With no idea what to expect, but assuming that I would wind up with some dry paperwork of census reports or something of the like, I was very surprised upon requesting Box 20 of the Vancouver Status of Women fonds (call code RBSC-ARC-1582 if you would like to take the files out from Rare Books and Special Collections yourself!) to discover that they were absolutely stuffed with newspaper articles.

Scores and scores of newspaper articles – with a few exceptions (like a Report on Canadian Poverty Statistics for women and a Pensions Report from 1981) almost all of the files were filled with carefully arranged clippings. What I mean when I say carefully arranged is not that the content was not that the articles were annotated, or that there was any sense of formal dialogue written in the content itself – the articles were sparingly labeled, with perhaps a very small bit of commentary or other information – but by and large the most telling thing about the pieces was their organization. Each folder was carefully labelled, and while some were much larger than others, they all were arranged and labelled around a very specific critique of female representations. The folders I carefully recorded and paged through were file 20-1 Sexism in Education, 20-2 Sexism in the Legal Profession, 20-3 Sexism in the Media, 20-4 Sexist Put-downs and Sexual Harassment 1978-79, 20-5 Sexist Ads. After realizing I didn’t have the time or patience to go through each and every one of the 40+ files in the box, I singled out a few more that caught my eye, pertaining to titles like Social Credit, Single Parents, Sexuality, Women in Sports, Survival, Stewardesses, Tokenism, Taxation, Unions, Trudeau, and Mayor of Vancouver – and that’s really just a quick survey.

The impatience that I felt flipping through these articles was disconcerting. Part of what made me uncomfortable was that going through an entire box of sexist newspaper clippings was time consuming, but also that it was upsetting that there were that many of them. You need to understand, this box was full. Full of articles that through casual skimming on my part still managed to amounted to a sensation of something like damning: damning the writers for writing sexist content, damning the editors and publishers for producing it, and damning the institution of media on the whole, with the evidence in this box of carefully curated injustices. All this I got from the single box I looked at, which spanned from the early 70s to the late 80s.

From an analytical standpoint, the breadth of the articles was fascinating – some were very blatantly sexist, while others insidiously so, to the point where it took me a couple reads to figure out why it was in there. While it was upsetting to see that many articles from mainstream papers all in one place, it was also interesting to see a clear example of the kind of archive that Shaunna Moore and Susan Pell talk about in their article “Autonomous Archives.” They define this idea of the marginalized archive as “Counter-publics [which] highlight alternative oppositional spaces in which marginalised groups construct collective identities and discourses apart from dominating groups” (Moore and Pell 256). Seeing mainstream news media clippings from papers across BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba re-purposed into an archive that brings to the fore the perpetration of conscious and unconscious acts of sexism (and worse) was extremely powerful. Knowing too that the newspaper clippings that I found in Box 20 are likely also kept in an archive of the paper that originally printed it made me very conscious of the fact that these archives represent very different narratives, even if they were not compiled with this intention.

The juxtaposition of the different contexts of these archives sort of provides a narrative in itself, which I instinctively gravitated to in my anger at the injustice of sexism, but once I got over my initial impulse of frustration, I also wanted to look beyond my emotions in my academic mission to analyze the archive without imposing my personal narrative. I don’t know that these two things can be fully rectified, but I think it might be interesting to keep trying.

VSW (Vancouver Status of Women) is alive and well for 44 years now – check them out at their website

Moore, Shaunna and Susan Pell. “Autonomous archives.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16.4 (2010):255-268.

Images by starsusask.blogspot.ca and fredacentre.com

This was a week of surprises in many ways. I pulled Box 9 from the Western Front archives (ARC- 1609) because I thought I was vaguely interested in finding out what war records the library has, only to discover that Western Front is a thriving artist center (est. 1973) located just off of Kingsway. Fitting, given that this week’s theme is “Artists’ materials” – more fitting than war records, anyways. The second surprise was that I was able to finish, and potentially even understood (debatable, but I tried) Derrida’s “Archive Fever”.

Western Front

The box I was examining was a bit eclectic, and each folder was labelled with the name of either an artist or an event that had been held by the center. I chose to focus on folder 9-1 (Tasse Geldart), arbitrarily choosing based on the primacy of the folder and the interesting name of the artist.

Tasse Geldart was difficult to pin down. A cursory google search turned up a twitter account in her name with 8 tweets from 2013, and a site for a Tasse Geldart in Ontario who is a visual artist that now specializes in pet paintings. I was unable to tell if any of these identities are connected to the same person, but it is a pretty unique name, so there’s a chance they could be. I think that safest thing to say is that my efforts were inconclusive.

The information that I did have available from the Western Front file concentrated on an exhibit by Geldart from 1996, titled  Over/hearing and Consumption which consisted of 2 interactive pieces: in Over/hearing, visitors overhead an argument taking place in another room, and in Consumption a fake telephone placed outside of the gallery rang every 10 minutes as an enticement for passerby’s to pick up and listen to a recording. While quite a bit of the file was random ephemera, such as a scrap of floral paper and a handbill for the exhibit that had a police report number on the back of it, the majority of the materials in the folder consisted of administrative paperwork pertaining to the exhibit. While I’m still processing Derrida and am still having a hard time articulating my thoughts on Archive Fever, the yearning I felt to actually experience the exhibit, rather than merely pour through a limited and random assembly of peripheral paperwork, made the materials of the fonds feel underwhelming in a way that made me think I maybe understand the complex sentiments of the term mal d’archive.

Tasse Geldart, 1996 (“Consumption”)

Until I got to a receipt for 5 walkmans, of all things. From the paperwork (and several apology letters) it seems that the walkmans, which were part of the exhibit, had been stolen and subsequently replaced. There was also a note that the fake telephone had been moved indoors a few days into the exhibit, as people were abusing it on the street – whether this was related to the theft of the walkmans or not, I couldn’t determine. The strangeness of looking through the shadows of shadows of shadows – there was this art piece that had walkmans which were stolen, and then replaced, and here I was 20 years later holding those receipts for the replacements – was surreal. What I wanted was to hold the original walkmans, the replacement walkmans, and/or the exhibit itself, just the way I was holding the receipt. Yet, I also knew that holding those things was impossible: the walkmans easily didn’t exist anymore, like many of their technologically obsolete brethren, or if they still did miraculously live on, they may not convey in any way that they were special in being the objects that facilitated the exhibit. Perhaps what I actually wanted was the tapes the walkmans had held, assuming I’m even thinking of the right walkman – after all, in 1996 Geldart could have been using a discman with CDs, as they were still referred to as walkmans sometimes.

My mom owned this exact Walkman when I was a kid

A participatory art piece is unique because it necessitates interaction, so in this case I was a couple decades too late to having this experience that was necessarily time-bound in a way the the receipt was not. Interactive art can’t really be stored and archived physically the way a piece of paper can be. One of the first papers in Tasse Geldart’s file was what seemed to be an artist’s statement, and the last sentence of it read “…consuming keeps us alive at the risk of killing us”. While my feelings during my examination of Tasse Geldart’s file and my limited understand of Derrida have left me confused beyond articulation, I think my condition can maybe be characterized as archive fever – an incurable disease, brought on by the consumption of an archive.

Derrida, Jacques and Prenowitz, Eric. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics. Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1995): 9-63.

Photos by front.bc.ca and theregister.co.uk