Disassembling the Archive: Fiona Tan

by Philip Monk
Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, 2007
232 pp., illus. 29 col./ 99 bw. Trade, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-921972-45-7.

Reviewed by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University Vancouver

jfbarber@eaze.net


New media-multimedia artist Fiona Tan (born in Indonesia; living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands) is noted for incorporating personal and social formations of identity into installations of still and moving images so as to engage the dialectic between the objectivity of unprejudiced witness and the subjectivity of personal travelogue.

Examples of Tan's installations include "Rain" (video installation, 2001), "Downside Up" (video installation, 2002), "News from the Near Future" (video projection, 2003), and "The Changling" (video installation, 2006).

It is the latter that forms the basis for Disassembling the Archive: Fiona Tan by Philip Monk, Director of Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). Written in response to Tan's 2006 exhibition at AGYU, Disassembling the Archive is the first full-length treatment of Tan's work.

"The Changling," a series of nearly 400 black and white school portraits of 1930s Japanese school girls was featured at the AGYU exhibition. Displayed on two video monitors, the images of these school girls, dressed in identical school uniforms, most with an identical hair style and many wearing identical glasses, morphed into each other until one became the other, until the notion of an individual Japanese school girl was lost in a more generalized notion of a Japanese school girl of a particular historical, cultural, and social continuum. In this way, Tan investigated and played with the notion of an archive as a permanent collection of specific objects, each imbued with a particular identity and relation to all other objects in the same collection.

Monk's text, in response to Tan's exhibition, written as a series of correspondences with Tan, is also playful, as well as insightful. Together, Tan and Monk complicate our understanding of the relationship between the photograph and the archive. He begins by assuming that the collection of photographs was found by Tan, perhaps in some context or order different from that of the final exhibition. Simply by the fact that the photographs are collected and shown together, Monk says, they constitute an archive, now put to a different use than what was originally intended. Cleverly, playfully, Monk establishes the archive as a fiction, maintained only by the chance of encounter. Left unsaid, but resonating, is the question of whether the archive exists outside that encounter.

Speaking of the photographs themselves, Monk notes that such images have long been thought to represent proof of identity in the absence of their referents. However, critical interrogation may secure the subject of any photograph as the identity of the viewer in relation to the original referent. The individual identities of the Japanese school girls are subsumed in the overall organization of the archive, Monk tells Tan, as if each individual image were produced serially from only one original negative. Yet from the accident of Tan's encounter with the photographs she saved one image, rescuing all from that one. By implication, every time anyone else views this archive of photographs, the same rescue is repeated. But, since these photographs, by their nature, are historical artifacts that pre-date us, and to which we have no connection, our viewing of them retrospectively bestows, not meaning but disruption, dispossession, and departure.

This has always been the problem of photographs in archives, says Monk. Archives were always meant to contain, and to constrain, their collections. The passivity of photographs, records that no one has yet established (they do not represent the performance and record of a past act but rather the potential of the future) waiting as they do, tokens that change hands in imaginary restitutions of identity, points, always, of departure, never of arriving, disrupting and unsettling the sediment of history, records, and archival classification through prompting continual speculation, disturbing a collection of closed transactions.

A central question for Monk's correspondence, and Tan's installation, becomes: Can still photographs, contained in an archive, or book, disturb their viewers? To answer his own question, Monk draws on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, writing about photography, and Jacques Derrida, writing about Freudian impression.

The upshot of this inquiry gives the book both its disturbing and insightful characteristics. Monk concludes that photography has no need for an archive as it is (and always was) a spatial and temporal inventory, providing some detail (individual photographs) and all detail (photography in general) of the human plight, always so contrary. Photography can be ordered and reordered, again and again, until, perhaps, even, eventually, into the right order. Such reordering of individual photographs affects their meaning(s) and so one photograph becomes a representation for many. Each photograph of an individual Japanese school girl becomes a referent not for the individual, but rather the general idea of Japanese school girls of the 1930s. Photographs, already archives, severed from their original, historical referents, quickly disintegrate into details that change the meaning(s) of the photograph. As a result, we can only believe that any photograph possesses truth as it carries no verifiable truth itself, that in fact photography is incapable of truth, having no meaning other than spatial configuration or appearance of the moment.

In the end, photographs become no different from the archival container in their general indifference; image and archive are no different from each other. This is the distinctive and destructive effect of photography on the archive. The result is both political and artistic, Monk says, deriving from the fictional reassembling of archival contents by artists and other users. The issue is no longer control—who, after all, any longer controls an archive, Monk asks—but transformation as archives are the shared artistic issue of our present continuum, each and every one of us, each and every archive.