For Hold… Held at Seventh Gallery
I work at a gallery with an extensive archive. On good days, I call my job archiving. On bad days, I call it data entry. I am not incorrect by either claim: I am an archivist, whose primary job is the entry of data.
The data I enter has been recorded by artists themselves and includes dates-of-birth, titles-of-work, dates-of-creation, colour-of-ink, measurement-in-centimetres-no-wait-that’s-millimetres-on-second-thought-that-title-could-say-Green-or-Dream. The work might have been made in 1986 or last week, but the errors span the decades. I am surrounded by data, and more often than not the lack of data, the lack of knowing.
The other part of my job is solving data problems. This involves going into the archive and trying to discern information from the art itself. I hold works on paper up to the light, see titles that have been erased and rewritten, I see manufacturers’ marks in the paper. I am always measuring. I feel like the slug-thing Roz from Monster’s Inc. “Wazowski, you didn't file your paperwork last night” but with my own flavour of art-wank: “Wazowski, you didn’t write which year you made this, July 2nd doesn't help me if I don’t know if it was 1991 or 1994.” The worst of the Wazowskis are the ones who leave the largest impression in the data they’ve left me. They require me to inhabit their mentality, their time, the impression of their pen on the page.
If I occupy an artist and their work too fully, it can cause problems with time. The years stretch and compress, and I find myself elsewhere. 2007, 2007, 2007, I write, as I try and fail to decipher some of the worst data I’ve encountered. This artist is chronically incapable of documenting her art. She made swathes of serialised work in 2007, all variations on a theme, with obscure and repetitive titles. She meanders all over the record in a leaking pen, apparently pondering the details of her work while committing it to paper. 2007, 2007. I was 10 in 2007. I remember being on the school oval and Kevin 07. She’s got her measurements wrong again. There’s no way this thing is 265 cm long. I flag the record and go to the archive. It is 26.5cm. I Google a title, I Google her. I find she died in 2008. I am 25, and it is 2023.
Sometimes I go home and the lazy time follows me there. I am late when I meet Hootan at a café near my house. He tells me about his work with photographs for his show. He corrects me when I ask why he works in photography. He is not a photographer; he only works with photographs. Hootan was born in Iran, and moved to Australia in 1985, and his practice explores the memory and mythology that arises from this dual cultural identity.
Photographs, like the ones Hootan uses in his work, are approximations of reality, attempts to capture a truth and hold it in time-and-place, in ink-and-paper. But Hootan’s practice challenges this apparent indexical quality of photographs. He combines them with air-drying clay to become sculptures, rendering the images obscured. This process highlights that, like memory, the images are a subjective experience. But they also gain a wholly different quality: they become 3-dimensional objects, which can be approached and considered from all angles.
When I am cataloguing, I find layers of faulty data. Faulty data point one is artist. Faulty data point two is also artist (uncharitable, I know, but deserved.) Faulty data point three is filing-related issues. Faulty data point four is me.
I amend a record I wrote last July for the artist who didn’t know her centimetres from her millimetres. The month was mostly chilblains and darkness, and it shows in the mistakes I have made. It’s frustrating to see my own fallibility here: I am supposed to be the neutral party, to be entirely invisible. But either it’s 2007 and the artist was numerically challenged, or it’s July last year and I wasn’t wearing adequate socks. Either way, I feel the lazy data-cum-lazy time bleed in everywhere.
I amend the records, and I am confronted with the fact that it is still an abstraction. I attempt to return to the truth, but I don’t know where to find it. She died in 2008.
Hootan tells me about a recent trip he made to Türkiye, a place he went in order to “not go to Iran.” The culmination of this trip-non-trip was travelling to the border of the two countries. Going to the border was purely explorative, sought under a desire to see the country where he was born. As Hootan is describing it, I begin to imagine a river, or a rocky escarpment: in either case, a place with wide views befitting reckoning and reflection. But borders are busy interchanges, and coming to ponder and reflect in this place is neither convenient nor particularly welcome, and Hootan’s border-related endeavours attracted the attention of Turkish guards. Hootan does not speak Turkish, and the guards did not speak English, resulting in a convoluted interchange facilitated by Google Translate and Hootan’s repeated insistence of “I’m looking, I like borders. I’m looking, and I like borders.”
Cataloguing attempts to record as many details of an object as possible so that it might stand for the thing when it is not there. It approaches the object, the artwork, the index, from all sides and all perspectives, approximating but never quite achieving the essential truth that only the object itself occupies. When I am cataloguing, I am so aware of the limits to what I can capture, that any rogue data is always a blow. How can I record the reality of the index when there are all these holes? The things I record are called data points, but they might one day be called history. As a purveyor of lazy time well acquainted with the soupy nature of it, I know that these things, once committed to paper, are hard to undo.
When describing repetitive nature of his artworks, Hootan tells me repetition is an act of compulsion and futility, an attempt to return to a state which may or may not exist. If I record enough – the date, the size, the colour, the material, the inscriptions on every surface – then perhaps I might begin to approach a kind of truth.
Or perhaps I too like borders, and all there is to do is look.