Documenting art and archives… and what we choose to leave out :: By Emilie Houssa

Art documents society not only through its subject matter, but also by the mediums and modes of representation used. More precisely, art documents only what society allows it to document, and in the end, reflects only what society wants to remember. Art documents society because it represents, criticizes, and archives its behaviour. It echoes society's practice of highlighting some entities while neglecting others, be they people, ideas or things. Our societies are struggling endlessly against the void of being forgotten: the ultimate desire is to leave a mark on the surface of the world, to pervade the collective memory. We want to remember, always remember: beautiful things and horrible crimes and everything and anything. The fear of being forgotten is what societies and memories and myths are built on: it is the fundamental fear, the endless loss, and also the necessary forward motion. What is the place of forgetting today in the functioning of our society, and how does art record this functioning?

This fall's edition of .dpi focuses on the complex and troublesome relationship between art and the archival process in contemporary society. New technologies are resulting in a proliferation of artistic “documents;” in what way can art be used to archive society? And also how can that art itself be archived? To what extent can art document itself?

In artistic journals, within research labs, at conferences, people are asking these very questions, devising methods of keeping tomorrow's archives. The way art is being made is changing so quickly: there has been an exponential increase in the available mediums and perspectives. Archives have been mutating to accommodate this evolution, changing in form, in arrangement and in effect. Are there things that we should forget in this ever-increasing mass of documents to record and works to preserve? How can we make this mountain of remains, this load of “waste” (as it is called in no. 64 of Esse ) survive ? How are our current artistic practices contributing to our collective memory of the future? And what type of memory will that be?

In this issue we call on two inherently linked themes to illuminate these questions. Firstly, we will examine the techniques used to document current artistic methods in their different forms and in their uniqueness, and secondly, we'll look at how they incite people to think of art in terms of the archival process.

There are indeed some artistic mediums that trigger people to think of art as an archival construct. In this issue we have chosen the example of found footage, one method that reveals quite a bit about the process. Found footage is a kind of visual patchwork that takes its inspiration from the waste of others, using sound, image and/or preexisting sequences. 1 It is a way to reexamine history, letting us take an event out of its intended context and create a history for it, archiving and recording it as a pure fragment. Found footage allows an original point of view, an alternate approach to an event, and places emphasis on the recording process, the medium itself.

Images recycled by filmmakers can be from public or private archives that are rediscovered and reworked, as in the work of the couple Angela Ricci-Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian. The Gianikians use found footage, plaited montages (juxtaposed images) and critical restructuring (manipulating the images' motions) to restore the original nature of the images. 2 But found footage can also include images taken by the filmmaker and then recontextualized and reinvented into a new cinematic approach, as can be seen in some of Patricio Guzman's films, including The Battle of Chile , Salvadore Allende , and Chile, Obstinate Memory . Patricio Guzman lays his films out like visual essays; they are poetry of the image, of sight, of life. He deliberately builds a manifestation of premeditated rebellion: the rebellion of the image against forgetting. 3 Francesca Comencini uses the same approach, but in her film Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo , the struggle wasn't against forgetting but rather against the plethora of images and accounts that can't be put together into an integral story. Using found footage taken by others, Comencini made a film, with the aim of reconstituting an event. The concept of choice is essential to her approach: which image should be the symbol, the synopsis, the symptom? The result is a grey area expressing the complexity and the ambiguity of the relationship between a real thing and its representation. 4 This method of documenting an event can also be seen in Michal Kosakowski's Just Like the Movies , a film that documents the events of 9/11 in New York by piecing together sequences of Hollywood disaster films that were made before the towers fell. 5 History repeats itself…

But back to the two questions that are central to this 13 th issue of .dpi : Can artistic methods be seen as an archival process? And how can we record or archive these methods? Three articles focus on the first question, while three columns examine the second. Together, these texts illustrate how these questions complement each other in the current artistic landscape.

Our articles examine the use of found footage, or more precisely, they reflect on the different aspects of the archival process that bring this technique into play. Caroline Martel, with LES PIRATES – monteueses en temps de guerre , introduces little known figures of quebecois cinema and discusses their use of film-trading within the context of different approaches to found footage. Danielle Raymond discusses another facet of the phenomenon of found footage: she writes about creating her latest work, Paysage Mobile , in which the idea of landscape leads to the exploration of the archival process and the composition of individual and collective memory. Jessica Santone, with her Learning to Document More , documents the participatory Internet project Learning To Love You More by Harrel Fletcher and Miranda July. The project encompasses all of these issues as it involves self-documentation, encouraging people to use preexisting documents and to record their own performance art.

The columns include a broader perspective of the relationship between archives and modern artistic methods. The free column is kept as an outlet for an artist's voice: for the next two issues, the column will be written by artist Jeanne Landry, who will discuss her work Chrysalide humaine . In this issue, with Les balbutiements du cyborg: le living web , Jeanne Landry explains the context in which Chrysalide humaine originated, articulating her thoughts through an interactive website; in the next issue, she will document her work. The current events column addresses the summit of the DOCAM research alliance taking place on October 30 and 31, where the launch of this the 13 th edition of .dpi will take place. Sandra Dubé delves into the issues of the summit, which correspond with our theme of art and archives. Finally, the first installment of a new column called “In the studio”, a project by Chantal Dumas, appears in this issue. The column uses film clips to bring us right into the creative spaces of Montreal multimedia artists. The featured artist is asked to discuss the tools she uses, as well as the structure and functionning of her work. In this first edition, the column features Leila Sujir, a visual and multimedia artist and professor at Concordia's Intermedia/Cyberart program.

This issue offers many different perspectives, as it is necessary to research, experiment with and question this theme that is so pertinent and yet so difficult to grasp, the issue of art and of archives, of art in archives, of archives in art, or perhaps art-chives…

Notes

1For a more in-depth definition, see: Nicole Brenez. “Montage intertextuel. Formes contemporaines du remploi dans le cinéma expérimental.” Cinémas , Montréal, Automne 2002, vol 13, no. 1-2.

2 The films of Angela Ricci-Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian are based on the desire to manipulate the medium. They are taken from two main sources: partly from the Luca Comerio database, and partly from national and local American, Italian, French, Russian and Armenian archives. The first step is to recuperate forgotten films, the second to restore it, the third to identify and catalogue it, the fourth to create a new cut, a new filing, and finally to refilm it using an “analytic camera.” This method shows both the deconstruction of propaganda images and the power of the documentary.

3 Patricio Guzman's work is anchored in a Chili that has only recently begun to question the years under dictatorship. In this perspective, he takes his own images, which he was never permitted to show, that were filmed when Allende was in power, and then during Pinochet's dictatorship. He places them in a searching, contemporary context, which questions how to make history out of a past of denial. What image can be shown today to consolidate Chilean history and conscience?

4 Francesca Comencini uses found footage in very specific terms: What image should be shown out of a whole mass of images? Far from being stifled by Berlusconi's repressive government, different social groups were constantly being mobilized between 2002 and 2005. During these demonstrations, Carlo Giuliani slowly became the face of the opposition. On one hand, we have all the archives of the Giuliani affair, on the other, his assassination as a symbol of governmental totalitarianism. Between the two, Francesca Comencini assembles the images to show a human being, along with the crisis of his assassination.

5For more details, see the Lower Manhattan Project website: http://lmp.uqam.ca/