Seminar 3: Creative use of archive
‘Creative use of archives: The opportunities’
–Dr Paul Gerhardt, Digital Archives Associate for Arts Council England, Archives
for Creativity
Bill Thompson, Chair and Head of Partnership Development, BBC Archives:
First up is Paul Gerhardt, a Digital Archive’s Associate, I don’t think I’ve ever heard
that phrase before, who’s going to talk about the opportunities, what is possible,
what lies before us and how we can make the best use of the archive material.
Paul...
Dr Paul Gerhardt, Digital Archives Associate for Arts Council England,
Archives for Creativity:
Well Bill, as always, thank you very much and thanks particularly to the BBC
Academy and to Art Council England for inviting me. There will obviously be an
aspect of autobiography in this presentation because it reflects my interest in the
creative use of archive over a number of years, particularly with moving image
archive.
So what I’d like to do to start off is to take you back to a room at the Idea Store
which used to be called a public library in Whitechapel, in 2007. Alright, the event
was the opening of artist Chris Dorley Brown’s exhibition and screening of a
project called BBC in the East End, 1958-1973. What actually happens in this
presentation, which I hope you’ll see in a minute, is that the screen dissolves from
a 14-year-old Richard Brown, from a Peak Time Manor Live documentary in 1972,
to the Richard Brown of 2007, and he’s not a happy man. He recollects that even
as a youngster he had been aware that the film he took part in was a kind of set
up, of failure and potential imprisonment for, what were described as these bad
boys of the East End of London. Neither he nor his family liked being the object of
a particular ideological construction. In fact, this entire evening has been, through
material recovered through the BBC Archive and enhanced by Chris Dorley
Brown, a kind of riff on the theme of media and ideology.
Media representation and change in 1971, and in 2007, and its impact on
Whitechapel, is the focus of a discussion in a room, packed with local people. An
artist, and free access to the BBC’s local television and radio archives, has made
this event possible. It should be noted how different this event was from
television’s regular ability to feed of its past.
Television is increasingly fascinated with revisiting the sight of early historic
coverage. But the follow-up frequently slightly sanitizes the earlier footage, treating
it as some kind of retro-chic or as some kind of heritage material. Nostalgia, you
begin to realise, could be the death of archives. What Chris Dorley Brown
achieved was something a little bit more raw. He brought materials from the
archive and re-contextualised them – and re-contextualised them for and in a local
perspective. Chris had brought it all back home by making a film using excerpts
from the original programmes, and by re-interviewing the participants in the same
spot where they’d stood 36 years earlier, we were exposed to a fascinating blend
of history, culture and identity.
I was there at the Idea Store event, as a kind of BBC suit, to say a few words of
welcome, and afterwards I was confronted by Jenny, a woman in her thirties, who
wanted, no demanded, a copy of the films, ‘Where can I get the film? Can I have
the DVD? Is it on the web? It’s about us you know; we should be able to have it’.
And she had a point, and a very clear notion that cut through all the complexities of
how and when the BBC should make its archive public. The BBC had a slice of her
heritage. She paid for the BBC and she was determined to have access to it. It
was a small event in Whitechapel, but it is part of a big idea, that as Roly said,
even out-sizes the BBC itself. Communities across the UK are represented in our
national archives: television, film and radio. These collections document the
massive changes in how we lived, in fashion, transport, politics, culture and
environment over the last century. A century of moving image and a century of
mechanised reproduction.
Just as every community expects to have a right to access a local repository of the
books that describe who they are and where they come from, so they have a right
to access, I believe, the sounds and the moving images that capture that past.
That they should be in the hands of the people whose participation helped to make
them, and who can remake them for themselves and for future generations, is an
idea which is beginning to connect with the managers of our national collections, a
thought I want to come back to.
Of course, artists have explored the potential of the moving image since the
invention of cinema, and the rich history of a collision between art and film, from
Dali to Banwell, to Jeremy Delaware or Tracy Emin, is a story that remains to be
told, I think in probably very exciting detail. But my theme is the confluence
between creativity and our increasingly available moving image archives. The
Golden Lion Award at this year’s Venice Biennale went to Christian Marclay for
The Clock, an astonishing tour de force, of 24 hours of edited movies which tells in
real time, clip after clip. Marclay’s achievement is being recognised as the turning
point, I think, in the use of moving image and sound archives by artists.
The partnership that produced the work of Chris Dorley Brown was another one
between the Art’s Council and the BBC, at the time of the creative archive project,
and a bursary was also awarded to Vicki Bennett, and we can see her film here.
By the way, I’m only going to show you these films mute. Anyone who wants to
see the full versions with audio, I can give you the links and you can follow them
up.
Vicky had already substantial experience of working with moving image archives,
mainly with Rick Pellinger’s extraordinary collection of US public information films.
Known for her dark and witty take on vintage, futuristic media, she brought to the
creative archive project a highly focused, craft-like approach to the iconic footage
that she was using. Her film, Trying Things Out, is made using selected found
footage, using imagery collaged from a number of documentaries made between
1951 and 1980, including footage shot at the Festival of Britain. She tells the story
through layers of audio visual collage, how the artist can bring about positive
change in culture, and Vicky describes the film as partly autobiographical, and it
reflects, by use of footage, people playing with machines and affecting imagery,
the possibilities that access to film archives can inspire new work, creating new
dialogues where previously there may have been none.
The work of Vicki Bennett and Chris Dorley Brown also had, of course, an impact
on the BBC as the host institution. Their work took them across the corporation’s
departments, and resulted in an interaction with a range of specialists and teams,
especially in the archive and legal departments, that would not normally
experience the world and the work of the artist. Archive researchers in particular
fed their pleasure back in working outside the usual parameters of programmes
researched for broadcasting.
I think the artist and film maker Chris Marker has identified the potential in the
discrepancy between sound and image. And an artist who’s most successfully
applied this to the archive is John Akomfrah, who was awarded an Arts Council
BBC bursary in 2009. He set out to make what he called a ‘tone poem’. He
described it as the fragility, and the burden, and the excess of remembering. I think
in order to appreciate John’s achievement we should reflect on the nature of an
archive, indeed of any archive.
The cultural theorist, Alida Aasman, described the archive as, ‘the basis of what
can be said in the future, about the present, when it will have become the past’. A
form of memory, in other words, refracted through the prism of a set of decisions;
what is collected, what is kept, and what is discarded. Every archive is a result of
this subjectivity, and it is the job of the researcher to be fully sensitive to those
decisions, and to understand the objective circumstances in which the collection
was laid down. Any visitor today, therefore, to the BBC television and radio
archives of the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s, would immediately notice the
cultural framework within which they are frozen. And this is particularly evident
around the subject of race and immigration. News reports, drama and
entertainment programmes, all carry a very specific narrative of a Black settlement
into Britain, suffusing the images and sounds with notions of difference,
separateness, controversy.
That they would need to be handled with care is self-evident. But the real question
for John Akomfrah was the morality of using these still and moving images to
reframe the narrative and to tell the same story but from a different perspective
with a quite different sensibility. So John Akomfrah’s film, which is called
Demoscene, his answer to this ethical issue is to give voice to what he called ‘the
ghosts of the past’, and to frame that myth, that voice, within a rich environment
including music, poetry, and Greek myth.
The resulting film has had an extraordinary life. It started as a scheme, a product,
to stimulate regional creativity; it evolved into an ambitious rough-cut which
threatened to outgrow its first sponsors. As a 40 minute film, Demoscene was
premiered to great acclaim in West Bromwich, before a long run at the BFI Gallery
in the Southbank Centre. From there it evolved into The Nine Muses, a feature film
premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and shown with great acclaim at many
subsequent festivals including Sundance, where it was picked up by a UK
distributer. This week it opens at MoMa in New York. It remains one of the most
singular success stories in the creative use of media archives by an artist.
So if I can digress for a second from art to history, what we can reflect on here is
the central importance of moving images, collections, in our understanding of the
20th century. From today onwards, as each centenary anniversary approaches,
we can be pretty sure that a camera was there to record the events and to capture
the reactions, giving us an understanding of the previous century, incomparably
richer than our insights into earlier times.
And this capturing of moving images is what defines the historical record of the
20th century and provides the inspiration for both scholarship and creativity.
Nobody mentioned the work of JISC, and I was very privileged also to be involved
in the work of this higher education agency, and its close relative the Strategic
Content Alliance, and the work that they did to promote the opening up of
significant collections to the Academy. I was privileged to co-chair their recent film
and sound think-tank, and we commissioned a short film, called Knowledge Is, to
explore this link between history, the moving image, and the difficulty of accessing
and using up the archives. Because we do need to ask why public access to our
great audio visual collections has lagged so far behind access to the world’s great
libraries of books or music. It’s an important question, especially when we
remember that unlike music or publishing, much of our film and sound has been
funded from the public purse. Part of the reason is that public access is simply not
the core purpose of our national and regional collections. These are 20th century
or older institutions, some going back to the 18th century, dedicated to storing
knowledge and making it available to researchers and decision-makers. Or they
are functioning organisations’ collections for the task of production and
broadcasting. Their organisation structure and history has not equipped them for
the world of low cost digital access and distribution. This is particularly clear I think
in the relationship between broadcasters and rights organisations and collecting
societies. Over time they have established a sophisticated process for the
negotiation of broadcast rights, usually in the form of one or a number of
transmissions within a specified window. This is very different from the strategy of
born-digital start ups who work from a clean sheet, bring high expectations to the
negotiating table, and are prepared to take risk with intellectual property rights in
order to prove a business point.
But overall, this situation is all the more extraordinary when we consider the
technology breakthroughs which have turned our younger generation into fully
fledged creative media producers and distributors. It’s as if we have
simultaneously created the technical conditions for a massive upsurge in literacy in
moving images, but banned access to the libraries or moving image collections
that creative people depend on for inspiration and for insights.
The experience of Chris Dorley Brown and Vicki Bennett and John Akomfrah
shows that opening up broadcast archives to artists can be mutually beneficial.
Artists are who they are because they take a licence to see our world in a different
way. Artists can create new work and explore new methods. Archive institutions
and the curators who manage them discover new approaches to the material they
preserve and see familiar footage through fresh eyes. But these kind of schemes
also have a wider application. They demonstrate the public value of the creativity
locked up in our archives and they open up the question of wider professional and
public access to that creative material.
And of course arts bodies are now creating their own archives as they use digital
media to record and enhance exhibitions and events. With the help of Arts Council
London, we’re currently setting up a series of workshops with the artist in the
archive to explore this border country between film and TV curation, and arts
practice. And the workshops will be hosted at the BBC, in their new Archive Centre
in Perivale and by the BFI at their national archives in Berkhamsted. And the
programme is designed to bring together the archivist and the arts practitioner, and
to manage practical issues such as search, discovery of content, formatting for
viewing and reworking, and of course the management of intellectual property.
Each workshop will be followed by a tour of the respective archive, and details will
be available soon and you’ll be able to book places through the Arts Council and
the BFI.
So there is an opportunity to build on this core idea of linking artists with broadcast
and other archives. The costs of providing a bursary to an artist for a fixed period
is quite low. And the costs associated with project management and business
negotiation, rights clearance and public exhibition could be shared across multiple
schemes. Many institutions and galleries and museums already provide occasional
access schemes for artists. And there may be a case for a national clearing house
that opens up a wider range of opportunities which cascade downwards, these rich
experiences, and the resulting creative output. So I’m clearly an advocate of some
kind of national clearing house between artists and collections and that would be
wonderful. But I think it’s only one step on the road. I think the real goal is even
more ambitious. It’s to work with national and regional archives to help them
embrace this relationship with the creative community, and begin the process of
transforming our almost static, inaccessible collections into open, living memory
centres for all.
I’ll be handing over in a few minutes to Jake who will introduce the prototype for
the digital public space, so I don’t want to intrude on his presentation. But I do
want to reflect the excitement about this space, a kind of creative playground,
where assets and objects can be discovered, where some of them can be
reworked, and where we can explore associations between different art forms that
could challenge and extend curatorial practice I think in the real world. And this is
new territory for our major institutions, many of which, as I said earlier, were
created in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They’re used to a world where
cultural objects have been defined by the collection or by the institution, but now
they may have to cope with a new digital space where historical and contemporary
objects can be ripped from their context and reassembled to create new and
unique experiences. For instance, as we digitise the works of artists in print, and
painting, in three-dimensional form, in video, in audio, in photography, we create a
historically unique opportunity to combine different artforms in the same digital
space. We can begin to explore specific themes, defined perhaps by a decade or
by a style. It’s a huge challenge for the traditional institutions because I think they
have to relax their grip on branding and on context.
And the Arts Council has a special responsibility and opportunity here and I’ve
recently been working with the Arts Council colleagues on their physical collections
which have both historical and cultural importance. And these collections of art,
film, poetry, were all established in the early 1950s when the old Arts Council of
Great Britain was a direct provider of excellence to the nation. A poetry library was
established which today contains probably the best collection in the country of 20th
century poetry, in English, an art collection with an opportunity to give a helping
hand to emerging British artists, by purchasing their early work, and the film
collection paralleled this by documenting the fast changes in the past, in the postwar world of the arts.
The film you just saw of Francis Bacon, was made in 1963 by David Thompson,
and edited by Kevin Brownlow, and it was shown in village halls, in schools and in
community centres.
Now not everyone has heard of the Arts Council’s collections, partly because
they’ve not been a good fit with the changing role of a national funding institution.
In fact, the poetry library is now physically housed in the Southbank Centre, which
also looks after the management of the art collection. And the art collection has no
permanent gallery, but more than compensates for that by long term lending of
many of its art works to public buildings all over the country. And the collection of
400 films has been digitised and is currently only available within higher education.
But here is the opportunity. The poetry collection is a potential online resource
which could tell the story of 20th century poetry to a global audience. We’re
currently in conversation with key rights holders to explore that very potential. The
digital world has the power to help the art collection leap from solely being a
lending service to also becoming a much more popular gallery online, allowing the
public to explore and curate the collection and set it in a wider contemporary arts
context. And the digitised film collection is being queued up to be one of the first
assets of the digital public space and enabling it to reach a wider public.
So it’s a tribute to the Arts Council I think to say that they’ve seized the idea, these
ideas, and pushed them forward, and pushed them hard. But of course the Arts
Council is also a strategic body, and as it steers the wider arts community towards
greater involvement in the digital world, and to extend its reach and to capture its
past, it has a responsibility to practice what it preaches with the collections that it
currently owns. And I believe that here we have a further opportunity. Because
these collections of different artforms – poetry, art, film – have been nurtured by a
single cultural organisation in the same 60-year time frame; they share aspects of
content and value that complement each other. They provide, for instance, an
opportunity to see, if you want to see, how pop art and concrete poetry in the
decade of the 1960s influenced experimental film making. And it’s hard to
assemble these different elements in the physical world but not impossible if there
are still curators available. In the digital world it should be easy, not just by an
editor, but by anyone.
So this brings me back to my key theme. Here and now, in 2011, I think we have
the chance to think about how we want to tell the story of art and culture and
collections in the 20th century. We have the collections, we have the
organisations, we have the creativity, and we have the technical means. If we don’t
tell that story ourselves, then you can be sure that others will. And the likelihood is
that it could end up with a cultural bias somewhere to the west of the Atlantic. I
believe that telling such a story could be a compelling way of organising the film,
television, art works, literature, music, in the digital public space.
In the meantime, the public value partnership between the BBC and the Arts
Council is stimulating some new thinking for a special season next year. I
understand that details will be announced soon and could embrace new
approaches to arts media, as well as trialling arts practice which uses archive.
Overall, it could be a way of accelerating the training, skills development and
digital capacity which we’re already involved in, here in this room today.
Can I just finish by taking us back to society at large? If we’re to secure the
public’s support, and the political support, and the resources to make these
developments sustainable, then we have to demonstrate their practical application,
I think to the wider world.
The last film I wanted to show you, if we can retrieve it, is a curiosity. It started life
as a British Council film, made in 1935, called The Heart of an Empire. It’s an
astonishingly confident portrait of a city with a pivotal place in the world, that
unknown to the film makers was about to undergo dramatic change. No one in the
UK saw this film. It was made only for export to the colonies and the Empire. Side
by side, you can see a remake of The Heart of an Empire, shot and edited in one
day on a device like this. The film has been digitised, distributed, researched, and
then recreated by a young team called Time Image. All in their early twenties, with
this as their first proper employment experience, they’re lovingly working their way
through the British Council’s collection, and they’re revealing a unique portrait of a
country before and during the war. All the more special because it was exclusively
for overseas consumption.
So the Time Image work is one of a number of projects initiated by New Deal of
the Mind, which has set up over a hundred creative placements around the country
to focus on archives, heritage, interpretation, and digital technology. It is providing
real training and real jobs for young people, working on local projects with artists
and archivists. Collecting, curating, digitizing stories, images, experiences and
knowledge, and this small way is proving not only that there is work to be done on
Britain’s archives and there are young unemployed people that can be employed
to do it, but that the results can be a tangible edition to the UK’s cultural heritage.
NESTA has predicted that employment in the creative sector in the UK will
outgrow the financial sector in the next few years, and that it was well placed to
play a key role in bringing the UK out of the downturn. That may be bad news for
bankers, I don’t know. But I suspect the creative industries will not have the same
grip on the political system finance has had.
But if this expansion is going to happen, then opening up access to our cultural
archives, including our moving image and sound collections can only help to
accelerate the process. So I’m a firm believer that the big institutions that we’re
talking about and the big collections need all the friends they can get, both critical
and supportive. For good policies to prevail, and for the right outcomes to be
secured, they need the active involvement and friendly cajoling or all of us. Thanks
very much.
[Applause]