Acknowledging Archives (after Caswell)
Christian Boltanski, Reserve Detective III, 1987, included in the exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, features shelves of captionless mugshots, anonymously merging perpetrators and victims of violent crimes. Photo: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Marian Goodman Gallery.
Acknowledging Archives (after Caswell)
by Carissa Pfeiffer
In case you haven't noticed, archives are all the rage in the art world these days. –Artspace, 2014 (1)
Art and archives: two of my great loves. I love seeing them come together, and I’m thrilled to witness the collaboration and cross-pollination that have blossomed over the past several decades, from artist residencies in archives (2) to archivists helping artists preserve their legacies (3).
Developing strong, meaningful, relationships between artists and archivists has so much potential to be fruitful for both fields. Interestingly, both art and archives have been historically undervalued in academia: artistic practice as a vehicle only for expression or reflection of issues, requiring translation by a critic or art historian to make sense of its real value (4), and archivists as “handmaidens of historians,” seen as passive intermediaries between records and the historians who interpret them (5). Popular culture tends to misrepresent artists as pretentious snobs with intentionally mystifying practices; archivists (when even visible) as antisocial hoarders (6) (and plenty of other stereotypes for both).
To me, this suggests that it’s even more important for both artists and archival workers to understand and acknowledge each other’s contributions as true collaborators, avoid the potential for contributing to false impressions, and establish a common baseline of understanding.
So, jumping right in: what are archives, anyway? Anyone could be forgiven for a little haziness.
The Society of American Archivists helpfully offers three definitions: archives as the records that serve as documentary evidence of past events and perspectives; capital-A Archives as an organization responsible for preserving and providing access to these records; and archives as the physical place where the records are kept (7). In addition to these, there’s the verb form, in which to archive is to get the records (archives) into a place (an archives) under the care of an organization (an Archives) (8).
And that’s just how archivists use the word. It gets blurrier. There’s also the archive as it’s defined on a conceptual basis by humanities scholars across many disciplines (9). For theorists like Foucault and Derrida, “the archive” is a metaphor for how cultural memory, identity, and power are constructed. The actual records and the actual places (in their varying states from small basements with banker’s boxes lining the floors to massive repositories with compact shelving) are amalgamated and inflated into a concept. The actual people, too, the archivists, are usually left out of these kinds of discussions. “The archive” has been a buzzword for a while now, and for over a decade archivists have been calling attention to “the large gulf between those who theorize the archive (singular) and those who work in archives (plural)” (10). Meanwhile, those who work in archives are theorizing their own labor and professional values, finding the ways that their real-world situations impact memory, identity, and power in very concrete ways.
Heather South, Lead Archivist, meets with students from the Warren Wilson College MA in Critical Craft Studies in the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. Photo courtesy lydia see.
As Michelle Caswell wrote in “’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies,” the archive as a concept has been “deconstructed, decolonized, and queered by scholars in fields as wide-ranging as English, anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. Yet almost none of the humanistic inquiry at ‘the archival turn’ (even that which addresses ‘actually existing archives’) has acknowledged the intellectual contributions of archival studies as a field of theory and praxis in its own right” (11).
Caswell’s call to action is for interdisciplinary exchange—for conversations about archives and “the archive” to involve archivists, who have also been engaged in such critical conversations, with the benefit of actually operating within the cultural and material reality of the archives.
Historians and humanities scholars have taken note: in 2018, medievalist Bridget Whearty devised “The Caswell Test” with three steps for historians to follow to avoid erasing archives workers’ labor. (12)
Artists’ engagements with archives often include the actual, physical stuff of archives, the places, and the institutions, but not always. The theoretical concept and aesthetics of the generalized archive have taken precedence in many cases, as suggested by Hal Foster’s 2004 essay “An Archival Impulse,” where no archival workers are mentioned other than the “artist-as-archivist” (13), and curator Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, which takes its name from Derrida’s 1995 book Archive Fever (14). Why this gap between archives as art and archives as real places?
There are reasons that archival workers have often been seen as practitioners only, excluded from critical conversations about their own field. Formal archival practice—collecting, organizing, and providing access to records—is rooted in a 19th-century, white, colonial, English-speaking lineage that considered itself as the “neutral” default. The records that early archivists maintained mostly related to government, which on the one hand contributed the principle of providing public access to records for government accountability, but even in the best cases, it also meant privileging records that reflected the narratives produced by those in power over anything in the private, personal realm (15).
Nowadays, it’s rare to find an archivist who isn’t aware of how their own implicit bias (mostly still reflecting dominant parts of society) shapes their decision-making. But this 19th-century approach required that the people responsible for maintaining and providing access to records were not seen as actively intervening in shaping history. “Impartiality” as a value served to reinforce the idea that archives represented “natural” power relations—and obscured the decision-making and labor that went into archives.
While archives have traditionally represented dominant perspectives and served the interests of the powerful, archival labor is also feminized. As archives became professionalized, academic training took place largely in male-dominated history departments, yet the work has long been associated with qualities that match up to a feminine ideal—hence the characterization of archivists as subservient and invisible supporters, working in a rarefied private sphere. Until the 1980s, Terry Cook notes, archivists proudly called themselves the “handmaidens of historians” (16). Like other feminized professions, such as teaching and nursing, this impacts pay, organizational structures, and cultural status (17).
The under-acknowledgment of archivists is also related to the devaluation of maintenance work and service work, as the perpetual and continuing care of collections and assistance to users are eclipsed by innovation, disruption, grand projects (18). Artists understand this, too, as Mierle Laderman Ukeles sought to demonstrate through her “maintenance art” manifesto and unpaid artist residency at New York’s Department of Sanitation (19).
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, 1976. Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art. © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, The Queens Museum and Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York.
As a result of this context, archives are still sometimes pretty invisible. Within organizations, they are often underfunded, understaffed, and may lack the material means necessary to make the changes they want to. Some of the most common misconceptions of archives directly relate to a lack of awareness of the realities of labor, time, technology, and materials. With all due respect to anyone who’s ever described archives as “dusty,” records are usually maintained in controlled environments, in folders and boxes designed specifically to slow down the physical deterioration of their contents. Records aren’t typically “hidden” or “lost” and later “discovered,” but instead have been described according to the best efforts of the archival worker at the time in order to provide access, with all the limitations that implies. Not everything is, or ever can be, digitized and put online, or even kept. Even removing staples and paper clips takes time that can’t always be afforded to the huge quantities of materials maintained in many archives with very limited staff.
Archivists must make decisions about what to keep, how to describe it, how to balance privacy and access—and how to improve upon or correct the decisions their predecessors made. Caswell describes how today’s archivists question and critically examine the foundational principles and practices of archive:
Record: something lasting, created by someone, during some activity, that gets preserved because it is capable of serving as evidence of something. The textual record—documents and letters—fills many archives, because historically it was deemed most important. Archival theorists have expanded this concept to include other, less fixed forms of preserving knowledge, such as “an actual person, a community, or the land itself” (20), and to question the fixity of records, focusing on the activities and uses that shift the meanings of objects (21).
Provenance: where an item or collection came from, who owned it, who took care of it. While a library might receive a donation of books and shelve them all separately according to call numbers, archivists keep records grouped as they were collected (respect des fonds) and in the original order (if any) that the individual, group, or organization that created the collection had them in, in order to preserve their context. Provenance and original order are so important that the International Council on Archives includes them in the very definition of “archivist” (22) —but provenance, too, is expanding. Newer ideas of provenance stress the importance of not just creators, but also archivists, users, the people the records are about, their descendants, and the society they arose from. This mix of stakeholders affects the records’ context, and impacts how we think about ownership and the balance between privacy and access—a long-time issue in archives which has become even more crucial in the age of digitization (23).
Description, or (more broadly, as Caswell uses it) representation: the work archivists do in order to make it easy to manage, find, and use a record. This might include making a finding aid that summarizes the context and content of a collection of records, inventorying a collection’s content, categorizing collections, even transcribing a recording—but it always involves decisions on the part of the archivist. Description is shaped by what the archivist considers important. Biases, assumptions, and cultural standards play a role, and even language shifts over time, so archivists today understand description to be a subjective act that should be revisited over time, that benefits from the input of diverse constituents, and that should encompass practices acknowledging the archivists’ role (24).
Value: how useful records are (or will be) in revealing something about the conditions from which they emerged. Archivists can’t keep everything, and must appraise potential acquisitions, based on criteria that can be highly dependent on their institution, the communities they serve, and their ability to properly care for and provide access to the records. Appraisal of value has historically reflected dominant perspectives about what is useful, and to whom. Over time, many archives have broadened their idea of who they serve and how they determine value.
What a record is, the context it’s placed in, how it’s described, why (and if) it’s important—these decisions, made by myriad archival workers in myriad institutions, have resulted in gaps. No historical record can be truly complete (plenty gets destroyed by personal choice, war or conflict, or other reasons before it even has a chance to be considered for long-term preservation) but archivists have tremendous power in determining which “sliver of a sliver of a sliver” does endure (25). While archivists in the early days of the discipline might have seen official documents as the most “objective” way to receive information about the past, it’s clear that this leaves out—well, most of human history, from the evidence of daily lives to entire groups of people.
“Archival silences” are a major topic of research for archivists, who study the ways that researchers can read between the lines to learn from what’s not there, and how shifting archival practices can become more representative of communities and stories that have been previously ignored (26).
Some collections explicitly acknowledge gaps in various forms (27). Archives also grow out of grassroots efforts to preserve a history that isn’t being collected elsewhere, often explicitly challenging traditional archival principles when they don’t meet the needs of the community they serve, and remaining independent of formal institutions, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives (28) and A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland (29). Established organizations engage in community archiving projects, turning over some of the power traditionally afforded them to allow individuals within specific identity-based communities to have more control over decisions about value, description, and more.
The Black Asheville History Project, an ongoing project of Buncombe County’s North Carolina Room, is an example of a community archiving project within a formal memory institution. The project is designed to make community members key, active partners with decision-making agency in ensuring that their community’s history is collected, preserved, and made accessible (30). Here, Sophie Dixon (left) and North Carolina Room volunteer Louise Maret (right) look over miscellaneous items brought in by Dixon for the history harvest in an individual interview. Photo by Abigail Wolff, courtesy of the North Carolina Room.
Successful models for artist residencies within archives show there are opportunities to directly address many of these topics, with artists and archivists working in tandem. In their artist residency at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center in Portland, Oregon, poet Kaia Sand and interdisciplinary artist Garrick Imatani produced interviews with activists, poetry, exhibitions, and performances “that address and fill in some of the silences in the records and enhance the historical view of political activism in Portland.” Their work also grappled with topics like identity and anonymity in public records (31).
Garrick Imatani, 1970 Bombing of City Hall I-VI, Exhibition at North Portland Library, Portland, OR (October 27-December 5, 2014). From The Watcher Files Project, artist residency with Kaia Sand at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center in Portland, OR (2013-2015). Photo via the artist’s website, © Garrick Imatani.
Clearly, the archival field is in the middle of several paradigm shifts. Conversations about the topics described above, how to diversify archives’ still-extremely-white labor force (32), and the extent to which archivists should see themselves as activists (33) are very much ongoing, and very deeply rooted in the material, cultural, and economic realities of archives, and to the historic view of archives and archivists as “neutral.” Archives is a lively field, and archivists are taking action (34).
“Archives aren’t sedentary places where old pieces of paper languish in boxes; they are kinetic lively places of interaction,” states archivist Heather South (35). Here, a class of drama students does research in the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. Photo courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, Asheville, NC.
For artists, collaborating with archivists means an opportunity to find inspiration in historic materials as well as to bring insights to archival theory and practice. Archivists, who come from many backgrounds and have differing familiarity with creative processes, goals, and theories, are well aware they also have plenty of room to learn from artists. In the introduction to a special interdisciplinary issue of the journal Archives and Records devoted to art and archives, Sue Breakell wrote about the importance of considering “the views on the archive from other stakeholders: creators, users, and those who, without necessarily a formal background in archives, are nevertheless assuming and adapting the role of ‘archivist’ in new ways in response to the needs of the community they represent” (36). For archivists, working with artists can re-contextualize historic materials, call attention to omissions, and introduce collections to new audiences. Art offers a unique means of exploring history’s resonance in the present day, instigating intimately personal experiences, and generating dialogue.
So—mine the archives, theorize the archive, and also seek to understand the underlying frameworks that have led to the present conditions of the specific archives you use, and what archivists are doing to address these. Talk with archivists about your work and theirs. Assume good faith and treat archival workers as active partners in helping build and serve communities. And please, don’t call archives “dusty.”
Archives at the Museum of Modern Art, 2017. Photo by the author. (Okay—they definitely don’t all look this nice!)
Carissa Pfeiffer (she/her) holds an MSLIS with Advanced Certificate in Archives from the Pratt Institute School of Information, and a BFA and BA from the University of Georgia. She works at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC.
Notes:
(1) Artspace Editors, “How the Art World Caught Archive Fever.” Artspace. January 22, 2014. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_market/the_art_worlds_love_affair_with_archives-51976.
(2) Kathy Michelle Carbone, “Artists and Records: Moving History and Memory.” Archives and Records 38:1 (2017), 100-118. https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260446.
(3) Colin Post, "Ensuring the Legacy of Self-Taught and Local Artists: A Collaborative Framework for Preserving Artists’ Archives," Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 36: 1 (Spring 2017), 73-90. https://doi.org/10.1086/691373.
(4) Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art and the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 12.
(5) Terry Cook, "Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory," Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 2006), 170. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.93171.
(6) A fantastic (and fun!) resource for how archives and archivists are represented is the blog POP Archives: Archives and Archivists in Pop Culture, maintained by Samantha Cross. https://www.pop-archives.com.
(7) Society of American Archivists, “Archives.” Dictionary of Archival Terminology. https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/archives.html#ucd3e2d74648b2f74.3d32d4e.15a432086a6.-27c4.
(8) This essay focuses on archives as a distinct professional discipline. It’s worth noting that libraries and special collections occupy similar realms and deal with many of the same concerns, albeit with some important differences. Within archives, too, there is tremendous variety, and the distinctions between archival work and related disciplines often blur.
(9) Archives and archiving also mean different things for computer scientists: compressing, consolidating, backing up, changing the storage medium. I won’t delve into this here, but this usage adds to the difficulty of finding a common vocabulary.
(10) Terry Cook, “Landscapes of the Past: Archivists, Historians and the Fight for Memory.” Public Lecture, The Ministry of Culture for Spain and The National Historical Archives Madrid, Spain, June 23, 2010. https://www.educacionyfp.gob.es/dam/jcr:c15b65cd-851c-4a81-9528-6ef87984e417/conferencia-terry-cook.pdf.
(11) Michelle Caswell, “’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 16:1 (2016), 10. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk. This essay directly developed from and is extremely indebted to Caswell’s article, which was a central part of my own education in archives.
(12) Bridget Whearty,“Invisible in ‘The Archive’: Librarians, Archivists, and The Caswell Test,” part of “Medieval(ist) Librarians and Archivists: A Roundtable,” presented May 11, 2018 at the 53rd International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 10-13, 2018. https://orb.binghamton.edu/english_fac/3/.
(13) Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse.” October 110 (Autumn 2004), 3-22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397555.
(14) Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, January 18, 2008 – May 04, 2008, International Center for Photography, New York. https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/archive-fever-uses-of-the-document-in-contemporary-art. For more on the exhibition’s uneasy relationship to Foucault, Derrida, and the actual history of archives, see Dan Weiskopf, “Theory in Studio: The Archive as Expressive Form” Burnaway, October 23, 2014. https://burnaway.org/feature/theory-studio-archive-expressive-form/.
(15) Cook, “Landscapes of the Past.”
(16) Cook, “"Remembering the Future,” 170.
(17) Alexandra A. A. Orchard, CA; Kristen Chinery; Alison Stankrauff; and Leslie Van Veen McRoberts, “The Archival Mystique: Women Archivists Are Professional Archivists.” The American Archivist 82:1 (2019), 53-90. https://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.53.
(18) Hillel Arnold, “Critical Work: Archivists as Maintainers.” hillelarnold.com (blog), August 2, 2016. https://hillelarnold.com/blog/2016/08/critical-work/.
(19) Jillian Steinhauer, “How Mierle Laderman Ukeles Turned Maintenance Work into Art.” Hyperallergic, February 10, 2017. https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/.
(20) Caswell, “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” 4, citing Shannon Faulkhead, "Connecting through records: Narratives of Koorie Victoria." Archives and Manuscripts 37:2 (2010), 60-88. https://research.monash.edu/en/publications/connecting-through-records-narratives-of-koorie-victoria.
(21) Caswell cites several examples, including Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish’s records continuum model.
(22) International Council on Archives, “Who is an Archivist?” ICA.org. https://www.ica.org/en/discover-archives-and-our-profession.
(23) Steven Bingo, “Of Provenance and Privacy: Using Contextual Integrity to Define Third-Party Privacy” The American Archivist 74 (2011), 506–521. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.2.55132839256116n4.
(24) Caswell, “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” 4, citing Wendy Duff and Verne Harris, "Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings," Archival Science 2 (2002), 276. http://yalearchivalreadinggroup.pbworks.com/f/Duff&Harris.pdf.
(25) David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson, The Silence of the Archive. Chicago: Neal-Schuman / American Library Association, 2017.
(26) Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez (2016) “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives. The American Archivist 79:1 (2016), 56-81. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56.
(27) For example, the policies of the Digital Transgender Archives note that they avoid adding description that might misinterpret an individuals’ identity, so such terms might be difficult to find by searching; the Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive’s Disclaimer and Usage Statement explains the conditions under which the records were created, received, and selected for digitization, especially emphasizing misinformation in the records. These and many other examples can be found in an excellent Twitter thread by Amalia Skarlatou Levi: https://twitter.com/amaliasl/status/1245544256212807680
(28) “History and Mission.” Lesbian Herstory Archives. https://lesbianherstoryarchives.net/about/about-a-brief-history/ - (Archived link).
(29) Jarrett M. Drake, “#ArchivesForBlackLives: Building a Community Archives of Police Violence in Cleveland.” Medium | On Archivy (blog), part of “Uploading Black History: Archiving Blacks’ Lived Experiences” at the Digital Blackness Conference, New Brunswick, NJ, April 22, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/archivesforblacklives-building-a-community-archives-of-police-violence-in-cleveland-93615d777289.
(30) Katherine Calhoun Cutshall and Zoe Rhine, “Community Archiving Profile: Community-driven Archives Programs in the Buncombe County Public Library System.” Appalachian Curator 1:3 (2020). http://libjournals.unca.edu/appalachiancurator/articles/community-archiving-profile-community-driven-archives-programs-in-the-buncombe-county-public-library-system/.
(31) Kathy Carbone, “Artists in the Archive: An Exploratory Study of the Artist-in-Residence Program at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center.” Archivaria 79, 38. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13522/14890.
(32) Mario H. Ramirez (2015) Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative. The American Archivist 78:2 (2015), 339-356. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.339.
(33) For instance, Randall Jimerson, “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice. The American Archivist 70:2 (2007), 252-281. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.70.2.5n20760751v643m7, and Mark Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice as an Archival Imperative: What Is It We're Doing That's All That Important?” The American Archivist 76:2 (2013), 302-334. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.76.2.14744l214663kw43, and then back to Randall Jimerson, “Archivists and Social Responsibility: A Response to Mark Greene.” The American Archivist 76:2 (2013), 335-345. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.76.2.2627p15350572t21.
(34) Michelle Caswell’s Archivists Against History Repeating Itself is a good resource for specific activities and actions: http://www.archivistsagainst.org
(35) Heather South and Alice Sebrell, “A Conversation with Heather South,” The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies 9 (2018). http://www.blackmountainstudiesjournal.org/active-archive-conversation-heather-south/.
(36) Sue Breakell, “Archival Practices and the Practice of Archives in the Visual Arts.” Archives and Records 36:1 (2015), 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2015.1018151.