The Archive Issue

In retrospect, it seems we weren’t paying close enough attention. While outbreaks grew in Wuhan and Bergamo, we spent the winter working on art projects, prepping for classes, reading submissions, and planning layouts for these pages—ignorant of the disruption soon to come, in spring, when the pandemic would race around the globe. Come March, we cleared out of our dorms, studios, and offices, gathered what supplies we could, and retreated into our private quarantines, stunned that daily life could be so quickly transformed. On laptops and phones, we watched maps of the world speckle with disease; we watched death tolls rise, beleaguered nurses and doctors lamenting the lack of supplies. We Skyped and Zoomed and WhatsApp-ed across time zones, by turns bewildered, enraged, and exhausted by pandemic life. Through it all, we kept records—diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, lists—so as not to forget what we’d lived through in the spring of 2020.

Work on this journal continued by fits and starts, via Zoom and e-mail and Google docs. We’d set out to make an issue devoted to art and archives, and now it seemed the archival impulse had been galvanized, at least among many of us, by the historic events unfolding. The archive is a source of power; those who control the archive influence what history becomes, as Brandon Sward suggests in his essay on the art of Michael Rakowitz (“The Politics of Translation”). In such unsettled and unsettling times as these, when we feel especially powerless, perhaps the practice of archiving—on a personal and institutional level—expresses an urge to exert some control over unruly conditions, to give lasting form to the flux all around us.

We see that human impulse at work in several of the contributions gathered here, most of which were selected some weeks before the pandemic shut down the country. In the art of Ellen Lesperance, as described by Bean Gilsdorf (“Power and Protest”), an archive of political activism functions as inspiration, a point of departure for new aesthetic directions. In Cris Mazza’s “Complex List,” the death of a mother triggers a reevaluation and resorting of a sprawling family archive. In “Channeling,” Andrew R. Mancuso describes the discovery and rescue of damaged negatives in a photographic archive slated for destruction. In these and other contributions, we see artists gathering together disparate archival artifacts and fashioning new contributions for the cultural archive of our time.

The archive is never static or inert; it is expressive of human urges—the urge to remember, to control, to love, to create, to understand, to grieve, to celebrate. In this season of loss, perhaps the archival impulse grows yet more salient, yet more vital to our collective well-being and sanity. As historian Michael Sizer notes in his brief, poignant essay on plague-related artifacts from sixteenth-century Paris (“Plague Laws from the Municipal Archives of Paris”), the archive can remind us that we have been here before; we have endured such ordeals in the not-so-distant past, and we will endure them again.

Putting this issue to bed in April, amid warm blossoms and news of mounting coronavirus deaths, we wondered what the archive of this time would include and exclude, who would decide and how. The writing and artwork collected here suggests that, to the extent we are a free and open society, control over such matters rests not only in the hands of conventional archivists, but also in those of artists and writers whose work feeds our archives, and can help shape them, too. We hope you find inspiration in these pages, and we thank you for reading.

The Editors