Retracings

Unfortunately, I was unable to open Jayce Salloum’s “untitled” films. I was very interested in viewing it because I felt that his ideas of what his work might be able to “do” seemed rather far-fetched in light of the subjective experience of viewing and his own assertion that “a relationship to reality can only arrived at through the subjective” and that the subjective experience relies on placement. He claims that the tapes are part of a continuous endless whole with no beginning or end. But, I would argue that while this is in some ways a valid and noble intent, there is no possibility of foregoing a beginning and an end for the viewer. There is always going to be a beginning and an end; a first, second or third; an a, b, and c for the viewer. One has to begin and end somewhere and this inadvertently affects the subjective viewing experience.

I was intrigued by his discussion regarding the archive as a living history as long as it has listeners or viewers and that the material in the archive has a “sense of ‘living.’” In the past several weeks, one of my functions at the San Jose Museum of Art has been to organize exhibition files and “archive” them. As the viewer, I have rendered a subjective relationship to these archives in which I am collaborating in a sense in their subsequent meanings to future viewers as I may choose to keep or discard any of the documents, some of which include thoughts of the museum visitors, which we receive a plethora of and only keep 10-20. Thus, others thoughts that are accumulated in the archive are subject to another’s thoughts and decisions and are thus effaced histories. I find this effacement to be a compelling part of the archive as it seems contrary to the point of the archive yet at the same time it is impossible to escape this effacement.

Merewether touches on this in his discussion of the “forces of forgetting” as does Spivak in his discussion of Dominick LaCapra and Hayden White and the privileging of the archive. I love the idea of thinking about the archive as a fetish and substitute for reality of the past that is actually “’”always already lost.”’” Kujundzic also refers to the quality of erasure in the accumulation of the archive in his discussion regarding Freud and the Holocaust, yet at the same time the erasure leads to openings through the traces left upon the erasures – or the traces left in the ashes or silicon.

On the other hand, the Raqs Media Collective points out the possible reasoning behind the popularity of the archive as art: the function of the artist is to “offer a way to make sense of the realities we live in.” Yet, the artist uses imagination to distribute and comprehend “facts.” This process can also be seen as an erasure in that the imagination of the artist may choose to efface certain readings of a particular archive in the interest of her or his interpretation. Here, I agree with Jenny that there is not much new being said in these essays: the main point seems to be the subjectivity of the archive, which is often viewed as fact (unless it is not viewed or heard). And this seems to be the point of the Atlas Group who might see an object as a fact in and of itself, but they attempt to view the “facts” through the acquired collective subjectivity of a fact.