By Ben Alper
I’ve always been somewhat of an archivist. Even as a small child, I remember avidly collecting things. Whether it was legos, baseball cards, or books, I was constantly obtaining, organizing and classifying some aggregate of related objects. I don’t recall ever being too cognizant of any real driving force behind these motivations; it was simply an impulse – and an archival one at that.
It is quite natural then, I suppose, that my artistic practice of the last 4 years has dealt directly with archives of varying, but related forms. This infatuation (obsession might be a more appropriate word) began after my grandfather died. In the wake of his passing, I turned toward the material things he left behind in an effort to try and discover how much, or how little for that matter, you can really know about a person from the objects that survive them. It is an admittedly unsatisfactory substitute for inter-personal experience, but when faced with nothing more than a patchwork of artifacts, it is often one of the only places we can turn.
All Images are Courtesy of Ben Alper
I certainly looked within too. I summoned a number of discrete memories that each gave some sense of the person he was – some nuance or idiosyncrasy – but in the end memory proved too confounding, distorted and tenuous. It was a truly strange sensation, similar in effect to the blurring of one’s vision. Things were there, they were just soft and non-descript. These encounters with memory’s impermanence ultimately led me back to the concreteness of physical things – things that would, in almost every case, outlive me as well. The most alarming discovery I made though was how quickly the memory of someone begins to shift or fade after they die.
Subsequently, I started working on a project entitled Erasure that presented appropriated material from archives that, while still domestic, were more broadly cultural – family photo albums. I began this work after an employer asked me to remove all the photographs from his albums in service of archiving his family’s photographic history digitally. Evidently, the physical space required to store these volumes had become too overbearing. He kept the original photographs, but when I asked him if he wanted to keep the albums he said that he had no use for them anymore. This gesture fascinated me. It seemed indicative of a much larger cultural attitude. And as I would soon find out, this phenomenon was indeed more pervasive than I had originally thought.
I began collecting these discarded photo albums and making images that showcased the traces, imprints and imperfections left behind on pages where photographs had been removed. Simultaneously, I began to ardently collect vernacular photographs that I would find in heaping bins at the very same places where I was buying the photo albums. This process is always a binary experience of feeling both voyeuristic and altruistic at the same time.
On the one hand, I am given access to incredibly intimate and private moments in other people’s lives – moments that were certainly never intended for my eyes. On the other hand, however, I am taking a genuine interest in photographs that have been relegated to a cultural graveyard. I am fully aware that my efforts will not lessen the disassociation that these images have been subjected to. They will all likely remain extricated from their origins; their reincarnation in my work will simply be yet another recontextualization, one more displacement. They are important though. They speak of cultural, social, domestic, familial and religious customs that are salient and worth remembering. Where once history was passed down orally, it is now passed down photographically. Ultimately, vernacular imagery offers the possibility for historical continuity by providing entry points into the past.
The Archival Impulse then grew out of a desire to create a “space” for these photographs to exist. To give them a platform where they are presented as they are found – stains, tears, creases and all. The blog takes its name from Hal Foster’s essay An Archival Impulse, which explores the archival minded practices of a handful of contemporary artists. Although not overtly influenced by this text, Foster does articulate a prescient aspect of the archival process that is at the core of my fixation with it. Foster writes that artists dealing with the archive “are concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces…” and are “often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” The lack of a concrete beginning or culmination in archival endeavors allows for a multiplicity of readings, precisely because archives are never really complete. They are, in some fundamental way, fragmentary – perpetually in a state of adaptation. This lack of definition cultivates a narrative structure that is constantly reinventing itself. And as archives fluidly change, it allows for them to be continuously new. In the end, finality is the true phobia of the archival artist.
