What Is An Archive?
All links and are interactive , so please click around.
I hope this presentation will be useful to anyone who encounters it. I address myself primarily to my fellow media archivists, A/V technicians, and connoisseurs of obsolete formats. We work in a variety of personal, profesional, and community settings, bring vastly different experiential and epistemological foundations to our work, and are motivated by an ever-expanding set of media, artworks and technological objects. I believe that a framework of archival theory can bring both clarity and joy to our work, and it is with this intention that I encourage you to read on.
Some things that might be [part of] an archive: array of cactuses at Wave Hill Botanical Garden in Riverdale.
Some things that might be [part of] an archive: gravestones in Green-Wood Cemetary in Brooklyn.
Some things that might be [part of] an archive: coke bottles in a diner window on the Upper East Side.
Some things that might be [part of] an archive: stained glass windows in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague.
Some things that might be [part of] an archive: HTML code for this website.
Some things that might be [part of] an archive: photos on my grandmother’s nightstand.
ἀρχεῖον
- Seat of the magistracy or government (Herodotus, 5th c. BCE; Xenophon, 6-5th c. BCE), headquarters (Plutarch, 1-2nd c. CE) or public archive (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 1st c. BCE).
- Public office (Isocrates, 6-5th c. BCE), or college or body of magistrates (Aristoteles, 4th bc. BCE).
In his deconstructive analysis of archives, Derrida explicitly cites the Greek arkheion as the place where power resides: “initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.” (Archive Fever, 2).
Though archives have existed since ancient times, modern understandings of archival practice were articulated in Western Europe in the 19th century, and further developed in the United States in the 20th century, following the implementation of public “records management” systems. Archives were and are places where documents are organized in a specific way. The definitions at left and right, drawn from the Society of American Archivsts’ Dictionary of Archives Terminology, offer meaningful points of comparison. The terms at left are concepts derving primarily from Prussian and French bureaucratic contexts; meanwhile, the terms at right represent 20th century British and American ideas about implementation within increasingly complex (and voluminous!) ecord management systems.
To put it all in more conventional language: things should be kept in the order they were produced in, alongside other material produced in the same context and by the same people and institutions. In principle, this all seems like a good idea. In pratice, of course, things are rarely that simple.
Thus, through the 20th century, archives continued to be understood as a physical locus of jurdicial authority. The documents in an archive serve as evidentiary testimony of events that had previously happened, because the documents thesmelves had been created in and through those events; “the archive” was essentially the accmulated residue of state acitivity.
Duranti, referencing work by Jenkinson and his American contemporary Theodore Schellenberg, describes documents as passing over a physical “archival threshold,” moving from a state of active use in bureacratic activity to a theoretically secure state of inactivity as archival record.
Further, a media archive might be organized more like a library than a traditional archive. Plastic cans of celluloid films shelved by filmmaker, date, and title share some common ground with archival fonds, but don’t necessarily convey the context in which those respective elements were produced.
Still, traditional film and media archiving takes care to separate out, label, and define the various production elements that make it into a final work. Film and media archives often distinguish between conservation, preservation, and restoration, which represent different of levels of intervention in archiving a given work. Even if the process of caring for and accessing records in a media archive looks a little different than in a traditional archive, clear classification of the consititution parts of a final work, metadata about those elements, and proper care and storage remain essential mandates.
Another helpful distinction is that between government archives and collecting institutions, which actively acquire manuscripts, papers, literature, film and other A/V media, art, artifacts, and all manner of items that we might not think of as “evidence.” In collecting institutions, arrangement and description look a bit different. Most media archives fall into this category.
Later, during the American Gilded Age, robber barons built gorgeous libraries, museums, and historical societies. These were often intended for the public, but were built with fortunes stolen through egregious labor practices and ruthless consolidation of capital. Many of these institutions housed the spoils of colonial expeditions into and onto sacred Native American lands.
While colonial ideologies are often less oppressively felt in media archives, they are still present, even just in basic western notions of collecting and ownership. And since media archives often contain elements that are more ephemeral than those of traditional archives, creators can face challenges when trying to copyright or secure their work, especially as films or other projects are digitized and (often illicitly) distributed, or used for purposes outside a creator’s (or creators’) original intention(s).
I think one of the best ways to understand these principles is to see them at work. The 431 midterm asked our class to evaluate the online presence of different archives and special collections. For that assignment, I looked at the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, housed at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. The screenshots at right show the online finding aid for the Smithson and Holt papers.
I chose this example because I’m interested in the theoretical problems that film, media, and conceptual art pose for “the archive.” I’ll follow this thread through the rest of this presentation, to test basic assumptions implicit in the definitions of “the archive” given above.
But what about and artwork like Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” ? Where does the archive have room for that? And even if we were to put it in an archive, what events does it record?
The work is comprised of four 9 ft. concrete cylinders, placed together in an arrangement forming an “X.” The sculpture was designed for, installed at, and still resides on a private plot in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, due west of the Great Salt Lake. Today, it is owned and managed by the Dia Art Foundation, and is surrounded by undeveloped private plots and land claimed by the state of Utah and the federal Bureau of Land Management.
Many famous site-specific earth works, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Walter de Maria’s Lighting Field, or any number of similar pieces, were designed to interact with, are contextualized by, and are co-constitutitive of the landscapes they inhabit. Some of these works (those like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative present an obvious example), ingratiate themselves in the landscape in a manner that is ecologically damaging, or that otherwise has a particularly significant and long-term impact on its environs.
This is further complicated when we note that many of these structures (“Sun Tunnels” chief among them) function as chronometric or astronomical instruments that measure, mark, or communicate information about the passing of time. “Sun Tunnels” has multiple such mechanisms: the two axes of the four tunnels align with the rising and settting sun on the autumnal and vernal equinox. Smaller holes drilled into the four tunnels correspond to the constellations Capricorn, Columba, Draco, and Perseus. While the holes do not “track” the movement of these constellations, the light filtering through the cut-outs, imprinted on the tunnels’ interiors, shifts throughout the course of days, months, and years, as the sun and moon change their position in the sky.
In this sense, works like “Sun Tunnels” can almost be considered archives unto themselves. The video at right (preserved and archived on HD video by the nonprofit distributor Electronic Arts Intermix) documents the sculpture’s contruction, and in doing so, presents one way of understanding what it might look like to “archive” “Sun Tunnels.”
HD video transfer from 16mm film, distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (video embedded from https://www.eai.org/titles/sun-tunnels). Editorial Assistance: Dee Dee Halleck, Aline Lillie Mayer, Laurel Siebert, Howard Silver. Camera Assistance: Sidney Crandall, Trent Harris, Richard Menzies, Dennis Wheeler. Sound Assistance: Dee Dee Halleck, Judith Hallet, Hass Murphy, Susan Penner-Wheeler.
In their site-specific, astronomical functions, “Sun Tunnels” and similar works of land art correspond to indigenous cultural heritage sites around the world, like Stonehenge and Chichen Itza, or large geoglphys and aggregations of petroglyphs, like the Nazca Lines in Peru and Murujuga drawings in Australia. Artworks/earthworks like “Sun Tunnels” and “Spiral Jetty” don’t often pay explicit homage to these original earthworks, despite being conceptually indebted to them and occupying the land on which indigenous creators of earthworks lived. I think it’s important to acknowledge these origins in any discussion of these works.
Furhter, if “Sun Tunnels” is an entry point into asking how nontraditional media and artwork complicate “the archive,” then situating it in the long, global history of earthworks-as-artworks (or earthworks-as-documents) opens up even bigger concerns about how the archive deals with time and ephmerality in relation to non-Western (and especially nonlinear and nonvisual) communication forms and formats. Earthworks are just one possible example.
At the beginning of this presentation, I stated that language, through etymology, is an archive. But historically, oral histories and other ephemeral forms of communication like performance, chant, and ritual or religious pratice have been maligned by “the archive,” when “the archive” is defined as the seat of power. Often, state archives have only accepted written documents as part of the evidentiary record. Refusing to admit non-written forms of information and knowledge as documentary evidence reinscribes colonial epistemologies on the histories of marginalized peoples and cultures, and silences the historical record.
More recently, indigenous archivists from around the globe and scholars writing from a decolonial lens have pushed to expand notions of “the archive” that can ecompass and situate non-Western forms of information and communciation. At left is a model of the “archival multiverse,” proposed by Anne Gilliland, which centers a conventional model of “archival studies” that expands outwards to include diverse and non-Western recordkeeping practices. At the same time projects like First Nations Principles of OCAP (facilitating data access while protecting data privacy and indigenous sovereignty) and the First Archivsts Circle’s “Protocols for Native American Archival Materials suggest essential praxis for what, in the academic context, is still an emergent theoretical model.
Implied yet not truly made explicit in the stricutres of fonds and original order is the primacy of archival context, which is what lends archival materials (be they documents, films, artifacts, earthworks, oral histories, or other intangible forms of information) their value and their power. The converse is that without that context, these materials become uninterpretable in both near and distant future, and are deprived of their rightful place in the historical record.
Thus, archives are and must be places that preserve not only all manner of recorded information, but the context with which and in which to successfully place and interpret the meaning of that information. Archives are structures that in themselves manifest structures that situate, contextualize, or give meaning to the archive’s contents.
New frameworks like “the archival multiverse” offer new avenues of understanding how we might archive and care for works from the past and works being created now that don’t look like textual documents. The “archival multiverse” allows us to radically reimagine what an archive could be.
Analog film is an example of audiovisual media that has been alluded to throughout this presentation. It is a medium has received a lot of attention in recent years, as filmmakers have returned to shooting on celluloid, and an increasing number of both repertory and commercial cinemas offer screenings in analog formats like 16mm and 35mm.
Still, there is a plethora of audiovisual material that needs our urgent attention in order to continue being a part of the archival record.
Among the interventions proposed by groups like the MMCC include preservation guides and standardized metadata, but also more creative and radical approaches like open-source preservation software and tech-focused how-to workshops (e.g., T.A.P.E.’s “Audio Casette Deck Maintenance Workshop” and similar programs) that enable practicing archivsts to better care for these types of materials.
These organizations, arising out of and existing within the communities that drive their purpose, participate in the archival multiverse and make space for new archival imaginings.
In this definition, archives continue to be seats of power – here, however, individuals and communities maintain agency in and through the archive, trusting their materials and their histories will be preserved and continue to hold meaning for future generations.
Sources
- Cook, Terry. “What is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1878, and the Future Paradigm Shift.” Archivaria 43 (1997): 17-63.
- Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Duranti, Luciana. “Archives as a Place.” Archives and Manuscripts 24, no. 2 (1996): 242-255.
- Gilliland, Anne. “Archival Traditions in the Multiverse and their Importance for Researching Situations and Situating Research.” In Research in the Archival Multiverse, edited by Anne Gilliland, Andrew Lau, and Sue McKemmish. Monash University Publishing, 2016.
- Gilliland, Anne. “Professional, Institutional, and National Identities in Dialog: Development of Descirptive Pracitces in the First Decade of the US National Archives.” Information & Culture 49, no. 1 (2014): 54-73.
- Lipman, Ross. The Archival Impermanence Project: Film Restoration Poetics, Case Studies, and Histories. Sticking Place Books, 2025.