The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and ...interpretation. Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes. The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.
Interest in art school histories and the archives that support them has grown over the past decade, yet institutional recordkeeping practices and collecting, where they exist, do not tend to capture ...the kind of records that are most useful for research into art school pedagogies or their relationship with contemporary art discourse. This article gives an archive studies perspective on the Fine Art Critical Practice (FACP) Archive, a collaborative project to collect archival sources documenting the history of the FACP degree programme at the University of Brighton, UK, to be held at the University of Brighton Design Archives and activated through involvement of the FACP community of staff and students. It considers the records of interest to that community may lie in the context of an art school archive within an institution. It goes on to consider the example of a body of papers received from a former member of FACP staff, Mick Hartney, reflecting on some of the questions raised by this mode of collecting in terms of archival arrangement and knowledge production for the project's future phases.
This article considers the involvement of the art historian Kenneth Clark in design policy and promotion during the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly his association with the Council of Industrial ...Design, at a time when the role of design was particularly prominent in Britain's war effort and post-war planning. Clark's activities have not to date received detailed attention from either art or design historians. Drawing heavily on unpublished material from Clark's archive and other collections, it considers Clark"s attitude and contribution to design, in the context of his own wider arts agenda, as well as the wider debates of the time about "good design" and modernism. Clark's somewhat abrupt withdrawal from the Council, and from a significant engagement with design, marks a shift in his thinking about the relationship between art and design and their place in society. (Author abstract)
This article considers the involvement of the art historian Kenneth Clark in design policy and promotion during the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly his association with the Council of Industrial ...Design, at a time when the role of design was particularly prominent in Britain's war effort and post-war planning. Clark's activities have not to date received detailed attention from either art or design historians. Drawing heavily on unpublished material from Clark's archive
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and other collections, it considers Clark's attitude and contribution to design, in the context of his own wider arts agenda, as well as the wider debates of the time about 'good design' and modernism. Clark's somewhat abrupt withdrawal from the Council, and from a significant engagement with design, marks a shift in his thinking about the relationship between art and design and their place in society.
The true object of study Breakell, Sue
The Materiality of the Archive,
2024, Letnik:
1
Book Chapter
Analyses of the material properties of objects, theorised in the discipline of material culture, do not have developed equivalents in archive studies, other than those captured through purely formal ...descriptive practices, or included in discussions of the affective qualities of the archival encounter. This chapter considers an aspect of materiality which is particular to work in archival contexts: the materiality of the archival fonds, which is the primary archival corpus left by an individual or institution. Focussing on the archives of artists and designers, and proposing the archive as itself a primary unit of creative production, I discuss aspects of the experience of the material encounter with the archival fonds and propose means for its analysis as a single three-dimensional entity. I consider how interactions with material traces of the creator can reach out of the archive's past moment of presentness, triangulating the relationship between the subjectivities of the archive, creator and viewer. Finally, it draws on Jules David Prown's foundational approach to object analysis to suggest how methods from material culture offer means of investigating the tacit knowledge produced by the archival encounter, particularly those generated through the practices of the archivist, which are currently largely invisible and accessible to subsequent researchers.
This chapter considers an aspect of materiality which is particular to work in archival contexts: the materiality of the archival fonds, which is the primary archival corpus left by an individual or institution. It discusses aspects of the experience of the material encounter with the archival fonds and propose means for its analysis as a single three-dimensional entity. The chapter considers how interactions with material traces of the creator can reach out of the archive's past moment of presentness, triangulating the relationship between the subjectivities of the archive, creator and viewer. Analogue archives of visual practitioners may include material forms such as sketches, notes, and myriad visual and textual manifestations of creative practice. The sketch or prototype is often - in the analogue world at least - in essence as well as execution distinctively 'other' than the finished item, materially and affectively.
Introduction Breakell, Sue; Russell, Wendy
The Materiality of the Archive,
2024, 2023, Letnik:
1
Book Chapter
This introductory chapter frames the rationale for the publication, as a contribution to bridging the gap between archival and non-archival bodies of knowledge. Positing materiality as a framework ...for analysing, interpreting and engaging explicitly with archives of creative practice, it contributes to the mapping of a shared terrain at the intersection of archives, material culture and creative practice. Noting some key points of connection and commonality across these and other related disciplines, it highlights themes that underpin the volume. In doing so, it seeks to connect the object-based ontology of material culture with the text-based ontology of the archive. While drawing on some considerations of materiality already enriching archive studies from other disciplines, it expands this connective potential of materiality in the other direction, outwards from the archive, a concept which is articulated in the structure and arrangement of the individual contributions in four parts: In, With, About and Beyond the Archive.
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