Art and Archives Roundtable

Ligatus Research Center will host the Art and Archives Roundtable on 18 July 2014, with the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) exchange programme ‘PROJECT ViA’ and the UK and Ireland Art Library Society (ARLIS). The afternoon will include presentations by Judy Vaknin, Victoria Lane, Wendy Russell, Gavin Clarke, Ruth Maclennan and Alan Crookham, as well as by the PROJECT ViA participants Sang-ae Park, Ji-eun Lee, Hae-Ju Kim, Hyun jung Woo, Ho-Kyung Chung and Jay Jungin Hwang.

Ligatus is linked to ARLIS through a common interest in artists’ archives. The relationship developed after work that Ligatus did on the John Latham Archive. Since then, Ligatus has presented that work on several occasions to the ARLIS group and welcomed ARLIS members to Flat Time House where the John Latham archive is kept.

Ligatus and ARLIS have also worked together in the development of new research proposals. Archivists try to be objective when undertaking archiving work, however, it is inevitable that their subjective opinions and views appear in archival descriptions. Although subjectivity should normally be avoided in archiving, Ligatus proposes to make it the main focus of the archiving process for artists’ archives. Creative Archiving has formalised this proposal, taking subjectivity to the extreme and treating the archivist as a domain expert. With Creative Archiving, in addition to standard ‘objective’ descriptions, subjective interpretations become an extra layer in the implementation of the online archive. With modern software tools, building this extra interpretation layer is feasible and relatively simple. Athanasios Velios, Deputy Director of Ligatus Research Centre, has explored Creative Archiving in his article, Creative Archiving: a case study from the John Latham Archive.

Presentations on the day will look at archiving art, performing archives, the artist and the archive and curating the archive.

KAMS and ARLIS are visiting the Flat Time House to discuss the John Latham Archive prior to the event.

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