The Materiality of the Archive The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of meth- odological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation. Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art his- tory and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding dis- courses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how steward- ship practices such as description and meta- data creation can accommodate these changes. The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academ- ics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture. Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, UK. She was formerly head of Tate Archive, London and War Artists Archivist/ Museum Archivist at IWM London. Her research bridges critical archive studies, twentieth- century art and design history and material culture. Wendy Russell is an independent researcher and Special Collections Archivist at the British Film Institute, UK. She has formerly worked at the Archives and Special Collections Centre at the University of the Arts London, and as a freelance arch- ivist. She was Secretary and then Chair of the ARLIS/ UK & Ireland Committee for Art and Design Archives (CADA) between 2011 and 2018. Routledge Studies in Archives Series Editor: James Lowry The following list includes only the most- recent titles to publish within the series. A list of the full catalogue of titles is available at: www.routle dge.com/ Routle dge- Stud ies- in- Archi ves/ book- ser ies/ RSA RCH Archives, Recordkeeping and Social Justice Edited by David A. Wallace, Wendy M. Duff, Renée Saucier, and Andrew Flinn Producing the Archival Body Jamie A. Lee Ghosts of Archive Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis Verne Harris Urgent Archives Enacting Liberatory Memory Work Michelle Caswell Archiving Caribbean Identity Records, Community, and Memory Edited by John A. Aarons, Jeannette A. Bastian, and Stanley H. Griff in Exhibiting the Archive Space, Encounter, and Experience Peter Lester The Remaking of Archival Values Victoria Hoyle http://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Archives/book-series/RSARCH http://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Archives/book-series/RSARCH The Materiality of the Archive Creative Practice in Context Edited by Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 20601- 7 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 032- 54209- 6 (pbk) ISBN: 978- 0- 429- 26248- 7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/ 9780429262487 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429262487 Contents List of contributors viii Series introduction xi Acknowledgements xii Introduction: materiality as connective tissue 1 SUE BREAKELL AND WENDY RUSSELL PART I In the archive: practices and encounters 13 1 ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’: materiality in archival theory and practice 15 ALEXANDRINA BUCHANAN 2 ‘The true object of study’: the material body of the analogue archive 33 SUE BREAKELL 3 Archival finding aids and perceptual frames: extending material contact points through Stephen Chaplin’s Slade School Archive Reader 48 LIZ BRUCHET 4 Archiving with scissors: materiality and cutting practices in photographic archives 64 COSTANZA CARAFFA vi Contents PART II With the archive: energy 87 5 Valentine’s jacket 89 MARYANNE DEVER 6 The archive as a site of making 106 PETER LESTER 7 Applications of energy: a study of artists and entropy in the material 122 LISA CIANCI 8 Archival endings: erosion and erasure in the film archive 143 ELODIE A. ROY PART III About the archive: technologies 157 9 The material archive everyday: technologies of the filing system 159 SARAH CAIN 10 The materialism of techno- archival memory 174 WOLFGANG ERNST 11 Paper tensions: from flipbooks to scanners – the role of paper in moving image practices 186 AMANDA EGBE 12 Expressing materiality in archival records 199 ATHANASIOS VELIOS PART IV Beyond the archive: expanding the frame 217 13 Lost Unities: the materiality of the migrated archives 219 JAMES LOWRY AND FORGET CHATERERA- ZAMBUKO Contents vii 14 Fabrications: the quilt as archive 231 CLAIRE SMITH 15 Performing gestures towards the archive: queer fragments and other ways of mattering 245 BEN CRANFIELD 16 ‘That’s special, we’ll keep that’: a conversation about counter archiving and socially engaged practice at Tate Exchange 259 SARAH HAYLETT, LUCY BAYLEY, CARA COURAGE, JULIA LEPLA, PIP LAURENSON, HÉLIA MARÇAL AND KIT WEBB Index 275 Contributors Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, UK. She was formerly head of Tate Archive, London and War Artists Archivist/ Museum Archivist at IWM London. Her research bridges critical archive studies, twentieth- century art and design his- tory and material culture. Liz Bruchet is a researcher, archive curator and oral historian, and currently Senior Lecturer in Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies, UCL. Her research focuses on the interconnections between archives and curation, with a particular focus on biographies of archives, and the records and record- keeping practices in visual arts organisations. Alexandrina Buchanan is Senior Lecturer in archive studies at the University of Liverpool and Director of the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies. An art historian by background and professional archivist by training, her research is situated at the interface between archival studies and architectural history. Sarah Cain is a fellow and director of studies in English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has research and teaching interests in American literature and transatlantic modernism, aesthetics and the history of science. She is currently writing a book about the cultural history of the filing system, including chapters on offices, indexes, photocopies and databases. Costanza Caraffa (PhD Berlin 2003) has been Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max- Planck- Institut, since 2006. With initiatives such as the ‘Photo Archives’ open conference series (started 2009), the Florence Declaration for the Preservation of Analogue Photo Archives, and her publications, she has been contributing to the international and transdisci- plinary debate on the current roles of photo archives in twenty- first- century research and societies. She co- curated the exhibition ‘Unboxing Photographs’ (Berlin 2018). List of contributors ix Forget Chaterera- Zambuko is an assistant professor in Records Management at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. She previously lectured at the National University of Science & Technology and Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. She is a rated researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa and a co- editor for Archives and Records Journal. Her research interests include displaced archives, access to archives and the application of emerging technologies in records and archives management. Lisa Cianci is a multidisciplinary artist, archivist and digital media developer from Melbourne, Australia. Lisa’s work is a study of [an]archival possibilities, entropy in the material, unexpected artefacts in both digital and analogue media, and the unsettling spaces where systems and structures break down. Intersections of art, archives and digital media technologies and the artist’s role as cultural worker are her research interests. Working and engaging with experimental archival practices and wild archives are ongoing pursuits. Ben Cranfield is Senior Tutor in Curatorial Theory and History on the Curating Contemporary Art programme at the Royal College of Art. His research is focused on the relationship between the curatorial, the contemporary, the archive and forms of instituting, asking what it is to produce queer and non- normative ideas of timeliness and history. Articles include, ‘On (Not Being with) Time (Queerly) in Post- War Britain’, Performance Research (2018); ‘Mind the Gap: Unfolding the proximities of the curatorial’, Performance Research (2017); ‘All play and no work? A “Ludistory” of the curatorial as transitional object at the early ICA’, Tate Papers (2014); ‘Not Another Museum’: The Search for Contemporary Connection’, Journal of Visual Culture (2013). Maryanne Dever is Pro Vice- Chancellor (Education and Digital) at the Australian National University. She researches on literary archives and she is joint editor- in- chief of Australian Feminist Studies. Amanda Egbe is an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Media Production at the University of Bedfordshire. Her artistic practice and research, concerns archives, new technologies, race and activism. Wolfgang Ernst is Full Professor of Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. His current research cov- ers ‘radical’ media archaeology as method, the theory of technical storage, the technologies of cultural transmission, micro- temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, and sound analytics (‘sonicity’) from a media- epistemological point of view. Peter Lester is an archivist and researcher. He completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Midlands3Cities funded PhD at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. The research explores the exhib- ition and display of archives and encounters with archival material, and wider x List of contributors reshaping of physical archival spaces. His forthcoming book Exhibiting the Archive, based on this research, is due to be published by Routledge. James Lowry is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool, where he was formerly co- Director of the Centre for Archive Studies. He is the author of the 2020 report on disputed archival claims for the International Council on Archives and is the editor of the forthcoming book, Disputed Archival Heritage, with Routledge. Elodie A. Roy is a media and material culture theorist, with a specialism in recorded sound. She is the author of Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove, the co- editor (with Eva Moreda Rodríguez) of Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890– 1945 and is currently preparing a monograph entitled Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture: Unsettled Matter. She is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University working on the project ‘Anonymous Creativity: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s’ (PI: Jamie Sexton). Claire Smith is Senior Curator of Special Collections at the British Film Institute, UK. Her research interests span text, textiles and design, as they relate to domestic and visual histories. She is currently editing a publication on the archives of filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Athanasios Velios FIIC is Reader in Documentation at the University of the Arts London. He was trained as a conservator in Athens and completed his PhD on computer applications to conservation at the Royal College of Arts. He has written, supervised, reviewed and led research on conservation documentation, artists’ archives and Linked Data for memory organisations. He is one of the editors of the CIDOC- CRM and contributes to several groups on issues around documentation. Tate Exchange was founded in 2016 and works with the public to explore what happens when art and society meet. Working on a yearly themed programme of events, Tate Exchange is led by Cara Courage. Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum (2018– 2021) was a Tate research project that sought to interrogate forms of art and art making that challenge the practices and definitions of the museum and its collections. Information about the project and the team can be found here: www.tate.org.uk/ resea rch/ reshap ing- the- coll ecti ble http://www.tate.org.uk http://www.tate.org.uk Series introduction Routledge Studies in Archives publishes new research in archival studies. Recognising the imperative for archival work in support of memory, identity con- struction, social justice, accountability, legal rights and historical understanding, the series extends the disciplinary boundaries of archival studies. The works in this series illustrate how archival studies intersects with the concerns and methods of, and is increasingly intellectually in conversation with, other fields. Bringing together scholarship from diverse academic and cultural traditions and presenting the work of emerging and established scholars side by side, the series promotes the exploration of the intellectual history of archival science, the inter- nationalisation of archival discourse and the building of new archival theory. It sees the archival in personal, economic and political activity, historically and digit- ally situated cultures, subcultures and movements, technical and socio- technical systems, technological and infrastructural developments and in many other places. Archival studies brings an historical perspective and unique expertise in records creation, management and sustainability to questions, problems and data challenges that lie at the heart of our knowledge about and ability to tackle some of the most difficult dilemmas facing the world today, such as climate change, mass migration, and disinformation. Routledge Studies in Archives is a platform for this work. Series Editor: James Lowry Acknowledgements Our thanks to all the members of the ARLIS (Art Libraries Society) Committee for Art & Design Archives (CADA) at the time of the event ‘Matter and Meaning: Materiality and the Visual Arts Archive’ held at the University of Brighton in 2016, from which this book evolved, and subsequently: Alan Crookham, Andrew Gray, Daniel Heather, Carys Lewis, Kirstie Meehan, Alice O’Hanlon, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Dr. Nayia Yiakoumaki. We thank also our speakers at the Brighton event: Dr. Alexandrina Buchanan, Professor Matthew Cornford, Dr. Ben Cranfield, Professor Maryanne Dever, Dr. Althea Greenan, Sadhna Jain, Dr. Claire Smith, Dr. Deborah Schultz, Rebekah Taylor and Jim Walker. Their contributions to the event began a conversation that evolved into this publication. We also express our warmest thanks to colleagues from the University of Brighton Design Archives, past and present, who contributed to the event in the form of preparations, hosting and speaking. These include Debbie Hickmott, Sirpa Kutilainen, Professor Catherine Moriarty, Barbara Taylor and Dr. Lesley Whitworth; thanks are also due to Professor Anne Boddington, former Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Brighton. Sue would also like to thank col- leagues at Brighton who supported her work on the book, and those readers from whom her writing benefited, particularly Professor Annebella Pollen and Professor Lesley Murray. We are grateful to the University’s School of Humanities and Social Science Research Support Fund for assistance with the final stages of the manu- script preparation. Wendy would also like to thank her colleague, Claire Smith, for her support throughout, and numerous helpful discussions on the topic. We are immensely grateful to our successive editors, Heidi Lowther, Emmie Shand and Amy Davis- Poynter, and editorial assistants Kangan Gupta, Manas Roy and Heeranshi Sharma, and to Sujeesh Krishna for project managing the book’s production; and to the Studies in Archives Series Editor Dr. James Lowry: our publication proposal arrived with Routledge just as this series was being initiated. Thanks also to Rich Cutler at Helios, for assistance with the manuscript preparation. Last but certainly by no means least, we record our immense gratitude to all our contributors, who stayed with us through the long gestation period of this book, so that it survived to a material form despite the immeasurable impact of a global pandemic on all our personal and professional lives. newgenprepdf DOI: 10.4324/9780429262487-1 Introduction Materiality as connective tissue Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell The origins of this volume lie in a symposium in September 2016, a collaboration between the University of Brighton Design Archives, who hosted the event, and the then ARLIS (Art Libraries Society) Committee for Art and Design Archives (CADA), who organised its content, and of which both this volume’s editors were then members. The event was part of a strand of programming developing inter- disciplinary exchange and reflection on archival practices in visual arts contexts. Its call for papers was driven by extensive recent attention to materiality across a range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, literary stud- ies and material culture, and a recognition that, as yet, archival theory and practice had given limited consideration to materiality as a distinct approach. We wanted to reach across and between these various bodies of knowledge, considering materi- ality as a framework for analysing, interpreting and engaging with archives of art and design. What research, we wondered, might we find that considered archives through a lens of materiality in other disciplines? What might the particular per- spective of the archive and the archivist contribute to existing scholarship, and how might connecting such work with critical archive studies be mutually enriching? The event attracted speakers from a broad range not only of approaches to materiality, but also of understandings of the archive: in some cases broadly coter- minous with the notion of the collection, in others denoting those parts of collec- tions which are not on display and therefore unseen, or elsewhere associated with the non- specialist digital process of archiving or putting out of current use. From the co- editors’ perspective as practising archivists as well as researchers it was clear that, while there was wide- ranging interest in the theme, a publication pro- posal required greater focus in its framing of the archive. We conceived a publica- tion that would clarify and refine ideas of materiality starting from a practitioner’s definition of the archive: ‘materials that have been created by individuals, groups or organisations during the course of their life or work and deemed to be worth keeping permanently for the purposes of research and as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator’.1 From such a definition we hoped to push boundaries of archival materiality more usefully than by assembling too many dis- parate notions of the archive with their associated conceptual slippages. A starting point for this volume, then, is the distinctiveness of the archive in its disciplinary http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429262487-1 2 Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell and epistemological history, and in its materials and its inherent organic structures. Here we follow the framing of critical archival studies as ‘using archival stud- ies to disrupt the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the humanities’ (Caswell, Punzalan & Sangwand 2017). In parallel with the archival and material turns in the humanities, interest in the archive as subject as well as source (Stoler 2009) has expanded exponentially in recent decades, with a particular mobilisation of the archive identified in contem- porary art and curating (for useful surveys of these literatures, see Bruchet 2019 and Callahan 2022). Yet within this phenomenon, limited attention was paid to the theories that underpin archival studies as a discipline and a practice, an imbalance that began to be redressed by archivists (Breakell 2008, Vaknin et al. 2013). By its focus on the archive, this volume seeks to contribute to such a rebalancing and to map a developing shared terrain. Bridging the gap between archival and non- archival bodies of knowledge, the collection places the archive, through a series of grounded case studies, at the heart of the enquiry. It brings together a range of innovative methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a frame- work for their engagement, analysis and interpretation. Its focus on archives of creative practices, including fine art, design, craft, film, performance and literature, reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as in the material encounter. This introduction cannot claim to offer a comprehensive history of materiality: its purpose is rather to note some points of connection and commonality across associ- ated disciplines, which generate productive interactions and intersections. It high- lights a set of themes and ideas which underpin this volume, primarily from the sibling pairings of archives/ conservation studies and material culture/ design his- tory. Responses to the elusive physical qualities of objects, as seen in material culture and other disciplines, do not have such rich equivalents in archives, despite the distinctive ‘allure’ (Farge 2015) ascribed to the archive, that very particular pleasure of the archive which is, in fact, founded in the material encounter. Broadly speaking, archival thinking has tended to focus on function and meaning, and the conservation approach on physical properties, or discussions of material literacy on the encounter with an individual document (Rekrut 2006). Ideas of materiality have received considerable creative and critical attention in the visual arts over recent years (Lange Berndt 2015), but questions of materi- ality in particular relation to the archive of creative practice – residues of the cre- ative process, or the social documentation that surrounds it – have, until recently, received less consideration. A wider exchange of ideas between archives and art has been deeply enriching (Stuckey et al. 2013, Breakell 2015, Bruchet 2019, Callahan 2022) and a conduit into the wider archive literatures. Indeed, this field has benefited materially from a shared concern with materials and media which is not always seen in other areas of archival practice, as it follows its descriptive prac- tices for drawings in archives, from those of the museum art object, and considers the archival nature of performance relics. Archives of creative practice have made Introduction 3 a particular contribution to expanding notions of the archive through the blurring of boundaries between archives and the art objects that may accompany them, chal- lenging what we might call the paper- based assumptions of the archive. Scholars within and outside the discipline of archive studies have noted a ten- dency for archives to be disregarded materially, too easily dismissed as primarily supporting documentation for other kinds of material culture (Dever 2013, 176; Hugh Taylor quoted in Rekrut 2006, 35). Conservation science is a corollary dis- cipline from whose material lens archives may benefit: trained as both conservator and archivist, Ala Rekrut’s perspective naturally tends to the material qualities of records, and to notice that ‘where text is present, the rest of the physical record is usually marginalised’ (Rekrut 2006, 35). A growing body of literature indicates how technological innovations in conservation science make possible new histor- ical research drawing on otherwise inaccessible knowledge held in the material of documents: patterns of handling different pages of manuscript volumes bear witness to the fear of bubonic plague (Rudy 2010), while biocodicology (ana- lysis at a molecular level) uses DNA, microbial and protein analysis ‘to enrich understandings of … objects and the people who use them’ (Brown 2021). Such projects embody the potential of material analyses to open up sources of informa- tion for cultures and communities whose histories we can’t access in other ways; new narratives that can mobilise marginalised voices, unacknowledged in the writ- ten record, thereby making visible ‘previously unnoticed … participants’ (Gansky 2013, 134). Other archival scholars have explored archival materialities beyond the document and modes of articulation which link to affect studies (Lee 2021; Cifor & Gilliland 2016) for new forms of archival knowledge. It is important to acknow- ledge the significance of contributions made by scholars whose work combines both academic and practice- based engagement, such as photographic historian and curator Elizabeth Edwards on the materiality of photographs (2004, 2009). Such immaterial properties of the material archive are paper’s ‘emergent capacities– what it can do’ (Dever 2014, 290) and can only be understood through handling the paper and the experience of ‘being- in- the- archive’ (ibid, 285). Of course, the experience of material encounters is no longer the only way to access the information held in archives, as the proliferation of digital surrogates attests. Pierre Nora famously declared that ‘modern memory is archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace’ (Nora 1989, 13): yet such reliance is both transformed and obfuscated by the emergence of digital technologies. Scholars have highlighted that discussions of materiality in archives emerge from a binary of digital/ analogue (Dever & Morra 2014), mirroring a similar tension in contemporary art between materiality and immateriality ‘its perceived opposite’ (Callahan). Burton argues that the digital gives the material ‘a new kind of sacral character’ (Burton 2005, 5), while Callahan suggests that the archive’s critical role in contemporary art in recent decades is attributable to its analogue properties such as ‘material authenticity’, as artists turn away from the ubiquity of the digital in daily life. While acknowledging these tensions, this volume’s concerns are weighted towards the analogue, while others attend to digital materialities (Goudarouli & Prescott forthcoming). 4 Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell The relationship between archives and material culture is most often seen in a distinction between the document and the object, which we seek at once to confirm and to avoid. While there are many discussions of the definitions of object and docu- ment in the literature, their commonly understood definitions indicate of object – ‘a material thing that can be seen and touched’ (Oxford Languages) – highlights its haptic or perceptual qualities, while that of the document – ‘a piece of written, printed or electronic matter that provides information or evidence that serves as an official record’ – focuses on its evidential or informational qualities; but both defi- nitions may apply to both nouns, in terms of what each can convey. Material cul- ture has often focussed on ways that objects embody and convey meaning through their use- value, seeing textual documents as merely conveying meaning (Hannan & Longair 2017), though there are material histories of typewriting (Acland 2006). The literature on object- based materiality has begun to permeate archival literature, but in general, there has been less traffic in the opposite direction, despite the prox- imity of their concerns with material remains and their informational content. This may be due to the richness of material culture’s own literature, and the different yet parallel disciplinary histories. Archival materiality has the potential to bridge this gap. Through a material culture lens, it may seem self- evident that archives are a form of material culture. Here, we seek to enrich and nuance such a framing, by foregrounding the particular materialities of the archive, treating material culture and archival studies on more equal terms and beginning to map the territory at their intersection. Both, in Hans Schouwenburg’s words, ‘Focus on stuff’, and docu- ments meet Schlereth’s definition of stuff as objects made or modified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect[ing] the belief patterns of individuals who made, com- missioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part? (Schlereth, cited in Schouewenberg 2015) Arjun Appadurai’s work on objects as commodities focussed on the thingness of objects, suggesting that ‘their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can inter- pret the human transactions and circulations that enliven things’ (Appadurai 1986); the role of things in human relationships was further explored by anthropologist Daniel Miller, for example (Miller 2010). By these definitions, documents, too, are things, mobile through time, whose stories are understood through their cultural biographies (Kopytoff 1986). Archives and objects reflect the dynamic interaction of people, things and, even, natural forces. Design history has similar concerns, though differently articulated and oriented: Judy Attfield ‘locates design within a social context as a meaningful part of people’s lives [which] means integrating objects and practices within a culture of everyday life where things don’t always do as they are told nor go according to plan’ (Attfield 2000, 5). We might also add the document to Attfield’s integration, to consider the behaviour of archival documents Introduction 5 in the different social contexts where they have agency: contexts of creation and of re- use, both by their creators and by subsequent readers and users. Space does not permit a full account of the complex relationships between text/ word/ document and functions/ things/ object, or the many ideas from material cul- ture which might be enriched by the inclusion of archives: the contents of this volume offer lead to further ideas and sources. For historians, the object- based approach offered by material culture, through the material turn, opened up new forms of knowledge as alternatives to the traditional textual sources, based on the distinction between object and document, drawing from object- based disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology which work with few textual sources; for some, objects offered richer and more inclusive forms of embodied knowledge (Glassie 1999). Others reject any distinction between supposedly active objects and more critically distant documents (Harvey 2017, 7); for Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry, ‘written sources represent simply another, albeit distinctive, form of material culture rather than a revolutionary change in the human past’ (Harvey 2017, 7). There is continuity across the work that objects and documents are doing, in recording, witnessing or expressing. Documents and archival records have an object life as well as a text life; they interact just as objects do: they have social agency and voice, beyond the mere embodiment of their texts into voice. Catherine Richardson points to a circularity in the way that documents and objects enrich each other: text sources in the writing of material culture history show ‘how language conjures things into being’, evoking the material objects they describe, such as the material goods listed in inventories, which testify to status in life and death. For her, reading archival sources is ‘a performance of objects in itself … a reanimation of the relationship between language, materiality and the imagination’ (Richardson 2021). If objects may be read both through (Richardson) and as texts (Tilley 2002; Glassie 1999), we may usefully complete the circle and read documents not simply as sources for understanding objects, but as objects themselves, both individually and in their sets and aggregations. As Tilley writes: Neither language or the production, reception and use of material forms can be claimed to have any ontological primacy. As differing modes of communication the linguistic forms of words and the material forms of artefacts play comple- mentary roles in social life. What links together language use and the use of things is that both arise as products of an embodied human mind. (Tilley 2002, 24) In short, there is a shared interest in texts in context, with people – actors – always central to the equation. Broadly speaking, then, a distinction between the material potential of docu- ments and objects is unhelpful. We locate this volume in this area of potential connectivity between the text- based ontology of the archive and the object- based ontology of material culture, and in the overlapping area between archive studies, materiality and creative practice. In doing so, we seek to let go of conventional 6 Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell distinctions, to focus rather on connectivity and to accelerate exchange. We frame the archive, not as a site for evidence to support or refute an externally gener- ated proposition, but as an affective encounter that, through a phenomenological engagement, generates propositions through the material encounter. If the archive is a means of approaching the creative practitioner who generated it, as many writ- ers in this volume agree, such an approach is made not just through the documents/ objects that provide evidence of the lives that produced them, but through the embodied material representation of the subjects themselves. As such, the volume considers archives not as ‘mere things in themselves’ but for ‘their complex role in the relationship between objects and subjects’ (Attfield 2000), or, in a phrase familiar to scholars of both material culture and archive studies, texts in context. Materiality is a connective tissue not only between disciplines but also across a range of creative practices, and their complex materialities and immaterialities. The performance of materiality witnessed in this volume takes a broad view of the archive’s agency. By implication also in the material archive are the immaterialities, those things which do not have a material presence, but which can be felt, inferred or performed from the archive, through its ‘leaky economies of generative and per- sistent acts in time’ (Clarke et al. 2018, 11). Given the vast reach of such connectivity, the volume can but indicate the richness and range of material- based methodolo- gies. It presents a varied yet coherent range of perspectives, rooted in case studies which frame the archive as a real place as well as a theoretical construct. Further, its focus on archives of creative practice heightens a particular emphasis on the genera- tive possibilities of the archive foregrounding the fluidity, blurred boundaries and expanded notions of the archive, that are characteristic of creative practices. Petra Lange- Berndt proposed ‘a methodology of material complicity’, asking what it means ‘to give agency to the material, to follow the material and to act with the material’ (Lange- Berndt 2015, 13). Materiality offers a means of engaging with the archive differently, beyond convention – Elodie Roy here suggests that ‘materi- ality prompts us to touch and not to read’. The volume moves out into a range of innovations and expansions, stretching the work that the archive is doing, critic- ally and practically, to support ‘multiple and provisional interpretations’ (Pringle et al. 2022, 1). Harvey notes a distinction between two historical positions in the material turn: materiality, and materials as distinct areas of thought. Both are rep- resented in this volume, as we put the material archive to all kinds of work and ‘mattering’ (Cranfield, this volume). Articulating its interdisciplinary frame in four sections, moving outwards from the archive itself, yet always held in relation to the archive, its structure is a ‘diagram of active forces’ (Yaneva 2020), part of an anthropology of the archive. Part I begins our journey, as might be imagined from this introduction, ‘In the archive: practices and encounters’. In the opening chapter, archivist and archi- tectural historian Alexandrina Buchanan primes us for the following chapters with a detailed account of materiality in the historiography of the archive profes- sion and the discipline of archive studies. She argues that certain material consid- erations – integral to contemporary discussions of materiality – have always been Introduction 7 central to the discipline, and to the broader realm and approaches – the ‘craft know- ledge’ – of the archivist and conservator, but that its presence has been implicit, latent, taken for granted, undervalued or directed to other ends. From here, archivist and researcher Sue Breakell considers the materiality of the fonds, or individual archive collection, often only experienced through the privileged access enjoyed by the archivist, as itself a primary unity of production with a distinct material presence and identity. She explores the triangulated relationship that develops through this encounter, involving the ‘viewer- participant’, the archive and its cre- ator, a version of whose presence is materialised by the archive. She uses material culture scholar Jules David Prown’s functional approach to object analysis as a means of analysing the tacit knowledge generated through this encounter. Curator and researcher Liz Bruchet presents a careful close analysis of the multi- layered materialities of a volume generated in the course of earlier phases of history- making in the archive of the Slade School of Art at University College London. Applying biographical and ethnographic approaches to both the archival object and its creator, the artist and educator Stephen Chaplin, she explores his complex positionality and his relationship with both the material object and the institution whose story he tells through it, all unfolded from this single volume. Finally in this section, photographic archivist and historian Costanza Caraffa identifies a range of ‘cutting practices’ in and on the institutional photographic archive, in this case specifically on the large aggregations of photographs created for documentary and comparative purposes in disciplines such as art history and archaeology, such as the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institut, of which Caraffa is Director. She discusses how these practices ‘materially trans- form’ the archive, reflect and record changing values ascribed to the photographs, individually and collectively, and shape our encounter with, and understanding of, these photographic documents, which are ‘produced by the technologies of the archive and … [its] actors’. Part II, With the archive: energy, brings together a number of evocations of vital forces at play in material encounters with the archive, reminding us of Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘vibrant materiality’ (2010). First, literary scholar Maryanne Dever presents a close and nuanced reading of a patchwork jacket, made for poet Valentine Ackland by her lover Sylvia Townsend Warner, held, along with Ackland and Warner’s joint paper archives at Dorset Museum, UK. Asking ‘what happens when traces of bodies collide with more conventional knowledge’, Dever’s careful analysis of the multiple material and immaterial traces and references held in the jacket, specifically in an archival context, suggests ways to bring out new under- standings from its material forms and their extrapolation into its making, wear- ing and wider social contexts of fashion and modernism, as well as the intimate spaces of domestic life. Picking up on similar themes, archivist and researcher Peter Lester presents the archive as a process of making: not a fixed object but a ‘working tool’ which records an evolutionary process. Encouraging us to work with not from the archive, he reflects on material culture scholar Tim Ingold’s notion of meshwork, the entanglements emanating from individuals during the course of 8 Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell their life, and from the objects and documents that they create or engage with. Applying these ideas to the archive of the playwright David Campton, Lester ‘fol- lows the contours of the archive’ to demonstrate the function of materiality as an indexical relationship between writer and reader. The two remaining chapters in this section address forces of waste and decay in the archive. Lisa Cianci brings her distinctive perspective as artist, archivist, digital media developer and educator, to a consideration of the ‘inevitable entropic tendencies’ of the archive. She uses three case studies of artists whose practices apply energy to resist entropy and to sustain the content and materials of the archive. Here, creative energy continually regenerates spaces, relics and records of artistic practice; brings out ‘dark and hid- den stories’ from Australia’s colonial archive; and, through ‘anarchival practices’, breaks down the original meanings and narratives of the archive. This section con- cludes with media and material culture theorist Elodie Roy’s lyrical consideration of materiality as a form of ‘surplus meaning’ offered by the inherently ‘dying foot- age’ of the film archive. Framing the archive as a ‘waste- site’, where time is at work in a natural process of erasure, Roy proposes this as a ‘laboratory of decay’, where decay radiates an energy that is its own ‘haunted dimension’, and offers rich yet elusive new understandings of what film seeks to present, when seen through the archive’s ‘grain, surface noise and asperities’. In this way, materiality makes us more aware of layers of temporality embodied in the process of decay. Part III, themed About the archive: technologies, unites a diverse set of chap- ters about the material/ immaterial underpinnings of the archive. It begins with literary scholar Sarah Cain’s analysis of the filing system in both analogue and digital forms. Cain charts its historical development across the administrative set- tings of the office, the archive, and later the home, the duality of the acts of stor- ing and retrieving marking ‘the moments of transition and transformation, when writing both disappears into, and appears out of, the object- world of the material archive’. What, Cain asks, does this mean for the labour of writing, the labour of filing and retrieving and the labour- to- come out of the archive? The analogue and digital imaginaries of the filing system are seen on screen – including in the visual filing graphics of the computer, where ‘skeuomorphic’ design emulates the aesthetics of physical files in the digital space, cementing the imagistic overlap in the way we imagine the storage of digital information as like our experience of the material archive, so that the physical and digital management of the archive develops as ‘two interconnecting fantasies’. Crossing Cain’s bridge to the digital, we are next reminded by Wolfgang Ernst of a very different kind of material framing of archival data. In view of the complexities of the material- immaterial nexus, Ernst focuses on the technological archive, reminding us that with digital records ‘media- archaeology still matters’. Where the analogue record is stored as a static object, the record in its digital form, ‘a matrix of “bits” ’, is configured through modes of fluidity and latency, but, Ernst argues, this does not mean that digitisation is synonymous with dematerialisation. Instead, the digital record is a composite, whose elements encompass both the material and the immaterial, the hardware and the software: ‘the techno- archive’s “two bodies” ’. How then are we Introduction 9 to understand the operation of memory within this distribution? As Ernst points out, in cyberspace ‘the archival rule that only what has been substantially fixed can endure and be located does not count any more’. Amanda Egbe considers the connected technologies of paper and moving image, with a specific focus on the process and outcomes of reproducing and duplicating film, addressing a criticism of media archaeology that it fetishises technology or ‘at the least relegates human agency’. Through an analysis of the interweaving of technology, paper and culture in a ‘new mapping’ of the history of film, Egbe identifies where the material and immaterial traces of the subject appear. Finally in this section, conservator and researcher Athanasios Velios contributes an important perspective too often under- represented in discussions of materiality: how the knowledge produced by conser- vators and their practices might be reflected in the archive catalogue. Outlining the limitations of current archival software tools for capturing materiality, he dis- cusses the potential of the CIDOC (International Committee for Documentation) Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ontological model created for cultural reference organisations, to rectify this, and encourages new, materially focussed descriptive practice. The model is a response to some of the challenges raised by Ala Rekrut to make materiality visible, and ‘to balance the current bias towards content [as opposed to material, my italics] description’. Part IV Beyond the archives: expanding the frame concludes the volume by reaching outwards beyond the conventional boundaries and emplacements of the archive, reflecting contemporary concerns about what materials and materialities are accepted into the archive, whose stories are told there, and to whom they belong in material form. These chapters show how expansions of the concept of what, and where, the archive is, can not only bring new forms of knowledge into play but also more voices in its ownership and formulation: what it is allowed to say. They consider what constitutes the archive at this moment in time: what we need it to be doing, and for whom. James Lowry and Forget Chaterere- Zambuko’s photo essay draws on their Lost Unities exhibition in the online Museum of British Colonialism, to foreground material aspects of the so- called Migrated Archives, displaced archives taken from 37 former British colonies as they became inde- pendent, which were only acknowledged to exist by the British Government in 2010. Now held at the UK National Archives, in which context they ‘confirm a colonial fantasy’, physical and catalogue access to the records is limited, espe- cially for those in whose countries they originated. The essay and the exhibition highlight the significance of space and place as physical manifestations of power through archives, through a material response to their physical expatriation, de- and re- contextualisation, a distance which the supposed potential of digital surro- gacy serves only to increase. These displaced archives are, as the authors show, ‘a symbol of the unfinished business of decolonisation’. Next, curator Claire Smith takes us through the complex materialities of the quilt as not only a ‘textile docu- ment’ but also a ‘record system for largely anonymised and hidden histories’. Among the multiple layers of transactions held in the quilt are the paper templates of the piecing technique, which repurpose other paper forms, themselves bearing 10 Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell fragments of text, ‘papery transactions that move beyond reading’. Like Dever, Smith connects the roots of textile and text, and their figurative as well as their constructive applications, testament to ‘a shared drive between textile, text and paper towards a consistent narrative’. Drawing on Agamben and Husser’s work on gesture, and Lepicki’s ideas of the archival nature of the body, Ben Cranfield uses an analysis of performance work by Trajal Harrell to present the archival fragment as both evidence and persistent materiality. He proposes that all archival fragments can be framed as gestures, performative pieces of ‘radical materiality’ which create new possibilities as a form of queer archive or ‘queer (dis)order’. In this way, ges- ture is a ‘material support’ in the re- imagining of the present. The volume closes with a collaborative chapter, with archivist and researcher Sarah Haylett as lead author, in which a project team captures moments from their own real- world con- siderations of archives and material manifestations of socially engaged art practice. The team brings together the Tate research project ‘Reshaping the collectible: when artworks live in the museum’ with Tate Exchange, a programming stream exploring what happens ‘when art and society meet’. The collaboration offers a participative approach to archive- making, between the museum and its communities, with the opportunity to challenge conventional boundaries between the record, the archive and the artwork and who is authorised to decide. Cara Courage’s vision of ‘a really beautiful living, breathing, dynamic archive [that] has relevance and use for people’ brings together not only the ideas in this final chapter, but the ambitions of all the volume’s contributors, ‘exploring what our archive may be’. Note 1 For more on definitions, see Breakell (2008); for an account of the archivist’s work on the archive, see McNally (2013); for a practical guide to understanding professional framings of archives as encountered by researchers, see Archives Hub https:// arch ives hub.jisc.ac.uk/ gui des/ what area rchi ves/ #defi nit ion References Acland, C.R. (ed) (2006) Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (1986) ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Appadurai, A. (ed), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Attfield, J. (2000) Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury. 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(2013) All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist. Faringdon, Oxon: Libri Publishing. Yaneva, E. (2020) Crafting History: Archiving and the Question of Architectural Legacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7081347 https://zenodo.org https://zenodo.org https://archivaria.ca https://doi.org/10.18352/22130624-00301003 Part I In the archive Practices and encounters https://taylorandfrancis.com DOI: 10.4324/9780429262487-3 Chapter 1 ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ Materiality in archival theory and practice Alexandrina Buchanan Introduction Both within the discipline of archival studies and in research using archives, either as sources or as objects of study, there have been recent calls for a ‘material turn’ (Cifor 2017; Dever 2013, 2014, 2017, 2019; Lester 2018; Rekrut 2006). Meanwhile, scholars whose work has been characterised as ‘new materialist’, including Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, have sought to contest a human- centred definition of agency, redefining the interactions between human and non- human matter in ways that have obvious significance for our understanding of the role of archives in events. Whilst these enterprises and their theoretical underpinnings are unprecedented in their emphases, it can be posited that ‘thinking through paper’ (Dever 2013) is not a wholly original exercise and that the agency of archives has already been recognised within archival theory and practice. In its focus on docu- ments per se, rather than as sources for history or other constructive practices, arch- ival studies is – or could be – essentially materially orientated. As Terry Eastwood once suggested, Banal as it is to say, the focus of archival studies is the nature of archives, not even the nature of the archivist’s duties, for everything flows from an under- standing of the nature of the things unto which things are done. (Eastwood 1988, 245) Whilst this statement implies the passivity of archival materials, their role as an ‘artificial memory’ and as ‘an actual part of the activities which gave them birth’ (Jenkinson 1922, 23 and Jenkinson 1948) potentially situates them as an active agent in events. My argument therefore is that an appreciation of materiality has always been integral to archival discourse, but that this can be hard to trace, for various reasons. Looking primarily at the UK, my approach in this chapter will be both archaeo- logical in the Foucauldian sense, looking through history to explore operational paradigms and how these tended to occlude discussion of materiality, and assertive, calling upon those within both the academic discipline and the profession of http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429262487-3 16 Alexandrina Buchanan archives to identify and acknowledge the (often tacit) expertise of their own prac- tices, not simply modelling their theories on those borrowed from other disciplines. When looking for evidence of attention to archival materiality, I have consid- ered the following aspects: documents’ and archives’ form, materials, manufacture and meanings(s) (considered in both empirical/ formalistic terms and in terms of social and cultural significance); their physical presence and occupation of space; their material temporality – their capacity to transcend their moment of production, which exists alongside their vulnerability, and the bodily materiality of the arch- ivist. I have looked both for discussion of these aspects and associated practices. Early history In complex societies throughout history, whilst oral traditions remain vital for cul- tural transmission, material inscription was considered the most reliable means of authenticating and communicating information across space and time. Materiality and archival creation therefore go hand in hand. Materials which were difficult to obtain or expensive to produce became associated with more prestigious docu- ments and, particularly in pre- literate societies, the material dimensions of docu- ments – their structure, the symbolism of their textuality and physical elements like seals – could be more important in asserting their authority than the textual content (Mauntel 2015). We also see general awareness of the longevity of materials as a consideration for documents intended to be preserved for posterity. In ancient Greece and Rome, archival information deemed important by rulers was published for preservation and wider access by being engraved on stone stele or on the walls of public buildings (Delsalle 2017, 18, 26). Although printing on paper trans- formed the availability of information, Abbot Tritheim (1462– 1516) continued to recommend parchment for long- term preservation (Tribble & Trubeck 2003). The choices involved in selecting materials and the understanding required to interpret the significance of documents therefore presuppose considerable material literacy, acquired both by training (learning the rules) and personal experience. As with much cultural knowledge, however, it often remained tacit, only requiring explica- tion to anyone unfamiliar with the issues and codes involved. The early modern period The materiality of documents came under scrutiny alongside attempts to under- stand and explain the materiality of alien recordkeeping systems. Such discussions may have occurred whenever one culture had to engage with another and are par- ticularly a feature of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, resulting from colonialist expansion, renewed interest in the ancient world and attempts to manage the medieval legacy to benefit the new status quo. These cen- turies therefore saw a body of scholarship emerge to meet these challenges, gener- ally characterised as ‘antiquarianism’ which is where we first find clear evidence of scholarly sensitivity to documentary materiality. ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ 17 As Arnaldo Momigliano has argued, antiquarianism, although based on earlier materials- based investigations, was first articulated and practised as an approach from the sixteenth century (Momigliano 1966). Antiquarians distinguished them- selves from historians by their focus on material objects, offering both a means of authenticating or critiquing literary accounts and a source for periods and places not discussed by Classical authors. Moreover, just as modern concern with materiality has emerged alongside the digital turn, so its early modern counterpart emerged alongside the rise of new techniques of print and engraving (Boehm & Mills 2017). In both, the developments have been symbiotic: through the wide cir- culation, systematisation, recontextualisation and discussion of textual and visual representations of objects (including textual objects), the absences from such ren- ditions become more evident, and object- orientated scholarship can emerge. Developed as a branch of antiquarianism, a new methodology termed ‘diplomatic[s] ’ was likewise concerned with using the past’s material traces as an alternative source of evidence, for legal as much as historical purposes. Diplomatic method examines the intrinsic and extrinsic elements of a document, the latter defined as ‘those which constitute the material make- up of the document and its external appearance’ (Duranti 1998, 134). In the first volume of De Re Diplomatica, which first codified diplomatic methods (Mabillon 1681; McDonald 1979), Dom Jean Mabillon studied the materials from which documents were made, while the fourth book, by Michael Germain, looked at the places where documents were cre- ated. The materiality of individual documents was an essential element, with close attention being paid to documentary media, seals, styles of handwriting and so on. Although diplomatic was not synonymous with archival literature (Friedrich 2018, 65), the two were clearly allied and modern archival scholars have identified diplo- matic scholarship as a point of origin for archival theory (Duranti 1998; Williams 2005), building material analysis into the field from the outset. Although antiquarianism established a set of tools and a rationale for studying materiality, to detractors, its focus on the material traces of the past could be seen as a distraction, sometimes even an obsession. Antiquaries were decried for their love of the rust and dust of Antiquity, the mouldering materiality of manuscripts, the dirt of potshards and tarnished medals. Francis Bacon expressed disdain for its methods: in The Advancement of Learning (1605), he defines antiquarianism as ‘Historie defaced, or some remnants of History, which haue casually escaped the shipwreck of time’, and which are brought forth when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence and obseruation, out of Monuments, Names, Wordes, Prouerbes, Traditions, Priuate Recordes, and Euidences, Fragments of stories, Passages of Bookes, that concerne not storie, and the like, doe saue and recouer somewhat from the deluge of time. (Bacon 2000, 65– 66) Here the focus on the material (monuments, private records and evidences) is sub- sumed within a list of topics whose significance, rather than their physicality, was 18 Alexandrina Buchanan problematised and contrasted negatively with the interests of the historian proper. Francis Grose, himself an antiquary, noted that it had long been the fashion to laugh at the study of Antiquities, and to consider it as the idle amusement of a few humdrum plodding fellows, who, wanting genius for nobler studies, busied themselves in heaping up illegible Manuscripts, muti- lated Statues, obliterated Coins, and broken pipkins! (Brown 1980, 11) Through such definitions and defamations, the antiquary was typified as a figure of fun, in contrast to the lofty- minded historian. It is therefore not surprising that antiquaries prioritised the historical and societal value of their research rather than its material aspects, which were mentioned only insofar as they had to be for meth- odological purposes. Thus, although antiquarianism provided opportunities for discussion of materiality, this aspect was rarely given the attention it could have merited. Archival practice in the antiquarian era Alongside the development of diplomatic, the emergence of the military/ fiscal and colonialist State involved the creation and management of both legacy docu- ments from the medieval past and growing numbers of new records produced by increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic styles of government, where rulers had to impose their will remotely or through delegates. Administrators within this system had to manage the associated archives, and manuals began to be published to help them to do so (Delsalle 2017), sometimes described as the first guides to archival practice. Within this genre, the materiality of documents is given due prominence but is generally presented as a problem to be managed rather than a quality to be inves- tigated or celebrated. Good practice was associated with a visibly well- ordered archive, in appropriately designed cupboards and presses, sorted into groupings for classification and retrieval. Physical order was thus associated with intellec- tual order, control and power: the archive could only be a useful, operational resource if it could be marshalled. In 1602, Arthur Agard, Deputy Chamberlain of the Exchequer, decided to refile numerous records held in trunks and chests into smaller, more manageable units. He reported that he removed from their chest a motley collection of documents from the reign of Henry III and reviewed repaired and sorted [them] and for their better preservasion placed [them] into sundrie little bagges some bagges conteyninge one sheire and some moe: And those put into three great bagges noted wth A: B: & C … and also upon a labell fastened to the same bagge is expressed by shire. (Popper 2010, 260; Yax 1998) ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ 19 Many such pouches survive in The National Archives (Wolfe & Stallybrass 2018). Nevertheless, with centuries- worth of disorganised records to bring under con- trol, the physical effort was considerable and rarely pleasant for members of a class unused to manual labour. In the associated discourse, there was therefore a conflict between emphasising the recordkeeper’s devotion to duty whilst not wanting to admit to the ignoble nature of the efforts required. William Prynne (1600– 1669), appointed Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London in 1660, gives a sense both of the experiential quality of the physical work entailed and how he became personally involved only as a last resort: I imployed some souldiers and women to remove and cleanse them from their filthynesse; who soon growing weary of this noisome work, left them almost as foul, dusty, nasty, as they found them. Whereupon … I and my clerk … spent many whole dayes in cleansing and sorting them into distinct confused heaps, in order to their future reducement into method; the old clerks of the office being unwilling to touch them for fear of … their cankerous dust and evil scent. (Delsalle 2017, 134) It is therefore unsurprising that when promoting the importance of archives, authors emphasised their potency rather than the nature of the work required to achieve this potential (Head 2003; Henny 2018). Nevertheless, the materiality of archives in terms of their need to occupy physical space did lead to the erec- tion of a number of repositories designed to impress and to enhance the status of their owners: the ducal archives of Turin and the archives of the ancien regime at Versailles were both constructed in the eighteenth century. The third edition of Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica, published in Naples in 1789, depicts the ideal archive repository as an extensive and well- ordered space, in a Classical style, con- taining documents which would have been visually impressive through their large size and pendent seals. Well- ordered archives became associated with particular materials (such as slate shelves), furniture and spatial configurations, creating a rec- ognisable ‘archival aesthetic’ since exploited by artists (Spieker 2009). The other sensory qualities of an archive, however, were less amenable to representation. The musty or mouldy smell of a poorly maintained archive could be verbalised (as in the context of a belief that malodorous vapours were injurious to health), but I have yet to find a celebration of the smell and sound of clean paper or well- maintained vellum. Likewise the grime of a dusty archive could be described in terms of its effects on those required to touch it, but there was no differentiation between dif- ferent types of dirt, nor of the values associated with a clean document, other than a ‘fair copy’ distinguishing a clearly legible transcript from an original record. As an ordered archive increasingly became seen as a prerequisite for good gov- ernance, so the idea of an ‘archivist’ as a curator with specialist skills associated with archival management began to emerge. In the years around 1800, university posts and training programmes were founded and their curricula defined the skills 20 Alexandrina Buchanan required. Even so, much learning would necessarily be acquired on the job and therefore remains inaccessible outside the master/ student relationship. Yet again, it may be assumed that sensitivity to the material qualities of both individual docu- ments and archives as a whole was acquired by archival practitioners in order to enable them to do their job. Nevertheless, these issues were rarely central to any discussion of archives or mentioned only in terms of problems and their mitiga- tion. Archival manuals are therefore again not the place to look for appreciation of archival materiality. The nineteenth century The methods of early modern antiquarianism arguably fed into nineteenth- century scholarship and the emergence of archaeology and history as ‘academic’ discip- lines (Momigliano 1966; Sweet 2004). Certainly the documentary emphasis of so- called scientific history as it emerged in nineteenth- century Germany appears to have more in common with antiquarian methods than the narrative- focused and moralising approach of Enlightenment historiography. Just as the new sciences of chemistry and physics were associated with particular locations: the laboratory and the workshop, so academic historians had their associated place of scholarly labour and discovery: the archive. Again, the reciprocal relationship between the devel- opment of the archive as a repository for scholarly research, rather than an instru- ment of bureaucratic governmentality is clear (although in practice the two were never unrelated): without a concept of historical scholarship that relied on access to verifiable archival evidence, the idea of an archive as a public resource would not have emerged, whilst privately owned archives presented a potential obstacle to historical research. Nevertheless, within historical scholarship, archives tended to be relegated to footnotes and their physical aspects, as repositories or as holdings, rendered invisible: redefined as ‘sources’, secondary to the past they were being exploited to reconstruct. The past as past is necessarily conceptual – as material objects, its remains and traces exist in the present, but foregrounding these exposes the constructed and provisional nature of history, something scientific historians were at pains to disguise. Within scientific history, the study of diplomatic became relegated to an ‘ancil- lary’ study, along with other subjects associated with archives, such as palaeog- raphy and sigillography. Derived from ‘ancilla’, the Latin for maid, specifically archival methods were thus characterised as feminine, at the same time as archive workers were starting to be considered the ‘handmaidens of history’ (Lapp 2019). Again, this did not favour detailed discussion of the materiality of documents, even when such knowledge was acknowledged as highly significant. For example, Hubert Hall in his Studies in English Official Historical Documents wrote ‘in the case of the Record the distinction between a volume and a bundle, a roll and a file, a membrane and a folio, may prove of real importance’; nevertheless the associated chapter dealt largely with discovering sources, whilst his chapters on diplomatic were more concerned with intellectual than physical form (Hall 1908, 77). ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ 21 It was nevertheless during the nineteenth century that those responsible for the management of archives began more explicitly to articulate concepts that have remained fundamental, albeit endlessly debated, to the arrangement and descrip- tion of archival materials, that is to say respect des fonds and Provenienprinzip. Deriving from different national traditions, these were connected by their recog- nition that archives consist of related items and that individual documents should be understood as part of a body of materials, defined by the relationship to its creating agency. In a paper world, an archive group was thus both an intellectual and, crucially for this argument, a physical entity. To be properly understood, the archive group had to be retained in its entirety and in the same intellectual (often conflated with the physical) order as it had been maintained by its creator. Although these strictures were often articulated in terms derived from the biological sci- ences (Ilerbaig 2016), it is unlikely that the concepts originated outside archival thought, rather the metaphors were used to explain and justify practices which both systematised the transfer of custody of records from their context of creation and original use into an archival repository and supported the requirements of ‘scien- tific’ historians that archives should provide a doorway into the past ‘as it actually was’ (MacNeil 2008, 13; Posner 2006). These ideas introduced a specifically arch- ival conception of materiality, based on context and connection, rooted (however problematically) in the needs of acquiring, describing and providing access to a physical grouping in a particular repository. Professionalisation of archive work The practices of antiquaries and scientific historians had required some level of public access to archives, and repositories were never entirely closed, although admittance often depended on personal networking or payment of fees. Even in the nineteenth century, archives were more often used for administrative than purely historical purposes and repositories such as the French Archives Nationales in France and the English Public Record Office were not originally opened with public reading facilities (Delsalle 2017). Their establishment increased awareness of the need for specialist staff including, for the first time, conservation expertise. Nevertheless, much of the associated scholarship was associated more with the burgeoning antiquarian book and print trades than with archives: early essays on paper conservation being found in the second edition of F. Mairet’s Notice sur la Lithographie (1824) and in Alfred Bonnardot’s (1846) Essai sur la restauration des anciennes estampes et des livres rares… its second edition of 1858 being trans- lated into English in 1918. An early text in English, first published anonymously in 1909, is explicit in focus: The book of trade secrets, recipes and instructions for renovating, repairing, improving and preserving old books and prints, although its author, W. Haslam, whose identity was revealed in the 1923 edition (Haslam, 1923), advertised the book as a means by which the reader could avoid paying a professional bookbinder. To the modern reader, its recommended treatments are a mixture of the horrifying (masking bleaching by holding the document above a 22 Alexandrina Buchanan smokey fire) and the terrifying (bringing up faded text using highly toxic ammo- nium sulphide): preserving the condition of the document as originally encountered was not a high priority. Nineteenth- century confidence in science offered new problems, diagnoses and solutions (Williams 1970). No sooner were new methods of paper manufacture introduced than their problems began to be identified (Murray 1824; Murray 1829; Grove 1966); in the 1890s, librarians including J.Y.W. MacAlister of the Leeds Library and the Librarian of Congress, John Russell Young (1840– 1899) voiced shared concerns about the fragility of modern paper (MacAlister 1898; Norman n.d.). Such awareness depends on a sensitivity to the material qualities of paper: its colour, texture and pliability, but yet again, these are rarely discussed. The Society of Arts established a committee on the Deterioration of Paper which reported in 1898 (Royal Society of Arts 1898), and a Committee on Leather for Bookbinding (founded 1900, report 1905), which recognised the problems of changes in manu- facturing methods as well as the lighting and heating of repositories. Michael Faraday, who had started his career as a bookbinder, had noted the detrimental effect of gas lighting on leather bindings as early as 1843 (Caldararo 1987). The application of scientific techniques to preservation problems was promoted by Cardinal Franz Ehrle (1845– 1934), Keeper of the Vatican Library, who was also instrumental in setting up the International Conference of St Gall on the preserva- tion of archival materials in 1898, the first of its kind anywhere (St Gall 1898), pre- dating the first international conference on archives held in Dresden in 1899. The St Gall conference called for a list and photographic record to be made of the world’s oldest and most valuable manuscripts and their current condition, and of emerging conservation techniques to review their long- term effects. The emphasis on record- ing is familiar from the earlier antiquaries and, as previously, prioritised knowledge of an object’s existence and visual appearance over other experiential qualities. The St Gall conference identified that the scientific expertise required for conser- vation work was not the preserve of archivists and many of the earliest writings on testing of documents’ materials were produced by chemists (Cloonan 2010). A few, such as W.H. Langwell’s The Conservation of Books and Documents (1957), were written for the purposes of archival conservation but most were associated more with forensic science, to test the authenticity of documents for legal purposes. Here the principles were similar to those of traditional diplomatic but the tools were more technical, including cameras, microscopes and chemical tests. The eviden- tiary potential of documents was scrutinised as never before, with their materiality providing much of the grounds for discussion. Key texts included Albert Sherman Osborn’s Questioned Documents, first published in 1910 and Julius Grant’s Books and Documents of 1937. Grant (famous for exposing the so- called Hitler diaries as a forgery in 1984) also wrote on conservation and there was significant crossover between the two fields of endeavour, but apparently little transfer into the more historical side of archival studies. Despite these early forays into conservation science, in practice much preser- vation activity remained the responsibility of the archivist. Although Geoffrey ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ 23 Barraclough, the medieval historian who founded the archives programme at the University of Liverpool, felt it would be ‘a sad day if archivists turn into labora- tory assistants dressed in white coats and surrounded by glass- stoppered bottles’, he nevertheless supplied the Foreword to Langwell’s book and noted the need for archival practice to take account of the demands of new materials, the growing bulk of modern records and the interrelationship between archival techniques and the sciences. For his primarily archival readership, Langwell wrote in language suitable for the layperson and advised on procedures to be undertaken by archivists themselves. The majority go far beyond what an archivist today would consider to be their remit and demonstrate how the scope of professional endeavour in relation to the material dimension of documents is mutable. Nevertheless, these more phys- ical interventions are less often discussed in histories of archival practice than the more intellectually orientated activities of appraisal and description. Other pioneers usually identified as archivists but equally important in conser- vation included G. Herbert Fowler, the founder of Bedfordshire’s archive service. He had originally worked as a zoologist and maintained a keen scientific interest in document repair, with his own conservation workshop in the attic of his house in Aspley Guise. He trained his record clerk and clerk’s assistant in repair methods and repairs were undertaken in a small workshop at the Bedfordshire archives ‘when other tasks are not too pressing’ (Fowler 1923). At the Public Record Office, Charles Hilary Jenkinson took a more managerial role but was extremely important in establishing both the methods used by PRO conservators (who also worked on documents from other repositories with no such facilities) and in giv- ing advice to other services in the UK and internationally. Jenkinson’s list of qual- ities of the professional archivist includes ‘more than a little of a Bookbinder and Repairer, with a touch of some of the “allied crafts” ’ (Jenkinson 1948), because he believed they could not direct craftsmen on the basis of theory alone. Yet again, these more physical interventions are rarely discussed in histories of archival practice, but it is from these men and women that the professional conservator emerged. The craft basis of conservation practice has long been acknowledged (Wardle 1971, 2; Padfield 1990). Craft has been described as a body of knowledge with a complex variety of values, and this knowledge is expanded and its values demon- strated and tested, not through language but through practice. It makes craft diffi- cult to write or even talk about with clarity and coherence. (Dormer 1997). Despite the focus on the physical makeup of archives typical of the conserva- tor’s approach, therefore, specific discussion of the craft element of conservation and acknowledgement of the material qualities of archives are rarely found in con- servation manuals, where their materiality was viewed primarily as a risk, through documents’ vulnerability and propensity to decay. Associated recommendations are presented as a ‘how to’, rather than a ‘why’, and focus on the chemicals and treat- ments involved, rather than identifying types of damage, the documentary qualities that should be retained or the resultant changes to a document’s materiality after conservation (Johnson 1919; Langwell 1957; Wardle 1971). 24 Alexandrina Buchanan Archival studies By the later twentieth century, the gradual expansion of archive services and arch- ival education programmes produced manuals and textbooks and ongoing debates over the nature of the profession and the content of its education. The need for practical experience, either as a precursor or companion to the more theoretical aspects learned in the classroom, was always deemed essential in the UK arch- ival education system. Despite this dual emphasis, neither the criteria for pro- gramme accreditation drawn up by the Archives and Records Association (or the preceding Society of Archivists) nor the subject benchmarks published by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education specify elements of what might, by Dormer’s definition, be defined as the ‘craft’ of archival practice. The experi- enced practitioner gets a ‘feel’ for the expected condition of collections, their likely use and significant features which can inform their management but which can be difficult to articulate via standardised rules and procedures. As well as the power enacted through archives management, which has often been discussed, there is a creativity involved which is less readily apparent and – in the drive to standardisa- tion – has tended to be overlooked. This is particularly evident in descriptive prac- tice, where no two individual archivists’ descriptions of an archive would match, revealing the creativity and crafting involved, even within recognised standards. Nevertheless, in writings about archival education, the craft element has tended to be dismissed as a precursor to professionalisation, as in Roy Schaeffer’s (1994) discussion ‘From Craft to Profession: The Evolution of Archival Education and Theory in North America’. It is nonetheless evident that the material dimension of archival work was a draw to many entering the profession. Michael Cook has reflected that ‘Many of us were enthralled by the strongly visual and practical aspects of the work’ (Cook 2013), whilst J.H. Hodson felt that The years immediately after the war were a golden age of collecting, discov- ering, pioneering, and communication. In sunny search rooms the dusty tang of freshly opened parchment tingled the nostrils of youthful acolytes of a new order, zested by a delicious pot- pourri of newly burgeoning antiquity, purposeful scholarship, educational altruism and sensitive organization. (Hodson 1972, xiv) The sensory qualities of archives have rarely been so enthusiastically lauded. Nevertheless, national and international standards created to communicate the existence and significance of archival materials to potential users have offered few opportunities for articulating their material dimensions. Those published since the 1980s tend to be based uncritically on the requirements of the majority user group, which was then historians, who – as we have seen – at that time priori- tised informational content over other archival characteristics. Archivists, particu- larly Jenkinson, had emphasised the importance of documenting treatments which ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ 25 might affect evidential value (Jenkinson 1922, 78– 79, 200; Christopher 1938, 122– 123), but this was not required by the international standard for archival descrip- tion, ISAD(G), although potentially included within the ‘Archival history’ head (International Council on Archives 2000). ISAD(G) offers little encouragement for recording archival materiality: documentary forms are only one element to be included within ‘Scope and content’; the ‘System of arrangement’ is defined as much in terms of intellectual as physical arrangement and ‘Physical characteristics’ are defined only as those affecting use. The proposed new standard, RiC, offers more opportunities for physical description information, but without prescriptive guidance, its application will depend on local or individual practice (International Council on Archives 2019). The establishment of archival studies as a discipline (i.e. a body of knowledge to be learned and standards of excellence agreed by the community) has involved much critical re- reading of the canonical works of archival literature, especially the holy trinity of Muller, Feith and Fruin (2003), C.H. Jenkinson (1922) and T.R. Schellenberg (1956). Nevertheless, this scholarship has been selective, omitting numerous contemporary authors whose significance has therefore been down- played, discussing only those elements of the original texts that speak – positively or negatively – to modern concerns. For example, it would not be evident from most modern assessments how much of Jenkinson’s work relates to the physical as opposed to the moral defence of archives (to use his own terms), emphases also found in contemporary writers such as Charles Johnson (1919), G. Herbert Fowler (1923) and H.G.T. Christopher (1938). Nevertheless, Jenkinson’s import- ance for conservation practice was well recognised by his peers and there are occasional glimpses of his sensitivity to the unique materiality of individual docu- ments, highly influential on practices at the Public Record Office (Cantwell 1991, 388). For example, the British Records Association’s Technical Section, which took as its 1949 focus the new technique of lamination, records that Jenkinson’s talk: ‘strongly deprecated any system that automatically subjected every document to the same treatment without regard to the particular needs of each …’ (British Records Association 1950). Jenkinson’s credo in respect of the importance of documents’ original material qualities is also highly evident in the assessments of Continental archival practices made by his disciple, L. Herman Smith, mentioned above. Smith condemned a variety of varnishes for consolidating and protecting documents, used in a number of national state archives because they rendered the paper and parchment crinkly and brittle, whereas the animal size applied to docu- ments at the PRO was not only cheaper and less flammable but also ‘restores to the paper the quality which it has lost’ (Smith 1938b). In the Algemeen Rijksarchief, in The Hague (the fiefdom of Professor Fruin), he regretted the use of Japanese paper which he found widely commended because its yellowish colour tended to disguise the newness of any repair: ‘Here there is a definite and rather deplorable departure from the accepted [i.e. Jenkinsonian] view that manuscript repairs should never be disguised or made so intentionally fine that they are not immediately appar- ent to the naked eye’ (Smith 1938b). However, at the National Library in Vienna, 26 Alexandrina Buchanan he approvingly noted that the philosophy for repair of bindings was exactly what was recommended by Jenkinson at the PRO: reusing surviving portions as far as possible and retaining any which cannot be reused; retaining original sewing and reusing sewing holes, and keeping a note on the flyleaf of exactly what has been done in order to distinguish new work from old (Smith 1938a and b). In all these examples, emphasis on preserving as far as possible the existing material qual- ities of the documents overrides access to the textual content or convenience to researchers or curators and implies sensitivity to the potential significance of arch- ival materiality. The skilled remedial treatments mentioned above are now carried out by pro- fessional conservators, whilst less specialist and more holistic actions are a shared responsibility, undertaken by a conservator or an archivist depending on staffing. This gives archivists an ongoing concern for materiality in a physical as well as an intellectual sense; nevertheless, much recent literature has tended to downplay this aspect of the professional role. In particular, Greene and Meissner’s advocacy of ‘More Product, Less Process’ (MPLP) advocated for minimal processing in order to facilitate access (Greene & Meissner 2005, in the process vilifying what they saw as the fetishisation of physical rearrangement and item- level preserva- tion actions such as the removal of metal fastenings, castigated as ‘overzealous housekeeping, writ large’ (Greene & Meissner 2005). Once again, we see some archival tasks being demoted via their implicit feminisation and inappropriate prioritisation of the material over the intellectual, the craft over the strategic. Although numerous arguments have been made against MPLP on preservation grounds, I am unaware of any that has justified the retention of archival items in their native state, rusty paperclips, acidic folders and all, in the same terms as maintaining original order: as providing evidence of the physical context of records creation, for the researcher. Since the early 1990s, post- modern theories have exerted notable influence on archival scholarship but, yet again, their emphases have tended to downplay the significance of materiality. For Foucault, the Archive is a concept or metaphor ‘the law of what can be said’ (Foucault 1972, 129), not so much an institution with a physical dimension as a practice or set of practices. Meanwhile the structuralist and post- structuralist derivation from linguistics and literary criticism, with its con- sequential emphasis both on the verbal content of texts and the interpretation of non- textual objects as texts, meant that the ideas of power, of memory and identity central to post- structuralist analysis tended to focus on the construction and use of archives in terms of human roles and relationships, rather than considering the interdependence of the human and the non- human in the form of records. Roland Barthes was undoubtedly sensitive to the materiality of the writing implements he used, and, in his later writings, Derrida identified the material affect of textual objects, describing paper as a medium which ‘gets hold of us bodily, and through every sense’ (Derrida 2005, 42), whilst later editors of their work have empha- sised the materiality of several post- structuralists’ work, through exhibition and facsimile publication of their research notes. Nevertheless, the overall impact of ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’ 27 post- modernism on archival studies did not serve to emphasise its material inter- ests. Instead, archival theorists have tended to focus on aspects of post- modernism emphasising the truth- claims exerted by archives and the potentially oppressive power of both records and recordkeepers. Some such powers relate to the materi- ality of the archive, for example, deciding what to keep can result in other records being permanently dematerialised, but the driver is intellectual rather than phys- ical, for example the Code of Ethics of the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland) states that records disposal ‘must not be solely driven by resource limitations’, such as lack of space (Archives and Records Association 2020). Nevertheless it was also among archival theorists most engaged with post- modern ideas that a concept of the archive as a material entity began to emerge. In the widely cited volume of essays entitled Refiguring the