ELASTIC An Archive Project

Lisa Andrew, Hany Armanious, Stuart Bailey, Jay Balbi, Joanna Callaghan, Liz Day, Deej Fabyc, Ian Geraghty, Sarah Goffman, Kathryn Gray & Holly Williams, Ross Harley, Mark Hislop, Emily Hunt, Andrew Hurle, Melanie Khava, Claire Lambe, Sally Mannall, Elvis Richardson, Tobias Richardson, Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Elizabeth Pulie, Mary Teague, Regina Walter

Curated by Elvis Richardson, Sarah Goffman & Lisa Andrew

You are invited to the opening
BY SUSAN CHARLTON
CREATIVE PRODUCER STATE RECORDS NSW (STATE GOVERNMENT ARCHIVES)
SATURDAY 15 OCTOBER 4-–6PM
The Cross Art Projects
A space for independent art & curatorial studies
33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney 2011
T: (02) 93572058 | e: joholder@aic.net.au
w: crossart.com.au

Exhibition continues until 29 October 2005
Wed–Sat 11–6PM
The Cross Art Projects
33 Roslyn Street

Kings Cross Sydney (opposite St Luke’s Hospital gates)
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CROSS CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS: SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER, 4PM
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ELASTIC is a group of nine artists who create projects that invite other artists to participate with a view to expanding the scope and interpretation of a project. This democratising curatorial model allows unexpected outcomes.

The Elastic: Archive Project displays, in various forms, the collecting and classifying activities that engage these artists’ practices as both research and raw material. Classifying systems are fundamental not only to public and private collection activities but relate, in a gallery context, to the manufacture of authenticity within

the art-culture system. This exhibition explores this operation by placing private studio process in the lived context of the gallery space.

The resulting archival categories range from fantastic or absolutely bloody useless catalogues of vernacular objects or adornments, to straight-faced empirical research into, for example, the reasons given by an arts council for rejecting a grant application or under-representation of women artists in contemporary criticism. The archive even has its own exhibition reviews.

Draw your own conclusion

s with regard to the authenticity of the artists’ interpretations of material and museum culture!

From a historical perspective the Elastic Archive Project harnesses conceptual and process art’s critical forces as well more recent methodological innovations using analytical techniques appropriated from interdisciplinary and institutional critique. Out of these parameters a new direction in contemporary art has emerged. The emphasis is on the formal experiments of individual artists. In this way and by these means, contemporary life and issues of the marginal or unfashionable can be given prominence.
The Archive Project is the latest Elastic ‘edition’. Artwork editions are available exclusively for the exhibition.
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ELASTIC
Elastic’s prior projects include running an eponymous shop-front gallery in Chippendale (for 6 months in 2000), Caravan a survey style show at Free Space (2002) and the publication of the celebrated Elastic: A Printed Project in 2004. Last year, Elastic moved off-shore to establish Elastic Artist Residence in Whitechapel, London, curated by Deej Fabyc as a gallery space for projects and durational performance.

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Supported by City of Sydney Council for Kings Cross Arts Festival 2005: www.kxarts.com

Elastic at Cross Art

Elastic Notions of The Archive
Susan Charlton
Saturday 15 October 2005
Firstly, I’d like to honour the space that Jo Holder and Gavin Harris have created
here with Cross Art Projects. A space that is not quite commercial gallery nor
artist-run initiative; social history museum nor archive; community arts centre
nor political thinktank, and yet draws from the potentials of these philosophical
spaces without being weighed down by their impossibilities. Now that they have
created this space for us, we realise that is was something we really needed.
Thankyou Jo and Gavin.
In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again)
Warhol discusses the need to live in one big empty space, with cupboards for
storage located elsewhere. He says: ‘What you should do is get a box for the
month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then
date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you
can’t and you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less think to think about,
another load off your mind.’
Following his own advice, Warhol accumulated ‘an anthropological sampler’ of his
life and times, stored in 612 boxes (or Time Capsules as he called them), filled
between 1974 and his death in 1987. These Time Capsules are now archived at
The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and a selection was recently on display
at the National Gallery of Victoria. As NGV curator Amy Barclay has observed,
beyond their cultural heritage value, the Time Capsules can be seen as another
form of Warhol’s artistic practice and artistic expression.
Whilst Warhol’s relationship to The Archive was more about collection and
acquisition, other artists have taken up the archival themes of recordkeeping,
classification and description; the creation of complex corporations and agencies;
and the reworking of official and personal records.
Taking in the works brought together as part of the Elastic Archive Project, we
can see a mix of cultural heritage and artistic practice also at play. For me, the
works are capsules of archives flavour; each item releasing a short, sharp,
surprising burst of archives sensation.
When I applied for my current job at State Records NSW, I did not know anything
about the State archives, and they certainly did not know anything about you.
But it was artists who revealed the creative potentials of working with archives to
me and drove me to apply for the position.
As I observed in a presentation to the Executive in my first weeks at the archive:
‘Seemingly unbeknownst to State Records a parallel universe of practitioners
already exists whose attention and interest has been captured by the realities and
potentials of archives. Individually and in collaboration they have been at work
over the last 10 years’, interpreting the collections and spaces of a diverse range
of institutions. ‘Sometimes these artists have interpreted a discrete archival
collection … At other times the influences and artforms are more abstracted’.
Fresh in my mind at the time was the work undertaken by Ross Gibson on a
series of crime scene photographs from the Scientific Investigation Bureau of the
New South Wales Police. Gibson went on to collaborate with new media artist
Kate Richards to create an exhibition based on the images, held at the Justice
and Police Museum in Sydney, as well as a performance and cd-rom.
It wasn’t so much the final outcome of the exhibition and its associated elements
that inspired, but that Gibson had evoked the visceral detail of his intellectual,
conceptual, emotional and even physical responses to being in the presence of
the archive; and that he shared his nuanced pursuit of an appropriate genre to
interpret this very particular series of photographs.
Gibson’s experience of being in the thrall of the archive may be no different from
the experiences of better-known archive habitues, such as professional archivists,
researchers, genealogists and historians.
But what keeps drawing me to the work of artists is their drive to realise an
aesthetics from their experience of the archive; often an aesthetics which evokes
the narrative of the ethical journey they have taken in coming to terms with the
lessons of the archive.
I guess it has been my job ever since arriving at State Records to make the
archive more elastic. For it to be more open to interpretation from outside the
profession, for its borders to dissolve a little, and to allow others in without fear
of contamination.
Just as the archives knew little about the parallel universe of artists engaged with
the idea of The Archive, many artists know little of the workings of actual
archives.
You might be surprised to hear, for example, that most archives aren’t actually
collecting institutions at all. They do not collect records in the way a museum,
library or gallery might. It’s not a case of seeing an artefact of interest and
making the curatorial decision to acquire it for the archive collection. Nor do
archives hoard and then later try and make sense of it all.
In classical archive theory, archives aren’t ‘collected’, they are ‘formed’. Archives
do not have ‘collections’, but ‘holdings’. In the case of State Records NSW and
other government recordkeeping institutions around the country, the process is
one of ‘records appraisal’, governed by law. State Records appraises the records
created by NSW public service agencies and nominates which classes of records
should be kept indefinitely as State archives.
At this stage, the elastic nature of the archive may seem to be contracting, even
strangulating, like a garrote perhaps. But I can assure you that the ‘appraised’
archive is still full of unfolding stories. Like those revealed in records of the
Aborigines Welfare & Protection boards which recorded the boards’ intervention
in the lives of Indigenous people. Like the archive boxes of porn collected by the
Department of Services from the 1950s until the 80s. Whilst the archives are
appraised and regulated, they still throw up the unknown, the untold, even the
unspeakable.
I encourage any of those artists who have taken great pleasure in the conceptual,
philosophical, abstracted idea of The Archive, to also engage with the professional
practices of actual archives, as well.
My official mission is to create : ‘a cohesive promotion and communications
program, which is both innovative and imaginative, in order to capture the
community’s attention and interest’. It’s a mission I fully engage with.
But speaking to a room full of artists I would quote the worlds of artist Declan
Donnellan as a truer picture of what I aim to do:
‘As far as I am an artist, it’s for me to draw a frame around things and bring the
audience’s attention to the ambiguity and ambivalence of what lies within it. Not
to make everything clear, but to make it clearly ambiguous. There is an honour in
that.’