What is an archive? The word typically conjures rows of shelving racks full of neat boxes containing paper documents, carefully categorised according to the logic of the institution, company or individual for which the repository is some kind of a record or authority on its subject. It may be where researchers pore over records in archive reading rooms and libraries for clues. Or perhaps it’s a dystopian scene from Terry Gilliam’s cult film Brazil (1985) that springs to mind. Whatever you imagine, the ‘archive’ is typically bountiful, highly organised, and an enticing gateway to the histories and memories contained within. But there are other possible definitions.
For Andy Warhol, archiving was an artistic yet somewhat indiscriminate process, which kept his apartment free from clutter but retained his source material for future interpretation.
Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it out. What you should do is get a box for a month and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to New Jersey. You should try to keep track of it. But if you can’t and you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.
— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), London 1975.
Warhol’s now famous Time Capsules is his most serialised art project and a sort of anti-archive. Generic, uniform storage boxes each haphazardly capture a slice of time (months, weeks, sometimes days) and were a way for Warhol, the anthropologist, to sort through and store the things he amassed – from magazine adverts, newspaper clippings and photographs to music, art materials, personal and business correspondence, books and objects (even a mummified foot). He followed his own advice and between from 1975 until his death in 1987, assembled some 610 ‘TC’ boxes, each shipped to storage in New Jersey. Unlike the precious ‘time capsule’, carefully conceived for communication with future generations, Warhol’s boxes are chaotic yet fascinatingly idiosyncratic portraits of the artist and enigma. Their contents offer little recognisable archive logic – all manner of material artefacts are thrown together and it is the viewer’s task to make sense of what all this stuff might tell us about time, place, society, or Warhol’s artistic endeavour. The Warhol Foundation is still in the process of cataloguing each Time Capsule, and while only a few are currently available for examination, those we can view never fail to ignite the public imagination.
The archive of American designers Charles and Ray Eames is held at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and contains a dizzying one million artefacts spanning five decades of practice. Like a mega-Time Capsule, you can deep dive into Eames Office designs, wonder about unrealised projects, read through preparatory lecture notes and unedited transcripts, and immerse yourself in promotional materials or printed matter from international design events across the 20th century. My favourite activity, though, is to look at what Ray kept in her pockets, which grew deeper as the couple became busier and busier, and travelled more and more. Doodles and abstract ideas, receipts, addresses and telephone numbers, drawings on hotel branded paper, notes scribbled onto the backs of Benson & Hedges silver foil cigarette box wrappers: nothing was discarded. This is the stuff of life and work in all its sprawling glory. The world of business before the age of the internet, email and SMS.
More museums, cultural heritage organisations, and commercial companies are making their own archives – and those they hold for public benefit – more widely available than ever before. People want to know more about the origin story of the places they enjoy, the products they buy, or the lives of the obsessive collector, artist, or designer whom they admire or study. Delving into these worlds by ‘lifting the lid’ is, in many ways, more intriguing and rewarding than the curated experience. Why have one narrative when you can have a smorgasbord of interconnected stories and insights? An endless game of Choose Your Own Adventure, if you will. We are experiencing a kind of ‘archive fever’, which is not surprising as humanity grapples with a Freudian death drive, searching for collective memory and the traces of positive human endeavour as an intellectual and emotional salve.
For some companies and individuals, archives are a way of keeping memory alive and meaningful for current and future generations. The Italian company Archivio is a specialist consultancy supporting commercial brands and individuals to professionally archive their business and creative history; they also publish a journal featuring expert insight, new perspectives and projects dedicated to archival practices across Europe and internationally. Numerous architects and fashion houses – from Le Corbusier and Norman Foster to Louis Vuitton and Prada – have immense facilities housing meticulously catalogued artefacts: architectural models, project drawings, designs, and, in the case of Prada, every button, trim, accessory, garment or shoe made by the fashion giant. A treasure trove of fashion history and increasingly, spaces where clients and the public alike want to visit and explore.
Artists often deploy archival methods in their practice as artwork itself or as means of documentation in the absence of an object or performance. Some artists are also collectors. In his work, American artist and trained urbanist Theaster Gates plays with the tropes of the archive but also acquires discrete archives that connect with his social and political ideologies rooted in disrupting and expanding knowledge about Black experience and the African diaspora. At Stony Island Arts Bank, a public community facility in a former bank building in his home neighbourhood in the South Side of Chicago, Gates shares the Johnson Publishing Company archive in a relaxed, library-like environment where visitors can browse the personal library of publisher John H. Johnson and the publishing house’s own magazines Ebony and Jet. This essential document of American culture (extended, published and toured internationally by Gates as The Black Image Corporation) sits alongside the 10,000-strong record collection of Frankie Knuckles, the influential DJ and ‘godfather of House’ music. In other rooms visitors can work their way through an epic glass lantern slide collection – an Aby Warburg-like visual feast of art and architectural history previously used to aid teaching at the University of Chicago – or the Edward J. Williams repository of ‘negrobilia’, some 4,000 artefacts collected by Williams to remove the offensive stereotyping material from public circulation. Most recently these archives have become the focus of a series of fellowships, supported by the Mellon Foundation to catalyse new research and perspectives on Black history and creativity. Gates continues to intertwine his artistic and performance practice with the generative potential of archives and historic resources, manifest in spaces of care and repair through creative urban renewal. His is a long-term, deeply rooted project which resonates internationally from its hyperlocal context.
In Europe, institutions are providing unprecedented access to stored collections and archives in unique and distinctive ways. In the digital realm, this year researchers from Aalto University launched the Nokia Design Archive, an interactive online portal devoted to the pioneering Finnish mobile phone manufacturer from 1995 to 2015. Clever mapping makes Nokia’s design history searchable as linear history and thematically – from ‘green’ connections to ‘future’ concepts or materials grouped around the design process. If unboxing is your thing, there’s plenty to watch. If you want to know the in-depth design story of Nokia’s classic 3310 handset or ruminate over the alarming whiteness of 1990s and early noughties European advertising campaigns, it’s all here.
On terra firma, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen led the charge towards greater transparency and public access when in 2021 it opened Depot Boijmans, a giant mirror-surfaced cauldron designed by architects MVRDV and located in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. The playful building houses the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art, conservation studios and a spectacular rooftop terrace café. Visitors can take a guided tour of the stores and studios, wearing a white lab coat to view paintings and sculpture in industrial storage mode: hung on mobile mesh picture racks or on open metal shelving. In perfect post-Warhol consumer fashion, art meets the IKEA warehouse. Elsewhere, museums such as Stockholm’s ArkDes and the Triennale di Milano have sought to give their collections and institutional histories greater visibility through new displays and lively, accessible archive-centred programming.
This spring sees the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s V&A East Storehouse, a hotly anticipated new storage and conservation facility for the V&A’s non-displayed collections and some 1,000 archives of art, design and performance. Much like Depot Boijmans, it was conceived as a place of work for curators, researchers, conservators and technical specialists as well as a super-public access storehouse of wonder, lightly mediated for the public to roam, explore and discover in a freer fashion than traditional museum settings.
In 2015 the V&A was informed it needed to vacate its off-site storage and find a new space for nearly 300,000 objects across fashion, textiles, furniture, architecture, theatre and performance, and Asian collections. Martin Roth, then V&A Director, and his deputy Tim Reeve, explored a wealth of museum, industrial and commercial storage typologies to inform early project visioning and these access and public experience ambitions were embedded from the beginning. In 2017, as the V&A East project in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park started to take shape, a site at Here East, in the former Olympic broadcast centre, became available and the V&A East Storehouse was born.
Designed by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro Architects (DS+R), V&A East Storehouse is an archive aficionado’s dream. The V&A holds an enormous array of business and personal archives: from Birmingham’s pioneering electroplating and silver manufacturing company Elkington & Co. and London-based firm Heal & Son to designers Lucienne and Robin Day, Edward McKnight Kauffer, photographer and curator Cecil Beaton as well as many émigré artists and designers seeking sanctuary in Britain in the 1930s and after the Second World War. Dedicated study rooms will provide public access via a new reservation service called Order an Object. Material from across the archives and collection will be on view in stored mode or in regularly changing, focused displays housed in DS+R’s innovative ‘hacked shelving’, which modifies the off-the-shelf pallet racking system with a new kit of parts designed to support and protect smaller artefacts in the right environmental conditions. V&A East Storehouse has also given the museum the space and means to show large-scale architectural fragments and complete interiors. Returning to display after some 20 years in multiple crates, visitors will see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann Office, the American architect’s only complete interior held outside of the US. A three-storey fragment from Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens has been re-erected and conserved to convey the magnitude and innovation of a Brutalist ‘street in the sky’. Importantly, this fragment is accompanied by audiovisual interpretation made together with former residents of the housing estate, located close to the Olympic Park in Poplar.
In 2023 the V&A finalised the acquisition of David Bowie’s archive, which spans the entirety of his career and includes everything from costumes and stage props to music, lyrics, notebooks and diaries, photography, and a panoply of fan art, which, according to his long-serving archivist, Bowie loved and treasured. The V&A is readying for huge public anticipation by creating a dedicated David Bowie Centre to house the archive, make its contents available for quiet, close study and, crucially, display key objects and audio-visual media from the extensive archive to tell the story of Bowie’s artistry, influences and legacy. The David Bowie Is exhibition toured to 12 museums around the world, reaching two million visitors. Now much of what was included in the exhibition will have its permanent home in east London and more people can immerse themselves in his unique creative universe. As someone privileged enough to work on the acquisition of the archive, I sat in an anonymous storage unit in New Jersey reading Bowie’s diaries and looking through chronologically organised drawers of photographic prints and contact sheets. Seeing an unpublished photograph of Bowie, at ease in his dressing gown before setting off for a walk on the streets of Tokyo in 1975, or reading his diary to-do list reminds you that the archive holds both the reality and the fantasy. The truths of the archive are also its fictions, and it is these affective associations that keep us digging.
This article is taken from Anima Issue 3, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here