter!
Concert: Éliane Radigue/The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners at the Wigmore Hall, part of London Contemporary Music Festival 2024, 17 January 2025
I know, I know: this newsletter is supposed to be recommendations of the things to see, hear or read and here I am discussing a concert which has already happened. But wait! The good news is that the concert was recorded and will be on BBC Radio 3 later this year - you can sign up for a notification of the date at the link above.
The next question I hear you asking is: what is a futurist noise intoner? The noise intoners, or intonarumori to give them their Italian name, were invented by Luigi Russolo in 1913 as part of his attempt to make modernity happen faster and to ‘liberate Italy from the weight of its past’. They are mechanical instruments designed to replicate the noises of everyday life, separated from their causes, through a mixture of discs, strings and motors. Performed in London in 1914, the noise intoners were a disaster - less for the sound they produced than the lack of it. Without amplification they could barely be heard by the audience. Overtaken by a world war and the advent of electrical instruments, the original noise intoners were lost and became a footnote to history.
In 2009, for the 100th anniversary of Futurism, the Performa 09 biennial (under the auspices of Mike Kelley) commissioned replicas of the noise intoners and a concert of both original futurist pieces and contemporary works. The performance is documented on YouTube with an excellent introduction to the noise intoners and the opportunity to see them in action, which will be sadly missing when the concert is broadcast on radio - they are intensely physical instruments both in their stage presence and the requirements of the musicians.
The LCMF event brought the noise intoners to London for the first time at the Wigmore Hall - where in 1912 Marinetti had delivered a lecture on Futurism (in French), denouncing the ‘worm-eaten traditions of England’. Reconstructed, amplified, and with the extra frisson of knowing that the building carried those memories of Marinetti, the noise intoners were an exciting experience for the senses.
There is, however, an inherent tension to the project as the Futurists explicitly disavowed the past. How do you engage with the archive of a movement that rejects the archive? Does performing the instruments with the benefit of amplification allow them to finally fulfil their aim or defeat the point of them? Does using them to perform newly commissioned pieces deaden the sting of the very idea of reconstruction? Does it even matter how Russolo might have felt about the performance? To acknowledge these tensions, however, doesn’t take away from the thrill of seeing the instruments in action and emphasises the potential of the past to generate the future (sorry Marinetti).
Reading: Lote by Shola von Reinhold, (Jacaranda Books, 2020)
I’d had Lote on my reading list since it came out, but not got round to it because I spent most of 2020, 2021 and 2022 playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons instead. However I was prompted to finally read it after seeing von Reinhold’s excellent exhibition at 243 Luz in Margate at the start of the year, and managed to get a copy from my local library (yay, libraries).
Lote is a dazzling novel with the archive at its heart - words that I don’t often get to write. The protagonist, Mathilda Adamarola, starts the novel volunteering at an archive, sorting and cataloguing photographs. Honestly these pages were painful to an archivist; not because they were inaccurate, but because they were so accurate I was both mortified on behalf of my profession (although I think there’s a bit less cocaine use in real life) and dying of laughter. The action then moves to a residency programme in Europe which has, at its centre, an archive that no-one is allowed to see.
Adamarola is researching Hermia Drumm, a Scottish modernist poet and part of the 1920s Bright Young Things. The idea of fixating on the Bright Young Things will be familiar to those of us who caught the repeats of Channel 4’s Brideshead Revisisted TV series as an impressionable teenager (guilty as charged); however Drumm is Black and therefore has been written out of history. Rather than asking the question, did she exist?, instead the book asks, could she have existed? Can we allow the archive to include unruly bodies? Can we allow for black people to have existed outside the prevailing narratives? If Hermia Drumm has no archive of her own, how do we piece together her existence from the archives of other people, what leaps of imagination can we make from the existing evidence and where is that imagination held back by our existing experience?
Lote is, of course, a novel but discussing whether Hermia Drumm is fictional feels like missing the point. The book reminded me very much of visiting Dennis Sever’s House, with its motto of “You either see it or you don’t”. Sometimes it’s not the reality that’s important. While we wait impatiently for von Reinhold’s next book, her 2023 essay on the Dandy and Blackness in Frieze magazine is an excellent (factual) coda .
Exhibition: Safety Curtain by Alex Margo Arden at Auto Italia, London, UK, until 23 March 2025
Arden’s new show at Auto Italia references the contemporary targeting of artworks by climate change protesters. Neutral on the validity of the actions, the show instead considers how the protests form part of the history of those works. Usually quickly cleaned off and back on display as if nothing had happened, the damaged versions of the work live on in digital images - and now, also here in the gallery through specially commissioned replicas with their stains and cracks intact. A triptych of the Mona Lisa presents both the initial impact, and the hand stains of a security guard who tried to clean it, replicating the sequence of events.
This idea of replicas continues in the back room of the gallery where the work Backstage Campaign re-purposes crates that previously housed the Royal Academy’s collection of casts (similar to those in the V&A Cast Courts and also recently reinstalled at the RA) as if they were a crime scene of museum processes. In the accompanying essay Arden describes the process of the reconstruction and recovery of evidence, re-articulated to become a representation of the evidence rather than evidence itself. The protest actions which were designed to be conveyed through digital images have now become objects in their own right. Like the casts, they have their own separate history and eventually have the potential to be studied in their own right.
There are obvious parallels here to digitisation within archives, yet it’s notable that Arden feels the need to make the copies physical in order to legitimise the process. When we digitise an archival item, the digital object has two sets of metadata - the descriptive metadata that refer to its physical counterpart (‘the original’) and the ‘technical metadata’ which allow us to manage the digitised version. This technical metadata includes the exact date and time of image creation, giving the digitised version a much more detailed history than the original. I’ve written elsewhere about how and why I feel there’s a need to look critically at the practice of digitisation. I’ve managed collections which have already been through two rounds of digitisation in the last 20 years as technology has moved so quickly in that time. Just as the cast collections fell out of favour in the 1960s but are now being reappraised, I can see academic interest turning towards some of those early digitisation, as it has towards slides.
One response to this, as I’m trying to do with the Charles Jencks archive, is to make the archival process visible. Pull back the curtain and show the workings. Yet what becomes apparent is that often people want the theatre of the archive and the celebrity objects. Safety Curtain plays with many of these feelings through not just reproduction but also reenactment. In an essay* responding to the show, Hetty Nestor describes it as a form of citation - “referencing what has come before while bringing a new version into the present”. Which brings us right back to the noise intoners, where we started this newsletter.
*I couldn’t find this online (yet) so I encourage you to pick up a copy if you visit the exhibition
Bonus track: ポップコーン by MAISONdes x Hello Kitty [YouTube link]
In the last issue I promised an extended treatise on the Hello Kitty archive, after my trip to Tokyo to see the 50th anniversary exhibition, but in the end even I couldn’t bring myself to theorise it. It was cute. Extremely cute. So much cute. My main takeaway is….perhaps we should write fewer explanatory labels and just arrange our archive exhibitions by colour and that’s enough? Also, if you give people a ten minute time limit in the gift shop they will spend FAR more than they originally intended to. In the absence of an extended commentary, please enjoy this special anniversary song.
Thanks for reading! Send me a wave if you’re at my talk on the 27th and do get in touch with any exhibitions or articles that you think I might like.
Anna