Traces and the Meaning of the Archive

I particularly liked Freud’s piece, which likened The Mystic Writing Pad to the physical structure of our memory apparatus in our minds – as if our mind could possibly have a physical structure. Maybe it does. But, what a funny thing to decide to do – map out the structure of the mind. It seems like something that could never be proven yet we lend his ideas so much precedence today. In a way, this makes me somewhat hopeful for the human race – that we can give authority to something that is so abstract, such as the archive.
Boltanski’s idea that we hoard or collect objects, words, moments in our past because we want to be immortal, I think is partly correct. But, I also think that because we fear death – perhaps that is the same as wanting to be immortal - we have a need to hold onto the past so that we can pretend that we are still living in it.
The excerpt from Warhol’s “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” reminded me of something that my father is doing right now. He decided to remodel his house so that he can rent it out and save for retirement. During the remodel and rental he is going to live in an Airstream trailer. For the past year now he has been going through all of his stuff trying to decide what he absolutely has to keep and what he should get rid of. It has been an agonizing process – I think because it is not only getting rid of his own past, but his parent’s, grandparent’s, great grandparent’s, etc as well. Yet, he came to a point where he just wanted everyone to take everything far away – like New Jersey. At one point he thought he might put everything in unlabeled boxes and let his friends take however many they wanted. I actually wanted many of the things that he was giving away, many of which he couldn’t believe I was interested in. But, certain objects remind each person differently about events in their pasts.
I was again reminded of my Dad when Kabakov wrote, “But if you don’t do these sortings, these purges, and you allow the flow of paper to engulf you, considering it impossible to separate the important from the unimportant – wouldn’t that be insanity?” My Dad often allowed for the paper as well as the accumulation of objects to engulf him – you should have seen his office – and he often referred to it as insanity. So perhaps creating an archive is an attempt to remain sane.
I loved what Susan Hiller wrote about her installation at the Freud Museum and the creation of her own archive, which commented at times on the archive that it was placed in. Hiller said, “If you think of Freud’s notion of the dream as a narrative that had both a manifest and a hidden content, this might have something to do with the relationship between the story told by the story-teller and the story that was being heard.” If the story is an archive then what comes across from the contents of the archive may be quite different that the message that was intended with the formation of the archive. I think in some ways this is the beauty of an archive – that it can mean something quite different from one person to the next.