Archiving The Unmade

Fraught time trying to pull everything together for final show. Predictably plans change at the last minute having spent so long working through ideas.I suppose that’s positive though? As long as the new idea is better than the old one…

Almost completed archive book which acts as a creative portfolio of most of the past year’s work.

Spending today figuring out how to photograph typewritten text and ordering test prints.

Self imposed exile in the library over the past month. Writing essay and continual rewrites. Feels almost there, I think. Spent too long looking at it and need some time out.

Change of exhibition plans: using smaller scale prints of black and white 35mm photography alongside text pieces. Quite a departure to the planned very large scale prints, but feel a lot happier with the plan. Possibly was just moving to large scale just for the sake of it, keeping to a more readable size could help remove the potential of scale as a distraction, and focus the viewer upon the content alone. Using text within the exhibition was also totally the obvious choice, and should have been all along really, yet somehow wasn’t… perhaps the attendant issues that this brings up for me (is my practice writing or image making?) was at play again.

Looking forward to finally getting back into the studios and getting on with work next week. (Period of blind panic finally subsided.) Need to adapt work to the space and play with the lighting there.

Notes marking out the structure of the first of two essays within the contextual report/archive (creative version of dissertation). They don’t reference my own work directly – written under a pseudonym – but describe and places the book within a definite context (which by definition should be the purpose!)

The Unmade and The Unfinished Collection

pt.1 The Unmade

Examines the role of the ‘unmade’ works of art/film/literature which have passed into critical and academic mythology. The half life they inhabit, their worth, and how perception of them changes when elements are published or exhibited.

A focus on Kubrick’s unmade film ‘The Aryan Papers’ as an example of a completely unmade work with an existence through the archives of the filmmaker and the mythologising and research of interested parties. The film had been in development for over 20 years before being finally shelved by Kubrick, ostensibly due to the release of Schindler’s List (too similar a storyline), but it is suspected by many close to the director he found the subject matter too overwhelming and was unable to work objectively as an artist or disassociate himself from the darkness of the themes.

Last year Jane and Louise Wilson were invited to make work based around the extensive archives left by Kubrick and chose The Aryan Papers as their subject. Their film centres on the actress cast to play the lead role, and the effect of the film (its lack) on herself. In doing this the Wilson twins have shifted the subject matter from the Holocaust which Kubrick himself found so difficult to enunciate, but to the unmade film itself. The film represents its ghostlike qualities, alongside the unknown potential and fallout.

pt.2 The Unfinished Collection

Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project the key example of an unfinished work that is placed well within the conventions of a collection. Passed again into a mythological state, but in this case has been published. Arguments as to why this type of work remains unfinished: is it the all encompassing boundaries of the subject which render the work innately impossible to complete, or the attitude of the author where the collecting impulse has overwhelmed that of the creative?

Could it be argued that if the work is impossible to ‘finish’ in the eyes of the creator/collector then the point at which it is published or exhibited (even if due to the death of the author) then that is the work completed – as a personal project of collecting.

Other examples: Aby Warburg’s ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’ (unfinished), Hanne Darboven’s ‘Cultural History’ (finished?)

Conclusions

How the works discussed can form the basis of a set of conventions for distinct genre into which these works can be placed.

Sunday’s photo shoot not as productive as I’d hoped, the Super 8 stock was more suited to gloomy conditions rather than the sunny day we had (decided not to risk it, too expensive) and the prom had far too many visitors to get many (empty) landscape shots.

Managed to get some photos of the strange, modernist cadet look out building will hopefully translate well into the archive book: a sense of incongruity in the setting, foreboding of an uncertain future (now passed), a bleak otherness inherent within the dated architectural lines.

The making process using 35mm film seemed far less comfortable then when using medium format. I have become used to the scrutiny and singularity of vision that comes with the limit shots and options of these cameras. 35mm (and digital) SLRs overwhelm with choice – to capture everything and anything just seems too much and the possibilities drown each other out. The quieter format seems to suit me (and the subject) much better right now… slows things down enough to think.

First outing for new/old Super 8 cam on Fleetwood seafront tomorrow. Taking 35mm camera also – add to collection of archive photographs, possibly for display in a gallery context.

Both sets of work will be empty, sparse in their content, featureless seascapes, spaces where structures once stood, a sense of loss and lost understanding.

In the archive these photographs could be used as an ending point (as opposed to the urban or domestic environment shots). A finality in their emptiness, functioning in the archive book as a suggestive, yet ultimately unsatisfactory conclusion. The journey ends here and we, as readers, can at best piece together and guess at what has taken place – myth and uncertainty reflected in the seascape.

The film will function as an extension of my photographic practice – fixed shots lingering on nothingness. The viewer questions why this space is important to the artist/filmmaker, its reason for becoming the subject of work – what has, or will, happen in this place? Narrative possibilities in elevated status.

(in the context of archive… lighting/cinematography test shots that flicker and jump. How would stills look enlarged as prints?)