Susan Hiller on her work From the Freud Museum

In this her text 'Working Through Objects' from 1994 Susan Hiller reflects on working with archival objects From the Freud Museum.

Reflections on the archive by Sue Breakell

"Archives are more prominent than ever, not only in art practice and theoretical discourse but also in popular culture. An archive is now understood to mean anything that is longer current but that has been retained. This paper considers how archival practice can be integrated further within current discourses of art history, theory and practice, at a time when the concept of the archive is at both more widely known and less fixed in its meaning." Continue reading Sue Breakell's reflections on  negotiating the archive in this piece published on the Tate website.

Song Dong: Waste Not

From the wikipedia page about this artwork

Waste Not is an exhibit by Chinese artist Song Dong that displays over 10,000 domestic objects formerly owned by his late mother, who refused to throw anything away if she could possibly reuse it. She had suffered poverty during China's turmoils in the 1950s and 1960s and had acquired a habit of thrift and re-use that led her to store domestic objects of all kinds in her tiny house in Beijing. After the death of her husband in 2002, her desire to hoard items became an obsession that began to affect her standard of living. Song and his sister managed to alleviate it by persuading her to let him use her possessions as an art installation, reflecting her life and the modern history of China as experienced by one family.

The careful categorisation, organisation and spatial arrangement of the objects hoarded by his mother turn these everyday items into an impressive archive that reflects the social and cultural issues alluded to above.

Sean O'Connell

For his exhibition suburban spirits in 2017 Sean O'Connell worked with objects that were highly significant to his deceased grandparents. His careful selection of these objects, the representations that he made of them, and the way that they were ordered in both the exhibition and the catalogue, gave these objects their archival quality.

These images are pages taken directly from the catalogue. The text for each image has been copied here. 

Above (left), my grandfather’s headband loupe that he wore constantly when engraving, peering into the minutiae of his work. Opposite (right), the loupe imaged by x-ray photography, using Industrex T200 radiographic film.

Above (left), a milling tool made by my grandfather during his tool-making apprenticeship in Germany. Opposite (right), the cutting head of the tool imaged by 60kV DC spark discharge over Arista orthographic film.

Above (left), my grandmother and myself, dressed to please, 1979. Opposite (right), my grandmother’s kitchen scissors, always at the ready to cut, imaged through 35kV DC spark discharge over Ilford Ortho Plus orthographic film.

Above (left), my grandmother’s kitchen scales, used daily, and repaired constantly with glue and sticky tape. Opposite (right), the mechanism of the kitchen scales imaged through x-ray photography using Industrex T200 radiographic film.

Tony Albert

Tony Albert Sorry 2008

Sorry commemorates the apology on 13 February 2008 by the former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, to Indigenous Australians who have suffered as a result of ‘past mistreatment’ by the Government of Australia. Yet, Tony Albert is neither championing hopeless blind optimism nor pessimism through his work. Aboriginal people have been offered many broken promises. Here, Albert and his army of kitsch faces, has taken this word on face value until real change is observed. read more

Janet Laurence

Janet Laurence Matter of the Masters

Janet Laurence’s work echoes architecture while retaining organic qualities and a sense of instability and transience. Her work occupies the liminal zones or meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Profoundly aware of the interconnection of all life forms, Laurence often produces work in response to specific sites or environments using a diverse range of materials. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underllying themes in her exhibition work. Read more

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski Personnes 2010

Read more about this work.

 

Christian Boltanski Reserve-Detective III 1987

Read more about this work.

DORIS SALCEDO

Doris Salcedo Atrabiliarios 1992-1997

In 'Atrabiliarios' Salcedo evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer's response is, in turn, emotional, even visceral, rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes as relics or attributes of lost people, donated by the families of those who have disappeared. Shoes are particularly personal items as they carry the imprint of our body more than any other item of clothing. She then sealed the niches with a membrane of cow bladder, which she literally sutured into the plaster of the wall as if picturing the literal process of internalised bodily memory. read more

Tom Nicholson

On 30 August 1999 East Timorese voted overwhelmingly to become an independent nation in a ballot sponsored by the UN. Following the announcement of the result, occupying Indonesian troops carried out systematic destruction throughout East Timor. Within two weeks several thousand civilians were murdered (a precise number is unknown), 200,000 were forcibly transported to concentration camps in West Timor and other parts of Indonesia, and most significant infrastructure was destroyed.

Books were targeted for destruction. Libraries were systematically burned, amongst them the widely-used university library and the English library in Dili. Private collections of books were targeted, and in notable cases book collections of prominent intellectuals and independence activists were collected on the street where they were publicly set alight. In villages, schools were systematically destroyed.

Action for another library was established in Melbourne in response to these circumstances. Thousands of books were donated by bookstores, libraries, and individuals. They were shipped to Dili in containers where they now form part of the nascent National University Library of East Timor.  Read more

Tom Nicholson After action for another library 2010

TONY CRAGG

Tony Cragg New Stones – Newtone’s Tones, 1978, plastic.

“I use everything but, preferably, after it has been used by man… what interests me is the special critical appraisal that we apply to manmade objects and man’s activities.It’s a real problem; the world is full of manmade objects. It’s about time we stopped producing and started clarifying and reevaluating the objects we have put into the world. The situation now has a political dimension. It no longer has anything to do with political structures but is related to the very nature of this critical search”.

Tony Cragg interviewed by Demosthenes Davvetas, 1985

Tony Cragg 

see more

and more

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso in his studio 1908

read more about Picasso's collection of African art

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

collected drawings of hands, among other things

10 a.m. is when you come to me -  read more

Hanne Darboven

From Hanne Darboven's collection, displayed as found in one room in her family home in Hamburg

see more of: Magnificent Obsessions - The Artist as Collector at the Barbican Art Gallery  12 February – 25 May 2015

more images at: Creative Review

Chris Burden

Chris Burden [1946-2015] All the Submarines of the United States of America 1987

see more on YouTube

WORSAAE

Worsaae Drawing 1

Worsaae, under the commission of Christian VIII of Denmark, spent nine months travelling around Britain and Ireland during 1846 and 1847. One of the most famous Scandinavian antiquarians of the nineteenth century, he had spent time visiting Sweden, Austria, Germany and Switzerland during the preceding years. The terms of his royal commission, as they related to his tour of Britain and Ireland, primarily focused on an investigation of the Viking-age antiquities and monuments of Scandinavian character. He published the results of his work as Minder om de Danske og Nordmændene i England, Skotland og Irland in 1851 with an English translation, entitled An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland, appearing in 1852. In this work Worsaae virtually created the concept of the "Viking Age". This work contains 12 drawings in which his found objects are grouped and identified, and known as the Worsaae Drawings. 

key to Worsaae Drawing 1

see UCC for notes on each

See Worsaae Drawings 2-12 here

other archeological drawing

Judy Watson

Judy Watson's collection from Herron Island

hear Judy talk about her collection on YouTube

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread and her collection

See Rachel Whiteread talk about her collection on YouTube

Tammie Castles

Tammie Castles  Preservations 2013 in  Hidden,  Rookwood Cemetery

see Tammie Castle website

KATHRYN RYAN

Never just one.

Collecting: promise and loss – constant objects and ephemeral narratives.

'The sheer number of the things needing to be arranged and the near-impossibility of distributing them according to any truly satisfactory criteria mean that I never finally manage it, that the arrangements I end up with are temporary and vague, and hardly any more effective than the original anarchy. The outcome of all this leads to truly strange categories. A folder of miscellaneous papers, for example, on which is written 'To be Classified...'

Georges Perec 'Species of Spaces and Other Pieces'

Kathryn Ryan is an object and installation artist who uses found objects, casts and texts, and is interested in the processes surrounding documentation, collection and arrangement. She is drawn to the transformative potential of disused objects and their connections to poetry, promise and loss, and the natural world. Her forum talk on 6 May 2015 will focus on her collecting practices, the shifting spaces a practice inhabits, and how we are all, in some way, collectors.

Studio blog: http://piecesofpractice.blogspot.com.au/

Website: www.kathrynryan.net
Forum talk attached here.
Images to come.

GIORGIO MORANDI

Giorgio Morandi

Grande natura morta con la caffettiera (Large Still Life with Coffeepot)

1933, etching, 38.3 x 51.1cm

Read more on Morandi on MOMA site

Morandi with part of his collection

Morandi's collection and studio 

Dong Yuan Giorgio Morandi’s Bottles (composed of 80 pieces),
2009; oil on canvas, 160X178.5cm SOURCE