Archive, Catalogue, Library
from Thursday, May17th of the year2007.
Whatever you want to call it, I have been happily organizing all my music and, piece by piece, putting it online. Now that there is a representative sample, please go visit the Projects section of this webpage if you haven’t already. Archival work (not that this is what I’m doing, but this is more of an aside) is one of the most fascinating businesses. When I first came to New York, I worked on creating Maira Kalman’s archive in her apartment, organizing and filing bits of ephemera ranging from drawings to pressed leaves to matchbooks. My friend Jeri is a fantastic artist, but also has a particular genius for creating artists’ archives. I think that there is a great deal of reciprocity when artists are simultaneously involved in Production and Catalogue; look at Jeri’s piece Location and you’ll see what I mean. This summer, I am going to record two long, new pieces about archives ““ one employing Colonial archives as textual and emotional sources, and the other about (and using) personal archives ““ memorized lists, alphabets, mnemonics &c. More on these soon.
1 Comment
May 18th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Do you know the writing of W. G. Sebald? His novels are heavily concerned with memory, and function in many ways as elliptical archives of the emotional residue of 20C history. I can’t think of anything better to read while composing pieces with the themes you mention. I look forward to hearing the works.