Archive games

Carson, JR; Miller, RA

Abstract

The central tenet of Archive Games is to explore the archive of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) through the Surrealist understanding of logic and chance, and through the use of our established practice of game-playing.

In order to function effectively, archives require the application of order and a systematic approach to classification and organisation. Likewise, game-playing offers structure and a different kind of order. It is bound by rules that permit a shared understanding of play, in the same way that the cataloguing and handling principles of the archive permit access and understanding of the archive’s contents.

Each exhibition space in the Keiller Library will represent a round of our Archive Games. We will play in order to make different arrangements and displays that will be installed in the cabinets of the Library and that will instigate interventions in the other spaces of the Library. An aspect of our game-playing will involve visitor and staff participation. Building on the work we have already undertaken in this area, we will invite people to play with us in order to select material, uncover connections and to make a different “sense” of the archive.

The proposed exhibition will comprise items chosen from the holdings in SNGMA’s archives and will reflect in the material displayed – and the nature of its display – the connections we outline; between Surrealist thinking and the notion of order, and between the game and its potential to trigger chance encounters in the archive. Combining the archive with game-playing highlights its potential for multiplicity, echoing Thomas Hirschhorn’s desire to make “…spaces for the movement and endlessness of thinking…” where sense, logic and order – or “archive reason” as Hal Foster identifies it in his 2004 article An Archival Impulse – are altered and re-valued. This sense of “endlessness” seems to run counter to an archive being ‘in order’ and that its meaning is singular and controlled. Our engagement with the archive - through game-playing - offers us a different way to value its contents.

In summary, the exhibition will:

- Encourage public engagement with the Archive and, in doing so, will explore the rlationsip between the “seen” and “unseen” aspects of SNGMA’s archive.

- Explore the Surrealist interpretation of logic and chance using SNGMA’s Archive.

- Work across the collections that make up the Archive, to allow a different consideration of what these collections represent and what they might mean

Citation

Carson, J., & Miller, R. Archive games. [Exhibition]. 11 July 2015 - 25 October 2015. (Unpublished)

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Start Date: Jul 11, 2015
• End Date: Oct 25, 2015
• Deposit Date: Dec 1, 2015
• Keywords: archive, game, play, exhibition, collaboration
• Related Public URLs: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/visit/modern-two/room-displays/archive-games-carson-miller
• Additional Information: Funders : Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Projects : Archive Games