Archiving a Pratt Graduate's experience with

We started this course with each one of us reading a different article about international perspectives on archiving artists' work and papers. Focused on the other side of the world from both New York and Rome, "Finding a Place" provided a great third viewpoint concerning how to go about creating and running an archive. In the article, Farah Wardani discusses the histories and archive work that has occurred at the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) and the archive at National Gallery Singapore. By examining these spaces’ pasts and current methods of archiving, Wardani demonstrates “the importance of art archiving and the centrality of art archiving to understanding the relations between art practice and the challenges of society in this region” (p.111).

National Gallery Singapore archivist Micaella Gonzales with Ireland-based Singapore artist Mak Kum Siew, who contributed his archives to the Gallery’s Library & Archives in 2018. (Photo by Farah Wardani)

Main takeaways:

No archive can contain everything or be everything to everyone

IVAA

does not have a strict collection criteria or policy
organizes an annual thematic focus of social issues relevant to Indonesia
includes a public library with an amphitheater to host discussions, workshops, and public events organized by local communities
stems from an “art movement becoming an archive” (219)

National Gallery Singapore

This archive seems much more focused on the formalizing the past than helping artists create for the future

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Our first site visit of the course was to the uniquely situated Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York. Located within what was originally a family home in the nineteenth century, the building served as a mission for orphans before becoming one of Rauschenberg's official studios. Created while Rauschenberg while still alive, the archive is still in the process of processing and creating an official catalogue of his work.

ROMA

MAXXI

After a night of delicious food and incredible sight seeing, we started the next day being dropped off in two vans at MAXXI’s main building (the National Museum of 21st Century Arts), which houses their collection of contemporary art and their archive. Although in the midst of re-construction, MAXXI”s impressively enormously designed building by famed architect Zaha Hadid impressed upon us the importance of this archive. The MAXXI’s team of two archivists, Giulia Pedace and Giulia Cappelletti, greeted and led us up the especially large staircase to a private grand conference room, where chairs supporting MAXXI tote bags and pencils awaited us. As we were settling down, suddenly Giulia Pedace announced that the director Francesco Stocchi had stopped by and wished to say a few words. With Penace translating, Stocchi welcomed us with kindness. Stocchi emphasized that the global political climate we are experiencing is forcing many archives and museums (and countries) to become more closed off from others. He hoped that our visit was the first of many such dialogues with archival professionals who have different points of views and backgrounds. While this was the only such greeting we got at any of the site visits we had, it left a lasting impression.

Archivist Giulia Penace explaining MaXXI's sorting system.

After Stocchi departed, Pedace and Cappelletti then proceeded to give us two in depth powerpoint presentations. The first talk explained the physical and the structural organizations of the archive and its role within MaXXI. This in depth breakdown was extremely helpful since for example I had never heard of the word “fund”, used instead of the word “collection”, with archives before. Now with a week of Italian archive visits under my belt, I understand that fund means collection. The second presentation focused on case studies of the archives as practice, examining the items in the 20th century art critic Alberto Boatto’s archive and the documentation of the exhibition Contemporanea (1973).

Once the presentations concluded, Pedace and Cappelletti brought us highlights from the archive. There were incredible items such as a hand printed invitation by Andy Warhol to his exhibition in Soho in the 1960’s, Alberto Boatto’s publication (which we saw in the presentation), and other treasures. One item that really struck me was the blueprints showing where all the art was going to be hung in the Contemporanea exhibition, which was staged in a car park in Rome. The exhibition included sections for art, poetry, artists’ books and records, music and dance, etc. Donald Judd, Yoko Ono, Rauschenberg, Philip Glass: a who’s-who from the avant-garde of the sixties and seventies.

Blueprint of Contemporanea 1960-1973 exhibition.

National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GNAM)

Holding Italy’s largest collection of 19th and 20th century art, the Archive and Library of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GNAM) hosted our second site visit of the trip. Housed in a hodgepodge of buildings from the 19th to the 21st century, the archive is located down long hallways underneath the megastructure. Passing hallway after hallway, being led by the head of the archive Susana as well as the archive’s accesioner Tina, we felt as if these records were never ending. Compared to our visit from the day before, far away from actual archives, today we held class deep within the archive. After the class was seated at a table littered with objects, the head archivist Susana dove right into the history of the archive, explaining at the same time what we were looking at.

Made up of different overarching subjects, GNAM’s archive has changed over the last hundred years. The first archive created at GNAM was a Bio-Iconographic Fund (a biography of an artist told by the images and documents left behind) formed in 1946 by Palma Bucarelli. By the 1970s, the archive started it’s Historical Fund. This Historical Fund is made up of objects and writings that strengthen the historical place of a work of art in the permanent collection of GNAM’s museum. Photographic archives and Institute Archives make up the rest of their items in the monstrous archive.

Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione (ICCD)

On our third day, we took a lovely morning stroll along the Tiber to the Institute of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage, Historical and Contemporary Photography (Istituto Centrale Catalogo Documentazione, or ICCD). The ICCD houses the largest collection of Italian photographs and cameras in the world. There we viewed a stunning exhibition by Vincenzo Castella that contained photographs of well known Italian works of art or architecture seen through a different lens or frame than the usual ones.

Detail of a Vincenzo Castella photograph

We then were led up to the third floor which led to a large open room, where we sat and heard a great presentation about the history and uses of the archive by curator Francesca Fabiani. Unlike most US archival institutions, the Italian archives were staffed with a mix of art historians and library and information professionals. I found this fact particularly helpful to know as someone pursuing a dual masters degree program at Pratt in both the Info School and History of Art and Design programs.

Examples of Artist in Residence books created from their times at ICCD

Although ICCD is technically a government institution, founded more or less after the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century, the institute has an unexpected degree of autonomy. While ICCD does house what is thought of as documentary photographic records, ICCD’s curators and archivists constantly try to breathe life into the collections by working with living artists. The institute is able to achieve this in three ways. They support a year-long artist in residence to interrogate the archive. They encourage new documentary photographers, hopefully amateurs, to introduce a new look to the way events have been documented in the past. And they look for ways to hire photographers by creating exhibitions such as the one featuring Vincenzo Castella which we viewed when we arrived.

"Documentary photography is the tool to make Itailan photography modern"

Francesca Fabiani, ICCD

While these efforts, and the archive itself, are extraordinary, the institute faces several challenges. One is that it remains relatively obscure, raising the question of what could be done to raise its global visibility. Another issue is one of representation: the artists in residence shown to us all were of the same demographic. What voices are missing from this experiment? How does the institute go about picking the artists it chooses? Last but not least, the institute has a funding challenge, being so strapped that the space is closed on Saturday and Sundays which make accessibility difficult. ICCD gets most of their funding through non-government grants. How can a cultural government institution survive and flourish if every year they must rely on outside funds?

Franco Angeli

After three days visiting large institutional archives, we were taken to the intimate archive of Franco Angeli. Although this archive is one of a kind in many ways, the most important way in which it is unique is the way in which the archive was created. Not a household name in America, Franco Angeli was a 20th century multi-media artist who could not easily be put into an art historical box. He passed away at a young age in 1988, leaving his works and papers to his nine year old daughter Maria. Protecting this huge legacy has created many exciting as well as hard challenges for Maria and her team. Learning about these challenges provided valuable insight into this particular artist's archive and its function.

Elisabetta Catalano

Although photographer Elisabetta Catalano's archive was our final site visit, we felt we had been in touch with Catalano's work since we got to Rome. At MaXXI, we learned how the archive team at that institution worked with Catalano's team to create an exhibition that used the light box (pictured above and below) for visitors to inspect Catalano's old contact sheets. These light boxes were designed by Catalano's partner, an architect, who was the catalyst of the creation of her archive.

Image of Elisabetta Catalano's lightboxes and contact sheets from MAXXI presentation

La Dolce Vita

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