well, i have to say that some of the issues
concerning archiving that ken brought up are
leaving me in a "searching" state.
for over six years now, i've been spending
much of my time doing what i thought was
archiving (video, audio, text, sundries of the
late composer Jerry Hunt) only to find that
because i've yet to have any institutions
interested and that there aren't any people in
scholarly pursuit of this material that i'm
really NOT archiving.
maybe i'm misunderstanding the definition,
but are you saying, ken, that when there's no
scholarly interest, it's just considered
collecting?
maybe, i shouldn't be so hung up on
terminology, but i thought that spending hours of
my time in a day carefully editing video, audio,
and text and then creating a database with
assigned numbers and notes WAS archiving.
if the next question is, "what's your reason
for doing it?" it seems that "archiving" seems to
have to start somewhere BEFORE the universities,
museums, et al. call. also, because he was my
best friend and nobody knows his work better than
i (our works and ideas were similiar), there
needs to be SOME kind of organization of
materials available when someone shows interest
(usually a person or ensemble, but no
institutions, yet).
didn't fluxus folks archive materials
without financial compensation and often at a
great cost to them? (in my case, actual financial
losses of buying things that i wouldn't need for
my own work - stereo betamax player, old
reel-to-reel machine fixup, obsolete DAT player
fixup, etc - and actual time losses when i could
be working on my own work: [someone mentioned
pauline oliveros earlier and i've waited so long
to put an hommage work in score form that her
ensemble has already caught up to the idea and
practically makes the work, itself, obsolete and
regarding ken - i'd like to find the time to do
the "kendust" work mentioned on an earlier post])
ken wrote:
>Scholars occasionally came to visit, but they
>were
>generally bewildered by
>the lack of organization.
when the scholars visited, were they looking
at an archive that was made for THEM or was it a
collection that was "tailored" to the search
capabilities of the people who were keeping the
material.
in other words, do you take maciunas' work
and archive it the way that you think that HE may
have wanted it archived
or
should it be arranged for the benefit of the
archivist in order to retrieve wanted or needed
material
or
should it be arranged for the future institution
that may be interested in what it has to offer.
>Jean Brown is a great example of a true
archivist collector.
does this mean that jean brown collected archives
(since there seems to be a dichotomy concerning
these two terms)?
>Some artist's papers are massive enough to
>constitute
>archives, but often
>lack the organizational structure (even the
>loose
>structure we had) or the
>accessibility to scholarship. These are not,
>properly
>speaking, archives,
>but collections.
>The word has somehow taken on its own meaning
>when used by
>artists today.
>At one point in the 1970s, a scholar who had
>made a tour
>of what artists
>had termed their archives, suggested that "some
>artists
>seem to think that
>an archive is any collection of documents larger
>than a
>row of books and a
>draw in a file cabinet."
again, these statements are what's led me to
ask these questions (of myself and anyone on the
list that wants to put their two cents...)
Rod
=====
http://rostasi.8m.com
http://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/hunt.jerry.html
Utilizing the blades of technology on the facial hair of imagination
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