Archival art is not for everyone.

Todays lecture detailed the work of tutor, Steve Lovett. His work as it seems is a collectionary repertior of people and places from his past. Steve likes to work with the idea of people and dialogue, and the way in which this can connect people and places together in a kind of linking web. Viewing some of his works, I could see that a lot of his works were quite archival based in terms of using his own family photographs and such.

Well, If I were to ask my self about the word "Archive", and what that particular word means, I would have to say that it was about collecting. Keeping groups of things together from different parts of time, and storing them away. Photographs, little nick nacks or trinkets, or old clothes from people who wore them in the past. Archives to me are very hoarded. whether it be about your life, or history in general, nothing is thrown away. It is all kept together in groups. I would say that Archiving things would also need to be in some sort of basic order, be it alphabetical, numerical, or even in the order in which these events occured. Although as we saw today, not every archive is ordered. Boltanski was an artist who clearly kept a lot of his work unordered, having tins of random reciepts and bus tickets all crammed together in stacks of rusty biscuit tins. You cannot find anything.

In Steves work I definatly saw an element of archiving. He has kept pieces of his past and turned these into works of art. This very much reminds me of scrap booking. A way of archiving our past. Putting our old photographs, postcards, pieces of hair and articles into an album, and making these into small heirlooms. In Steves work, he has done the same by copying, old photographs from his childhood and from where he grew up, and added to them with print and paint.

For me, I do not see a trend between archives and artists. Neither do I see Autobiographical trends. Not all artists take their past and make it onto art. infact I have only seen a moderate ammount of artists who keep bits of their past and express it in ink ect. Artists like Bauhaus do not use any elements of their past in their work. Bauhaus merely takes shapes and adds further meaning to them. There is no representation of his childhood or past, or even any kind of archival quality added to it. Infact, One of my favorite artists Josephine Wall (image above) is someone who has never used a biographical element to her paintings. All of her works are based on the imaginary.

I do not think that I like the idea of making my art based around a documentary of my life. This is because my own life has never been an inspiration for me. Perhaps my past intregues me a little more, but I am perhaps more interested in the pasts of others. Better still, I would rather not make art that is archival of the past hardly at all. For me a faked archival look can be pretty - vintage looking borders and old documents. However, faking the past in photoshop, by taking old papers and manipulating them is probably as far as I will go. Grunge is something that I enjoy. The stains of life? Not so much.