Rich material.

ARCHIVE FEVER: A DIGITAL WONDER ROOM

HOOD MUSEUM OF ART, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 

HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE 

JUNE 7-OCTOBER 2, 2005

There is a long tradition of artists reflecting on museum content--from Peter Paul Rubens's paintings to Fred Wilson's subversive museum "mining"--that instigates reflection on the institutionalization of art. Over the past ten years, the growing number of museum studies courses and programs has brought deeper consideration into the meaning, use, and perception of cultural objects addressing issues ranging from display of objects to broader decisions concerning what is preserved and what is not. The meaning of art is increasingly constructed and deconstructed in the exhibition space, as are the preservation choices in collections. Artwork is increasingly interpreted through curatorial lenses, a reordering process that sometimes overshadows the artistic vision of the maker. Exhibition titles with colons reflect this increased curatorial intervention, as subtexts have become the norm.

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This relationship is flipped in the work of Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom--who have collaborated since 1974 under the name MANUAL--in the installation "Archive Fever: A Digital Wonder Room," presented at the Hood Museum of Art and commissioned as part of the twentieth anniversary of the museum. MANUAL revisited the museum collection, a visual archive of the process of the institutionalization of art and rich material for artists exploring the authority of the museum as site of preservation and bridge to the future. As Jacques Derrida stated in his 1996 text Mal d'Achive (Archive Fever), "the theory of the archive is the theory of this institutionalization." (1)

The curatorial lens is replaced by the "technological lens" that de-organizes the organized. MANUAL's machine performance, animated by the sequencing of still images, slowly divulged aspects of the museum's collections and an expansive collection it is. The artists culled the collection of sixty-five thousand works, scanned six hundred pieces, and selected about half of these images for the final installation. They also studied the day in the life of one permanent display. The small, darkened Harrington Gallery was brought to life on two opposing sides by these two projections.

On one side of the room was a projection of the daily life of the gallery of European art in the Hood. The art/archival material is installed in the permanent collection; this "stalled" room is animated by the people passing through and reacting to the work and to the presence of the camera. Some onlookers stay focused on the art while others interact with the camera: a distracted Boy Scout troop passes through, a child waves while a mother smiles awkwardly. The archive of the past is brought into the present with each passing person; the future is suggested by the memory left with the viewers.

Opposite that wall is a second projected piece that includes a series of scanned images that emerge from one image, such as a Japanese screen that fades into a nineteenth-century American painting. The machine playfully determines the order so there is no redundant structure with the images or the music. As MANUAL explained, "Our exploratory approach, which ultimately reveals the impressive quality, depth, and surprising diversity of the Hood collections, is meant simultaneously to be celebratory, critical, and resolutely playful in the spirit of late French philosopher-critic Jacques Derrida, from whom we have borrowed the title Archive Fever." (2)

The soundtrack of "Archive Fever" was another aspect of the "surprising diversity" of Dartmouth's repository as it was derived from the instrument collection at the Hood that was initially housed in the music department. The actual instruments could not be played but their presence was asserted by auditory "samples" of the types of instruments in the collection. The inspiration for the composition was the short selections of music heard on National Public Radio (NPR) programming within and between segments. This reference to NPR segments allowed the music to be extremely diverse and the result was a soundtrack that was as culturally varied as the works in the collection. With only a few exceptions, the visual and musical segments were not coupled, so the audio stood on its own.

Celebrating twenty years of the Hood means celebrating uniqueness; the clusters of collections and occasional oddities from across campus came together when the building was constructed to house them. Images and sounds in "Archive Fever" pixilated and faded in and out, animating the otherwise static archive and bringing to life the Derridian notion that the archive is not just about dealing with the past but can structurally determine the "very question of the future." New technologies open questions around the increasingly ambiguous line between what is private and public as well as systems of classification and how they shape understanding. MANUAL deconstructs the museological system of ordering, organizing, and tracking works with a technical structure determined by "machine choices" with the various points of breaking and merging.

As the computer sequenced through sound and image, there was a constant embedding of the past into the present and the future. Or as Derrida stated "[T]he technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable contents even as it comes into existence and its relationship to the future." (3) The traditional architecture of data is thereby transformed by the pervasive impact of the computer that now shares authority with the institution and the artists.

CATHERINE AMIDON, PhD, is the director of the Karl Drerup Art Gallery at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Mal d'Archive: Une Impression Freudienne, in Hydra on-line source from University of Minnesota: www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/arch.html.

2. Press release for "Archival Fever: A Digital Wonder Room" by MANUAL at the Hood Museum," Hood Museum of Art, 2005.

3. Derrida, Ibid.