Studio International 1965-1975 Archive

Interrelated archive, event, display and articles
The Studio International Archive entered the public domain with a Peter Townsend memorial event which I curated at Tate Britain. The archive shows the processes of magazine production, tracing ideas, memos, meetings, diaries, to the product as magazine. The journal underwent radical re-invention with Townsend’s policies to privilege the artist’s voice within text and page layout, as a result it raised the profile of new art practices in the UK.

David Goldblatt’s book Art and Ventriloquism (Routledge 2006) provides a model for me to re-tell stories that are not implicit in the documents from the archive, as I look at the human interactions implied by the material in front of me. I act as an interlocutor for the material and ventriloquise the archive: by telling its unofficial stories I enable people to experience the archive as a primary encounter. In my role as interlocutor – an unofficial organizer - I assert the centrality of anecdote and marginalia to animate the materiality of the archive, allowing the forgotten traces of unrealised projects to be re-read.

For the Tate event I invited contributions from those whose early careers the archive witnesses. Contributors included: Bridget Riley (script), Peter Sedgely (film edit) and a text work made especially by Lawrence Weiner. Intrinsic to this event was my display of material that revealed the traces of editorial decisions including a pencilled addition to Baldesari’s ‘I will not make any more boring art’ that read ‘Do you wanna bet?’ Examples of interventions like these illuminate meta-structural connections between people that exist outside dominant art-historical readings of the archive.

The programme mirrored the processes of editorial production; this was done in homage and to demonstrate the phenomenal life of this archive. While curating the programme I was aware that this event would be sited within the archive.