IV. DOING DOCUMENTATION
Looking for Elizabeth Pavlik: Documenting Entropy
Maria Tane (Amsterdam)
Reviewing Tarrah Krajnak’s exhibition at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, I observe how for Krajnak, distorting Ansel Adams’ photography is an act of appreciation as much as it is an act of questioning the process of archiving and preserving his art. Rather than trying to preserve the intentions or essence of the art, Krajnak’s series challenges the very idea of an essential, immutable spirit that belongs to an artwork, opting instead to document how interacting with art dissolves the possibility of its fixed condition and involves an act of co-making. Moreover, as I will show, by bringing her videos into circulation on social media such as Instagram her work enhances the performativity of documentation through the audience’s (potential) engagement, but it also destabilizes documentation as a window into the past and hints toward how preservation has instability built into it. Krajnak’s doing documentation may ultimately turn into decayed matter feeding the ground from which art keeps on emerging.
Tracing the Cultural Value of Photographic Documentation in, and beyond, the Museum
Annet Dekker (Amsterdam), Katrina Sluis (Canberra), Gaia Tedone (Milan)
In order to trace the shifting cultural value(s) of photographic documentation, in this paper we present selected outcomes of a series of workshops hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London (TPG),which developed around the question: How can institutions engage with this expanded field of visual documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory? In the paper we consider the ways in which documentation is diffused, operationalized and valorized by different agents in contemporary visual culture.