DISMANTLING THE ARCHIVE
(Where I write of leaving the “archival spirit” behind and starting on a new path and journey.)
As I have mentioned over and over again, one of the foundational and most important art-research projects I ever undertook started in the summer of 2001 and was called “The History-Project”. It began with the simple premise, “To Paint The Concept(s) Of History.” I had been studying art history and history in general, historiography, and I wanted to represent the work of historiography in painting, and history in music as well. I did a lot of research and wrote many essays on the philosophy of history and so forth. It was an art-research project on a grand scale.
I continued this project indefinitely, and have even grown into being a kind of archivist, maintaining an archive of the past 30 years of my art and research. I prided myself on my archive until recently, where I realized that I needed to “un-historify” myself from “The History-Project”. The History-Project defined me as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, but it came at a cost. My whole identity as an artist and as a person, as I have said, was as an archivist. Over the years, I was able to move 15 times and still maintain my personal archive, with minimal loss. I maintained it through my life’s many adventures, through countless traumas and transformations, and saw this as a great accomplishment.
Now I am seeing what this obsession with history is costing me. I need to liberate myself from my history and history itself. Up until now, I saw history as being present as soon as you had any process persisting over time. Everything time-bound was a historical process in its essence. But now I am realizing more and more that life and everything in the universe is truly impermanent. Every historical process eventually “dies”.
In a sense, I need to “dismantle the archive”. I’m not necessarily going to destroy or throw out my entire archive, but I’m going to spend some time going through it and “downsizing” it a great deal, only keeping the bare essentials. I also want to “dismantle” this identity I’ve created of being an archivist. I want to be free from earthly possessions, even if I choose to keep a great deal of things. I just don’t want to be tied down to “precious” possessions. I want to reach a point where it wouldn’t matter if I lost it all. Complete or near-complete detachment.
I see it as disconnecting myself from the “ARCHIVE-OF-THE-SOUL”. In my work on the pseudo-science of “Historiomics”, I worked hard to develop a theoretical framework to deal with what I called “historical pathologies” or “historiopathies”. The problem is, I never really liberated myself from my own main “historiopathy”, that of being an archivist or historiographer.
This hasn’t taken place by choice. I am feeling a heaviness or weight of all these countless “historical processes” which I used to idealize and adore, but which I am seeing as leading to a kind of “prison of the soul”. In working on my musical project, “Seasons of The Heart”, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the “heart” means, what it means to have “heart”, to enter into one’s “heart”, to listen to one’s “heart” and soul. I want to simplify my life and reach a place where my only goal in life is to choose between two or more alternatives at every step of the way, choosing what is most aligned with my heart and soul over what “resonates” less with my core self and values.
So I’m currently undoing the archival mindset where I needed to keep a record of everything, of every event in my life, every artistic production, every piece of research, every note and sketch, thought and feeling, etc., and just “letting go”. Letting myself go into the stream of life, taking me wherever I am meant to go, fulfilling my life’s purpose without any attachment to anything (in the ideal). This, to me, will be true freedom of the spirit, if I can attain even half of it in the rest of my lifetime on earth. I need to “un-historify” myself, to leave The History-Project behind and start new projects that go in another direction completely.
I leave you with a final “Archive-Painting”, a concept I invented many years ago, after theorizing what I called the “History-Painting” and the “Process-Painting”. The “Archive-Painting” was the logical conclusion, from the start of the History-Project where as I said previously, I tried to “Paint The Concept(s) of History”. Now I will paint the concepts of something else, something thus far ineffable, which is mysterious and which I am discovering and rediscovering each passing day.
I thank you dearly from my heart of hearts for having followed me on this great journey. The best, I think, is yet to come. Stay tuned for more in the coming months!
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
