collecting -> archiving ?

What is a Cabinet of Curiosities?

Leonie Oortgijsen

Carnavalesque Medicine

Leonie Oortgijsen

Just who is collecting what is of great concern to Mr. Macdonald of the Museum of the City of New York. From mayoral papers to fliers of the missing, the artifacts from this event will be of potential interest to historians, he said, and ”it would be unfortunate if museums, libraries and archives viewed this as a competition.”

Leonie Oortgijsen

Linda’s exhibition at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery, Collecting Excursions, was a culmination of many years of environmental research and experimentation within Georgia, as well as an exploration of tree bark and mushroom specimens she collected while participating in a residency at the Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers in South Africa. “Transporting foreign bark and mushrooms back to the United States can be tricky,” she remembers with a smile. “I sometimes feel like an artist outlaw.” In addition to the specimens from South Africa, the exhibition will examine the relationship between trees and mushrooms through the inclusion of a dead tree that Linda found in Grant Park

Leonie Oortgijsen

watch?v=AVden4ngsMo

By Annemieke Teresa van Twuijver – She is an artist who made archiving her art. Highly unconventional archiving that is: these ‘registries’ keep record of what regular archives are meant to avoid. Sculptor Cornelia Parker (UK, 1956) documents decay, destruction, oxidation, erosion, oblivion and the constant transitions of meaning. Her archives could be labelled ‘disappearing in progress’ and ‘forgetting under construction’ (with emphasis on the present continuous). Her pieces range from the jaw-dropping monumental (’preserving’ the white cliffs of England in the shape of a drapery) to the delicate fragility of intimate tenderness (white handkerchiefs with rubbings of the tarnish of silver family heirlooms). Other works include the wreckage of an exploded log cabin put together again in the shape of a log cabin and the char coaled parts of a church tower that was struck by lighting. 

[in relation to conversations during the break]

“Photography is memory, the trace of an original. In a postmodern age,…the past has become a collection of photographic, filmic or televisual images. We, like the replicants [in the movie Blade Runner], are put in the position of reclaiming a history by means of its reproduction.”

“Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner” Giuliana Bruno (1987)
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/slippery/Slippery.html
—
from an interview with George Legrady:
Geert Lovink: How did you come up with the idea of putting your collection of Cold War items on a CD-rom?

George Legrady: I didn’t want to carry all the material in my head anymore. All these objects, film footage, images, stories needed to be contextualized and brought together into a concrete form so that they could exist on their own and be made accessible to a viewing audience.
http://www.mediamatic.nl/magazine/8_2/Lovink-Legrady.html

Museum De Paviljoens in Almere presents a good collection of artists who work with concepts as collecting, archiving, taxonomy and others. The exhibition stresses on a certain way of working and acting as a collector within a city of human interventions.

Go there.

http://www.depaviljoens.nl/page/688/nl