Radical Sampling: Archives Remixed and Remade
Duration: 01:10:05; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 71.648; Saturation: 0.068; Lightness: 0.310; Volume: 0.202; Cuts per Minute: 0.285; Words per Minute: 0.014
Summary: Beverly Buchanan: Sculpture as Archive
Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton
In her 1973 book Overlay, Lucy Lippard presents prehistory as
fundamentally unknowable: subject to speculation, mystery, and myth. All
that remains from this era are the “primal forms” of stones left in
circles, in mounds, in spirals, and spanning axes—their ragged
structures relaying a “social message from the past to the present about
the meaning and function of art.” This presentation is a temporal
chronicling of our encounter with Beverly Buchanan’s sculptures,
“prehistoric” minimalist forms made during the late 70s and early 80s,
over the course of this past year. It is a moment of public visibility
in an ongoing process: a place to share the arc and nature of our
research by presenting questions we have asked ourselves as well as
those that remain unresolved. Accompanying our discussion is a slideshow
of images drawn from both personal and institutional archives. This
visual chronicling of the contours of photographs, sculptures,
notebooks, drawings, and life decisions that compose Buchanan's actions
and oeuvre frames our research.
A manila folder inside the Whitney Museum's relocated library on
Manhattan’s 26th street marked our first experience with Buchanan’s
work. Photographs, taken in her studio and sent to her then-gallerist
Jock Truman, reveal a sculptural language of cast “fragments” (or
“frustula”) meant to evoke the remains of urban structures after their
destruction. Exploring these enigmatic photographs further, we found
descriptions of large-scale installations constructed via similar
methodologies and located throughout the American Southeast: sculptures
that evoke the “prehistoric” (i.e. non-written, non-specialist,
unknowable) narratives of African experience in America. These histories
survive as unmarked gravestones and crumbling homesteads scattered
amidst rural terrains, just as current histories of marginalization and
disenfranchisement survive in post-industrial urban landscapes. Our
ongoing project explores such sculptures (both studio-specific and
environmental) as geographical archive: an art historical framing that
takes up Lippard’s early politicization of Land Art as a generative
platform from which to consider the social and aesthetic propositions of
Buchanan’s work from these years.
The Valaco Archive Project: The Speculative Archive as Machine for Visual Thinking
G.D Cohen
In the spring of 2004, a peculiar document surfaced in an obscure
municipal archive in the Parque Patricios neighborhood of Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Its contents—a motley assortment of idiosyncratic musings
scrawled by hand onto every manner of scrap paper and organized into
three unmarked manila folders—offered abundant evidence of a singular
intellectual force, if precious few indications of the identity of the work’s
author. One notation, however, etched in lead pencil inside the back
cover of the third folder, furnished the following datum: "C. Roberto Valaco. Schriftatlas."
As later inquiry would reveal, certain passages of the so-called “Atlas
of Writing” (today commonly known as the “Notebooks”) would suggest that
C. Roberto Valaco—born Konstanz Robert Wälke sometime in the
mid-1920s—had served as a movie extra in Nazi director Veit Harlan’s
epic historical melodrama, Kolberg, the last and costliest film
production of the Third Reich. Yet, what most distinguished Wälke’s
brief tenure on the famed UFA Studio backlots in Berlin in 1944 was the
means by which he arrived there: like tens of thousands of other Germans
who also figured in the motion picture’s colossal battle scenes, Valaco
had likely been furloughed from the front lines of World War II by none
other than Harlan himself, precisely as Germany careened towards
imminent defeat. Nearly a decade has intervened since the encounter with
the Valaco Notebooks.
Evidently a recluse, quite probably an autodidact, most certainly a man
possessed of prodigious if enigmatic critical faculties, Valaco was
preoccupied with a range of questions regarding the nature of memory and
forgetting, the practices of scavenging and discarding (both of which
he seems to have practiced assiduously), and the philosophical
dimensions of vision, visual technologies, and techno-visual experience
per se. The vivid if sometimes vexing questions and ideas about archival
practice contained in the Valaco Archive itself have structured
REASArch's approach to our work organizing and reshaping the archive,
from its core organizational rubrics (Schriftatlas; Forensics; Residua;
Anarchaeolog) to its signal theoretical propositions (rigorous
speculation; speculative archives; experimental accumulation; the
anarchival and the anarchic). The archive can currently be visited online.
Multi-Voiced Archival Performance and the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection
Brian Harnetty
The Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection is a catalog of approximately 700 audio
tapes that span over thirty years of the experimental jazz composer and
bandleader Sun Ra’s career. In 2010, a number of visual artists,
musicians, and writers were commissioned to create new works based on
these archival recordings. By simultaneously creating many works from a
single, specific archive, these artists yielded a rich and complex
series of reflections on Sun Ra that are varied, layered, and
simultaneously listen back to the past and toward the future. A new
space of sonic engagement is opened that is not limited to music alone.
If the archive is often understood as a meta-narrative, a conceptual or
philosophical problem, or as a bureaucratic mechanism, then my primary
interest here lies in the many smaller stories––flawed, open-ended,
fragmented, interstitial––that coalesce to form the body of an archive listened to
“from below.” Multiple voices move across the living contexts of the
archive, across disciplines, and across time and space as active,
embodied “archival performances,” what Shannon Jackson also refers to as
“performance[s] of history.” As such, a complex and often difficult
relationship is formed between the creators of the archival material and
those remixing it, a sonic historiography that opens new ways of
exchange, dialogue, respect, conflict, and multiple meanings.
Sukhdev Sandhu, Introduction, Radical Resampling:Archives Remixed and Remade.
G.D. Cohen, The Valaco Archive Project: The Speculative Archive as Machine for Visual Thinking
In the spring of 2004, a peculiar document surfaced in an obscure municipal archive in the Parque Patricios neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Its contents—a motley assortment of idiosyncratic musings scrawled by hand onto every manner of scrap paper and organized into three unmarked manila folders—offered abundant evidence of a singular intellectual force, if precious few indications of the identity of the work’s author. One notation, however, etched in lead pencil inside the back cover of the third folder, furnished the following datum: "C. Roberto Valaco. Schriftatlas."
As later inquiry would reveal, certain passages of the so-called “Atlas of Writing” (today commonly known as the “Notebooks”) would suggest that C. Roberto Valaco—born Konstanz Robert Wälke sometime in the mid-1920s—had served as a movie extra in Nazi director Veit Harlan’s epic historical melodrama, Kolberg, the last and costliest film production of the Third Reich. Yet, what most distinguished Wälke’s brief tenure on the famed UFA Studio backlots in Berlin in 1944 was the means by which he arrived there: like tens of thousands of other Germans who also figured in the motion picture’s colossal battle scenes, Valaco had likely been furloughed from the front lines of World War II by none other than Harlan himself, precisely as Germany careened towards imminent defeat. Nearly a decade has intervened since the encounter with the Valaco Notebooks.
Evidently a recluse, quite probably an autodidact, most certainly a man possessed of prodigious if enigmatic critical faculties, Valaco was preoccupied with a range of questions regarding the nature of memory and forgetting, the practices of scavenging and discarding (both of which he seems to have practiced assiduously), and the philosophical dimensions of vision, visual technologies, and techno-visual experience per se. The vivid if sometimes vexing questions and ideas about archival practice contained in the Valaco Archive itself have structured REASArch's approach to our work organizing and reshaping the archive, from its core organizational rubrics (Schriftatlas; Forensics; Residua; Anarchaeolog) to its signal theoretical propositions (rigorous speculation; speculative archives; experimental accumulation; the anarchival and the anarchic). The archive can currently be visited online.
Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton. Beverly Buchanan: Sculpture as Archive
In her 1973 book Overlay, Lucy Lippard presents prehistory as fundamentally unknowable: subject to speculation, mystery, and myth. All that remains from this era are the “primal forms” of stones left in circles, in mounds, in spirals, and spanning axes—their ragged structures relaying a “social message from the past to the present about the meaning and function of art.” This presentation is a temporal chronicling of our encounter with Beverly Buchanan’s sculptures, “prehistoric” minimalist forms made during the late 70s and early 80s, over the course of this past year. It is a moment of public visibility in an ongoing process: a place to share the arc and nature of our research by presenting questions we have asked ourselves as well as those that remain unresolved. Accompanying our discussion is a slideshow of images drawn from both personal and institutional archives. This visual chronicling of the contours of photographs, sculptures, notebooks, drawings, and life decisions that compose Buchanan's actions and oeuvre frames our research.
A manila folder inside the Whitney Museum's relocated library on Manhattan’s 26th street marked our first experience with Buchanan’s work. Photographs, taken in her studio and sent to her then-gallerist Jock Truman, reveal a sculptural language of cast “fragments” (or “frustula”) meant to evoke the remains of urban structures after their destruction. Exploring these enigmatic photographs further, we found descriptions of large-scale installations constructed via similar methodologies and located throughout the American Southeast: sculptures that evoke the “prehistoric” (i.e. non-written, non-specialist, unknowable) narratives of African experience in America. These histories survive as unmarked gravestones and crumbling homesteads scattered amidst rural terrains, just as current histories of marginalization and disenfranchisement survive in post-industrial urban landscapes. Our ongoing project explores such sculptures (both studio-specific and environmental) as geographical archive: an art historical framing that takes up Lippard’s early politicization of Land Art as a generative platform from which to consider the social and aesthetic propositions of Buchanan’s work from these years.
Brian Harnetty, Multi-Voiced Archival Performance and the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection
The Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection is a catalog of approximately 700 audio tapes that span over thirty years of the experimental jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra’s career. In 2010, a number of visual artists, musicians, and writers were commissioned to create new works based on these archival recordings. By simultaneously creating many works from a single, specific archive, these artists yielded a rich and complex series of reflections on Sun Ra that are varied, layered, and simultaneously listen back to the past and toward the future. A new space of sonic engagement is opened that is not limited to music alone. If the archive is often understood as a meta-narrative, a conceptual or philosophical problem, or as a bureaucratic mechanism, then my primary interest here lies in the many smaller stories––flawed, open-ended, fragmented, interstitial––that coalesce to form the body of an archive listened to “from below.” Multiple voices move across the living contexts of the archive, across disciplines, and across time and space as active, embodied “archival performances,” what Shannon Jackson also refers to as “performance[s] of history.” As such, a complex and often difficult relationship is formed between the creators of the archival material and those remixing it, a sonic historiography that opens new ways of exchange, dialogue, respect, conflict, and multiple meanings.
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