We all have our pet professional rants. One of mine: a rumbling suspicion that archives are, more often than not, sites of theory and research for everyone but archivists (we who are too busy corralling the materials to have time to write theory and research). The new book The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context, edited by Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell, both backs me up and offers enlivening possibilities for a critical archival theory that actively centres archival labour. It is probably not a coincidence that the book’s central concern is the multimedia world of archives of creative practices. Arts archives are spaces where traditional archival methods are not always fully compatible with the tasks at hand, creating the very conditions that push practitioners into building new theoretical methods and tools. The seed of the book emerged from a 2016 symposium aimed at “developing interdisciplinary exchange and reflection on archival practices in visual arts contexts” (p. 1), with a specific focus on theories of materiality. As Breakell and Russell sketch out in the introduction, the gathering brought forth a wide range of interests, making it clear that there was a hunger for more consideration of the materiality of archives. The flip side of the coin was a lack of familiarity with archival theory and the specificities of day-to-day archival operations in other disciplines, which tended to engage with “the archive” as a primarily abstract space. Focusing attention on these two needs, The Materiality of the Archive is rooted first and foremost in the experiences and expertise of practising archivists. Chapters operate as case studies, at the hearts of which are archives of creative practices – defined broadly to include “fine art, design, craft, film, performance and literature” (p. 2). The texts engage deeply with the complexities of the materials held within this often-unruly expanse of arts archives. This structuring offers a prime space for “challenging what we might call the paper-based assumptions of the archive” (p. 3). A common division when considering materiality and archives is strict differentiation between document and object, with the former being prioritized within archival theory while the latter is shifted into the subgenres – the “special archive,” the “artist archive,” and, increasingly, the “community archive.” But as The Materiality of the Archive insists from its first pages, documents themselves are material and, in their materiality, hold the traces and contexts of their creation. Acknowledging and assessing this materiality opens up new channels to disrupt the veneer of objectivity within archival theory, which has been cracking for some time. The book is split into quadrants, with each section offering readers a different method for orienting themselves in relation to the archive. Part I, “In the Archive: Practices and Encounters,” brings them right into the room. At hand are the idiosyncrasy of finding aids, the distinctiveness of the corpus of records as a form, and the unacknowledged role of scissors in “shaping photographic documents and objects” (p. 64) in photographic archives. Sue Breakell makes a strong argument for considering the entirety of an archival fonds as one material body. As a processing archivist, I was caught off guard by the accuracy and emotion in her description of the intimacy that comes from searching through every box and file. Breakell is intent on showing that there are relationships among the materials within an artist’s archive which, when taken as a distinct body, can provide “methodological opportunities for understanding the characteristics of archives of creative practice and their conditions of creation” (p. 44). Liz Bruchet picks up a parallel thread in her consideration of Stephen …
