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A Code of Practice on Archives: for Museums and Galleries in the United Kingdom (2002) (3ed.)
One thing all the archivists we spoke to mentioned, either at Tate, British Museum, White Cube or the John Latham Foundation and Archive, was how an archive’s form and organisation very much depended on the head archivist. Archiving, it seems, is a very subjective thing. Perhaps John Latham’s archive is the most clearly subjective – the staff told us that Latham himself had complied the archive in a very specific way, that might not make sense to most, talking great care in separating work he did for the Artist Placement Group, to his own practice. Indeed, even the Head Archivist at the White Cube said that one’s approach to archiving was, in the end, a character assessment, while the Tate archivist noted that the approach to archiving changes depending on who is in charge.
As the archivist as the British Museum noted, a former Head of the Museum’s Central Archives was clearing out the stores, and simply dumped a chuck of material he deemed of no use. This again raises the question of who decides the value of what, and with what criteria? This morning, an article on the Guardian website was posted that directly touched on this issues, with the headline, “Tate’s national photographic archive ‘rescued from skip’ after internal tipoff”. The article opened with the following summary:
As the archivist as the British Museum noted, a former Head of the Museum’s Central Archives was clearing out the stores, and simply dumped a chuck of material he deemed of no use. This again raises the question of who decides the value of what, and with what criteria? This morning, an article on the Guardian website was posted that directly touched on this issues, with the headline, “Tate’s national photographic archive ‘rescued from skip’ after internal tipoff”. The article opened with the following summary:
It seems in both the V&A sand the Tate, someone had taken the executive to render a store of information worthless, an as such, found it within their jurisdiction to dispose of the archival material in question. Considering both Tate and the V&A are public institutions, this is highly problematic. It again recalls the idea of the archivist as “archon”, here not guardian, but in fact, lord, of the archives. It raises issues of power once more, and again, accessibility. Surely the decision to discard of records supposedly belonging to the public should first be fourth to the public? In the end, apparently a “low-ranking” staff member of Tate tipped off Brain Allen, director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a UK educational charity, who was said to have promptly sent down a van to salvage the archive from the skip. Mellon was said to have been shocked to not only have found curatorial material, but highly confidential records too, “so confidential that he asked the Tate to take the items back. These included sensitive documents relating to government committees and export applications.”
This begs another question. Did the one doing the throwing away know about this confidential material, and did he in fact act alone, or with permission? Suddenly, Derrida’s notion of the archive as the Lord’s house of power comes into play. I refer here, to Lefebvre’s “science of space”, referenced in the Theoretical Background tab in Performing the Archive on this website. If the archival space is the setting of such forces as law, politics economics, information and knowledge, then is the archivist as the subjective archon the knowing mediator to such forces, or an unknowing accomplice? When one is given responsibility to guard artifacts of history, from documents to photograph records, how does one mediate such knowledge(s) within the wider framework of the institution, and society itself? (see Raymond William’s definition on Institution, as well as his definition of Democracy in References to Para-Practice on the Performing the Archive tab. Or could it be that the politics of institutional spaces, and their somewhat schizophrenic public/private persona, have been nullified due to he somewhat bipolar relationship between responsibilities of private confidentiality in response to public transparency? This might relate to the dialectic created by Freedom of Information and Data Protection, in which archives must constantly mediate between the archiving of confidential documents in parallel to the keeping of public records…
Key Issues: What is public, what is private in terms of information and property? How does one value the archive and who does the valuing? To whom do archives belong? If we don’t know of the existence of archives, say, in the case of Tate’s photographic archive, why would we miss them? Do we need these archives? If so, why? What is the importance of the archives?
This begs another question. Did the one doing the throwing away know about this confidential material, and did he in fact act alone, or with permission? Suddenly, Derrida’s notion of the archive as the Lord’s house of power comes into play. I refer here, to Lefebvre’s “science of space”, referenced in the Theoretical Background tab in Performing the Archive on this website. If the archival space is the setting of such forces as law, politics economics, information and knowledge, then is the archivist as the subjective archon the knowing mediator to such forces, or an unknowing accomplice? When one is given responsibility to guard artifacts of history, from documents to photograph records, how does one mediate such knowledge(s) within the wider framework of the institution, and society itself? (see Raymond William’s definition on Institution, as well as his definition of Democracy in References to Para-Practice on the Performing the Archive tab. Or could it be that the politics of institutional spaces, and their somewhat schizophrenic public/private persona, have been nullified due to he somewhat bipolar relationship between responsibilities of private confidentiality in response to public transparency? This might relate to the dialectic created by Freedom of Information and Data Protection, in which archives must constantly mediate between the archiving of confidential documents in parallel to the keeping of public records…
Key Issues: What is public, what is private in terms of information and property? How does one value the archive and who does the valuing? To whom do archives belong? If we don’t know of the existence of archives, say, in the case of Tate’s photographic archive, why would we miss them? Do we need these archives? If so, why? What is the importance of the archives?