Reflection — A Constellation of Practice

Recent research into the work of Chema Alvargonzález and Félix González-Torres has begun to reveal a broader constellation of artists and ideas through which I can reconsider my own practice. What initially began as an investigation into Alvargonzález, prompted by my interest in undertaking a residency at GlogauAIR in Berlin, has developed into something considerably more significant. It has caused me to think again about the relationships between photography, objects, place, memory, collecting, identity and the archive that have persisted throughout my work.

An important discovery was that Alvargonzález and González-Torres were both included in Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, the inaugural SITE Santa Fe exhibition in 1995, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson. The exhibition considered questions of identity, place, displacement, belonging and the changing relationships between individuals, communities and larger cultural structures. Their inclusion within the same exhibition establishes an intriguing historical point of intersection between two practices that I had previously considered separately.

There is no evidence, at least at this stage of my research, that Alvargonzález and González-Torres had a close personal relationship or that one directly influenced the other. This may ultimately be less important than I initially imagined. What interests me instead is their conceptual affinity: two artists working contemporaneously with different histories and experiences, yet encountering related questions of identity, place, absence, time and belonging.

Alvargonzález’s Available (1995) considered the relationship between identity and place through photography, architectural intervention, language, sound and light. González-Torres’s “Untitled” (America) similarly employed light while bringing into play questions of nation, migration, identity, impermanence and belonging. Light therefore operates in both practices not merely as illumination but as a conceptual material: something simultaneously present and intangible, capable of suggesting time, transience and disappearance.

This research has made me reconsider my earlier tendency to think about artistic influence as a genealogy — one artist influencing another, who in turn influences someone else. Perhaps a more appropriate model for my practice is the constellation. Individual artists, writers, artworks, objects and experiences become points that can be connected in different ways according to the question being investigated. This seems particularly appropriate given Alvargonzález’s own interest in cartographies, journeys and constellations of photographic images.

Within this constellation, Félix González-Torres provides an important way of thinking about intimacy, absence and identity. His work demonstrates how profoundly personal experience can enter an artwork without becoming illustrative autobiography. Ordinary materials can carry extraordinary emotional weight. An object need not be explained as a symbol of a particular person or event. It can remain open, allowing absence, memory, love, mortality and identity to coexist within it.

This has particular significance for my own developing investigation of identity. My experience as an older gay man can be present within the work without requiring the work to announce itself as autobiographical or to become explicitly about sexuality. González-Torres demonstrates how biography can operate as an underlying emotional and intellectual structure while the artwork remains open to the experiences of others.

Chema Alvargonzález provides a different point within the constellation. His importance lies particularly in movement, travel, place, photography, language and personal cartography. His conception of the artist as an itinerant subject — continually encountering, connecting with and disconnecting from places — resonates strongly with my own projects.

I can now recognise this particularly clearly in Every 10 kms. The journey, predetermined intervals, geographical locations, photographs and subsequent sequence effectively constitute a personal cartography. What I had understood primarily as a photographic project can also be seen as an accumulation of traces produced through movement across a landscape.

This has direct implications for the project I am considering for Berlin. Entering an unfamiliar city, walking without complete knowledge of the terrain, photographing, visiting museums and libraries, searching flea markets and junk shops, collecting fragments and gradually constructing my own understanding of the city could become another form of personal cartography. The resulting artist’s books and boxes would not attempt to describe Berlin comprehensively. They would record my particular encounter with it.

Joseph Cornell occupies another position within this constellation. His boxes demonstrate the extraordinary poetic potential of collecting, juxtaposition and containment. Ordinary and discarded things are removed from their original contexts and brought into new relationships. The box becomes both an object and a world.

This has an obvious relationship with my own artist’s books and boxed works, including Boy, Every 10 kms and the Oliveira project. It also provides an important precedent for the proposed Berlin work, where photographs, found objects, printed material, maps, text and other traces of experience might ultimately be assembled rather than simply displayed as individual photographs.

Yet this developing framework seemed incomplete until I reconsidered Margaret Olley.

Olley occupies a quite different position. It would be artificial to place her within the same discourse of migration and displacement that surrounds Alvargonzález and González-Torres. Her importance to me lies much closer to home: domestic space, collecting, arrangement, colour, light, beauty and the emotional presence of everyday objects.

Olley’s home and studio demonstrate how living and making can become inseparable. Objects accumulated through a lifetime became both the environment in which she lived and the material from which paintings emerged. Collecting was not peripheral to the practice. It was part of the practice.

This recognition has caused me to think differently about my own accumulation of things: books, photographs, furniture, fabrics, ties, beads, vessels, inherited objects, travel souvenirs and seemingly insignificant things retained because of the memories or associations they contain. These objects are not simply possessions surrounding my artistic practice. Increasingly I recognise that they constitute part of its material vocabulary.

Olley also introduces the importance of arrangement. Her objects were continually repositioned and reconsidered until relationships emerged between colour, form, light and space. This connects strongly with my staged photographic tableaux. I similarly bring objects together, change their relationships and photograph the resulting arrangement. Meaning emerges not only from the individual object but from its relationship with everything surrounding it.

There is also something Olley contributes that I do not want to lose as my practice becomes increasingly theoretically articulated: beauty.

My work is concerned with memory, identity, absence, mortality and legacy, but I remain deeply interested in making beautiful things. Colour, surface, material, composition and visual pleasure are not secondary concerns that need to be justified by conceptual content. They are fundamental components of my way of seeing. My current Continuum quilt project makes this especially apparent. I am bringing together fabrics, ties, beads and materials accumulated across different periods because I want to transform them into an object that is beautiful, meaningful and enduring.

The emerging relationships might therefore be understood quite simply:

Margaret Olley — arrangement
domestic space, collecting, colour, beauty, objects and self

Joseph Cornell — assemblage
found objects, containment, association, memory and imagined worlds

Félix González-Torres — intimacy
absence, love, queer identity, mortality, time and emotional association

Chema Alvargonzález — cartography
journey, place, photography, light, language, identity and movement

Lucy Lippard — place
site, displacement, geography, photography and the experience of finding oneself somewhere

And perhaps my own contribution to this constellation is archive.

Not archive understood simply as storage or documentation, but archive as an active creative process:

collecting → arranging → connecting → photographing → making → remembering → reinterpreting.

Seen in this way, The Living Archive is not merely a digital repository created to document my practice. It may increasingly be understood as an artwork and a methodology in itself: a structure through which objects, photographs, journeys, artworks, research, memories and experiences can continually acquire new relationships.

This also changes how I understand the apparent diversity of my practice. Photography, painting, printmaking, artist’s books, objects, quilts, travel, collecting, research journals and digital archives need not be regarded as separate activities requiring individual justification. They are different manifestations of a persistent enquiry into how a life is accumulated, remembered, reconstructed and given material form.

Perhaps this is also where legacy enters the work.

An archive inevitably looks both backwards and forwards. It preserves what has occurred while simultaneously creating material for future interpretation. Objects outlive their original circumstances. Photographs detach themselves from the moment in which they were made. Books and boxes preserve fragments. Fabrics carry histories of touch and use. Places remain after we leave them.

The archive does not arrest this process. It allows these fragments to be continually rearranged into new constellations.

What has emerged from this research, therefore, is less a list of artistic influences than a way of locating my practice. Olley, Cornell, González-Torres, Alvargonzález and Lippard illuminate different aspects of something I have already been doing for many years.

Their importance is not that I should make work like theirs.

Rather, they help me recognise more clearly what I have been doing in my own work all along.

And perhaps this is the most important realisation: The Living Archive is not simply where my practice is being recorded.

The Living Archive may be the place where the practice itself resides.