Welcome to Issue Ten of Related Materials

a newsletter that's feeling self-congratulatory for making it to double figures

Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher. Welcome to issue ten of Related Materials, a newsletter where I discuss three things that have got me thinking about archives this month. Although I’ve only managed ten issues in a year so it’s a very loose definition of month.

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Exhibition: brecht: fragments at Raven Row, London, UK [performances until 28 July, returns only; exhibition continues until 18 August 2024, free]

When I saw that Raven Row had announced not only an exhibition from Brecht’s archive, but also performances to activate the archive, I may have emitted a small unsightly squeal and instantly booked onto a performance (and on my birthday, no less), such was my confidence that this would be marvellous.

Exhibiting archives is, unsurprisingly, a topic I return to often in these newsletters, usually with the same question: what are the archives meant to be doing here? Archives are not, on the whole, suited to display. Rarely does someone write something so interesting and pithy that fits one page, handwriting is difficult to read, bound volumes are meant to have their pages turned. Without careful use, archives can often seem flat and dull and lifeless and merely serve to lend the exhibition a vague air of authenticity - ‘x was here’.

On entering the ground floor of brecht: fragments and seeing the album pages I laid out, my first thought was ‘ah, they got lucky - he conveniently used loose leaves!’, cynic that I am. Yet what becomes clear from the accompanying exhibition booklet (the texts from which should be on the website after the exhibition closes, judging by previous Raven Row shows) is that this is not, in fact, lucky but absolutely inherent to Brecht’s method of working. “Part and parcel of this approach to writing” writes curator Phoebe von Held, “is a treatment of the manuscript where the unbound single page, or often just a scrap of paper, reigns over its contextualisation within the successive structure of a narrative plot.”

Even if you can’t read German (or, like me, remember worryingly little from 8 years of studying it), the exhibition does an excellent job of showcasing Brecht’s process. The aforementioned album pages demonstrate his accumulation of newspaper images for studying gestures; scripts are neatly cut apart and pasted back together with annotations and additions; the inclusion of images in his diaries make clear that these are working documents rather than private ones. In fact, the whole archive feels like a very deliberate act, rather than the traces and happenstance we (I) often associate with personal papers.

The performances which are taking place throughout the exhibition also focus on the piecemeal and unfinished qualities of the archive. Weaving together several incomplete plays and scenes, the audience are led through the galleries by actors performing multiple roles and regularly breaking the fourth wall. While I was quick to book my tickets, a part of me also feared some slightly naff interactions with the documents as part of the production, but these concerns were unfounded. Instead, what I found most thrilling was that the disjointed style replicated the feeling that I have as an archivist of opening a box with absolutely no idea of the contents in advance and then slowly leafing through. Voices recur, narratives stop and start, questions go unanswered, the archive never reaches a conclusion. Also the costumes are fab, it’s like being at a Vivienne Westwood show in the 80s.

The performances are now sold out but you might be lucky enough to get returns if you’re on the waiting list; however the exhibition is very much worth your time; and if you can’t get to London, I thoroughly recommend checking back on the website in September to look for the accompanying texts. I’m sure I will be returning to them many times in my work.

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Exhibition: Patric Prince: Digital Art Visionary at the V&A, London, UK [until 15 September 2024]

On a recent visit to the V&A to see their Tropical Modernism exhibition, and after a delightful digression through the jewellery galleries to see some of the amazing pieces from the Royal College of Art Visiting Artists Collection, we happened upon this display in a small unloved and barely lit corridor of the museum.

Utilising some curatorially difficult mid-century built-in wall cases, the display introduces Patric D. Prince, an American collector of digital art who donated her archives and 260 works to the V&A in 2008. Noticeably, while the term digital art conjures up images of screens and software today (and preservation headaches for archivists), this show is resolutely paper-based. Many of the works were made through CAD and plotters, either using computers to realise a vision or allowing the program to perform an element of randomness/decision-making. On display alongside the artworks are ephemera for the gloriously named CyberSpace Gallery which Prince co-founded in West Hollywood in 1992.

The introduction to the show on the V&A’s website makes clear that many of the works themselves were either meant to be or were treated as ephemeral, and Prince’s archive is often the only record of them, through print-outs pulled from bins or photographs of computer screens. Too often in archives the focus falls on big names and celebrities, whose papers only serve to elucidate and bolster their own importance. Collections like this of organisers rather than producers will often cast a wider net and tell you more about the networks and processes that enabled those bigger names to be successful.

There’s more about the collection on the V&A blog and an audio tour on Soundcloud.

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Reading: A Digital Feast: working with Archives, Collections and Recipe books edited by Heather Froehlich and R.A. Kashanipour [online, Open Access]

The relationship between food and archives is a tricky one. I mean, obviously we don’t allow food when you’re using the collections, but it’s also documented surprisingly sparsely. Or perhaps not surprisingly; it’s so every day that it’s not worth documenting. There are a lot of menu cards [I never want to catalogue another menu card in my professional life] and there are recipe books; but those don’t actually tell you what people are eating. I’ve probably made less than 5% of the recipes in my recipe book collection, although admittedly it’s fairly evident which ones those are as the pages are covered in splashes.

This collection of essays from The Recipes Project doesn’t seek to address that imbalance but it does look at some of the ways in which researchers are making use of or, my favourite essays, being frustrated by digitised recipes sources.

‘Pasta, Pasta or Maccheroni?’ gets into the nitty-gritty of searching metadata. When I was teaching students how to use digital archive resources, I tended to use examples around researching climate change to help them think about what it means to construct search terms. How the language around climate change has changed over time, and how you get different results searching specific issues like the hole in the ozone layer versus broader terms like Global Warming. (I’m really fun at parties, as you can imagine). ‘Pasta, Pasta or Maccheroni?’ looks at how, even on a database specifically for searching recipes, you aren’t quite sure if pasta is going to be treated as a type of dish or as an ingredient, and whether you’re going to need to search for each specific type of pasta by name…

The second half of the essay discusses how, even though librarians have whole bibliographic systems for dealing with these kind of issues, they still come across issues around standardising vocabulary, leading onto discussions of the semantic web. It’s all super geeky and I love it. This would be a great essay for introducing students and new researchers to the joys of archival and bibliographic databases and helping them to tease out why they’re not getting the results they expected.

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Bonus track: Einstürzende Neubauten - Der 1. Weltkrief (Percussion version) [YouTube link]

In 2014, Einstürzende Neubauten released Lament, one of the few art projects commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War One that didn’t fall into either mawkishness or jingoism. Considered by the band to be a studio reconstruction of a live performance rather than a studio album, while it’s available on Spotify and other platforms, the link above takes you to a YouTube video showing Blixa Bargeld’s introduction to this particular piece, as well as a chance to see the instruments specially constructed for it. The album was rigorously researched and in this particular track every beat you hear represents a day of the war, with the names of countries entering the war and specific battles read out over the top. It manages to be devastating, beautiful and fury-inducing all at once; ten years later I still find myself putting on this album more often than you’d expect.

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Thanks for reading!

Anna

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