On Semi-permanence & History: New Museum Digital Archive

TheNewMuseum

NEWS/CALENDAR

FALL AND WINTER 1984

On Semi-permanence & History: New Museum Digital Archive

by Tara Hart
Digital Archivist, New Museum

“The New Museum of Contemporary Art was founded on the premise that works of art are not only objects for visual delectation and assessment, but are repositories for ideas that reverberate in the larger context of our culture.” - Brian Wallis, New Museum Curator, 1984

New Museum of Contemporary Art. New Museum News / Calendar (Fall and Winter 1984). New Museum, NY: 1984. Printed material. Cover image. Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure V, 1983. Artwork © Silvia Kolbowski. Courtesy the artist and New Museum, New York.

When New Museum was founded in 1977, there was a limited commercial market for emerging and avant-garde works, and the New York contemporary art scene revolved around alternative spaces such as Artists Space, White Columns, and P.S. 1. Founding Director Marcia Tucker envisioned an institution positioned between a traditional museum and an alternative space focusing

New Museum staff members: Marcia Tucker, A.C. Bryson, Allan Schwartzman, Susan Logan, and Michiko Miyamoto, ca. 1977. Courtesy of the New Museum, New York.
on the work of living artists. Against the standards of tradition, permanence, and connoisseurship generally associated with museum collections, the New Museum’s stated mission was “to provide a forum for contemporary art, especially work that has received little or no public exposure or critical attention, or that might otherwise be inaccessible to a broad-based audience; to share new issues that are constantly raised in current artistic inquiry; and to challenge the context of historical precedent and museum practice.” This early mission aimed to support recent art made by less established artists through exhibitions, events, interpretation, and documentation. One of the most radical innovations was the museum’s approach
to collecting: in 1978, the New Museum initiated a “Semi-Permanent” collection policy that allowed the Museum to critically examine and deaccession works from its collection after ten years to make room for new additions, though the idea was never fully implemented.

Over the years, the Museum’s approach to history has progressed to consider how the New Museum’s own institutional past might inform its current program. Seventeen years after the Semi-Permanent Collection was introduced, the exhibition’s organizers re-evaluated the Museum’s initial collection policy in the exhibition “Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection” (1995). In the exhibition catalogue, former New Museum curator Alice Yang asked, “How does one maintain the forward trajectory towards innovation without rendering an absolute rupture between the old and the new and losing sight of the histories that contextualize recent developments?” We might ask today: How do we represent and activate the Museum’s history in light of its present for particular histories to be remobilized, or brought to critical scrutiny? In 1999, Director Lisa Phillips implemented an expanded vision for the Museum, which included collaborative partnerships and new digital initiatives. As part of this vision, plans for a digital archive began in 2002 with the announcement that the Museum would construct a new building. Preparation

for the move required a close examination of the Museum’s offsite and inaccessible holdings. As the Museum began to evaluate its relationship with its past, the Digital Archive was conceived as an experiment with public access to historical materials that were previously unavailable.

The common characterization of digital archives as “immaterial” frames them in opposition to the analog. Rather than polarizing the digital and analog, the New Museum conceives of the Digital Archive as an expansion of the reach of traditional cultural objects by increasing their accessibility, reproduction, and use. The Digital Archive is innovative in that it expands upon the interest in new forms of distribution posed by conceptual and process art during the 1960s and 1970s. While the structure of the Digital Archive frames meaning and provides context by creating new forms, it is nonetheless anchored within the material realities of documents, boxes, and folders. Significant documentation of the organization remains unprocessed and inaccessible to outside researchers - the collection is comprised of more than 300 linear feet of primary and secondary source materials, including papers from Marcia Tucker, curator and AIDS activist William Olander, and a wealth of exhibition files, press clippings, and research materials. Analog materials are ordered and described using traditional series, box, and folder structure in the form of finding aids. Moving forward, the aim will be to create a Digital Archive experience that truly combines

Ethyl Eichelberger, “The Decade Show: Performance Series,” 1990. Performance view. Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams. Courtesy the artist and New Museum, New York.
“old-school” archival methodologies of traditional archival description with the “new-school” digital culture.

The current incarnation of the Digital Archive acts as an important milestone with the potential to develop into a progressive archival program. We are particularly concerned with providing evidence of ephemeral events and time-based practices that resist traditional modes of documentation. The archive includes a wealth of traces from performance-based or mediated art events, such as “The Decade Show: Performance Series.” As we process and make available additional materials, we work to present the original content and context of the activities of the New Museum through finding aids, metadata, relationships, and links. We have also invited others to interpret and contribute ideas related to the archive. This interpretation is found in essay form on the Digital Archives “Features” page. By bringing in new ideas, we hope to create a narrative of the museum that is heterogeneous and relevant to the art and politics of today. As the New Museum continues to foster and develop programs focusing on contemporary art, we hope the archives will continue to inform current practices as well as future initiatives and that we will continue to think critically about the value of technological innovation in archives, while expanding upon our understanding of archival history and structures.

The New Museum gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Booth Ferris Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services for making its re-imagined online initiatives possible.

B OARD OF DIRECTORS

Rachel Chatalbash President

Pamela Cruz
Vice President

Mitchell Brodsky

Treasurer

Melissa Bowling

Secretary

Karen Murphy

Director, Education Committee

Ryan Anthony Donaldson

Director, Communications
Committee

Anne Petrimoulx

Director, Membership Committee

Janet Bunde

Director, Outreach & Advocacy Committees

Nick Pavlik
Director, Programming Committee

Editor-in-Chief
Ryan Anthony Donaldson
Managing Editors
Rachel L. Conrad
Madeline Rogers
Mary Ann Quinn
Features Editor
Rachel Greer
Interview Editor
Ellen Mehling
Book Review Editor
Lindsey Wyckoff
ART News Editor
Will Andersen
Layout Design
Shirin Khaki

WELCOME

The following individuals have joined the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York since June 2012

We extend a special thank you to the following members for their support as

Friends of ART: Sustaining Members: Sponsors of ART:
Timothy Conley
J. E. Molly Seegers
Gina Pollara
Stephanie Gellis

The mission of Metropolitan Archivist is to serve members of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART) by:

• Informing them of ART activities through reports of monthly meetings and committee activities
• Relating important announcements about individual members and member repositories
• Reporting important news related to the New York metropolitan area archival profession
• Providing a forum to discuss archival issues

Metropolitan Archivist (ISSN 1546-3125) is issued semi-annually to the members of ART. Comments, questions, or submissions for features should be directed to the editor at outreach@nycarchivists.org. Deadlines for submissions are April 30 and November 15. Similar inquiries and submissions for reviews should be directed to outreach@nycarchivists.org.

Preferred length of submissions is $800-1000$ words for feature articles and $400-500$ words for reviews.
Metropolitan Archivist and ART assume no responsibility for statements made by contributors.

TABLE of CONTENTS

Letter from the President / Editor’s Note … 4
On Semi-permanence & History: New Museum Digital Archive by Tara Hart … 5
Picture Perfect: Surveying Photographs of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, Special Collections, New York Public Library by Valerie Wingfield … 8
Archive Notebook: “Writing to the Scrap” as Qualitative Crowdsourcing by Jane Greenway Carr and Cecily Swanson … 10
“Human Skin Color” and the Challenges of Using LCSH to Describe Oral Histories by Margaret Fraser … 12
iPads in the Reading Room: Broadening the Reference Horizon by Melanie Meyers … 14
Saving a Memory: Verrazano Narrows Bridge Construction by Laura DeMuro, Alexandra Janvery & Ann Christiansen … 15
INTERVIEW WITH THE ARCHIVIST: An Interview with Rebecca Goldman by Nick Pavlik … 16
BOOK REVIEWS: Rare Book Librarianship: An Introduction and Guide review by Matthew Flaherty / How to Manage Processing in Archives and Special Collections review by Michael D. Montalbano … 18
CITING COLLECTIONS submitted by Jim Moske … 19
EXHIBITIONS REVIEW: Straight to Hell: 20 Years of Dyke Action Machine … 20
ART News … 21
Programming Committee Report by Pamela Cruz … 32
Education Committee Report by Karen Murphy … 33
Treasurer’s Report … 34

Front and Back Cover: Images depicting the demolition of the Third Avenue “El” train tracks at the intersection of East 42nd Street and Third Avenue. Photographs taken in summer 1955, photographer unidentified. The photographs vividly convey the changing nature of transportation in New York, a theme of this year’s New York Archives Week K-12 Archives Education Institute. Courtesy The Durst Organization Archives.