Category Archives: collections

Archive Donation – Brian Eno, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Richard Pinkney

A Donation of 1960s Poetry Magazine With Hidden Gems

The Text Art Archive and I were very excited to receive a generous donation of a 1960s poetry magazine from a fan of the Text Festival. The donor was at Winchester School of Art with Brian Eno in the 60s where Eno went after his time at Ipswich College of Art.

The Ipswich College publication is very striking with a red cover with bold silver design (for which Eno is credited).The poems in the magazine are experimental in the 1960s spirit of the avant-garde.

Inside the magazine were some extra text art pieces including two fabulous large poster works by Richard Pinkney and some smaller uncredited pamphlet poems.

Loose inside the cover we were stunned to find an incredible type-written poem by Dom Sylvester Houédard. The poem is a long multiple page piece with handwritten alterations, called The Primamadonna and Child, and has a stunning concrete poem on the last page.

It’s a magnificent donation of stunning items, and hopefully will inspire more collectors to donate material to the archive where they can be conserved and made accessible to interested researchers. We would be very interested in any DSH scholars who would be willing to offer information about the work.

Anyone interested in the Richard Pinkney poster poems can see them in the upcoming exhibition at Birkbeck’s Petlz Room, Gordon Square from the 21st June to July 10th.

Archive the Mess

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A perception shift that was necessary for me to get this project moving, and to begin to function as an archivist, was to resist viewing the archive from a researcher’s point of view. (I don’t need to lose my practitioner’s point of view – otherwise how would I understand vagueness?). As I researcher I would engage with the archive at the front door, by looking for the subject; an artist or a specific event. But from this back door perspective, there is no subject in the archive, only records gesturing towards the existence of a subject or an event. There are chains of evidence, led by documents that support the fact of the collection. Everything is kept in the archive on the basis that it is part of the evidential chain that leads to the fact of the collection. Curating an archive is not so much about imposing order onto chaos, but articulating the collection’s mess.

Controlled Vagueness and Mingling the Records

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My first week working on the archive was a case of building its architecture.

How I built its architecture.

In diagram form this architecture looks like a root systems (they call it a tree but it’s not, it works down) that starts at the top with the name of your collection. The collection is the ‘National Text Art Archive’ or the ‘Arts Archive Collection’ (it will have more than one name to keep its meaning open and broadly attributable to different bodies). From the ‘collection’ the structure drops down into ‘sub collections’ including the Text Festival Archive. This drops down into three ‘series’: Text 2005, Text 2009 and Text 2011. Decisions from this point on how the material is organised from these series is the point at which this archive becomes authored. How do I break up the admin and correspondence, what do I do with the curatorial plans for various exhibitions and events within the festivals, how do I organise the trail?

Thoughts on the authorship of this archive’s architecture.

The architecture has to allow for the materials and records to mingle. It cannot be organised to the point where the trail leads too directly to each item, record or example of correspondence. You have to leave room for the archive to breathe, for readers of the archive to wander around in. This roominess in the archive is a question of controlled ambiguity, structured vagueness. This project (of building the archive) has to capture and be led by the Text Festival’s approach to collating and gathering materials, artists and documentation for a show. The TF has a way of working that is decisively imprecise and haphazard, this is how it stays exploratory, and experimental.