Welcome to Issue Twelve of Related Materials
This month it's swords, 35mm slides, somewhat damaged clothes (and archives)
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher. Welcome, new and old subscribers to Related Materials, a newsletter vaguely about archives.
After a bumper issue 11, we’re back to the usual format this month: three things that that made me think about my professional practice, and some music to see you out.
Exhibition: Alice Gomme Archive: Catalogue 001 at Troy Town Pottery, 156 Hoxton St, London N1 6SH UK until 13 October 2024
The instagram post announcing the exhibition showed a picture of a heap of discarded clothes, barely lit by a small shaft of sunlight. The caption was ‘A selection of 100 year old garments excavated from European rag yards’. I immediately made plans to visit.
The story of this collection is a particularly seductive one. Gomme was at a market in northern France when a man approached her. Based on what she was wearing, he said he had some clothes she might want to see. He took her to a barn with clothes piled to the rafters - 1960s on the top, World War One at the bottom, decades like geological strata in between. The clothes had been collected for rag but never sold. Over three subsequent years, Gomme sifted through the barn by torchlight and selected pieces. She was drawn to those with repairs and alterations - darns in elbows, fabric added to the bottom of trousers where a child had grown, patches over a knee where someone habitually knelt in their work. Garments that seemed to somehow allow us to experience time - time to wear through the fabric, time taken to repair.
What I don’t want to get into here is the ‘is this or isn’t this an archive?’ question. That battle is lost, for starters, but also these garments share so much in common with the paper (and photographs, and plasticine) that I deal with on a day-to-day basis that I’m more than happy for it to be called one. Like paper documents, the garments bear the traces of every day activities, they are evidence of transactions through stains, damage and repair.
And perhaps most importantly, like documents in an archive, they have been selected. I had the opportunity to speak to Alice at the exhibition but it was only on the bus afterwards that it occurred to me - I asked her how she had selected but not how much. The figure we quote in archives is usually around 5% of all documents created will make it into the archive. We appraise the documents for the information within them and the evidence that they hold. As archivists, we decide what will be useful to others. Faced with a literal mountain of rotting fabric, Alice made a personal choice - to prioritise the repaired garments and tell a particular story through that selection. I realised as I travelled home that the only difference I could put my finger on between her collection and the ones I manage is the extent to which she is clear about her subjectivity.
If you’re reading this email the day I sent it, then the exhibition is only until this Sunday (if you left it in your inbox for a few days then, sorry, you probably missed it). It’s small - only 20 pieces - but an absolute delight. Not only is there a catalogue to buy, but you can also pick up some Troy Town pottery while you’re there: so be sure to take your wallet, you’re going to need it.
Reading: From Art History Pedagogic Resource to Post-Digital Art Medium: Shifting Cultural Values in a Dismantled Slide Library by Annebella Pollen History of Photography, 47(1), 5–27. [Open Access]
Because of the age of archives I prefer to work with, I spend a lot of time dealing with slide collections. Very large slide collections. And having to explain to people younger than me what a slide is, which I’m no longer surprised by but still find slightly odd nonetheless.
Until comparatively recently, slides were still a major part of the transmission and discussion of art. When I worked at the Tate Library and Archive in the 2000s they would still regularly be made for the curators to give talks (although around the same time I also supported an exhibition using the ICA’s archive, where slides were projected as an obsolete media so they were already on borrowed time). This article discusses the slide library at the University of Brighton and how, upon its dismantling in 2011, Pollen took home the entire photography section, approximately 20,000 slides.
I like this article for a number of reasons. Firstly, Pollen explicitly acknowledges the labour and skills of the librarians that went into the creation of the slide library. Secondly, the discussion of the value of the slides after they ceased to be of everyday use. Clearly, they could be valuable for research as a historiography of art teaching - but would anyone use them for that? The collection may contain some unique images - but how to identify them? These questions were not only being posed in the University of Brighton but across Europe and North America in many other institutions. Thirdly, I really like Pollen’s honesty about the role of her emotions in her response, She describes the “urgency to preserve at a moment of crisis” but admits that “ twenty thousand or so slides … remain barely touched.”
I remember some of the outcry when these collections were being thrown away - and at the time, shrugging my shoulders because the collections weren’t unique. Yet in Pollen’s article she includes some fantastic examples of images within the collection that instantly have all my archivist senses on high alert. These include photographs taken by staff at the institution of local shopfronts and flyers for gay clubs. Not only do these evidence the content of the images but also the role of individual staff in education - something that higher education archives often surprisingly lack.
The question comes back, again , to selection. Having made an argument for preserving some of the slides, and agreed on criteria, do you then need to represent that they were part of a larger whole that wasn’t selected? This is something that we don’t generally do in archives - we take 5% and don’t record the 95% we didn’t preserve - but yet in this situation it feel disingenuous. A large amount of the collection was duplicated material of little research interest. The material selected is more of an anomaly than a representation.
Selection is something that we’re increasingly going to have to confront in archives as the volume of digital records grows to beyond what a (badly paid) human can realistically assess and as we’re encouraged to use AI tools to help/replace us. Given the ‘urgency to preserve’ that so many people feel, we need to be honest and upfront about how we’re making those choices if we’re going to maintain trust in the profession and our resources.
Watching: Sword of Trust (dir. Lynn Shelton, 2019) [currently streaming on Mubi in the UK, other territories may vary]
This brings me neatly onto my final selection for this issue. It’s a comedy! About provenance! Cynthia and Mary inherit a sword and some associated documents which may or may not prove that the South actually won the American Civil War. They team up with a grumpy pawnshop owner to sell it for a vast sum of money to conspiracy theorists. Japes ensue.
This is a fun, light-hearted film that doesn’t outstay its welcome (88 minutes! when was the last time you saw a film under 3 hours long? and yes I am dreading going to see The Brutalist next year) and is just archives adjacent enough for me to feel like I can get away with recommending it here. I actually laughed out loud when one character described as print as being ‘basically like the photographs of their day so it must be true’.
I could talk at length about trust in archival documents and how the research process can sometimes make documents mean what people want them to mean, and about the grimly fascinating Searchlight Archive which gets round the question of how you document the far right without glorifying the far right by being the archive of an anti-fascist organisation who document fascists; but really, its just a cosy film I’d suggest you watch on a Sunday evening.
Bonus track: Blowing Up The Workshop #63: ch00n!!!!: Selections from the Middle East, the Middle of the East & Just East of the Middle [soundcloud link, free]
Since this issue’s unofficial theme has been selection, today’s bonus is not just one track but a whole mix. This comes from the much-missed Blowing Up The Workshop project - all the mixtapes [do the kids know what a mixtape is???] from which are still available to stream on Mixcloud.
Thanks for reading!
Anna
p.s. if you’re lucky enough to snag a ticket to The Cosmic House in the next few months then you can see a new work by Adam Knight which I’ve been supporting, using slides (yes, more slides) from Charles Jencks’ archive. Jencksianagram is on display until 20 December 2024.