Welcome to Issue Nine of Related Materials
thinking out loud about archives
Hi, I’m Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher. Welcome to issue nine of Related Materials, a newsletter about things that I think are related to archives, even if no-one else does.
Reading: A materials- and values-based approach to the conservation of fashion by Sarah Scaturro [2017, open access]
In 2022, back when Twitter was still Twitter, I remember seeing my social media feeds light up in fury in response to Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala. In amongst the headlines, conservator Sarah Scaturro was one of the few professionals willing to add some nuance to the debate, arguing that - while this instance was probably a bad idea - there are specific conditions when historic garments can and should be worn, especially by indigenous communities. I was reminded of her work lately when Madonna kicked off another furore by implying on her social media that she had been allowed to try on some of Frida Kahlo’s clothes.
The 2017 paper I’ve linked to above looks at a slightly different issue. Here Scaturro seeks to define fashion conservation as separate from textile conservation by considering the values that are being conserved and not just the physical properties. She distinguishes between conserving fashion-as-object - the physical garment down to its individual threads - and fashion-as-system, the intangible context that surrounds and is comprised of the garments. Fashion-as-object always implies the presence of the body and its impact on the garments has to be taken into consideration, as well as its absence for display. Meanwhile fashion-as-system implies newness, ephemerality, and performance, which stand in contrast to the very notion of a museum.
The field of conservation, fairly obviously, operates as a parallel profession to archives and there’s a lot to be gained from reading each other’s theory and practice. For me, Scaturro’s distinction between fashion and textile conservation has echoes of the difference between preserving paper and digital records. In particular, lately I’ve been thinking a lot (probably too much) about physical digital records - CD-Rs, floppy disks, memory sticks. Like fashion’s dependence on the body, these records imply the existence of additional hardware in order to use them. While processes to retrieve the files themselves are well-documented in the digital preservation community, how much of the context - digital-as-system - is crucial for a researcher to be able to understand how they were used? And how do I convey this within existing descriptive standards?
Similarly, the idea of performance as a model for digital records has a long history within the archival profession, and crucial to this is defining what it actually is that we’re preserving. Is it the 0 and 1s that make up the file? The experience of viewing it? The experience of interacting with the data? With paper records, all of these experiences (roughly) coalesced but with digital they all require different processes. I’ve found adopting the framework of considering the digital file as-object and as-system is proving helpful to me in trying to define what I’m trying to preserve.
Exhibition: Expanded Pamphlets: Sara McKillop at Roland Ross, Margate, UK [exhibition continues until 21 June 2024]
Sara McKillop’s practice sits between sculpture and printed matter, working across both gallery shows and artist’s books. Her new show at Roland Ross in Margate displays large format artist’s books on the kind of folding tables usually seen at book fairs and car boot sales, while the books themselves comprise scans of stationery and nondescript crockery rendered slightly larger than real life and uncannily 3D looking.
The works have a push-me-pull-you sense of touch/don’t touch - books are made to be interacted with but sculptures aren’t; books on display are generally fragile and precious but the objects depicted here are every day and low-value. The way we display archives, with acid-free mounts and weights, creates a natural boundary; the aura asserts their preciousness. I find when I take archival material to events for handling sessions, I usually have to encourage people to touch the documents and turn the pages. Here, because of their association with browsing and commerce, the folding tables in McKillop’s exhibition invite touch while the gallery environment creates an aura of don’t-even-think-about-it.
I was particularly struck in one of the works by the scan of a CD - a digitisation process of a kind but not one which renders the contents intelligible or useable. It reminded me of the old tumblr account The Art of Google Books. For my younger readers, Google Books was originally a project to scan the libraries of American universities and make the contents available online, before pesky copyright got in the way. Like all digitisation, the process was incredibly manual and subject to human error. In particular the hands which regularly appeared in the scans, as the operator didn’t move quickly enough to keep up with the automation, became a hot topic of online discourse at one point. It’s amazing how much has changed in less than ten years - how much the digital is now taken for granted, along with the work required to create it.
If you’re in Margate for the exhibition, I can recommend getting breakfast or cake at Batchelor’s Patisserie nearby. Not only are the doughnuts good but the interior is from a decidedly non-digital era.
Exhibition: Paper Cuts: Arts, Bureacracy and Silenced Histories in Colonial India at Peltz Gallery, London, UK [exhibition continues until 12 July 2024]
In what might be a first for Related Materials, this is actually an exhibition explicitly about archives. Curated by Surya Bower, the exhibition has two components: firstly the display of material from the papers of Sottish engineer George Turnbull documenting his experience of planning India’s first long-distance railway. These are presented alongside works by two contemporary Indian artists, Ravista Mehra and Divya Sharma.
Turnbull’s papers express the kind of views you’d expect of an exponent of the British Empire: the railways are seen as an improving force, the local population as in need of improvement. Portraits and caricatures are named when showing British sitters but anonymous for the Indian men depicted, referenced only by their job titles. Yet in planning the railway line and what would become the second longest bridge in the world, Turnbull relied on local knowledge, both in using existing roads to determine its route and drawing (in both senses of the word) inspiration from bridge designs. You can read more on Turnbull’s papers here.
Of the contemporary works. I was particularly struck by Ravista Mehra’s (Mis)Infographics, 2021. As explained on the project’s website: ‘Misinformation’ in it’s essence is incomplete knowledge that goes to form wrongly accepted and distributed ‘facts’, which becomes the basis of the ‘history’ of humankind. A ‘(Mis)infographic’ is a or set of graphics, images, or texts that highlights the ‘tension’ in ‘information’. A presence of contrast is crucial in the formation of a (mis)infographic.
The (Mis)Infographics work from the Paper Cuts exhibition can be seen on Mehra’s website, presenting side-by-side representations of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre from both the British official and Indian Congress report. Both sets of figures are most likely misleading; the true number of casualties probably sat somewhere between the two but will never be known because it is unrecorded. The work reminded me of Amber Sinha’s excellent Homo Digitalis newsletter which lately has been specifically looking at the role of misinformation in India’s elections. While AI and deepfakes add a new dimension to political misinformation, exhibitions like this demonstrate that just because something is on paper doesn’t mean it’s implicitly trustworthy either.
Bonus track: Digital ∞ Tzunami by Lorenzo Senni [bandcamp link]
One of the fun things about writing this newsletter is that I don’t start out with a theme and it’s only when I’ve finished it that I’m like ‘hmmmm, that’s what I’m mostly thinking about at the moment’,. Increasingly it seems that the ‘that’ is often digital.
This is a great track by Lorenzo Senni, an artist and musician who plays with the euphoria of early 90s trance records to create a similar kind of tension to what I described in McKillop’s exhibition - this track is both perpetually a middle eight and perpetually on the cusp on exploding into a chorus until it just…fades out. I also particularly like that Spotify can’t manage the ∞ symbol - it brings back happy memories of looking at Japanese websites in the early 00s when they’d just be a row of unicode squares and an instruction from Microsoft to download the language pack.
As always thanks for reading, and for all the replies: suggestions of exhibitions, articles or photos of your cats are always welcome.
Anna