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Radical archiving for radical art histories: against a positivist rhetoric of discovery.

Session will present: Virtually

Complex narratives around art's production and reception can emerge from studies of studios, art schools, artist-fellowships, collectives and milieux. But these histories often rely on dispersed collections and perspectives, including archives of artists, collectors and critics. Independent, grassroots, liberatory and radical thinking has developed archival practices for recording and preserving histories often overlooked in authorised heritage organisations (Flinn, Stevens, Shepherd 2011). This has highlighted the non-neutral and political aspects os archives, and the activist potential of archiving, as a 'process of selecting, ordering, and preserving the past - in short, of making history.' (Latimer, 2013).

Prompted by Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH), our oral history project to archive stories from UK and Ireland, 1970s-90s, this panel focusses on the political considerations that underlie inventing, making and organising an archive. It will explore how repositories represent radical organising in, around and adjacent to the visual arts. We seek contributions that address questions or offer case studies arising from different political and methodological engagements with the production of archives and art histories. How can the discipline Art History learn from the decades-long practices of radical archives that have preserved histories overlooked by authorised heritage organisations? How can radical practices of archiving impact canon-formation? How can archives make visible interconnections across their collections using digital media? How might we write more complex histories of artistic and political movements and their interrelations, or biographies that take into account changing alliances, affiliations and solidarities across a lifetime? What does radical accessibility to archives look like?


Field(s) of Study:
Topics: Radical Art
Topics: Feminisms
Topics: Class
Theory / Practice: Library and Archival Studies
Time Period: Twentieth Century


Chair:
Prof. Hilary Robinson, PhD, Loughborough University

Nao Bustamante’s Innovative Archival Activations: Transmedia – Performance – Art/ifacts
Lucian O'Connor
Radical archiving as a feminist-led methodology in the web-platform ‘collective herstories’
Alessia Cargnelli
Feminist and Familial Carceral Archives
Keren Zaiontz, The University of British Columbia
The Women’s Art Register: Archiving feminist community
Caroline Phillips, Women's Art Register
Negative archive/archive of negatives: mining the impenetrable past in Chinese contemporary photography
Qiuyang Shen, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract Submissions Closed
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