Not an Archive

Three new commissions by Kobby Adi, Suzanne van der Lingen and Celia-Yunior explored the diverse and ephemeral history of New Contemporaries. Established in 1949, New Contemporaries is a platform for emerging artists that celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2019. It has come to be one of the most prominent exhibitions for new artists in the UK and has supported the launch of thousands of artists, many of whom have become synonymous with contemporary art, from David Hockney to Tacita Dean. The artists' work for Not an Archive explores this daunting transition for artists moving from education to the professional arena, as well as looking at the shortfalls in recording this period of their history. As a continually roving programme with a rotating committee for selection from an open call, the history of New Contemporaries, and its narrative, are equally hard to pin down. To date there has been very little research or investigation into their history, and there is little archival documentation. 

Piecing together the extensive but scattered history, Celia-Yunior reflected on the pressures of competing in an ever more complex and populated field through assessing the seven decades of New Contemporaries selectors. Suzanne van der Lingen examined the fragmented records that echo the dispersal of these new contemporaries wiithin the larger matrix of arts in Britian. Kobby Adi, who was selected by a panel including Keith Piper for New Contemporaries in 2018, follows Piper into his own archives. These document Piper's practice from his time as a 'New Contemporary' in 1986 to the present day.

Collectively, their work probes the lure of the archive, as compelling, and at times opaque, as New Contemporaries itself. 

Speakers 

Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski is a PhD student at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) and Tate Britain. Her doctoral research investigates the life, works, mobilities and philosophy of Ronald Moody (1900 - 1984), placing much needed critical attention on the artworks and personal papers of this Jamaican sculptor and philosopher. She holds a master’s degree in Archives and Record Management (International) from University College London, UK. Her work explores archives in relation to Black and minority ethnic and histories and experiences in Britain and throughout the Diaspora. 

Panya Banjoko is a UK based writer, poet and PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University. Her debut collection, Some Things, was published by Burning Eye Books (2018). Her work has featured in numerous anthologies, including award-winning Dawn of the Unread (LeftLion, 2016); One of a Kind was commended in the Writing East Midlands Aurora Poetry Competition (2017); and They and Them featured in a touring exhibition by Keith Piper. She has been artist in residence in Germany, India, and the UK, including the National Trust’s 100 verses. Panya is the founder of Nottingham Black Archive, coordinates a Black Writers’ Network, and is patron for Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. 

Sue Breakell is Archivist at the University of Brighton Design Archives, and a Senior Research Fellow. Her research engages with critical thinking about the nature, meaning and practice of archives, focusing on their use in visual arts contexts and in the history and practice of art and design. She has extensive experience of working with archives, including cataloguing the papers of Kenneth Clark and other large archives of modern British art and artists at Tate Archive; working as both War Artists Archivist and Museum Archivist at the Imperial War Museum, and as Company Archivist at Marks and Spencer. Prior to her post at Brighton she was head of Tate Archive. 

Emily Gray, curator for Not an Archive and PhD researcher on the subject of archives and contemporaneity at Nottingham Trent University. Combining a decade of arts programming in the visual arts sector alongside postgraduate study in Art Theory and Curatorial Practice, her research interests include exhibition making as research, the archive as a generative resource, and ‘untimeliness’.

Lila Matsumoto is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at The University of Nottingham. She has also taught creative writing and English literature at University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh and the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School. She is a practising poet, with three published collections: Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018); Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016) and Allegories from Kitchen (Sad Press, 2015). She regularly performs her poetry in the UK and abroad, and co-edits the poetry and arts journal FRONT HORSE. 

Alice O’Hanlon re-trained as an Archivist in 2012, further to several years working in a range of cultural settings including the Museum of London and the RIBA, and to completing a Fine Art MA at UAL. She has managed the archive of Heatherwick Studio, the architecture and design practice of Thomas Heatherwick, and an archival project at CASS Sculpture Foundation. Alice currently works as a freelance archive consultant, with clients including individual artists such as David Remfry RA and David Ward (as part of the Art360 project), as well as the Design Museum, the Royal Society of Sculptors, Monty Python, architects David Adjaye and David Kohn, and the fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. 

Naomi Pearce is a writer living in Glasgow. Recent projects include OSTEON, Matt’s Gallery, London and Every Contact Leaves a Trace, Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Her essays, reviews and fiction have been published by The Happy Hypocrite, The White Review, Film and Video Umbrella, Art Monthly, Art Review and SALT Magazine, amongst others. From 2009 she co-founded the Woodmill, Bermondsey, South London until 2014. She is currently finishing a mystery novel as part of an AHRC-funded practice-based PhD researching women administrators, artist studios and gentrification at Edinburgh College of Art. 

Not a Live Show

Archival Research

Kobby Adi

Celia-Yunior

Suzanne van der Lingen

Not an Archive

Primary

31 October - 23 November 2019

Not an Archive

Exploring perspectives on institutional archives, legacy and the collective imaginary, Not an Archive presents three new commissions by artists Kobby Adi, Celia-Yunior and Suzanne van der Lingen, responding to the seven-decades of New Contemporaries. At the core of this enquiry is the approach to New Contemporaries history through the lens of the archive, but one in which the ‘archive’ does not yet exist. It questions the necessity of the archive, what forms it may take, the multiplicity in what it tells us, and how it might engage with current ‘new contemporaries’.

Celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2019, New Contemporaries is one of the most prominent and significant platforms for emerging artists in the UK to date. From its origins as Young Contemporaries in 1949, this annual exhibition programme continues to support artists as they transition from art education into the professional sphere. Its seven decades of activity is not only demonstrative of the culture of the moment, but also reflexive of the evolving relationship between arts education and the ‘art world’. It has seen the launch of innumerable artists, from those whose meteoric rise have come to epitomise the British art scene - such as David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Mona Hatoum, Tacita Dean, Grayson Perry, to name a few - to others who have contributed to the UK’s reputation as a centre for cultural enterprise, paving the way for the generations to come. However, despite its longevity and renown, New Contemporaries does not have an archive and records of its activity (particularly prior to the organisations’ formalisation in 1989) are few and far between, dispersed amoungst partner institutions or held by the individual past participants. While the impact of the artists it has supported on the contemporary art scene is not in question, how can looking back at New Contemporaries history and the current assemblage of its historical materials help us to not only understand and think about the many artists who have experienced this pivotal moment of transition, but also think about what this means today.

For the artists, the access to this history has necessitated the mediation of not only archival processes - potentially chance operations of what has been ‘kept’ and by whom - but also where attention may have been drawn to one thing over another, and of course subject to the fallibility of tracking down and locating the information and materials. Here, it is clear that while archives play a part, such as the National Art Archive at the V&A, the material the artists are responding to and the history itself is scattered. Items and materials across disparate spaces do not constitute an archive: held in working documents in the New Contemporaries offices, in the collections of host organisations and associates, or, most predominantly, in the memories and paraphernalia of past participants. But do we need ‘an archive’? Although archivists have been challenged by the increasingly hazy distinctions regarding the contemporary vernacular of the ‘archive’¹, this broadening of our understanding can also introduce new ways in which to position ourselves to the past as a contemporaneous and continual process. Once the archive moves beyond Foucault’s ‘system’ in which the archival document is imbued with the power of “establish[ing] statements as events... and things”², is there an opporunity in which we can move to an open framework, in which the archive is able to actively transform itself?³

Rethinking this paradigm of preservation and conservation, how may an organisational history be engaged with, (re)constructed and articulated within our present contexts? The resulting works by Kobby Adi, Celia Yunior and Suzanna van der Lingen consider how the merging of linear histories juxtaposed against tangential or repeating narratives may form a durational bricolage: an accumulating genealogy of interpretation that is fluid, porous and emerging. It also raises questions of how we read the past and its potential plurality: a confluence of fiction and fact, mystifications, falsifications and appropriations. The power of the archive in this instance to grant authority to and promulgate an instittutional narrative is one that we have learnt to and must question - the context of our history is subjective, both in the past and in relation to our present. 

Celia-Yunior are an artist duo originating from Cuba who are currently based between Mexico City and Perth, Scotland. Having been educated and led the majority of their careers outside the UK, their position to New Contemporaries is entirely external. Often creating works that look to unpick political or social systems, Shallow Breathing 1949-2019⁴ examines the seven decades of New Contemporaries selection. As a uniquely national entity, applicants to the New Contemporaries are selected through an open call by a panel that has ranged from art educators, curators, critics, students and artists. From 1989 onwards, this selection has become a key feature, with internationally renowned British artists and leading experts making up the panel that selects work across all media in a blind review. Both as practicing artists and as educators, with one half of the duo now living and working within the UK, Celia-Yunior reflect on the anxiety of trying to compete in an ever more complex and competitive field. Faced with a 3m squared rendering of all known selectors for each year of the exhibition - a body that both makes up and reflects the contemporary British ‘art world’ - the audience is invited to sit and listen to guided breathing exercises. The scale and visual impact demonstrate the immensity of the challenge for artists trying to emerge in Britian today. Whilst drawing focus in its size and simplicity, the information it is portraying remains slippery, as the contrast sensitivity causes a visual distortion.

Alongside, Suzanne van der Lingen’s fabric banners voice the very impossibility of grasping seventy years at once.⁵ What is lacking in every gaze⁶ both echoes the physical manifestation of the New Contemporaries as a moveable, ephermeral and iterative presence, as well as their archival absences. As discussed by Carolyn Steedman in Dust, it reflects on the lack of the archive as the starting point in its interpretations, that while we might look at a document, this does not transport us into a past experience, but can only tell us that at some point a record was produced: “though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. The Archive is not potentially made up of everything ... And nothing happens to this stuff, in the Archive.”⁷

The archive therefore, as we commonly interpret it, is a conceptual space,a realm in which we attempt to reform the ‘aura’ of the past into being.⁸ Derrida’s proposition that ‘the archive takes place’ has an immediacy in which time collapses: past, present and future becoming an eternal return.⁹ One that can only point to the impossibility of encountering the past without the entanglement of the present. In Suzanne’s companion piece, What is magic¹⁰, she expands this dialogue to include not only the partiality of history, but also the scattering of New Contemporaries historical materials as much as the scattering of the participants themselves. In their ‘Brownian motion’, what appears as random and erratic movements are the consequences of their collision through the organisation¹¹. The ‘collidal particles’ relate equally to the organisation and the artists, suspended in the amorphous and fluid British arts scene.

From the weight and movement of a national annual exhibiton programme, to the individual entities, Kobby Adi, participant in New Contemporaries in 2018, looks to engage in an inter-generational dialogue with fellow alum Keith Piper. Piper participated in the exhibition in 1986, one of the few complete catalogues for New Contemporaries that has been located for the period prior to 1989. From an emerging artist in 1986, Piper was on the selection panel for Adi’s year with fellow artists Benedict Drew and Katy Moran. In this instance, the Brownian motion sees New Contemporaries become a catalyst for a wanted - and needed - conversation regarding the work done by Piper, and in particular his activity with the Blk Art Group in the 1980s. Rumours of Riots¹² is a film that both documents and silently investigates. Its looping structure, enabled by the screening of a film within a gallery setting, offers alternating glances of different objects in his archive, in particular, Piper’s poster collection relating to the Blk Art Group activity. Examing the poster as a key document of an event that took place, the film is accompanied by an object from Adi’s own collection, an illegally printed and distributed poster of H. Brown by Emory Douglas created after Brown was accused of inciting a riot. The location of Piper’s studio in Brixton also bring into sharp relief the critical political moments of the 1980s. Thinking of the archive as a place of rumours, the film looks to convey the potency of the space through its silent capture. As H. Brown holds up a match outside¹³, the fragile shield is all that keeps the spark from being ignited.

Establishing a career within the cultural arena upon leaving the security of the institution is always a challenge, whether this is seventy years ago or today. From post-WWII to our contemporary environment, New Contemporaries has brought artists together to show work. However, as said by Andrew Forge in the foreward to the 1962 exhibition, the resulting show is much more than ‘the sum of its parts’. It has led the way in promoting the new as the ‘next big thing’, and has been instrumental in the recognition of the ‘emerging artist’.¹⁴ Yet, as much as it has perhaps instrumentalised this position, it has also been subject to and had to adapt to the same political and social contexts that the artists also find themselves in. It has had to professionalise, it has had to expand its capacity to display work that has transformed from oil paintings and stone to installation and performance, and it has managed to survive whilst still trying to assert itself in the competitive and crowded market.

Seven decades of history brings with it an inevitable volume that makes unravelling New Contemporaries activity an endless task. As a continually roving programme that has never had a permanent home itself, and travels to different cities each year¹⁵, it makes it a particularly daunting prospect. As a new approach to regaining and exploring this legacy, the artists have responded from their own emerging positions and particular practices. The resulting exhibition offers a point of reflection. It is not summative, but opens up the discussion to how New Contemporaries history and their resulting legacy ‘fits’ within our contemporary moment, and what role they have had to play in it.

Emily Gray

Curator and Researcher

¹ Discussions regarding the most recent archival turn include publications such as Kate Eichhorn’s The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2013, or Sue Breakell, Perspectives - Negoting the Archive, Tate Papers, Spring 2009, among many others.

² Michel Foucault, 1972, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books

³ Markus Miessen and Yann Chateigne, editors, 2016, The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, London: Sternberg Press

4 Celia-Yunior, Shallow Breathing 1949-2019, installation, vinyl (Young/New Contemporaries selectors), seat/sound, 2019

⁵ While Suzanne completed her Masters at Edinburgh College of Art, she also did not participate in New Contemporaries.

⁶ Suzanne van der Lingen, What is lacking in every gaze, fabric banners, 2019

⁷ Carolyn Steedman, 2001, Dust, Manchester: Manchester University Press. p.68

⁸ Boris Groys refers to Walter Benjamin’s A Short History of Photography (1931) in proposing that physical archival objects are denuded of their ‘aura’, such as Benjamin proposes occurs between the subject and the photograph. He goes on to propose that in the digital era this is reversed - the digital record is an aura denuded of its objecthood. In Boris Groys, In the Flow, 2016, London: Verso Books.

⁹ Jaques Derrida, 1996, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

¹⁰ Suzanne van der Lingen, What is magic, video, 3:45min, 2019

¹¹ Brownian motion is the erratic motion of microscopic particles in a fluid, as a result of their collision with the fast-moving particles in the surrounding medium.

¹² Kobby Adi, Rumours of Riots, featuring Kieth Piper and in collaboration with Nina Porter, 16mm transferred to HD, endless loop installation of wood, plyboard and welding blanket (with film poster), 2019

¹³ Kobby Adi, (for now), illegally printed and distributed poster, fire resistant glass, walnut frame, 2019

_¹⁴ Alex Massouras, 2013, Patronage, Professionalism and Youth: the emerging artist and London’s Art institutions 1949-1988, PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London

¹⁵ New Contemporaries was based in London until 1986, with a small touring contingent arranged by the Arts Council from 1949 - 1969. In the relaunch of the organisation in 1989, its specific remit was to de-centralise from London. It now opens in a different city each year, including Nottingham in 1992 and 2015, and opening in Leeds for the very first time this year.

Suzanne van der Lingen, As if by magic / What is lacking in every gaze

Kobby Adi, Rumours of Riots, 16mm transferred to HD, endless loop, 2019

Kobby Adi, Rumours of Riots / (for now)