‘Perspectives: negotiating the Archive’. Tate Papers, 9, Spring 2008

This paper sets out the areas of interest which I continue to develop in subsequent work.  It 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.

The paper was given as part of the ‘Archival Impulse’ strand at the Association of Art Historians conference in April 2008 at Tate Britain, and subsequently published in Tate’s online journal Tate Papers.  However it had its origins in a short introductory address given at the ARLIS/Tate Britain study day ‘the Archival Impulse: Artists and Archives’ in November 2007, which I co-organised. Through this sequence of activities I was interested to promote a closer exchange of information about the practices and methodologies of those who use, those who work in, and those who engage with the idea of the archive.  In this and my subsequent work I have sought to place the archivist’s perspective alongside those of, for example, the critical theorist and the artist who uses the archive as a ”site of construction” (Hal Foster).

http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7288