Although I have really no experience to speak of with either job, it
seems to me that the jobs of archiving work and curating it are pretty
separate, even if they're often done by the same person. A curator has
to help present a work to a public today, in the present .... an
archivist has to preserve that work for the future, and hope that their
efforts are useful for some future curator presenting it to a future
public. So seeing it differently might be why I don't think it's a bad
thing that archivists seek to record artworks that are ephemeral.
Whether curators choose to present them as fixed and static, well,
that's a different issue.

An event in time can have a different sort of value as it ages. If I
fall in love with somebody today, that's something that can never be
reproduced in the same way again. But I'm still going to write about it
in my diary.

And regardless, I think the ephemerality in the end trumps any efforts
of the artist, archivist, curator, theoretician,
email-list-participant, whatever. If you make an ephemeral work, then
it's going to be ephemeral no matter what some museum or historian
tries to do with it. I'm always struck by the records on display at
performance retrospectives, how quickly these things acquire the patina
of the past. How the Yoko Ono videotaped on stage in 1973 is not the
same Yoko Ono I sometimes see photographed in society pages in New
York, how the video image has a certain grain that is unusual today but
might have been state of the art then, how the audience members were
dressed as they stepped on stage, one by one, to each cut off a scrap
of her own clothing. How could this not be a thing of the past? We're
in time's grasp, whether we like it or not.

How does that line go, the one from Saturday Night Fever? "You don't
fuck the future, my friend, the future fucks you."

Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
+ + +
On Feb 24, 2005, at 6:04 PM, francis mckee wrote:

> isn't there a danger here? if you preserve impermanent work against the
> author's wishes isn't there a danger that the only message you send to
> the future is 'some artists believed philosophically in ephemerality
> but the society they lived in ignored the point of their work and
> archived it instead'.
>
> naturally the artist cannot control the reception of the work but isn't
> there any curatorial responsibilities - even for curators to be
> sensitive to the work or think beyond collecting comprehensively
> despite all artistic intentions? and if foucauldian notions of death of
> the author are to be summoned then shouldn't we remember the 'will to
> knowledge' and the drive for power that foucauldian readings uncovered
> in various archives (say, Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive)?
>
> There are some interesting artistic works to consider that are not
> digital but the work of Francis Alys, for instance, seems to thrive in
> the oral tradition - relying on the retelling despite the existence of
> documentations of the performances (often multiple documentations which
> make each relative and less authoritative)
>
>
> On Thursday, February 24, 2005, at 10:25  pm, Francis Hwang wrote:
>
>> On Feb 22, 2005, at 10:44 PM, Curt Cloninger wrote:
>>> I'm not arguing that all net art wants to be ephemeral, but much of
>>> it does.  Not because of software obsolescence or because it lacks an
>>> art market, but because that's what the art is about conceptually.
>>> To attempt to preserve such work misses the point of the work.
>>
>> And yet, if a thing happens publically (net art, street performance,
>> political speech, etc.) you can make the case that regardless of what
>> the original author intended for it, that other people will find value
>> out of the act of archiving it. I say don't say this out of a "death
>> of
>> the author" mindset, just that different people can draw different
>> types of value from the same thing. Maybe the original artist would
>> rather a work of net art obsolesce as quickly as its technological
>> context. But maybe, say, my as-of-yet-unborn grandchildren will, in a
>> few decades, learn wonderful things by reading historical accounts of
>> that work.
>>
>> Seems to be that being an archivist is a fairly tough job: You have to
>> inconvenience the present on behalf of the future. And you have to
>> sometimes impose your own mindset about permanence upon the works of
>> others, but if you do it right, one day somebody will benefit from it.
>>
>> Francis Hwang
>> Director of Technology
>> Rhizome.org
>> phone: 212-219-1288x202
>> AIM: francisrhizome
>> + + +
>>
>