Mining the Archive

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Guest editor Zara Stanhope. Reflects a range of recent artistic and curatorial responses to particular collections as well as considerations of the nature of archival material and knowledge in the broader sense.

Topic list: conservation, cultural policy, identity, indigenous culture, migration, multiculturalism, outsiders, politics.

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Articles in Vol 19 no 1, 1999

A Dream of Earthly Organisation

Feature by Zara Stanhope

Not only are artists fascinated with images and objects - it has been estimated that half the adult world population has been a collector at some point in their life. A number of different projects have been instigated by artists considering what it means to collect and archive. — More »

Archives After the Seventies and After

Feature by Tom Nicholson

Brown and Green are well known for their meticulously produced paintings, often involving the layering and juxtaposition of competing forms and histories. They continue to paint though photography has now assumed a major position in their practice. These photographs function as archives without narrative: scrambled mythology. — More »

Artists and Collections: a working partnership

Feature by Rachel Kent

The notion of the artist working with the museum collection is not new. Historically, artists have drawn inspiration from museums and their diverse collections - archaeological, ethnographic, medical, botanical and zoological- as a basis for academic studies and finished works. — More »

Debra Phillips: List

Feature by Blair French

'List' examines Phillips recent investigations into issues of memory, history and renown, and the structuring of such through systems of language representation and communication. The work traverses the worlds of royalty, theatre, film, science, politics, literature and fashion. The images range across a period of 150 years. — More »

Elizabeth Gertsakis: Tampering with the Archive

Feature by Brett Jones

Elizabeth Gertsakis has excavated her family histories and Greek/Slavic heritage as part of understanding difference as a critical space of knowing. It is not an attempt to 'position' or 'locate' herself in Anglo Australian culture or in the art world, but to understand the mechanisms that produce dominant cultural histories and resultant exclusions. — More »

Fabricating Archives: Six New Zealand Artists confuse the system

Feature by Christina Barton

In New Zealand, conceptual and post conceptual artists from the 1970s to the present have incorporated various references to the archive; its contents, classificatory systems and its institutional adjuncts, the library, the art gallery and the museum. — More »

Four Shoes Many Signs

Feature by Jason Smith

Four artist's projects initiated by the National Gallery of Victoria engage contemporary art practices and the role of the museum and public galleries as mediators between the collections and the viewers. Impacts on policies regarding the moral rights of artists. — More »

Going Over Old Ground

Feature by Vicki McConville

The artist discusses the research for her exhibition entitled 'The Private Eye- a foreigner's power of observation'. Held in regional Victoria 1998. — More »

History and Memory

Feature by Philippa O+Brien

History and meaning are very much at the centre of an important exhibition in WA of Aboriginal art. Many of the artists draw on personal or family memory, while others use documentary evidence of the past. Parallel to these individual histories is the history of government policy and its impact on groups and individuals. — More »

Is there an Artist in the Museum?

Feature by Merryn Gates

Examines two multi-site exhibitions Archives and the Everyday, Canberra Contemporary Art Space September/October 1997 curated by Trevor Smith: and Collected, Photographer's Gallery London June 1997 curated by Neil Cummings. The museological urge in artists has for some time been a part of contemporary practice...leading to the new museology. — More »

Market Mark-Art: Forgotten Fruit

Feature by Noel Purdon

In the final stages of the demolition of the old Adelaide fruit and vegetable markets, Margaret Dodd and Jennifer Hughes collaborate to produce an installation which caught the echoes of the history displayed in situ at the markets. — More »

Parallax Error

Feature by Naomi Cass

Working within the context of the Percy Grainger (1882-1961) collection, artists Louise Weaver and Carolyn Eskdale created an installationwithin the architecture and material culture of the building. In 1998 composer and sound artist Ros Bandt created an installation for the Museum's courtyard. — More »

Photosynthesis: Two approaches

Feature by Clare Williamson

The photograph as a source and subject for photographic practice iteself is characteristic of the work of a great many artists today. Tracey Moffatt and Margaret Dawson's works are considered. Each draws on photographs which precede their own, but work in markedly different ways. — More »

Polemic: Object and Text

Feature by Donald Brook

"So the question raised for art theory is this....Is a physical autographic sculpture - a Brancusi woodcarving for example - only an 'instantiation'(albeit rather a privileged one) of some imperceptible, intentional object that is the 'real' sculpture? Are sculptures more literally than metaphorically - 'poetry in stone'? Are they in a word 'texts' whose proper reading (as we are told) had best be undertaken in French?" — More »

Psychology of Retrieval: Personal and Fictional Archives

Feature by Natalie King

How can (traumatic) memories be excavated? Many visual artists use records and material objects as documentation with which to resurrect their past experience and those of their families. Often using literary means, visual artists who archive their past employ text as well as images in poetic and haunting ways. Quotation and citation form the kernel of this pychology of retrieval and act of preservation. — More »

The TMAG Commissions 1998

Feature by David Hansen

Here at the end of the twentieth century, the world is having to come to terms with the socio-political, economic and environmental legacies of nineteenth century imperialism. Contemporary art participates in this post colonial discourse: issues of ancestry and inheritance, relations between indigenous and settler peoples, national and imperial mythology, mapping and borders, migration and language, ecology and exploitation - these are increasingly familiar themes. — More »

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