Queer artists have engaged archives throughout modern and contemporary American art, but art historical discourse of their work has centered the writing of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to theorize these spaces without considering archival scholarship. This text takes up Gabriel Martinez’s Archive series as a case study to critique archival selection theory and better understand how prejudice has affected the preservation of queer folx’s collections. Martinez’s series is situated amongst other Western artworks that center archival records and queer themes throughout the last century. This section places his artwork in dialogue with other artists for whom the archive is the subject of their artwork. The artworks detailed exemplify the multiplicity of ways that queer folx critique and interpret the histories preserved in these institutions. Following this survey of art is an analysis of how archival records are selected for preservation and the inherent subjectivity of this task. Pedagogical writing on archival selection by Frank Boles, Richard Cox, and James O’Toole are consulted to better understand how archivists working in the field are taught to handle this type of work. Most of their writing is focused on traditional archives and fails to articulate the challenges facing counterarchives, spaces formed to compensate for the erasure of queer persons in traditional institutions. This review of archival scholarship ends with a critique of how queer counterarchives have fallen short of their inclusive aims. The final section of this text is dedicated to a close study of Martinez’s Archive series. His photographs document the Harry R. Eberlin photograph collection and the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia. The historical context of the Eberlin collection and the founding of its host repository are presented in conjunction with Archive series because Martinez’s compositions are inseparable from these histories. Philadelphia queer culture in the 1970s and 1980s is revealed through the retelling of these histories and by examining who was visualized in the images themselves. These images of bars and events simultaneously reveal the gender and racial disparity of patronage within these spaces and exemplify long-standing tensions in the city’s queer spaces. Lastly, this text posits a practice called “pseudo-processing” where artists document and preserve facsimiles of archival records to question the divisions of archival labor from that of an artist performing comparable tasks. / Art History
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/913 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Carroll, Michael Jeffrey |
| Contributors | Pauwels, Erin Kristl, Glahn, Philip |
| Publisher | Temple University. Libraries |
| Source Sets | Temple University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 115 pages |
| Rights | IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/895, Theses and Dissertations |
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